CHAPTER 6: Back Before She was Not A Queen

But of course, like most magicians, from the lowest kind who parade around in glittery outfits and top hats, magicians cheat. The basest use smoke and mirrors, ones like Hinaya use words and intent. It’s always the plan to fool the audience. All magicians are tricksters at heart.

She used her power to send Ivorie’s soul to a land without magic, where it would be near impossible for her to come back. And for most magical endeavors, it is a realm where everything is not exact. What was thirty years in Ostarii was 43 on earth.

The great dog had stopped convulsing and padded towards the two birds, wagging her tail. She then opened her mouth to speak.

“Do we send out people to look for her?”

“We can, but I don’t think she’d come. She doesn’t know who she is? Remember?”

“What did the Duke say?”

“He got all nervous and didn’t have the heart to accompany her. He advised her to go the other direction.”

The dog snorted.

Typical. Aleksdayer had always been a jerk. It would have been impossible to expect otherwise. A self-serving narcissist. She wondered why his wife even married him. But the immense wealth of the House of Dinarius was not to be trifled with. When she was a human, she had seen fish wives sell their young daughters to become whores or servants to dealers to work in the capital. Thankfully, that practice had been banned, thanks to Ivorie.

The people in the capital underestimated Ivorie when she first came to the capital, even the former Grand Duchess did. To the sophisticated citizens of Ostariii, she was nothing but an uneducated extraordinarily pretty girl from the mountain s of the Western waste. They didn’t know that the teenager was smart and hardworking, not a lazy noble with hands smooth like silk. Ivorie’s hands were gnarled from years of tending sheep and fighting wolves with a long sword and a slingshot. She was incredibly good at problem solving.

The dog padded to the throne room and sat on the carpet facing the furnace. There was an enormous portrait of the royal couple on the wall. They were clad in their wedding finery, King Piers with his dark gold hair and skin with a slight patterning of golden scales. He was dressed in a gold and black tunic. A sash heavy with diamonds and garnets hung from his right shoulder. The mountain dwarves of the North had given the Diamond Sash as a gift to his grandfather five hundred years ago, a gift for letting their youth enter the university. On his head, he wore the Obsidian band of Flame, it fit his head in human form, but in dragon form, it hung around his wrist. It was dragon glass, and was originally made from a single piece of diamond, but his father had been involved with a fight with some disgruntled kin which burnt the supposedly durable stone.

Queen Ivorie in a golden gown which made her hair blaze out like winter fire. A collar of bloodstones, each the size of a postage stamp adorned her neck. A crown dripping with pearls and sunstones framed her delicate face, making her emerald eyes stand out .

The Grand Duchess didn’t know if her brain had simplified once she had been turned into a dog, but she liked looking at the painting. It gave her hope. Or at the view from the deck. Every now and then she could see Lesser Dragons in the distance ferrying people, other realms were untouched by the curse. The sight of life going on as usual from afar made her somewhat happy. Since Ostarii faced the corner of the Realm, it was nothing but an empty corner now. A ghost kingdom, full of shadows and the emptiness of the depth of a curse.