Mentally bracing herself, Rysha opened the door and strode into the spacious office.
Fire crackled in the hearth, and Angulus stood behind a desk and before one of two large windows. Two men in almost matching gray suits were in the middle of a presentation, complete with easel, pointer stick, and text and charts printed on large cards.
“I beg your pardon, King Angulus,” Rysha said, clicking her heels together and saluting sharply. “I don’t have an appointment, but I must talk with you about an important matter.” She kept herself from saying it was of country-wide security, since he would likely see through that.
“There aren’t any appointments available because he’s booked,” one of the men at the easel whispered to her, frowning. “We had to wait three months to present our concerns. Given the destruction dragons have been doing to crops…” He glanced at Angulus. “Well, it’s not my place to object.”
Rysha looked at the top card on the easel, prepared to feel bad—or at least rude—if their concerns were important and time-sensitive. It showed a picture of a pond next to equations dealing with volume and drainage rates, followed by a summary of the equipment and manpower needed to turn a wetlands area into agricultural land.
“Did you check your math?” Rysha asked, spotting an error in one of the equations. They would need a few tons more fill dirt than they were requesting to fill in the wetlands for farming.
“Of course we did.” Both men whirled toward the equation she pointed at.
“Seven gods, is that—someone didn’t carry the—Sire!” One man blurted while the other positioned himself to block the view of the card. “Please forgive us, but the gentleman who prepared our data should have been double-checked. We, uh, aren’t as ready as we thought. Many pardons.”
They hurried to fold the easel, grab the cards, and rush out, nearly knocking over the guard in the doorway. The guard still looked puzzled and was frowning at Shulina Arya.
“Jasfer,” Angulus said, meeting his eyes and pointing at Rysha. “Explain.”
“She invoked the, uh, Feudal Convocation Agreement of 697—no 8, sir. Section 12, Paragraph 13, sub-paragraph, uhm, something.”
“There’s no such document,” Angulus said.
“What?” The guard gawked at Rysha.
She shrugged, almost feeling bad for him, but she was on a mission, damn it.
“Go.” Angulus flicked his fingers toward the guard. “We’ll talk later.”
The man fled, his expression promising he did not look forward to that discussion.
“Lieutenant Ravenwood,” Angulus said, facing her as the door closed. “Explain. No, wait.” He strode from the window to the open back door that led into a private suite. “There’s a wayward lieutenant out here with a dragon.”
Rysha arched her eyebrows and thought about protesting that she was wayward, but Angulus didn’t sound angry, and she didn’t want to provoke him. Shulina Arya was poking around the room, peering at books on shelves and picking up and fiddling with what were likely priceless objets d’art.
“Sounds like a vast improvement over the stuffy people you’ve been talking to all morning,” came Kaika’s voice from the next room over.
“That remains to be seen,” Angulus said.
Kaika walked out in a lush brown robe and fluffy tiger-striped slippers. She carried a steaming mug of something and smiled, but she didn’t look like herself. First off, Rysha had never seen Kaika out of uniform, even when they’d been traveling together, so that was startling, but more alarming was that most of the hair on the left side of her head was gone or cut extremely short. Rysha had heard she’d been burned, but she didn’t see evidence of wounds, other than the missing hair. The robe might hide a lot, though. Rysha glanced at Kaika’s hands and bare shins.
“I don’t suppose dragons can grow hair back?” Kaika looked at Shulina Arya, who was spinning the wheel on a gold-and-silver ancient fidget ball from the Dumeriun civilization. Rysha was positive only a few of those devices remained in existence.
Shulina Arya looked up. “You wish to be hairy?”
Angulus held up a finger. “Be careful how you phrase your request.”
“What, you couldn’t love an ape?”
“It depends what the ape’s propensity for injuring itself is. Apes probably don’t fling themselves in front of fire-breathing dragons.”
“Ah, so now you’re thinking of replacing me with a zoo specimen.”
She smirked and elbowed him. Angulus gave her a tender smile, and Rysha looked away, not sure she was supposed to witness their intimate moments. Though a part of her was glad to know Angulus had tender inclinations, at least somewhere in there. He always appeared so stern at speeches and in his photographs. Rysha had met him a few times over the years at the semi-annual social gatherings among the nobility, but he’d always seemed distant at those, like a man who either didn’t want to be there or who was, despite his job, uncomfortable in crowds.
“What’s wrong, Rysha?” Kaika asked, glancing at Shulina Arya. “Other than gullible guards and math-challenged agri…thingies. I forgot who those people were.”
Kaika’s eyes crinkled, and Rysha sensed that she at least approved of her tactics.
“The MPs came and arrested Trip,” Rysha blurted, then winced, realizing she shouldn’t have led with something that sounded like it was a personal problem for her. She had to make the king understand how important Trip was to the country.
Surprisingly, Kaika slapped Angulus on the chest with the back of her hand.
“What? I didn’t arrest him.”
“You can wave your hand and have him un-arrested.”
“Mm,” Angulus said, very neutrally.
“He was in the middle of working on a solution for our dragon problem, and they dragged him away from his drawings,” Rysha said, already sensing that this wouldn’t be as easy as asking for hand-waving. She’d been afraid of that. “And if dragons come again, and he’s locked up, the city will be at a disadvantage. I know you drove them off yesterday without us here, but we can certainly help with the next attack. And if Trip can get his hands on some of the banded iron from Rakgorath, he has an idea that may solve our problem forever. At the least, it would make the dragons hesitate to attack us.”
Angulus’s lips pressed together, and Rysha sensed she was pushing too hard.
“Also,” she said, to wrap things up, “he didn’t do what that idiot, Lockvale, is accusing him of. All he did was ask Lockvale questions, which I asked him to do. That bastard has been plotting against my family, trying to bring down the value of our land and scare all our workers away so he could buy our estate cheaply. He even talked a silver dragon into colluding with him.”