Golmarr alights beside me and without a word takes a knife from his sleeve and cuts the rope from my ribs. More pearl buttons fall from my corset, bouncing on the ground and toppling over the cliff. Golmarr tugs the rope three times and it is whisked away. His eyes meet mine.
“Are you crazy?” My entire body is trembling, even my voice. “What are you doing down here?”
He scowls and puts the knife back into his sleeve, then bends and picks up his father’s hunting knife from the ledge, roughly pressing it into my limp hand. “I figured you didn’t stand a chance of surviving alone. But with me, your odds will be a little better. I am armed, and I have fought in half a dozen battles.”
My throat grows tight and I can’t talk, so I throw my arms around him and hug him as hard as I can. “Thank you,” I croak against his shoulder. Then I realize I am holding him and quickly push away.
“Don’t thank me yet.” He adjusts the bow on his back, loosens his sword in its scabbard, and strides into the cave.
“Wait!” I call. He turns around, a mere shadow in the darkness, and scowls at me. “Where are you going?”
“To find a way out before the dragon finds us.” He tilts his head to the side. “You weren’t going to just sit here and actually wait to be eaten, were you?”
Yes, that was my plan unless I could scale the cliff, but I don’t tell him. “It’s as black as pitch in there. How are we going to find our way through the cave if we can’t see anything?”
Golmarr strides back out into the sunlight and stops in front of me. He lifts the dragon scale flask that is attached to my necklace. “Do you know what this is?”
“Of course I do. It’s a dragon scale.”
“And do you know what they do in the dark?”
I look at the flask dangling from his hand. “Glow?” I guess.
He nods. “Yes. They have eternal light. At least until the dragon it came from dies. So if it glows, we know the dragon is still alive. It came from the fire dragon that lives in these mountains, right? Not from one of the others?”
“That is what I was told.”
“Well, then let’s get going. We don’t have any food or water, so we need to find a way out of the mountain fast.”
He starts walking back into the cave, but again I blurt, “Wait!” I unsheathe the hunting knife and hand it to Golmarr. Turning my back to him, I put my chin down and say, “Please cut this stupid corset off of me. I would like to spend my last living minutes breathing freely.” He takes the knife but pauses. I peer at him over my shoulder. “What?”
“This could have been our wedding night.” His face is so close that I can feel his breath on my skin. His fingers brush the back of my neck, and my cheeks start to burn. Carefully, he pops the corset’s laces with the knife, and it falls away from me, leaving a wrinkled, voluminous white shirt tucked into my skirt. I kick the corset over the side of the cliff and then pull the pearl tiara from my hair and throw it down, too. Taking a deep breath, I turn to the mouth of the cave.
“I am ready,” I say, tucking the hunting knife into the back waistband of my skirt. Together we walk inside. When the cave entrance is far enough behind us that it gives off no light, the dragon scale starts to glow.
Golmarr puts his hand on his sword. “It looks like the fire dragon is still alive.”
To say the dragon scale glows is like saying the moon lights the night. The moon does light the night…sort of. But not well enough to go on a walk through rocks and gravel and boulders without stubbing your toes every other step.
The air is damp and cool, and it stinks like animals—like a chicken coop that has never been cleaned out. I am a mess, tripping over my skirts, crawling over boulders on my hands and knees, tearing my nails and scraping my arms and legs. Golmarr gets ahead every few minutes, and then pauses for me to catch up. I can see his patience waning in the way he taps his toe and keeps looking over his shoulder, leading us deeper into the blackness of the cave.
“You’re not very strong, are you?” He says it like it is an accusation and frowns as I slide down a rock on my butt.
I glare at him. “I’ve never climbed on rocks before.”
“Not even when you were a child?”
I brush my hands together, ridding them of lingering grit. “I have never been allowed to leave my chambers except to attend private family events, and for dancing and riding lessons.”
“You’re not allowed to leave your chambers?” he asks.
“Not without my father’s permission. And he rarely gives it.”
He shakes his head in disbelief. “Why?”
“Because the queen doesn’t like to see me,” I admit, my voice quiet.
“The queen, as in your own mother?”
“Yes. She doesn’t like seeing me because I have brought her nothing but sorrow since I was born.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, looking into my eyes.
I shrug, pretending like it is not a big deal, pretending like talking about it doesn’t make it hard to swallow. “Don’t be sorry,” I whisper, looking away from him. “I hardly know her.”