Chapter 15
The Dragon King's Substitute Bride
CH15
Morgan
Worry clawed at me. "Isn't it pretty usual for people to leave instructions for their successors?"
He nodded. "In the case of the queen, your instructions are in two parts. One is the journals, but the part you are looking for is held in the Trial itself."
I scowled at him. "I'm just supposed to know because I didn't die?"
His lips twitched. "Because you were chosen by the heavens and blessed by the Phoenix."
I cocked an eyebrow. "Mystic words that mean nothing to me other than seeming important."
He tapped a journal. "Perhaps reading will educate you, then."
I met his gaze. "How can you be so sure?"
He sat on the edge of the desk and looked out the window with a wistfulness in his eyes.
"Because I knew my mother, and she told me many stories about how she came to settle in her power as queen."
I looked down at the journals. "Will you tell me about her?".
"What do you want to know?"
I considered it, trailing my fingers over the cover of the journal in front of me.
"Was she happy with your father?"
"She said she was."
"You didn't believe her?"
her
"I believe that happiness in tion was complicated," he said. "She stirred a lot of
controversy."
him.
been talking
handmaiden
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could not ask
more and more. Is Maya... related to you
smirked. "You have sharp
cousin."
she
choice," he said. "Her mother and mine
on
chuckled. "You'll meet them soon enough,
he's hitting on me, then he's insulting me." I glanced over at him, holding back the
behaviors run in the family." He sounded amused.
I can keep
He smirked.. "And it's the
read
upon a time,
darkness."
my head. "That have something to
me and resentful of me being chosen as the next heir. I am
- nower:
due to the
Having a dragon child is a hard undertaking." Tsuneo paused. "Her handmaiden was meant to be ensuring she was taking the potions necessary to keep her from becoming pregnant, but she was bribed by a concubine and later dismissed. My father says that my mother didn't show a moment of fear until the day of my birth, My
the destruction of
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He went still.
no desire for
www
a child to succeed me or choose someone to do so, and if I married, he would essentially be
..
never had a desire
him. "Get
"I cannot."
my head. "It hardly matters
His eyes were
with desire. His hands shook, suspended in the air between
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