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I’d always imagined sunlight pouring over me as I walked through the velvet blooms of the fernblush meadow near my home. It would be summer, not the snow-melted pall of late winter. I would be wearing my late mother’s green silk wedding gown.
And I would know the groom.
But I didn’t know the groom. I’d sold the green dress. And there was no warm sun bathing me in its blessings. Winter’s damp wind clawed at my threadbare brown cloak as I stared up at my soon-to-be-husband’s home. Our home.
It was a behemoth of stone and crystal. Not surprising, given that the man who’d claimed me as his bride was Dragon Caste. Dragon Caste men tended to be large, wealthy, and owned astonishing castles as their homes. They needed high-ceilinged rooms and cavernous halls to accommodate their width and wingspan. They needed hard stone floors to hold up against their scales and claws. This place was no exception. Broad stone towers punched up into an ominous, slate-grey sky. The front door ahead was as wide as my entire house had been. Before I’d started tearing down the shabby planks of its walls for firewood, that is.
“Here’s your bag,” said the carriage driver.
The Matchers Guild had paid for my journey here, thank goodness. There was no way I could have made the trip otherwise. Getting to the capital to enrol in their services had taken every last coin I’d had.
Services. That’s one word for a mail-order bride for monsters program…
“Thank you,” I said woodenly, taking the bag. I nearly dropped it, my fingers were so numb with cold. If the bag had been any heavier, I likely would have. But it wasn’t heavy. My entire life was in that bag.
Which meant there was barely anything left at all.
The driver was human like me. He nodded at me, efficient and business-like, before hauling himself back up into the driver’s seat of the carriage. His mountain mare whinnied and tossed her shaggy head before breaking into movement at his command. In a matter of moments, the carriage was a mere coal-black speck on the horizon. I stared down at the muddy road, my eyes tracing the imprints the wheels had left in the muck. I felt like if I stopped looking at those tracks, if I so much as blinked, I’d never find my way back home again.
But there was no more home. Nothing to find my way back to.
Nothing but the monstrosity of a castle that lay ahead of me and its even more monstrous master.
I took a steadying breath as I stared at it.
It actually wasn’t all opaque stone. Dragon Caste loved gems and elaborate stained glass and crystal. Most of the bricks of the castle walls were grey, but every so often along the walls, one glittered in a different shade. Rectangles of clear dawn pink, brilberry wine red, and exquisite sapflower blue winked at me among all the grey. The windows, too, were colourful. Each window was fitted with traditional Dragon Caste stained crystal.
Those little splashes of colour, like flashes of sun through clouds, gave me just a little bit of hope. Just a little bit of courage.
I hoped that it would be enough.
The Matchers Guild said they vet everyone. They wouldn’t marry you off to someone horrible…
I’d told myself that, over and over again, on the long ride here. But I still wasn’t convinced. Why would this Dragon Caste man, a lord among his kind from what I’d been told, want me? A human woman so poor she’d had to cut and sell her own hair to the Dreamspinners Guild just to survive the winter? I had no skills fit for a lord’s wife. I could hunt. I could carve wood. I could mend clothing. But none of those things were special. Nobody needed a human woman with those skills. The Matchers had told me that themselves. They’d told me that they wouldn’t be able to find any sort of match for me beyond a marriage match. If I’d had some potion-making abilities, for example, things might have been different. But my potion-making was limited to boiling up whatever half-frozen plant matter I found in the woods to try to make some semblance of a drinkable tea.
Monsters requested human mail-order brides from the Matchers for various reasons. Some of them needed humans’ famous fertility to conceive children more easily. Sometimes they needed to marry for political reasons, and language barriers made wooing a human woman difficult without the Matchers’ help. Some monster races had few women, or none at all, which made finding a wife among their own kind difficult, if not impossible.
But there was no such lack of females among the Dragon Caste. And if he needed to marry for a political reason, wouldn’t he choose someone with status? A wealthy Dragon Caste lord could have anyone. Which made it alarming that he’d chosen a destitute human woman with no living relations as his bride. No one would miss me if something bad happened to me. If I disappeared, nobody outside these castle walls would ever even know. Even the Matchers wouldn’t know. Once they matched you to your fate, they stepped away entirely.
My fingers squeezed around the old leather handles of my bag.
Maybe there’s another way. Maybe I don’t have to do this…
But there was no other way. I knew that. I’d examined every option, every possibility. I’d sold everything that mattered to me. Torn down the walls of the shack I’d called home and burned them for warmth.
I wouldn’t survive another winter.
It was marry a monster.
Or die.
Chapter 2
Wynthea
I couldn’t tell if it was fear or the cold that made my hand shake as I reached for the massive knocker on the door. I hesitated, my fingers a hair’s breadth away from grasping it. I realized with a lurch in my stomach it was a real dragon claw, not a stone replica. That single claw was as large as my own hand.
If my husband is that big… If he’s not careful with me…
