The arena sands had been turned; raked clean and white for the next day's games. But as he climbed the long snake of stairs to his office, Tavlen felt the blood under sand itch like a fresh wound under linen.

The stairs were lit by fat red candles, suspicious yellow eyes watching him climb. They snuffed out as Tavlen passed; a wheeze of smoke from the wick.

The arenas had been a gruesome thing.

He could still feel the copper of blood, dusty with sand, in his lungs. Smell the fear from the little Lady of Honour curdling the air around his throne like sour milk. See his troops leaving the arena like a funeral procession, heads bowed and hearts confused.

Because there had been no games last night. Just butchery.

For the thousandth time, he wished for Ilina. She'd had a way of reaching into a warrior's tangled gore of a chest for the heart below the muscle. And watching predators of that size take blow after blow knotted something in the younger ones. Even for him, the smell of blood lingered fresh.

Tavlen paused, fingers outstretched for the door latch. The smell of blood was no ghost memory. It leaked from under his door, fresher than the sands in his memory.

He unlatched the door as quiet as a tomb mouse.

His office was a sea of silhouettes. Among the fleshy colours of dawn, the smell of blood and the sea-touched breeze from the balcony, someone small stood behind his desk. A shadow leaning against the wood with a paper held up for inspection.

His papers. His desk.

With a sudden whoosh, every candle in the room lit, casting a kaleidoscope of shadows.

Eleos of Kana lifted her eyes from the papers, her face illuminated by the candles on his desk. She didn't say anything; merely stood there as he entered.

Her appearance was entirely different. A loose, dark-knit sweater. White cotton band at her chest. Hair frayed from a simple plait over her shoulder. No gold paint, no black diamonds, no silk and chains. It was a stripped-bare look that made him feel the intruder.

The reek of blood came from a pile of bandages on his desk. A great mound of sopping red linen that was slick in his throat like a swallow of metal and salt.

He approached his desk, grabbed the wooden chair that Fent kept nearby and sat across from her as if they convened over blood every morning. "This display of gore will stain my table," he heard himself say.

"Forgive me," she said. "I had not considered the delicacy of the Midland's veneer."

Tavlen twisted up his lips for her. "Before I have you dragged off my land—care to explain your presence?"

"You mean how I managed to bypass your guards with a bag of blood on my back?" She took in the room with a slight pinch to her brow. "This is where Stalwar was killed, you know? This very office. 'How'd Siman get in?' I wondered."

She re-folded the papers she'd been reading. Tavlen recognised them now; the letters he'd taken from her at the beach.

"My informant tells me you trained with the Wing Ripper." He stretched his legs out before him, like a father preparing to deal with the tantrum of a child.

She smiled at the creased paper in her hands—a sad smile that (like the bare look of her) Tavlen felt he shouldn't see. "Tragic now, but true. And I was always better than him at the sneaking part. Dragons rely too heavily on smell for their defences."

Tavlen breathed in through his nose.

The smell of blood climbed down his throat and buried beneath his bones. But battle and the cage years made that a familiar sensation. Under it, he smelt dust, olive wood, the small-bud flowers outside and the sea. But (startling him) there was not a twinge of another person. Scent mufflers blurred the air around their carrier, like a signature with smudged ink. But this was like the air rewove itself in a veil around her.

Tavlen's attention sharpened; dragon focus making the air feel heavier, the light brighter, the shadows colder. Then he caught a touch of her body heat, a slight undercurrent of her breath and other small inconsistencies in scent—like mismatched colours in a portrait. But no tigress.

"I studied smell for a while, you see," Eleos said indulgently. "Erasing scent is easy, but blending into the background? That takes study. The right meld of smells for the right setting. A touch of the jasmine outside. The smell of paper for an office. The olive tree you have in the courtyard. Can't forget the wax and smoke—Midlanders love their fire."

To prove her point, she held her letters over the lit candle and watched the paper catch. The fire from the letter spread an orange too harsh for dawn over her face, catching in the blackness of her hair to glare at him in gold.

She dropped the burning paper on the bandages. "As for the blood—a tightly sealed bag with a few layers of beeswax. An unlocked door. And an empty office. Until you graced me with your presence, of course."

The linen was too sodden to catch fire and the desperate buck of the flames begged him for fuel. He reached out to squelch the fire in the blood. "Come to do away with me as your brother did Stalwar?" The bandages were sticky and cold.

That finally angered her. "I am peace-vowing, snake. I am not here to kill you."

"That's a relief." Tavlen leaned back in his chair. "You were missed tonight, a little tigress might have meant a better show. The rest of your pride practically put us to sleep."

"Yes, the slit-drip of innocent blood. A lullaby to your kind."

Tavlen grinned. "Is that how you tuck in that little hybrid you hide?"

Her voice was vicious. "Ha."

"Here to make me hate myself for your family's decision? If not to kill me, that is." He lifted one of the bandages in a long strand of linen. The smell was beginning to make him feel as if he were back in the cages on the worst sort of night.

She didn't answer, just watched the blood hang between them with a bristle beneath her skin. She looked, hands on his desk, shoulders arched, braid swinging, like kindling about to crumble.

Tavlen dropped the bandage with the rest. "They didn't rend to fur," he said, ensuring guilt (What guilt? He had no guilt) was clipped from his tone. "It's hardly my fault they chose to stand there and bleed. What animal refuses to rend when threatened like that?"

"I told you they wouldn't," she said, low and nearly inhuman.

Tavlen stood. "Again, not my fault."

"Not your fault?" The words tore from her like a ripped seam. Eleos rounded the table and fisted her hands in the bandages. "Son of every snake—did they shed this blood themselves?"

She shoved the linens at him, and the wet fabric wound through his fingers like a knot of eels. The fire in the hearth and the candles on the shelves leapt with his surprise.

Tavlen let them fall to the floor and the blood smeared his hands, his shirt. It was cold, but fresh. Alarmingly fresh. How long ago had the Kana left his sands? Surely too long for this much blood to still be spilling.

When he looked up, Eleos remained before him; no scent, but a warmth from her skin raised the hair on his neck like the kiss of a ghost.

She wasn't looking at him. Or the blood. Her wrist was over her eyes and her head was stretched back. The dawn twisted through the stained glass in green and gold to lay over her throat like a collar. She swallowed thickly.

It took him a moment to realise she was crying.

"Damn you." Her voice was a croak and she smeared a hand over her eyes.

Eleos gathered the bandages from the floor and returned them neatly to the table. The tears did nothing to dampen the hatred in her voice. "Hedren's lost a leg," she said.

Tavlen wiped his hands on the hem of his shirt.

"The twins have a broken ankle and a dislocated shoulder between them. And slashes down their thighs." She preyed closer. "You liked that, didn't you?"

Tavlen fisted his hands to hide the fresh blood stuck under his nails. The candle on his desk was burning at an alarming rate, the white wax dribbling down the bronze stick like an open wound.

"Kylan's got bruised ribs and stitches on his brow. Nash—who is pregnant with her first—was so bloodied in the teeth she could barely spit out if her cub was alright! Irie's nose was reset twice. And I gave our oldest lion—our elder, at seventy-two years old—twenty-three stitches down his back. Twenty! Three!"

"They made it worse by not rending to pelts." He stepped to meet her halfway across the room. "The crowds might have stopped their jeering and we could have taken it easy on them."

"Taken it easy?"

He hated how she did that; flinging his words back at him to make him sound the fool.

"You bled my pride before the whole province!" Her finger hit his chest; an echo of the night before. "There is no 'taking it easy' in these tournaments. There is only blood and violence and death!"

His chest burned where she touched him; he knocked her hand aside. "No one died."

"But what about tomorrow night, hey?" She jerked away from him, her hand raking through her hair. "Hedren lost his leg! You expect him to stand and live in the group games? Which did you choose again? 'Escape'? Thirteen peace-vowing lions against five blood-crazed dragons?"

"Hedren does not have to come."

"But Qipra—still crying on her pillow—she'll come? And Nash, nursing a broken jaw while monitoring the heartbeat of her unborn—" She cut off with tears again, but there was nothing watery in her voice. "You'll kill us."

"The pregnant one doesn't have to come either."

"Oh," she laughed, stepping away from him and wiping tears with her wrist. "How generous of you."

This dance of proximity and distance left him feverish; an indecisive hot and cold all at once. "You are trying my patience, kitten."

She rolled out her neck and took a deep breath. "I have come to give you a chance, dragon."

"Oh. How generous of you."

She raised her chin in defiance. "I know you're looking for your sister."

Every flame in the room stammered like a lost heartbeat. The hearth crackled at Tavlen's sudden chill—Ilina's absence creeping back to wrap around his throat with a cold hand. "My sister," he echoed.

"That's right." She advanced again, her bare feet glinting with silver rings beneath the billow of her trousers. "The Kana specialises in information."

His dragon focus was returning, sharpening the spilt hair from her braid, the orange candle glow on her shoulder, cataloguing every muscle twined around her small flame. "And you think you can help me."

"You find us dangerous enough to beat down in an arena, but not dangerous enough to be of any use. Don't be stupid, snake, let's make a deal." When she crossed her arms, her sweater slipped off her shoulder. "Let us off tomorrow. And I'll track her down for you."

Tavlen found his hourglass in his pocket and spun it on its ring; forcing his breath out with the aggravated whirr. "Do you even know her name, still-skin?"

Her chin canted to a proud angle. "Ilina, yes?"

The fires in the room leapt with Tavlen's pulse, reaching for him with an eager blaze. To hear her name spoken like hate. By a stranger in this strange land. "Who told you that?"

"Like I said, the Kana specialises in information." She refused to move as he closed the distance between them, though the little vein across her throat pattered faster. "And your secrets sold for cheaper than you'd like, Lord Overseer."

He stopped close enough to taste the smeared, false colours of her scent under his tongue. He was short in human-skin, but her eyes still only came up to the scruff of his chin.

"All I know is her name, that she was taken, and that she has magic." She turned away, excusing her retreat by plucking the figurine from his desk. "Glass magic. So these—" she turned the glass dragon over and inspected its underbelly "—are probably hers. Shouldn't have thrown that glass pearl in the fire, hey?"

The candle on his desk finally bled out of wax and they were left with the hearth and pale near-morning. Which was more light than shadow now.

Tavlen took the figurine from her.

Eleos watched his movements from the corner of her eye. "If she's on the coast, I'll find her, dragon. Just let my family out of tomorrow's games."

Tavlen returned the glass dragon to his desk. "On the coast?" He laughed. "Kitten, it's not that easy. I am hated in all three territories. She could be dead in the Northern Mountains for all we know. Best case scenario, I take you as bait for the Wing Ripper and ask him where she is."

Her jaw tightened. "Or let me ask him myself."

Tavlen smiled; these Southerners, always gambling with money they didn't have. "Why do that when I can keep the tigress here for him?" He leaned towards her. "Especially when I can do so without fearing so much as a scratch from her peace-vowing claws."

"He won't come for me." The shoulder she turned from him almost brushed his chest. "He knows one drop of bloodshed on my account is the end of us for good."

"So sure, kitten."

"Surely you understand the plight of the exile." She sidestepped him. "They say one would do anything for a welcome home, hey?"

Before he could revel in her retreat, she withdrew a letter from a pocket of orange silk tied around her waist. The stained glass light caught in the divots of its red wax.

Tavlen snatched the letter from her and it fell open like in accordion of paper. She'd broken the wax seal.

Good Unyielding, Veritrith's hand read. You are missed in Court.

Tavlen snapped the letter closed.

Eleos laughed. "Lover's spat?"

"Ha." Tavlen set the letter on the heap of bandages. (Nothing irked a dragon more than a thief). "I think you're the one who doesn't understand your plight."

He smiled. "I am the Court's dragon; you are the Court's subject. A skinless, clawless subject at that. If I want you to help me; you will. If I want your pride to fight in my games; they will. That's how this works."

He leaned against his desk and gave his hourglass a spin, turning to the sunrise. "Surprisingly, I have enjoyed these games." (He lied, though it didn't feel like a lie when she bristled like that). "What others found boring, I found quite... satisfying. The Unyielding is not my title by accident, kitten. As you said, I take until they choose to give."

"Monster," she snarled. "Blood-sick coward."

Her angry black eyes ran over him, amusing him in her small ferocity.

"If you say so."

She ran her hands down the blue linen of her trousers and shook her head, her braid swishing like a tail. "Sometimes, I think: dragons can be good. Strong and good." She reached back into her pocket. "It can't be impossible."

Tavlen scoffed with a whirl of his hourglass. "I'd beg to differ."

"And yet the rebellion wants you anyway." In a slower movement, she withdrew a second letter from her pocket. This one a crumple of creases and the remains of wax. Orange wax. "Tell me, what do they see in you?"

The hourglass stopped spinning. "Where did you get that?"

Eleos blinked at him with false concern. "Your top drawer."

"It wasn't open." Tavlen straightened off his desk.

"Oh." Eleos looked down at the letter, then spread it before the morning sun. "Well, they want you and your precious army for the Threshing."

The sun pressed through the paper to shadow the ink Tavlen had so long avoided. He moved towards her, feeling dangerous. "Give it here, tigress."

"Rebels from the north—" she was saying as she sidestepped his advance. "Determined to depose Court and Coven. What would they think of you now?" She waved the letter like a flag towards the blood-soaked bandages. "Innocent blood dripping from your desk, still drying on your sands!"

The corner of the letter began to smoke and Tavlen snatched it from her, pressing out the singed corners. "This is none of your business."

"Though let's not forget the other one." Eleos reached around him for Veritrith's letter and wiped at the blood by its seal. "This sounds more like it. The Queen Venomous. Coven's Mistress. Keeper of the Cracked Skies."

Tavlen seized that letter from her too. The hearth in the corner was roaring. Or perhaps that was the blood in his ears.

"The Culls were done in honour of her appointment; easy blood to bolster her control." Eleos wrapped her fingers in the ends of her sleeves and gestured with knitted fists to the blood on his desk. "You'd lend to her cause beautifully."

"What are you planning, then?" The hourglass left an indent in his palm. "Blackmail?"

She scoffed. "While I'm sure the Coven would love to know you're entertaining thoughts of the Threshing—"

"The letter wasn't opened."

"—telling them hardly helps my immediate cause."

Tavlen forced himself to lean back on his desk. "Hardly."

The sun was near awake, watching the room through a veil of pale light.

"I kept it only because I thought it odd someone holds out hope for you," she continued. "As odd as it was to find you had a little sister. It humanised you. For a moment."

She advanced; he let her. "But under all those scales, there is no man left, is there? No brother. No great dragon worth the Threshing's time. Just a coward caught between two letters."

His dragon focus drank in her nearness until he felt he would choke on her. The letters in his grip were smouldering, near-flames beckoning him in twisting hands of silver smoke. He set them on the desk behind him and rolled out his shoulders.

He hadn't felt this in a long, long time. Like his body wasn't flesh and bone anymore but mere paper and wood. Fuel to a fire that longed to swallow the world whole.

The tigress moved to cage him closer, one of her bare feet between his boots. Her head tilted like a cobra about to strike. "A coward who passes his time draining easy blood to remind himself he's got power."

A hiss sounded as the papers behind him caught. Furious, he reached out to snuff the flames; but so did she, and their hands clashed.

It was the contact that broke him. It turned that paper lantern feeling inside-out like a hit from the stomach that coughed blood from the mouth. Before he (or she) knew what he was about, he'd spun them so it was his body caging hers against the desk, his boots either side of her toes and his hand around her throat.

Her skin was cold, but the blood pounding beneath his fingers was hot. She wrapped her hands around his wrists, pulling at his grip like a rabbit fighting a snare. 

Even as she struggled, something dark and smug eclipsed the flash of terror in those paint-bare eyes. A cold, knowing smile stretched the skin beneath his hand. "There's the coward," she rasped, like a tiger relishing the food of a hunt.

Tavlen's fingers tightened; he felt her swallow catch under his grip. "I could kill you," he said, almost to himself.

"Would that mean the games are off?" Her voice choked at the edges.

With a shuddering breath, Tavlen peeled his fingers from her throat. He nearly shook with the effort. "Your life isn't worth that much," he managed.

She sagged against the table and pressed her fingers to the ghost of his grip at her neck. "You snakes price your amusement far too high," she coughed.

Tavlen put distance between them. "You know," he said (not quite sure why he was speaking). "Before they decided to clean me up for Court, my title wasn't the Unyielding. It was the Ruthless."

Eleos pulled the collar of her sweater higher up her neck. "The Threshing calls you that. Ruthless One," her tone was a mocking recitation. "We implore your help against the Coven. Your strength, your speed, your fire—"

"Enough!" Tavlen turned to the hearth. The fire roared at him, licking red up the sides of the grate.

"Oh, you'd rather sit here and wallow." She stood from the desk; fury cloaking her fear. "Keep the Coven games fed with the flesh of the land you're meant to oversee! Where is the honour in that?"

Tavlen's hands were in his hair. "I'll kill you!"

The letters caught flame again and he grabbed for them, near desperate.

"No, you won't." Eleos rounded him so she could smirk at the way he fumbled the letters closed. "You won't because somewhere deep inside—" She smacked the papers from his hands. "You hope that little paper is right about you. That you are the Ruthless." Her finger landed his chest and his hand wrapped around her wrist to hold her at bay. "The Unyielding One. That Veritrith and her Coven and her games have no sway over you."

Tavlen held her there. This close in the brightening morning, he could see the stains of blood on her sweater, the skin scrubbed raw between her tattoos.

He stretched his neck to the side and breathed in through his teeth. "So this is an appeal to my ego, then."

"I tried compassion. I tried logic. Tell me, what's left?"

The blood and dawn was smudged with the smoke gathering in the rafters—the hearth coughing plumes of black-grey too dense for the chimney to spew out.

"Fine." His words didn't sound like words anymore. He shoved her from him. "You need your games changed?"

She stumbled towards the hearth and caught herself on the armchair before its greedy orange maw.

"Need my blood on the line?" He hit his chest where her finger had pinned him. "So be it."

He stalked to the office door and flung it open. "Fent!" he called down the stairs. Then turned to point at the chair by the hearth. "Sit, Lady Kana."

Eleos considered the chair; she clutched the wrist he'd earlier grabbed to her chest. "You'll set it on fire."

Her wrist was red—a burn, probably. She was lucky she didn't have those same welts forming on her throat. "I said sit!"

Eleos moved so the chair was between them, but didn't sit.

Exasperated, Tavlen turned back to the door. "Fent!"

The door opened with a clack against the wall and Fent stumbled in: shirtless, trousers barely tied, notebook clutched to his bare chest. "What in the cracked sky—!" he waved a hand to clear the smoke and caught a glimpse of Eleos in the corner of the room. "You?" he asked, scandalised.

Lyra slipped in behind him, cloak-less and with her hair in red-gold braids at her shoulders. Her eyes honed in on Eleos.

Tavlen paced to his desk, tore open a bottle of ink, sloshed in a quill and tossed it to Fent. "Here." The dragon-claw clattered on the wall behind the secretary in a splatter of purple. "We're changing the games."

"Changing the—" Fent picked up the pen and looked to Eleos as if for help. "What?"

"A round of Predator." From the corner of his eye, he saw the bandages begin to slip off his desk. With a roar, Tavlen shoved them to the floor. "Four of our strongest on guard for the Kana." He turned to Eleos, who cowered behind that armchair with calculating eyes. "That satisfactory, tigress?"

Fent was scratching the words in his notebook, borrowing some ink from the wall. "Four on guard? Who the hell is on predator?"

Tavlen's lips pulled over his teeth. "I am."

Fent's quill paused. "Just you?"

Tavlen shook his head at Eleos. "Going for easy blood? I hope you'll attend this time, kitten."

Eleos stepped out from behind the chair. "They don't let me in," she said through her teeth. (She'd tried to sneak into the feast; it had made Tavlen smug to have her thrown out).

Fent looked up from his notes, eyes darting between dragon and tigress. "Well, love. The tattoos don't help. Nor the attire."

"I'm as noble as the rest." She still had that wrist clutched pathetically to her chest.

Tavlen waved a hand at Fent. "She'll come."

"Like that?" Fent pointed the butt of his quill in her general direction.

The proud set of her mouth, the sharp edge of her eyes, the morning sun over her shoulders like fine lace made the fire in Tavlen wrap around his chest until he felt he couldn't breathe.

"Oh, she'll come. In fact—we're changing the lady of honour."

Eleos scoffed. "I will not have a snake's tournament played in my name."

Tavlen met her halfway across the room. "Welcome to the Coven's games, Lady Eleos. You didn't want to play, you should have stayed home."

"Tavlen," Lyra called softly, a gentle warning. Lyra's voice generally cooled him, but now it sizzled over his skin like water in hot oil.

"No. She'll watch me fight and she'll watch me win. Kana blood on the sands for her sake!"

"You against four dragons?" Eleos raised up on her toes. That definitely was the smell of a burn on her skin. "I'll be there."

Fent's ink dripped to the floor. "Lady of— Tav, we can't—"

Tavlen's heat was in him like a knife. "Get her out of here." He stalked away from the tigress.

Fent turned to Eleos. "You have a dress, at least?"

A crinkle of paper sounded beneath Tavlen's boot—the Threshing's letter.

"How about another name, hm?" Fent was saying, scribbling furiously in his book. "Something more feminine?"

Eleos was next to the secretary—Tavlen felt her presence move behind him like he felt the gasping fire in the hearth. "You'll see the games changed?" she demanded.

Lyra tried to herd her out. "You'll leave now, tigress."

Fent's pen paused. "How about Ellaine. Ella? Elly, even?"

"The games will be changed," Eleos insisted fervently.

Tavlen picked up the letter at his feet. Its neatly penned paragraphs were nested in ash. The fire had burned his own name right off. "I said, get her out."

Eleos took Fent's book from him and read over his notes. Appeased, she tossed them back to the Worm. "I have a dress," she said. With a last look for Tavlen, she turned to the stairs in an arc of braid. "See you tonight, then."

Lyra descended after her, but Fent lingered in the doorway, looking at the departing women, at Tavlen, at the letter and back again. "What in the hell?" he shut his book. "Changing the games? Four against one?"

Tavlen tossed the letter on his desk. The daylight was sand in his eyes. "Leave me alone."

"That tigress? It's a real dishonour to the green vein, I-"

"Please, Fent." His voice was ash.

Fent must have heard it because when Tavlen opened his eyes again, Fent was gone and the door was shut behind him.

Tavlen's arms fell to his sides. The hearth was a smoulder of disappointment. Smoke funnelled out the balcony door. And the bandages would now stain the grout as well as his desk.

Tavlen sat on the red mahogany, with blood at his feet and the fire withering out until the smoke was gone and the day had traced that cage of scales over his office floor in heat and gold.

_____________

Wow. That was intense.

I need to recover from reading this over and over again for edits. It's like being tuned into screamer music while high on redbull and the innocent blood of a dragon's enemies all day long. Writing, folks. The things no one prepares you for.

Dedication goes to InfernalHearts (why didn't this tag you the first time!? Sorry!) who left me a lovely message on my board. 

Speaking of intense, here was almost my reply to their message. And this is a direct copy and paste, mind.

" I find it hard not to respond to these messages without just opening up with GAHHHHHHHH I'M GLOWING! But really, this comment made my day. It's hot over here, I'm weening myself off caffeine and the bunny I'm housesitting for hates me. (the bunny whose house I am living in; the bunny pays me nothing to sit this house, the bunny's owners do. grammar, grr). But this message! "  
*realises one is rambling about bunnies and coffee and grammar*
*squits back at text to assess mental health*
**select. delete.**

Don't worry, I toned it all down and cleaned up my caps to sound half reasonable. ;)

I blame the heat.
the end (of me, not this story. that lives on tomorrow)