Polo Shawcross: Dragon Soldier Read online

  As for Mother, all I needed to do was offend her and she’d tell everyone in Port Azrael I was a dreadful son and they really shouldn’t accept me as duke.

  ****

  There were a wonderful couple of weeks when I was thinking life wasn’t bad at all, then I came in from riding with Azrael and his bodyguards to find Mother ensconced in my sitting room. With Ben.

  “It’s the lake air,” said Mother, looking wind-burned and pretty, a smile in her eyes and patting the downy pink cheeks of her new cat’s-eyed paramour. Ben squeezed Mother, who giggled like a schoolgirl, then he stretched and she looked at his muscles. I didn’t like Ben. He was about twenty, two years older than I was, and doing my mother.

  Suddenly, I had an idea of how Azrael must have felt when I was with Saraia, though we never flaunted things in public like Mother and Ben were doing, and Ben wasn’t a friend. He was Blood, fifth son of a duke’s brother or something, and determined to live off his looks while he could. While talking to me he actually said so in front of Mother, who only simpered and said he was, quote, cute, end quote. I wanted to hit Ben. I wanted to slap Mother.

  Father was back in Malion too, a message said, and he and Kendra invited me to visit. He was at least with someone his own age, but I didn’t like her either. She reminded me of Azrael’s Half Aunt Suzy, though Kendra was Blood, her hair a brassy red, not blonde. All tight velvet dresses with a flirty manner that required lots of cleavage, enough to draw stares even in cosmopolitan Malion.

  Kendra and Mother hated each other with a passion. Mother always referred to her as ‘That Woman’. Kendra called Mother ‘Poor Old Tess’. I smiled and pretended not to care. Mother and Father weren’t speaking at all, and Father frostily ignored Ben.

  Ben didn’t notice. Sometimes he reminded me a bit of me, at least how I used to be, oblivious to anything except personal pleasures. Mother beat Father back to Malion by a day and was down the hall at the Spotted Horse, which meant Father wouldn’t visit. To let me know when he wanted to meet up for a coffee or a meal he’d send a page from his hotel a block away. To my horror, both my parents decided to stay with me in Malion until at least the end of the year.

  Azrael and Bailey were rooming together at the guild, so we three got to know each other properly. If I thought about it, the idea that my two closest friends my own age were Crown Princes was quite staggering. The current term’s tuition coin was returned to Lilith as I wasn’t at the Military Guild any more. I didn’t need it and certainly wasn’t going to be tied to hanging around Malion for the next two-and-a-half years.

  My subjects at the Harvesters Guild were so far proving more interesting than I expected. It was still good to let off steam with a night of drinking and smoking and now I wasn’t pining for Miri I was always interested in sex.

  As I was about to be duke, the same gold-diggers and title-hunters I had already seen go after Azrael were pursuing me. It was amusing and another lesson. They didn’t seem to understand their transparency. People were endlessly strange. I tumbled them if I felt like it. I was never going to fall in love again, not after Miri.

  Despite keeping up my meditations and katas, and staying as mentally and physically fit as I knew how, I had no luck trying to change shape.

  ****

  By September and my eighteenth birthday, Mother had moved on to some new toyboy and Father was in a court case with Kendra because he called off their engagement. He claimed he’d not asked her to marry him. Besides, he was already married to Mother.

  As he still wasn’t drinking, I took his word for it and funded his defence. Kendra dropped the case, though only after the lawyer found out she was also already married to someone else. The lawyer gave me the card of the investigators he used, and I resolved to use them if I ever fell in love again.

  My grades weren’t as good as they could have been, but with Mother and Father fighting, study was difficult. They were also partying in embarrassing amounts, and it seemed everyone in the Malion social scene knew them. Instead of me being famous or notorious, the gossip was about my parents. Avoiding them was often very difficult. Wiping out on drugs and alcohol kept me sane. I tried not to go too far, an expert at dancing the fine line between high and nauseated, exercising my right to rebel.

  With the pious condescension of the newly-converted, Father lectured me about substance addiction and how I should let Thet into my life, so I went on a dreamdust trip that I was lucky to come back from. The danger with dreamdust was that one stopped eating and drinking, lost in the mind. Dosage wasn’t a precise science. You might end up seemingly asleep for one day or five. It was easy to dehydrate and die. I was out cold, so Azrael and Bailey told me, for two whole days.

  In my mind it seemed I was gone for weeks, in a crazy dream I could only remember in fragments, where I killed a redheaded woman to take a silver dragon crown. All I was sure of was that the woman wasn’t anyone I currently knew and the crown wasn’t Sendren’s.

  Somehow, Mother found out about the dreamdust. I suspected Azrael might have told her, under the kind of extreme interrogation that only mothers are capable of. She told me I was just like my father.

  Of course, I got blind drunk.

  ****

  The next morning I woke up next to a stunning blonde I didn’t recognise, in a bedroom I didn’t know either. I lifted the covers, looked at her, congratulated myself on my wonderful good taste even plastered out of my mind, and stroked a hand across her stomach, then decided my hangover was too large to ignore. The blonde smiled in her sleep. I dropped the sheet, she snuggled back under the covers, and I left her to wake.

  I found a servant and realised from the livery I was somewhere in King Lewis’s palace. The servant brought mindweed, orange juice, ground willow bark for my head, and coffee. Feeling much better after a dose of each and a pipe, I woke the gently snoring blonde, thinking to tumble her again if her own hangover could stand it. If not, I had the necessary cures arranged on the bedside table.

  She woke up, but was suddenly coy and doing the ‘Oh dear, what must you think of me?’ performance some women think is necessary so men won’t think they’re whores. I’ve never thought a woman a whore for bedding me but I know enough men do, especially young ones.

  Listening to the blonde, I found myself wondering what kind of a world it was where women had to hide their true selves or be judged? Where it paid for, in terms of how society viewed them, to lie about their motives for wanting a man? They couldn’t be sexual, enjoy their bodies and want sex, or they were branded a whore.

  Not that men fared better. Azrael and his whatever-sexuality-he-was shouldn’t be anyone’s business. I kissed the blonde to shut her up and it worked. I slid a hand under the sheet, she kissed me back, hips moving, but kept trying to sit up. I pushed her down, not to be brutal, just firmly. She looked up at me, panting.

  “I think,” I said, one hand stroking down her face, then her neck, and pulling the sheet down, “that you should lie there and let me do you again.”

  I didn’t mention the truth, which was that I remembered doing her up against a tree outside the ballroom but not much after that, though there had been oral sex involved later. Definitely too drunk to see clearly the previous night, I wanted a sober memory because she was completely gorgeous. She snatched the sheet back up to her chin.

  “I can’t do that,” she said, her mouth prim.

  “Can’t?” I looked at her, mystified. “Course you can.” I grinned. “Unless you want me to lie down and you can do me again.” She scowled at me, making her pretty face an ugly one.

  “You don’t understand, I’m the Crown Princess-” She saw me be surprised by that and put on a haughty face, used to being recognised. I thought aha, Isabella.

  Up until then I’d completely forgotten her name. I remembered meeting her briefly a few times when I was with her father. How had I picked her up? Had she been drunk? Isabella pushed my hand away. “You tricked me into bed last night,” she said, “I’m not falling
for your smooth talking again.” I frowned, stopped trying to stroke her, rolled onto my back then onto my side, propped myself up on one elbow and looked at her again.

  “I was drunk,” I said, “probably not very smooth.” I was concerned. There was my reputation to consider. “Didn’t you enjoy the sex?” I said. Even blind drunk, I didn’t usually shirk my duty to help partners enjoy themselves first. Isabella looked away from me. I had a fading memory of me spending a long time with her thighs over my ears. Hadn’t she liked it? She screamed when she came, had she faked it? I’d heard of women doing that.

  “That’s not the point,” she said. Oh, I nearly shouted, it bloody is! However, right then she said, “We need to talk.”

  Suddenly there were loud bells ringing in my head and a thousand red flags waving. My cock, which was paying attention up until then, went down faster than I’d ever felt it. Adrenalin started pumping in me as she went on, “You can’t expect me to fall into bed with you like this.” I couldn’t?

  As she began the lecture, the one that reminded me I was an evil person who had somehow talked a pure innocent girl into sex, who would now have to do everything her way to make up for my crime, I didn’t say a word. I did smile and slide out of bed.

  Some wonderful servant had found my clothes and put them neatly together. I was sure I hadn’t left them that tidily the night before. I dressed fast. As I bolted out the door I heard Isabella, in a very bossy tone, calling after me, “Polo? Where do you think you’re going?”

  I shouted my thanks for a wonderful evening and kept running until I reached the nearest exit from the palace. A spoiled, beautiful woman who expected me to do as she ordered? I had Mother. I did not need Isabella.

  For a few weeks I stayed away from palace events, until I heard the Crown Princess was being seen with a new beau, a young lord from somewhere in the north. Shame not to get a second shot at that body but, as I was always telling Azrael, it really was best to avoid the crazy ones.

  ****

  Along with my other sexual conquests there were several threesomes with Azrael. Every time, I swore I wouldn’t do it again. I didn’t actually have sex with him, though he tried to with me, but I deflected him gently and focused on the girl.

  With another man I would usually be happy to have several kinds of sex with him, but not with Azrael. I kept trying to avoid even the possibility, but there was always a time I was drunk enough, she was pretty and willing, and Azrael bit his lip, trying not to beg.

  Every time, I’d think it was fine, he was over me. He kept saying he was. Somewhere in the drunken haze I’d realise that even though I didn’t touch him, he still loved me. I was always drunk enough to stay and hate myself in the morning. Or whenever I sobered up.

  One time I woke up with someone’s tongue tickling me. For an awful moment thought it was him and opened my eyes, to find the girl from last night grinning up at me, with Azrael – eyes closed - doing her from behind.

  Sometimes we went to the House of Silks, the best brothel in Malion. There you could hire your desire by the hour, in pairs or even triplets. With or without whips and chains. There were men or women and those between the more common two sexes. It was like attending some kind of sexual university where I explored new kinds of depravity.

  We were there so often that the floozies adopted us, though I was under no illusions. It wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts, more that we tipped impressively.

  ****

  Chapter 10 – Endless Summer

  By the time of the end-of-year exams my hair was to my shoulders. I had it cut short, a symbolic gesture, saying goodbye to the past and boyhood.

  My full investiture was to be at the beginning of the summer holidays. I had a ducal yacht and was going to spend the summer learning to sail. A large number of my duchy’s residents made their living from the Great Star Lake, so I needed to see that economy in action. At least that was the excuse Master Thomas the steward suggested if accused of slacking during my sailing holiday. Being duke was like winning some lottery, every day.

  Azrael, Bailey, and I went to Starshore, where King Theo met us. We gave the Royal Bodyguards a nightmare time as we all partied in Port Azrael during a three-day Duke’s Investiture Festival funded with some of my savings. There was free food, booze and mindweed, everyone making merry at my expense. Then a fair number of them threw up.

  This was, Master Thomas assured me, and Uncle Theo concurred, an excellent public relations exercise with which to begin my time as ducal ruler. It was easy to leave Master Thomas in charge. There was no need for me to do more than note what was done in my name, which I did.

  Via Theo’s recommendations, I recruited personal spies to tell me what the people were upset about and watch the staff. I also arranged my own bodyguards. This seemed a sensible precaution. With Azrael’s permission and at Fenric’s recommendation, I poached Ross from Azrael’s staff to become my head of security. Ross and I got on well, and he stopped me bleeding to death the day Aunt Kristen mauled me.

  The Royal Court moved south, taking me with it to the Duchy of Beechwood, where Azrael was made duke with another fete and attendant security nightmares. I rode to Lower Beech while we were there, thinking to see who said hello. I was surprised at how many did.

  Even the boys my own age seemed to have forgotten they hated me. Instead they were proud of being at school with the famous Polo Shawcross. A lieutenant colonel at the barracks knew me, he was a major when I saw him last. We caught up on village gossip. He said Rob and his wife Molly, who’d been my lover until my mother had paid her to leave me alone, had left about the same time my family did.

  The whole Court circus went back to Peterhaven, where we celebrated Azrael being officially Crown Prince. Once that was done I went back to Starshore and went sailing.

  Thanks to Grandmama Daeva, who took me on holidays up to the Great Star Lake as a child, I was a strong swimmer, and discovered I liked sailing. Losing myself in the rhythms of the water and the snap of canvas, I tanned very dark. My hair bleached until it was nearly white. Ross and the other guards had nothing much to do, which they weren’t bothered about, and spent some solid time fishing and working on their tans.

  Azrael wrote, saying there were several genuine threats on his life but none that came close to hurting him. There were conspirators caught while still plotting but nothing that implicated his half-brother Young Perry or my enemy, Indigo Sutherland.

  I read this while lounging on a beach in a small lakeside town on Dragon’s Mouth Bay, where the girls were pretty and the boys liked to do each other. This resulted in the girls being both sex-starved and used to doing each other, something they would happily repeat whenever I got two of them together in a bed. It was the best holiday I could remember, sunlit, dusted with salt and sand, and damp with sex and kisses.

  While I was in Starshore, my parents went to their various homes there, which I visited and admired in turn as a good son should, especially when he’s paying for them.

  ****

  With a string of horses and some grooms, I took care to dress like the latter for the ride back to Malion. I sneaked out of my duchy, down to Peterhaven to see Azrael. We wanted to ride back together instead of going in a coach, but Fenric said only if Azrael cut his hair.

  “If you can’t pass for a soldier or a groom you go in a coach,” said Fenric, “I will not allow you to ride all that way.”

  So Azrael had his hair cropped short like mine. Symbolically shorn of the past, both of us went into adulthood. With our new cuts and dressed in black and green fatigues, we could pass for soldiers. We spent five days happily riding, staying at inns, pretending his name wasn’t Azrael Westwych, Crown Prince of Sendren, Duke of Beechwood, and I wasn’t the notorious Polo Shawcross, Duke of Starshore.

  None of Azrael’s harem had thrown a baby, despite Azrael devoting himself to the task. He was philosophical and had stopped being sure he was gay. Now he was sure he was infertile. It was looking that way.
While Saraia and Nanny Black lined up the next lot of possible breeding stock for mid-year, he was taking a break from his forced mating.

  It would be his second year at the Military Guild and he didn’t need to live-in any more, so after some discussions with Fenric and Ross about security, we had decided to rent the entire first floor of the Spotted Horse and were looking forward to some fun.

  ****

  The first afternoon back in Malion, there was still nearly a week left of the holidays, and so far my parents didn’t know I was gone from Starshore, mainly because my mail was being carefully routed via Dragon’s Mouth Bay.

  I was ignoring a new book about me. It was the second book. The first one, that best-selling pile of twaddle, now in about its twentieth printing, covered my life in lurid and often incorrect detail up until I was ennobled. A number of other events in my life lent themselves to even more creative re-writing and so Anonymous released another damn book.

  The second book’s title was even worse, Jealous Love: The Wild Adventures of the Duke of Starshore. I felt nauseated every time I heard the name. We all thought it was the same writer, at least Anonymous sounded the same, verbose yet coy. He or possibly she told my life story as I attended then was asked to leave the Military Guild, ascended from Lord of Starshore to the dukedom, then seemed to settle to a life of partying in Malion, in a rather hackneyed role as one of the old kingdoms’ more desirable bachelors. Despite my deserved reputation as a sexual omnivore the writer completely left out all mention of anything non-heterosexual.

  Likewise Anonymous omitted the news that anyone tried to kill me for political reasons. Aside from the dragon attack, which was simply luck or lack of it, the writer always blamed the husband of someone I bedded for my near-death experiences, even when a mob of thirty or so attacked me.