“When everything is done to your satisfaction you will turn Sapphira over to me,” Dillon told the duke. “I am anxious to enjoy her company.”

The duke bowed. “It should be but a few days, Majesty,” he said, and backed from the king’s presence.

When his niece, however, learned that she was not going to the king this night she grew furious. “He wanted me tonight! What if he changes his mind while you dawdle and fuss over the bits and pieces of your agreement?”

“You, yourself, have said that he is eager for you. He will wait, and you will not seem so much like a loose woman,” the duke told her. “The proprieties will be observed.”

“You are right, Brother,” Margisia spoke up. “Now tell us exactly what you have obtained for our Sapphira.” And when he had, she was ecstatic, and turned to her daughter. “Thank your uncle, my child! He has done well for you. And when the king is finished with your company you will have a wealthy man to wed and a large dower. Far larger than we might have provided for you.”

“I mean to be his queen,” Sapphira said in a hard voice. “Do you think that I do this thing lightly, without thought, Uncle? I will make him love me, and he will never want me to leave him, nor will he think of Fflergant’s daughter, Cinnia, ever again. I will be queen of Belmair within a year. I swear it!”

“If it should come to that I will negotiate a marriage agreement for you,” the duke told her drily. “But for now I have preserved your reputation and your value as best as I might, Niece.” Tullio of Beldane doubted Sapphira would obtain her way in the matter but it would be impossible to convince her otherwise. She would learn by hard experience.

“I must go to him now,” Sapphira said.

“Nay. Not until the agreement has been written and signed,” the duke told her. “Remember, you are not some farmer’s daughter to be taken by the lord of the land. You are my niece. You have value. An apartment must be prepared here in the castle especially for you. Your wardrobe must be filled with gowns of the finest silk. The dower portion he has promised must be with my goldsmith. Only then can you go to the king. I will see you treated honorably,” the duke told the girl.

Sapphira pouted, but she nodded reluctantly. “I know you are doing what is best for me, Uncle. I am just anxious to be in the king’s arms.”

And while Sapphira dreamed of her lover, Dillon found himself both reluctant and eager for the girl. “She looks so much like Cinnia,” he told the dragon.

“She is not Cinnia,” Nidhug said in disapproving tones.

“You do not favor my taking a mistress,” he said.

The dragon sighed softly. “I know you are faithful in your heart to Cinnia,” she said. “And I know that you are passionate. How can you not be, given your parents? It could not be expected that you would eschew pleasures forever, Majesty.”

“But you do not like the lady Sapphira,” Dillon replied.

“Nay, I do not. It is not simply that she looks so like my mistress. There is a darkness in her. We have all sensed it. And I know that your mother would not be pleased with your choice. Either of Dreng’s granddaughters would have been a more suitable choice.”

“Dreng seeks to make one of his granddaughters my queen,” Dillon said.

“True, but he would have jumped at the opportunity to put one of them in your bed without a crown. He is an ambitious man or he should not have put those two girls in your path, my lord. I personally favored Panya,” Nidhug said.

“Why?” Dillon asked her, amused.

“She is intelligent, and would be able to converse with you on all manner of subjects. All Sapphira can offer you is her body.”

“It is a most luscious body,” Dillon noted.

“She will bore you to death, my lord,” the dragon said.

Dillon laughed. “I have no interest in carrying on a serious conversation with her, Nidhug. I want only to enjoy her body, and sate the months of pent-up lust.”

“Thus speaks your cold faerie heart,” Nidhug murmured.

“It is my nature,” he responded. “My heart belongs only to Cinnia. My cock, however, must be entertained, else it shrivel up and die.”

Nidhug tittered but then she grew serious again. “This girl means to be your queen. She is Belmairan from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. Like most of the others she believes Cinnia is despoiled and cannot be queen again even if she were to be found and returned to you. Sapphira wants to be your wife. She believes by climbing into your bed she can accomplish that goal.”

“She cannot,” Dillon said.

“I know that!” Nidhug answered him. “But she does not. Tell Duke Tullio you have changed your mind, my lord, I beg of you. Find another female for your bed. One who will understand her place is but temporary. Sapphira gives herself to you because she truly believes she can overcome your reluctance to let Cinnia go.”

“You are Belmair’s Great Dragon,” Dillon told her. “You hold the ancestral memories of all the previous dragons. Is there any law written in Belmair that says women taken by the Yafir are unclean, and cannot return to their families?”

“There is such a law, my lord,” the dragon said. “It was enacted long ago because the Belmairans did not want to mix their blood with the blood of the Yafir. But laws can be amended, changed or even dispensed with, as you know.”

“Then we shall dispense with this law as soon as possible. It has outlived any usefulness it once possessed. While the Yafir may have retained their magic, their blood is now so mixed with the Belmairans that they have become a different race.”

“The dukes will fight you on this,” Nidhug said.

“Alban will stand with me,” Dillon replied confidently.

“Dreng will not, and with Sapphira in your bed it is unlikely that Tullio will, either,” the dragon told him.

“I shall do this before the girl becomes my mistress,” Dillon told the dragon. “Then we shall see just how ambitious that duke really is. It is my feeling that he does not approve of what Sapphira does although he has negotiated with me in good faith in order to protect his niece as best he can. I think he will stand with me in hopes of dissuading her from her course. And if he does Sapphira may choose not to come to my bed.”

“She will come anyway,” Nidhug said dourly. “The girl is ambitious, and believes she can win your heart.”

“Cinnia has my heart,” Dillon said, “and Sapphira cannot have what I no longer have. I will have my beloved back if I have to wait a hundred years.”

“To be loved like that…” Nidhug said a trifle enviously.

Dillon smiled. “My uncle loves you,” he murmured. “And you, my beautiful, scaly friend, love him. It is a most interesting pairing.”

“It is an impossible pairing,” Nidhug replied, “and I am foolish, like all females in love. But I cannot help myself. I adore him in his faerie form, and when he takes my dragon form he is equally magnificent.” She sighed. “I miss him.”

“He will return as soon as we have some word from the Merfolk,” Dillon reassured her. “He is clever to remain in his mother’s forest for now. It allays my grandmother’s suspicions that her son has given his fickle faerie heart to a dragon.”

Nidhug could not refrain the chuckle that issued forth from her throat. “Ilona of the Forest Faeries is a most formidable creature,” she admitted.

“She is indeed,” Dillon replied with a smile. “My mother grows more like her than she would want to know.”

Using his magic Dillon brought the three dukes to his castle the following day. They met in a small paneled counsel chamber with Nidhug in attendance. “I am removing from Belmair’s laws the one that forbids the return of women taken by the Yafir.”

“Never!” shouted Duke Dreng jumping up, his face puce with outrage.

“The blood of Yafir and Belmairan is so mixed now that the law is foolish,” Dillon said. “I want peace with the Yafir. This is the first step I will take to make that peace a reality.”

“I like this proposal,” Duke Alban said quietly. “It makes sense. It is hundreds and hundreds of years since Napier IX caused this problem for all of us. Let us end what has been a great mistake. I stand with the king.”

“And what of you, Tullio?” Duke Dreng demanded to know. “Will you betray our land at the behest of this Hetarian king who has been foisted upon us?” he asked rudely.

Duke Tullio was silent for several long moments. His eyes met Dillon’s, and then he said simply, “I, too, stand with the king, for he is right, Dreng, whether you like it or not. Times have changed while we have remained static.”

“Traitors! You are all traitors,” Dreng yelled at them. “Take the law from the books if you will, but in Beltran the law will stand! No woman taken from my dukedom, even my granddaughter, will be allowed to return to my lands.”

“While I do not need your permission to remove this law from our legal books,” Dillon said, “I am grateful to you, Alban, and you, Tullio, for your support. As for you, my lord duke-” and Dillon fixed Dreng with a hard look “-do not think because I deal lightly with you now that I will continue to do so. The law of the land will be enforced throughout Belmair even if you do not like it. Do you understand me?”

In response, Duke Dreng angrily threw over his chair, and stalked from the small counsel chamber where they had all been meeting.

“I can see he will take some winning over,” Nidhug murmured drily.

“I will tell Sapphira,” Duke Tullio said to the king with a small smile.

“Our agreement will stand if she wishes it,” Dillon replied. “If she does not I shall pay you damages for your trouble.”

Duke Tullio nodded, and then standing, he quietly left the room.

“What agreement?” Duke Alban said. “If I may be so bold as to ask,” he amended his query politely.

“I need a mistress, for I have not taken a woman in almost a year now. As a man both Shadow and faerie, this has been difficult for me. Sapphira of Beldane pleases me, for she is so much like Cinnia, and she had indicated her desire to come to my bed. Of course I would not just use her without a proper agreement with her family,” Dillon said.

Duke Alban nodded. “My nieces did not please you?”

“Your nieces are hardly the sorts of girls I would ask to be my mistress,” Dillon replied. “They are charming, and amusing, but very respectable. Sapphira, on the other hand, is a bold girl. She thinks she can convince me to desert my wife in favor of her. I have been most candid with her. I have said she will not, but she was willing to come into my bed nonetheless. Tullio has not been happy with her decision, and I cannot blame him. Still, now that I have reversed the law concerning captive women, we will see how Sapphira feels.”

“If she is as ambitious as you believe her to be then she will come,” Alban noted.

Told by her uncle of this new turn of events, Sapphira was furious, even more so than Dreng, but of course for an entirely different reason. But then she said, “It matters not. He will not find her. No one has ever found the Yafir. The king will be mine.”

“You speak confidently for a virgin,” her uncle remarked. He cast her a sharp look. “You do still retain your virginity, Niece, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Sapphira said, irritated that he would doubt her.

“But I have been schooled carefully by my mother in what pleases a man. We used one of her handsome young male servants for me to practice upon. His cock was restrained, and bound with leather so he could not harm me. And Mama was with us at all times. My virtue is as tightly lodged as a cork in a bottle of new wine, Uncle. I shall scream when he first pierces me, and the blood of my innocence will stain the sheets beneath us, as well as his mighty cock. The king will not be cheated. He will have my virginity.

“But I know how to love a man well, Uncle. I know the places on his body where my kisses and my touches will be irresistible. I know how to suck a reluctant cock to an upright stance, and how to caress a man’s seed sac until he is on fire. My kisses are said to be like burning honey. Fflergant’s daughter surely never made the king feel the way I will make him feel,” Sapphira concluded with a self-satisfied smile.

Tullio shook his head, surprised. Then he looked to his sister. “You are certain, Margisia, that she is still intact? The king will not like being cheated.”

“She is as pure physically as the day she came from my womb,” the lady replied.

“I am somewhat shocked that you would have imparted so much carnal knowledge to a virgin, even your daughter,” the duke told his sister. “Would it not have been best to wait until she was wed? You did not do these things but recently.”