《The Dragon King Is a Girl》全部章節：第 1 章 - 第 10 章

Kael Draven.Black hair, green eyes, jaw set like he'd been born disappointed. He leaned against his doorframe with his arms crossed, looking at me the way you'd look at a stain on your shirt.Not angry. Not surprised. Just inconvenienced."You," I said."Me." He glanced at the trunk behind me, then back at my face. "You're next door."It wasn't a question. He'd already processed it, accepted it, decided it wasn't worth his time, all before I'd remembered how to breathe.For half a second his eyes stopped on me instead of sliding past.I could have counted on one hand the times that had happened.I hated that I had counted.I hated Kael Draven.It was the slow kind, the kind you build one afternoon at a time. Mine had a start date.I was thirteen. A combat theory problem had taken me three days and I still had not cracked it. He had finished it in an afternoon. I swallowed enough pride to walk the length of a practice yard and ask him how.He looked at me with those flat green eyes an

"Not until the infirmary." Kael's voice was flat. Final.He set me down on a cot like he was putting down a package, carefully enough not to break it, detached enough not to care. Before I could say anything, he'd already turned and walked out.I stared at the empty doorway.In twelve years, Kael Draven had never carried anything heavier than his own superiority. He didn't do favors. And yet he'd just carried me through half the academy without a single word of complaint.I didn't know what to do with that.The light through the window had gone orange by the time the doctor came. She was a thin woman with sharp eyes and ink-stained fingers. She handed me a small glass vial. The liquid inside was dark red, almost black, and smelled like copper and burnt sugar."Dragon blood," she said. "Drink."I'd read about it in my mother's books. Dragon blood carried traces of the magic that ran through their veins, enough to knit torn tissue and close wounds in minutes instead of weeks. It was rar

We walked to the Dragon Court at dawn.The path wound east from the academy through the pines and up a ridge of bare stone. It wasn't far, twenty minutes on foot, but the silence made it feel longer. Nobody spoke above a whisper. Even the students who'd been boasting about Tharion the night before had gone quiet.The Dragon Court was carved into the base of a cliff face. A vast circle of open stone, ringed by pillars worn smooth by centuries of wind. At the center stood a single monument: a slab of dark granite, tall as a man, etched with a name I couldn't read from where I stood.The last Dragon King's tomb.And curled around it, tail wrapped three times around the base of the stone, was Tharion.He was enormous. Twice the size of Solari, maybe more. His scales were gold, deep and heavy, the color of sunlight trapped in amber. His wings lay folded against his back, each one wide enough to shade half the courtyard. His eyes were closed.He looked old. Worn, like something that had bee

Kael had always been like this.Since we were children — since the first time our names appeared on the same list and his was at the top and mine was at the bottom — he'd made sure I knew exactly where I stood. Not through insults. Through certainty. The kind that didn't bother explaining itself.I stood from the table. The laughter stuttered for half a second, then resumed. Kyra was still holding the letter, tilted so the students closest to her could read it for themselves.I walked over and took it from her hand.Her fingers opened without resistance. She didn't need to hold on. The damage was finished.I looked at Kael.He looked back. That same flat expression. As if he'd said something so obvious it didn't require a response.I wanted to say something. Something sharp enough to crack that certainty open. But my mind was blank and my throat was sealed and every second I stood there was another second they could watch me lose.I walked out.The corridor was dark and cold. I presse

"Sleep."The word dropped into the dark and stayed there. I was still trying to catch up with what had happened — one moment I'd been standing, the next the mattress was under me and Kael's hand was heavy on my shoulder, and the reversal had come too fast for anything useful like dignity."If you don't," he said, "you'll be dead before tomorrow's course ends. Your stamina won't last the morning."He let go. Just like that.He stood, turned, and walked to the door. He didn't look back at me sprawled across the covers with my heart still hammering. The door closed, and the corridor swallowed the sound of his footsteps, and I lay there staring at the ceiling.He was right. That was the worst part. I'd known about the dragon-riding course — everyone had — and I'd simply stopped keeping track of the days somewhere around the dinner that went wrong and the midnight training that followed. My body had been running on spite and stubbornness for hours, and spite didn't hold when you were this