His fingers ached from cold inside his sodden gauntlets and a steady stream of water got past his broad-brimmed cavalry hat to run down the inside of his great coat. He was cold, tired, sore, and late, and to top it all off, he had absolutely no idea where he was. He wiped the moisture from his goggles and squinted into the rain-swept darkness. There just wasn’t anything to see through the clouds and the gloom. If there had only been a moon. He cursed his ill luck. How could he have been so foolish? It wasn’t really his fault, he reminded himself. The letter from Annabelle had come last week. What was a person supposed to do when his girl spurned him to marry his brother? “Not get drunk for three days straight,” he said to the empty night. Below him Genevieve snorted. He wasn’t sure if the dragon could understand him and was offering her derision, or if she just responded to his words. It really didn’t matter since it wasn’t her that would have his spurs and summarily drum him out of the Southern Knights.
