The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2) by Marina Finlayson Page B

last. In our case it was only about eighteen months.” Or so I’d always been told. “Valeria was first, and Monique was last.”
    “How is that fair? The older ones are bigger and stronger.”
    “True. Which is why the hatchlings are reared separately, and the proving doesn’t start till the queen judges they’re all ready.”
    “But why does she care? If the queen’s about to die, what difference does it make to her who takes over?”
    “Dragons are very territorial. If they don’t make sure they have the strongest possible successor, they risk having a queen from another domain move in and take over. No queen can stand the thought of her bloodline being wiped out and one of her rivals stealing her throne. Anyway, when she thinks they’re ready, you get the Presentation Ball, where the candidates are officially introduced and the proving is announced.”
    “Though some don’t wait for that,” Ben pointed out. “If you can believe the legends, Elizabeth finished off her sisters before the last one was even out of nappies.”
    “Maybe that’s why she was so careful with us. The first time I met my sisters was at the Presentation Ball—though I tried once before that.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    I was twelve years old and convinced I already knew everything. I’d devoured every book in the farm’s small library, and could rattle off the powers and weaknesses of every type of shifter like a regular little encyclopaedia. I knew the colours of their auras and their special abilities plus the personal histories of every shifter in my mother’s court. On top of that I knew all the turning points in my mother’s long rule, and was pretty well acquainted with the courts and histories of the other queens too.
    And then Mr Saunders arrived to teach me economics and human history.
    Well, economics I could at least see the use for. After all, when I was queen I’d have a huge business empire to oversee. Though my servants would do the actual work, I would need to understand what was going on. But human history?
    I sat at my desk in the library. I’d been having lessons here since before I could read, and the wooden surface of the desk showed my evolving handwriting skills, with various sets of my initials, snatches of poetry and the occasional swear word carved into it. From here I could look out over the paddocks of the farm and see cows and horses grazing, and maybe the odd hawk circling far overhead. Some days whole afternoons slipped by in a kind of dreaming haze, but today I lounged back in my seat and glared at Mr Saunders.
    “Why should a dragon bother learning human history? What do I care what the monkeys have been up to?”
    Mr Saunders was an old man, the first old person I’d ever known. The permanent staff at the farm were all my mother’s thralls, mostly young, fit men apart from the middle-aged couple who posed as my parents. Supposedly I was too sickly to attend school or get out much, and they were homeschooling me. The only other people I saw were my mother—very occasionally—and slightly more frequently, her right-hand man, Gideon Thorne. And since they were both dragons, they looked even younger than my middle-aged guardians, their bright red auras blazing with good health.
    Mr Saunders’ wisps of white hair and thick-lensed glasses fascinated me almost as much as they grossed me out. Thank God I would never look like that, with half my face sagging down my neck and my shoulders rounded with age. If he’d had an aura it would have been flickering and dull, but he was human, so no aura cradled him in its soft glow.
    Still, he could sit up straight when he wanted to, and he did so now, giving me a disapproving look from under his thick white eyebrows. Those eyebrows were a shocker too, with random hairs curling off in all directions. Someone needed to do him a favour and introduce him to a pair of scissors.
    “You have to live in the human world,” he pointed out. “You need to understand it.