Maximus glided gracefully onto the turret, his tail grazing the back of the castle as it wrapped around his massive claws curling to grip the stone. He stared out into the woods, his breath expelling in long streams against the driving rain. He was in no rush to retreat into his natural form and find warmth inside the castle, despite the chill surrounding him. He knew what waited for him inside: an irrational old man who was expecting news Maximus could not possibly provide him.

One of these days, I am going to get out of this castle and leave Father to his own devices, he vowed, his glittering saffron eyes taking in the lush greenery without really seeing it.

Lowering his scaly head, he allowed the water to roll off his leathery skin and bounce to the ancient floor, cooling his overheated body after the flight he had just taken from Oxford. Slowly, his shape began to shift, and he reluctantly allowed himself to become human again, his broad shoulders overtaking the oily talons, his wings retracting into a muscled back.

Maximus moved toward the small portal leading into the castle walls, wondering how long he might be able to hide out before King Rui learned he was home.

Creeping down into the turret, a flurry of mice scattered at his footfalls, and Maximus paused to catch his breath. He found his heart pounding, but it had nothing to do with the trip he had just taken, nor with the impending meeting with his father.

It was the image of Poet Mueller that caused his pulse to quicken, and for a moment, in the shadows of the stone walls, Maximus could almost see her, as if she was there with him. He had not expected her to be so beautiful, so fresh.

When he stared at her face in detail for the first time, he had seen a certain vulnerability to her that had almost stolen his breath. Even in the aftermath of the rain, her soft blonde hair matted to her head, her mascara running slightly down her pale cheeks, her beauty was unbelievable.

Watching her slip into the lecture hall, her face flushing with embarrassment, the freckles on her cheeks seemed to pop, even from the distance between them. Maximus silently willed her toward him, hoping she would take the empty seat in front of him before she settled in beside a girl with malicious brown eyes.

Maximus had been tracking Poet Mueller for days, learning who she was and how she had come to be in Misty Woods weeks earlier. He had been pointlessly arguing with his father about the girl’s untimely appearance.

“She must be stopped!” King Rui growled. “She will expose us and ruin everything!”

At first, Maximus had rolled his eyes, knowing his father’s penchant for exaggeration and old-fashioned desire for war. At first, he had thought he was bored and looking for something to entertain himself, and Maximus had barely heard his father’s endless rambling about the unexpected visitor.

In seven centuries, the fallen king had not learned to adapt to the modern world, no matter how much Maximus and his brothers tried to push him forward. Not even electricity existed inside the cold walls of his castle, since Rui was determined to live in the past and keep Maximus there with him. He still insisted on being referred to as “King,” despite the fact that Misty Woods had not been a kingdom in four centuries.

Still, Maximus had to admit that a stranger appearing on their doorstep, asking questions about the history of Misty Woods, was cause for suspicion. How long had it been since anyone had remembered the shambled castle in the depths of the north? It was a long-forgotten end of the earth.

At least until the blonde girl had arrived.

“Who did she say she was, Father?” Max asked, and Rui grunted in response.

“Is it not obvious, you fool? She is a spy, a usurper sent from a neighboring kingdom to overthrow our greatness!”

There was no point in explaining to the old dragon precisely how many issues there were with his statement. Rui was far too deluded to understand or heed reality.

Maximus had been in London, securing their finances, when the girl had arrived, leaving only Rui and his new wife, Estrella, as witnesses to what had occurred. Making sense of it was Maximus’ duty, but it was a difficult task when neither his father nor stepmother could be considered reliable sources for the most basic information.

Still, the idea that an outsider had been inside the castle walls was disturbing to Maximus, especially because he had no idea who she was and what she wanted.

“What is her name, Father?” he had asked patiently, knowing that answers were difficult to get from the failing patriarch even under good circumstances. Adding stress to the old king’s already frail state of mind did not prove fruitful for anyone.

Instead, Maximus had turned to his stepmother. “Estrella, what was her name?”

The waif stared at him with haunted eyes, and Maximus stifled a sigh of exasperation. How could he do anything if he had no idea where to look for this intruder?

“What did you tell her?” he asked hopefully. If they told the girl nothing, what danger could she possibly be?

“Her name was Baird!” Rui announced, and Maximus turned his attention to the old man.

“Baird?” he echoed. “Are you certain? Was that her surname?”

“Her name is Poet,” Estrella murmured. “Poet Mueller.”

Maximus blinked again. As long as he had lived, he still could not begin to comprehend the strange names humans gave their young. “What else can you tell me about her?”

“She gave us this,” Estrella said, holding out a card in her translucent hands. Maximus reached out for it and read it closely.

Indeed, the card read “Poet Mueller, B.A. Archeology, Oxford University.”

“I do not care what her name is, Maximus!” Rui roared. “You must find her and kill her before she returns with the cavalry!”

“She seems to be nothing more than a scholar, Father. This castle is old. Perhaps she found it in the archives.”

“You are naïve if you believe that! How many times have our enemies come to us, hoping to catch us unaware? You must act at once!”

“Father, if you were so concerned, why didn’t you just kill her when she was here?” Maximus asked, stifling his frustration.

“And bring our enemies directly to our doorstep?” had been the king’s answer. “Do I look like a fool? No, you must go to wherever she is and be rid of her without causing attention to us! No one must know we had anything to do with her demise!”

Of course, Maximus went—not because he intended to kill the unsuspecting graduate student who had ventured into the wrong part of England, but because he had to learn what she knew about Misty Woods and its occupants, both present and past.

He had expected it to be a short, uneventful journey. Instead, what he had learned about Poet Mueller had shocked him.

For example, she was not just any graduate student. She was a princess from the Island of Luxe and the only daughter of King Henry VII. And she came equipped with a hidden security team.

The excursion to Oxford took longer than he had expected, and Maximus hunkered down in Ansel’s London townhouse to research his royal mark more carefully. His brother had laughed when he told him why he was there.

“Oh, Father and his schemes,” Ansel chuckled. “What would he do if he knew you were here right now?”

Maximus already had enough to worry about; the ongoing feud between the king and Ansel was not one of his concerns. Dealing with King Rui’s madness was a never-ending battle that fell upon Maximus’ shoulders.

“A princess?” Ansel chortled. “You would think he wants you married to her, not killing her.”

“He doesn’t know she’s a princess,” Maximus sighed, unsure of how to proceed. He didn’t want to arouse the eyebrows of her security team by following her around, but he needed to contact the girl and find out what she knew. From there, he could decide what to do next.

If she is a princess, she can’t be that intelligent, Maximus reasoned, basing his judgment on past experiences. Over the centuries, the royalty he had come to know were vapid, spoiled women without much intelligence. He was sure that Poet was no different, even if she did attend one of the most esteemed universities in the world.

After a week of learning the ins and out of Poet’s surveillance, he decided to make his move. He had learned nothing of value, except that she was stunningly beautiful up close and pursuing a master’s degree in Anthropology.

The only threat in this princess was the way her loveliness made Maximus’ heart ache.

Something tells me that is not the information Father wants to hear, he thought dryly, slipping down the dank stairwell into the belly of the castle walls. It was late afternoon, despite the blackness of the skies outside, and Maximus suspected he could find his father with Estrella in the salon. The man was nothing if not a creature of habit. Maybe everyone becomes a creature of habit after seven centuries, Max mused.

Estrella sat by the fire, crocheting a throw pillow, her dark hair falling freely over her wan face, the shadowy light of the flames illuminating her form. King Rui lay in his own armchair, his head down as he snorted in his sleep like the fallen regent he was.

Maximus stood in the doorway for a long while, taking in the two, wondering how he had been left to deal with them when the rest of his brothers had gone off to make lives on their own. They all mocked him for his decision to stay, but Maximus believed more and more that he was the only one with a true sense of loyalty to the kingdom and his family.

Maybe he was more like his father than he chose to admit. Perhaps he, too, was a creature of habit who refused to leave this fallen land behind.

“Oh, Maximus!” his stepmother called, looking up at him with wise, dark eyes. “You startled me!”

“Pardon me,” he replied, stepping over the threshold. “I just returned from my journey.” She cast her husband a look, as if waiting for instruction on whether to wake him, but Maximus shook his head. “Let him sleep,” he said, finding a spot on the bearskin to soak up the heat of the fire. “I have nothing of interest to report.”

Maximus had been weighing whether to tell his father about Poet’s royal lineage, but Rui was known to lose his frail sense of sanity where princesses were involved. The king had tried to marry off his sons on more than one occasion to secure their failing dynasty, and Maximus was not sure he had the energy to explain to his father that was not how things were done anymore.

“What have you learned about the girl?” Estrella asked, setting aside her craft to study his face.

“She is only a graduate student from Luxe,” he explained. “Her presence here was no cause for alarm.”

“Luxe?” she echoed. “I don’t know it.”

“It is a newly-independent island in the north Pacific. A small country that exports tobacco, mostly.”

Estrella stared at him. “What else?” she asked softly, as though she knew he wasn’t telling her everything he knew, and Maximus shifted his eyes under her watchful gaze.

“There is nothing else,” he answered. “That is all there is to it. She is no threat to anyone.”

“I disagree,” Estrella said flatly, and Maximus was taken aback by her words. His stepmother was not one to argue. In fact, she was rarely one to be heard at all. His brothers often joked that they could not recall the sound of Estrella’s voice because she was so meek.

“She is merely a university student,” Maximus insisted. “Whatever you believe she—”

“She knows about us, Maximus,” she continued. “You were not here, so you cannot understand the questions she brought forth. But she will be back. I am certain.”

“And should she return, I will deal with her then,” Maximus snapped, his patience running thin. “I have done my investigation and found nothing of consequence.”

“If you choose to do nothing, Maximus, you are inviting trouble to our doorstep.”

“What trouble?” he demanded. “A girl? We are dragons, Estrella. There is no threat she can present that we can’t overcome.”

“You are hard-headed, like your father,” Estrella sighed. “It will be your downfall.”

As if hearing the mention of his name, the old dragon king stirred in his spot.

“What—oh, Maximus! You have returned to us!” King Rui struggled to raise his head against the high back of the wing chair, blinking his cold eyes rapidly, shunning the sleep from his eyes.

“Yes, Father, I’m home now,” Maximus said.

“Is the girl dead, then?”

Maximus looked at him, aghast.

“Of course not!” he barked with more anger than he had intended. “How am I supposed to kill her?”

Rui glanced his son like he was the mentally unsound entity in the room.

“How?” he repeated. “Have you been so removed from the world, holed up in this castle, that you need to ask me such a thing?”

“Father,” Maximus began, “you know I am incapable of killing a civilian if unprovoked. I assure you, this girl is no threat to us.”

“And I gave you an order!” Rui growled, ambling to his feet. Even in his decrepit state, the king was a formidable man who commanded authority, particularly when he was incensed.

“Be reasonable, please, both of you,” Maximus sighed. “Even if I wanted to kill her, I have no just cause to do so. Are you forgetting that?”

Rui loomed over his son, glowering, his eyes flashing dangerously.

“I forget nothing!” he roared, as if the mention of his faulty memory was angering him further.

“Then what do you suggest I do, Father?” Maximus demanded, rising to defiantly stare back into Rui’s embittered face.

“I suggest,” Rui muttered, his complexion tinging red, “that you pack a trunk and go back to Oxford before she returns here with her armies!”

Maximus stifled a groan of exasperation.

“And do what exactly?” he asked sarcastically. “Enroll in university myself?”

Rui’s eyes lit up at the idea.

“Yes,” he hissed, and Maximus wished he had kept his mouth shut. “You will enroll in Oxford and keep an eye on the girl.”

“To what end?” he cried. As the words left his lips, though, he admitted that the notion of seeing the lovely Poet again was appealing. But his excitement lasted only until his father spoke again.

“You will follow her until she gives you just cause to kill her,” he replied. “And do not return here until she is dead!” Rui whirled to storm from the salon, signifying the conversation was over.

A thousand questions formed in Maximus’ mind. He looked at Estrella, who had returned to her needlepoint, her face hidden beneath her free-flowing tresses.

“This is ludicrous,” he grunted at her. “You must speak to him and change his mind.”

She glanced at her stepson, shaking her head.

“Why would I do that?” she asked. “I agree with him.”

Of course she does, Maximus thought furiously, also spinning to leave the hearth. She is just like all the other women he has chosen; meek and unwilling to think for herself.

Even though what they were asking was impossible, Maximus knew his father was not apt to change his mind. He was being banished for a mission, and if he failed, he would be exiled from the kingdom, just as Ansel had been.

Maximus was filled with a sense of bittersweet. On the one hand, he had always dreamt about leaving the castle, starting his own life somewhere new. At the same time, he wondered what damage Rui would cause if someone was not left behind to wrangle him in.

He stole up the center staircase, darting to the south-west wing toward his quarters. He had his orders.

Going forward, he was not Prince Maximus Williams, son of the mad dragon king. He would be Max Williams, Luxe King’s Guard.

There are worse things to be doing than following Poet Mueller around campus, he thought, smiling slightly as he entered his bedchambers. The only problem was going to be figuring out what to do with her after all was said and done.

For the first time since learning about the girl, Maximus felt a flutter of doubt in his gut.

Killing her might still be his only option if he ever wanted to come home again.