The dragon princes libra.., p.1
The Dragon Prince's Librarian (Royal Dragons of Alaska Book 2), page 1
THE DRAGON PRINCE’S LIBRARIAN
ELVA BIRCH
Copyright © 2020 by Elva Birch
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
Royal Dragons of Alaska
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
A Note from Elva Birch
More by Elva Birch
Writing as Zoe Chant
The Book I’m not Writing
Sneak Preview of The Dragon Prince’s Bride
ROYAL DRAGONS OF ALASKA
This book is part of the Royal Dragons of Alaska series. All of my work stands alone (always a satisfying happy ever after and no cliffhangers!) but there is a story arc across books. This is the order the series may be most enjoyed:
The Dragon Prince of Alaska (Book 1)
The Dragon Prince’s Librarian (Book 2)
The Dragon Prince’s Bride (Book 3)
The Dragon Prince’s Secret (Book 4)
The Dragon Prince’s Magic (Book 5)
Get a free collection of flash fiction when you subscribe to Elva Birch’s mailing list and join her in her Reader’s Retreat at Facebook for sneak previews and sketches!
PROLOGUE
His first email was short, and completely professional.
To: t.perez@floridaulibrary.edu
From: northernbookwyrm@alaska.sk
Subj: Thesis topic
For the attention of Ms. Tania Perez,
I received your contact information from the University of Florida, Orlando, and have several questions regarding the topic of your thesis regarding the Small Kingdoms Compact and its symbolic shift. Please contact me at your convenience. I am including my direct phone number if you would prefer that method of correspondence.
Thank you for your time,
Rian
Rian, Tania noted. A pretentious mis-spelling of a common name, or a classical Irish name? She was going to guess pretentious.
Her first email was curt, and she could not quite keep her bitterness from it.
To: northernbookwyrm@alaska.sk
From: t.perez@floridaulibrary.edu
Subj: Re: Thesis topic
A correspondence: A written or digital communication exchanged by two parties. I would prefer to continue any contact via email and do not share my direct phone number.
Also, you should be advised that the thesis is not currently in progress and I no longer have a copy of it, nor of the source material.
I am only a circulation librarian; you would be better served by contacting a Compact scholar with active research work.
Sincerelui,
Tania Perez
She didn’t offer to point him towards such a scholar, deleted his email as soon as she replied, and expected to hear nothing more.
To her surprise, he replied with a graphic in Tolkien's Elvish that translated to gratitude. It would have been more sensible to assume her valediction was French than Elvish and Tania felt her ire thaw a bit even before she read the rest.
The email continued:
I appreciate your reply and your candor. I have a particular interest in your theories regarding mates and diplomatic bonds and have also seen the same obscure version of the Compact that you originally referenced.
Tania actually closed the email at that point, stood up, and shelved books until she could bear to return to the circulation desk to read the rest of the message.
It had been almost a year since her thesis had vanished.
It wasn’t just a single missing file or a random computer error. The hard copies she had printed were stolen out of her apartment while she was out, along with her copy of the old Compact, and her notes. There was no sign of a break-in—her front door was still locked! It was just seamlessly, completely, all gone. She hadn’t even been able to call the police, because she had no idea how to explain that only very specific, valueless paperwork had gone missing, and files on a computer with a lock code had been carefully deleted.
It was like ninjas had taken it.
She’d gone to her advisor, and gotten very cagey answers about a crashed computer; for some reason, none of the drafts that she’d sent him could be found, in email or in his personal files. He claimed he would search for the hardcopy drafts, then simply never returned to the University after the holiday break; Tania returned from the hiatus to find his office empty and a flailing graduate student struggling to cover his classes.
Tania went to the dean of the college and quarreled with his secretary, who claimed that Tania didn’t even have a prospectus filed with the history department. Her student ID was in the database, but her topic was undeclared.
Undeclared.
She’d spent her entire undergraduate career sure of what she was going to write, compiling notes, trying to find an advisor who would be a good match for the paper she wanted to work on. She had worked for nearly a year (going through four advisors) to get her premise and outline approved.
She tried to find anyone who remembered her, or her paper, but found only blank stares and head shakes; she was one student among thousands, another unremarkable face that they barely recalled. A few vaguely remembered the topic she’d been interested in, but not enough particulars to be useful.
She staggered through her classes, but couldn’t maintain both the course load and the fight to find a new advisor and declare a new topic, and she couldn’t simply redo her original thesis with her primary source document mysteriously missing from the library. No other school or research library seemed to have a copy, or even knew what she was referring to. At the end of the semester, struggling with her health, she was informed that her grades were not sufficient to keep her scholarship, and she still had undeclared for her thesis. If she could not pay, she could not continue as a student...and if she could not continue as a student, she was no longer eligible for her part-time library job after the summer break. The library director, not wanting to lose her, offered her full-time work for the fall, when their leniency would expire. With nothing else to do, and a desperate need for the health insurance that came with it, she accepted the job.
It was a surreal year, and Tania spent most of it questioning her own sanity.
But Rian...Rian believed her. Rian knew about the original Compact. Maybe she wasn’t crazy.
It was with shaking hands that Tania logged back into her email and read the rest.
He casually mentioned the curious dragons reference that had gotten her side-eyed by respectable researchers, and asked about her interpretation of the mate language.
Tania put her head in her hands and was not sure if she laughed or cried, only knew that she was a tumble of crazy emotion.
Then she sat down and wrote back, in great detail, answering his questions and offering her own in return.
It wasn’t long before he replied, and they exchanged a flurry of emailed letters, each longer than the last, as they dug into the language that she remembered, and her theories about the stranger points.
It all makes sense, she wrote, if you keep in mind that the dragons referenced are a metaphor for the royal families. The ‘protector of the lands’ stuff falls into place. Possibly, the fire is an analogy for a weapon or a defensive force. I mean, I suppose it’s possible they actually were dragons at the time of the Old Compact. That would explain a lot! Hahahaha.
When he did not consider her ideas too outlandish to bear, she even, very hesitantly, with a winking emoji, suggested that the formality of the language had the kind of specificity of a ritual, or a magic spell.
His email in response treated the idea with grave consideration, and he offered a few ideas in return that made Tania long for the copy she’d had. There were so many things she would have liked to go back and double-check.
Their emails devolved into stories about their jobs, about the food they were eating, and most of all, about the books they were reading.
Some days, the letters were the only thing hauling her out of her bed, and she would check for his messages first thing, replying while she ate breakfast and decided how much she could do that day. The red flag announcing new mail became an object of joy, and she found herself lurking at her inbox at every opportunity.
They became the glowing high point of Tania’s life...until she feared she was developing an unhealthy crush on someone she didn’t even know, and decided to search for Rian’s real identity.
The email address was her first clue. She assumed, from the address, and his mention of a uniform, that he was in some kind of security, so she went looking for more about an event he’d disparaged.
I have been to these parties, Rian told her. It’s like they read books to hate them.
; That led her to sites that she didn’t usually visit, gossipy royal news sources that specialized in paparazzi photos. She was looking at the staff in the background when one of the captions caught her eye.
Twin brothers Prianriakist and Grantraykist attended the event…
Prianriakist. Prian. Rian.
Tania had to chuckle and lean her forehead onto her hand. Rian wasn’t a pretentious mis-spelling, it was his casual name.
She read back through every email he’d ever sent her, and felt supremely stupid.
Of course he was a prince: the cultured tone of his writing, the oblique references to high-brow parties. His intimate knowledge of the Compact and other legal treaties.
In retrospect, it had been completely obvious.
He was a prince.
And she wasn’t a princess.
To: t.perez@floridaulibrary.edu
From: northernbookwyrm@alaska.sk
Subj: Hello?
Tania,
I don’t want to be that guy, but it’s been a week since you wrote back, and I’m getting worried. I got the book you recommended, and you’re right, he’s a blow-hard. I was hoping to get your opinion on the chapter talking about succession.
And...I miss you. I’ve missed your letters this week, and I don’t want to seem like a stalker, but it’s not like you not to write back. I hope you’re okay.
Yours, Rian
To: t.perez@floridaulibrary.edu
From: northernbookwyrm@alaska.sk
Subj: Re: Hello?
Dearest Tania,
Please let me know that you’re alright and I haven’t made you angry. If I said, or did anything, let me know and tell me how to make it right. I haven’t heard from you in ten days, and I’m worried for you.
Yours always,
Rian
To: northernbookwyrm@alaska.sk
From: Mailer-daemon@floridaulibrary.edu
Subj: Mail System Error, Re: Hello?
This message was undeliverable, recipient unknown. Please contact a system administrator if you believe this is in error.
1
This was going to be the greatest ‘I told you so’ in history, Rian thought. He was sweating in the Florida humidity and reconsidering the uniform that had seemed so sensible in Alaska in October.
“She’s not your mate,” his twin brother Tray had insisted. “She’s a pen pal. The Compact already tapped a new queen for Alaska. Why would there be more than one? So that Fask could be king, maybe. You? No.”
But Rian knew before Tania opened the door to her apartment that he wasn’t here by accident. He hadn’t imagined that undeniable pull whenever he thought of her, and his dragon was steaming in his head, absolutely certain and utterly focused.
This is where we need to be, he told Rian firmly. This is the time.
And when he saw her at last, she was weirdly familiar and entirely new; Rian couldn’t stop himself from staring. She looked like her surreptitious photographs, wavy dark hair with fading blonde highlights framing a round, tawny-skinned face. Brown eyes with layers of gold gazed back under bangs that were too long.
Did she feel the same recognition that he felt? She didn’t look particularly welcoming, but it was hard to parse around the flood of emotions and feelings he was simmering in. His? His dragon’s? Hers? Even his body didn’t feel like it was entirely his own, which wasn’t entirely pleasant.
“What do you want?” she asked, and her voice sent shivers down his spine.
“I tried to call,” he explained. “And before that, I emailed.”
It had only been emails, at first, starting from one carefully worded query about Tania’s thesis—a thesis that had been wiped by Small Kingdoms agents from her university’s database almost a year before.
Her first reply, more than a month ago, had been understandably defensive.
The document she had been working from was a secret version of the international treaty called the Compact, and had never been intended for general consumption. The public version had been greatly sterilized, removing all mention of dragons, magic, mates, and casters.
She’d written most of a thesis on the document before Small Kingdoms agents got wind of it, and operatives had moved in decisively, deleting the thesis, her copies, the copies of the secret Compact at the library, and even her prospectus in the university database. Her advisor had been amply paid off to pursue a sudden change of profession.
Once Rian had assured her that she wasn’t crazy, that he had seen the same Compact she remembered, they traded a flurry of emails on the topic...and later went completely off-topic as they connected through a long string of letters. Rian’s life had narrowed to her correspondence; he had never guessed he would meet anyone with her clever turn of phrases who shared his interest in books. Every email was anticipated more eagerly than the last, every red flag on his phone was a reason to shirk his duties and disappear. He read them over and over, composing his replies with care.
And then they stopped coming.
“The library froze my email when I got fired,” Tania said coldly. “And my phone is off.” Then, suspiciously, “How did you get my number? How did you know where I lived?”
Rian flushed. “I hired an investigator.” He swiftly put up his hands. “Not that I was stalking you, but your emails started bouncing, so I called the library, and they wouldn’t give me any way to contact you. I was worried for you. I couldn’t sleep. I needed to know that you were okay.” He ran his fingers through his hair in nervous habit. “I’m not making myself sound any less like a stalker…”
“I’m fine,” she said, and in a rush, Rian realized that he knew she was lying. She was barely holding on. She was afraid, and she was in pain. He could feel the ache in her hips and her shoulders, and the exhaustion she was fighting.
“You’re not fine,” he blurted.
He really did think she was going to shut the door on him then.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said swiftly. “You’re fine. I mean, and you’re definitely fine. I just don’t mean…” Why couldn’t he be suave like Toren or Fask? he wondered desperately. She probably thought he was leering at her, because he couldn’t stop staring at her in wonder.
Tania’s scowl softened a little. “You’re not what I expected from a prince,” she said, confirming that she’d long since figured out exactly who he was. It probably hadn’t taken her a private investigator.
“I’m not,” Rian agreed. “I mean, I’m a prince, but I don’t fit much of the prince...expectation. Sorry.”
“The uniform helps,” she said, with a tiny quirk of a smile. “When you said you wore a uniform as part of your day job, I assumed you were in security.” Then she glanced out into the hallway behind him. “No escort? No honor guard? Trumpets with long flags off the bottom?”
“I flew alone,” Rian explained. Which wasn’t much of an explanation, since she didn’t know he was a dragon shifter. Yet. “I mean...ah…can I come in?” He certainly wasn’t going to reveal that information in the dark, muggy common hall of her apartment building.
She gave him a deeply considering look and finally stepped aside, a little hitch to her step that Rian knew caused her pain.
Her apartment was small, just what Rian could charitably call cozy, and untidy. It was also completely lined in books. There were bookshelves on every free wall, a short shelf behind the couch, high shelves above the cabinets in the kitchen stuffed with cookbooks, even a narrow shelf just two books wide next to the door. Further piles of books were scattered on the coffee and end tables. Above the table, the only clear wall was decorated in old photographs and certificates.
