It's ironic that slavery can be a fantasy--it certainly is one of mine!--and that getting out of slavery can also be a fantasy. (There's no accounting for taste.) Or more specifically, the fantasy is finding a hero to defend you from the cruel Master who slaughtered your village, took your people as prizes of war and who made your last five years into a life of hell. Even more specifically, the fantasy is finding a hero with a little something extra--he's not just a hero, he's a shape-shifter.

In Arrik Varkas Drakon's case, he is not only a man who happens to rescue a damsel in distress; he is a Drakon lord, which is a mythological creature whose lineage is comprised of man and dragon. And the woman he rescues--Eartha--is a runaway slave of Hameon of Gradoc.

Fortunately in this brief short story (forty-seven pages), we do not have to share Eartha's time with Hameon, but the little we see of him does a fine job of justifying Eartha's willingness to beg protection from a complete stranger she meets in a bar. Cloaked in shadow, and bigger than life (bigger than more things than you could shake a stick at)--all seven feet of him--Arrik promises to be a figure of mystery.

N. J. Walters nicely presents the mythology in the preface, so we don't wander through half the story trying to figure out what is going on. If there's a problem, it is one that is common to so many romances: the hero doesn't exactly have an equal foe. Like so many romances whose focus is, well--the romance--the conflict is too easily gotten out of the way and is somewhat anti-climactic. Then we can get back to the story we care about: the hero and heroine. In Drakon's Treasure , the romance is the thing. If your thing is lonely, possessive shape-shifter rescue-dragons with seriously long life spans, you're going to find Drakon's Treasure to be a treasure in itself.

Reviewed by Maîtresse
© November 2006