Title: The Ice Dragon Author: Bianca D’Arc Publisher: Samhain Publishing Genre: Romance/Fantasy Publication date: August 2006 ISBN:1-59998-092-4 Pages:194 Series:Dragon Knights Heat Level:     Rating:

Publisher Note: “Warning, this title contains the following: explicit sex explained in graphic terms.”

Slave girl Lana had been abducted, drugged, and dragged to the Northland years earlier, and only few memories remain of her twin, her mother, and her younger sister. A servant in the home of Salomar, who considers himself lord of the realm, she has been tossed into a dragon’s nest which has then been barricaded; and ordered to tend to the newly-hatching dragonet. Amazingly, Lana and the baby dragonet have psychic contact, even before the hatching, and the dragonet recognizes something in Lana kin to itself. When a matured Tor and Lana escape Salomar and move to their own lair, they rescue a black dragon from the South that Salomar’s soldiers have been trying to destroy or capture. Shortly after his hatching, through Tor’s minor injuries, Lana had learned of her own healing gift.

Lana and Tor cooperate to help save the black dragon from his nearly-mortal wounds, and Lana experiences a jolt of magical energy from the dragon unlike anything she’s perceived before. There is a shock of recognition with him. When Roland, the black dragon/shifter, awakes, he and Tor, the huge silver beauty, communicate in dragon-speak, and exchange information. Roland realizes that if Tor and Lana were in his region, and she was male instead, she would have early on been made a knight for her ability to mind-meld with her dragon companion. To his even greater amazement, Roland realizes that Lana is a dragon-healer, one of the gifts passed through the females of his royal line, and believed lost for centuries, until recently. He needs both Lana and Tor to return with him to his country to fight against the depredations of Salomar, warlord of the North, and Skithdron, who has warred on Roland’s land for quite some time now.

Once again, in The Ice Dragon,Bianca D’Arc produces a lovely story of dragon shifters and their human companions. Her world-building is very detailed and complex, with nary a thread left to unravel. The writing is fast-paced; and immediately the reader becomes deeply involved with the characters. The love and psychic bond of the silver dragon Tor and his human guide, the healer Lana, is heartwarming. Roland and Lana make a true pair, an alpha dragon shifter and his equally independent alpha mate, who has immense talents and gifts of her own. This is a most excellent novel, to read alone, or as part of the series. I challenge any reader to pick this one up and NOT go on to complete the series, though! May there be many more episodes in the future!