The King of the Crags

by Stephen Deas

  Zaster had always been too quick to take offense. His lips drew tight together. He started to sit down; as he did, Vale found himself rising. It was such a surprise that he didn’t quite understand what was happening at first, and then had to wonder whether some sorcery was at work. But no, his own legs, nothing more. He looked from face to face, suddenly uncertain. He wasn’t supposed to have opinions, so what in the realms could he be needing to say?

  His legs seemed to know what they were doing though, so he extended the same trust to his mouth.

  “Hyrkallan won the Speaker’s Tournament a decade ago when Hyram took the Speaker’s Ring, Your Holiness. And a decade before that as well, when it was Iyanza.”

  Zafir gave him a scornful look. “Since when do Guardsmen speak in the Speaker’s Council?”

  He bowed and fell silent, but he’d done enough. The spymaster nodded. “When the talk is of warriors, Your Holiness,” he murmured. “Hyrkallan is a clever man, a good rider, strong, brave, with all the best qualities. Most of all he has experience and respect. The other riders of the north will follow him. They are much more dangerous with him than without, Your Holiness. As they have already shown.” A thundercloud passed across Zafir’s face. No one spoke about Drotan’s Top, but it hung in the air throughout the palace. Hyrkallan had bloodied her nose there and it still stung, even if she’d bloodied him back since.

  “Give me dragons!” shouted Prince Sakabian. “Let me smash them!”

  Zafir glared him into silence.

  He’s right though. Any other speaker would have summoned a hundred dragons, sent out the Guard and crushed this nonsense. Zafir does nothing. Why?

  Vale felt he ought to have been sitting down but somehow he wasn’t. Instead, there were more words coming out. “Why is he doing this, Lord Zaster? Why did he not go north all along? He has the whole of the north as his weapon if he chooses to use it, for they would follow him. He could force Jaslyn off her throne and come at you with ten times the dragons that follow him now. Why does he not?”

  Zafir glared at him. “If you’d done what was asked of you, Guardsman, then Hyrkallan and his Red Riders wouldn’t even exist, would they?” She spat the words out. The fingers holding her goblet were twitching. “If you’d taken all of Shezira’s riders. If you hadn’t let Almiri, of all people, escape. I should have removed you from your post there and then.”

  Vale bowed. He sat down.

  “They need to be dealt with, Your Holiness,” snapped Zaster. “You should send Watchman Tassan—” He didn’t get any further. Zafir’s goblet caught him on the side of his head. Hard. Zaster staggered and put his fingers to his temple. They came away bloody.

  “You presume to tell me what I should do?” She waved a hand at Vale. “Send this idiot to finish cleaning up the mess he should never have allowed in the first place? Now that they have their dragons? And how many of the Adamantine Guard shall I throw away into the Maze?” She snorted. “Very well, Lord Zaster, if they must be dealt with, and if my dragon patrols are not enough to satisfy you, you deal with them. Hire more sell-swords. Put a bigger reward on Rider Hyrkallan’s head. On all of them. My weight in gold for every one of them. And while you’re at it, they must be getting their potions from somewhere. Get me proof that Almiri is sending them supplies and I will reduce Evenspire to ash. Let their dragons turn rogue and eat them!”

  Jeiros jumped to his feet. “Your Holiness, Evenspire is a city of thousands! As large as the City of Dragons itself! Your dispute—” He bit his lip. “Our dispute is with Queen Almiri, not her subjects.”

  Zafir snarled: “Then why don’t you find some way to lure her away from her defenses, eh, alchemist? But after you have finished learning to count.” She turned back to Zaster. Her face softened a little. “Spymaster, you have not answered the Watchman’s question. Why is Hyrkallan pursuing this foolishness?”

  Zaster licked his fingers and shook his head. The look he gave Zafir was venomous. “Oh I dare say he’ll tire of this soon enough. Without him, I’m sure the rest will disperse.” That would have earned him the goblet again, if Zafir hadn’t already thrown it at him. The speaker bared her teeth.

  “Sell-swords, Zaster. More sell-swords. They are cheap and expendable.”

  “Wasn’t Rider GarHannas among them?” asked Prince Tyrin suddenly. “GarHannas of Bloodsalt?” He was looking at Lord Eisal. Eisal pretended he hadn’t heard but the damage was done. The council slipped back to doing what it did best, sniping at one another and making sure that nothing useful ever got done. Vale closed his eyes for a moment. Ten thousand men and two hundred riders sat idle at the palace. If he’d been permitted an opinion, it might have been that they should be doing something.

  10

  JASLYN

  Is there news, Your Holiness?”

  Jaslyn sighed and slid off her dragon. Her new dragon with his glittering silvery black scales. A real prize. Morning Sun, Isentine had named him, but Jaslyn still thought of her old dragon, Silence, every time she flew. In her head, this new one had a different name. Not morning, but mourning. It felt much closer to her heart. They sounded the same too, which kept everybody happy. Her little secret.

  She took off her helmet and dropped it on the packed, scorched earth of the landing field. One of the Scales would pick it up later. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that, Eyrie-Master.” She didn’t even glance back at the dragon behind her. The sun was low and its bulk cast them both into shadow.

  Eyrie-Master Isentine bowed as best his age and stiff back would let him. “A thousand apologies, Your . . . Your Highness.”

  “That’s all I am, Eyrie-Master. For as long as my mother . . . for as long as Queen Shezira is alive. Even imprisoned within the Adamantine Palace, she is your mistress. You should call me student and I should call you master.” That had been one of her mother’s last commands. Isentine was getting old and they’d need a new eyrie-master before long. A master or perhaps a mistress.

  She tried to smile but it seemed she didn’t know how anymore. Isentine stared at his feet.

  “Not much,” she said after they’d stood in awkward silence for far too long. “Hyrkallan has plundered Drotan’s Top. The speaker’s dragons have taken a couple of his riders but so far he evades her grasp. Everyone demands that I call him back and make him knight-marshal in Nastria’s place.” She shook her head. “We don’t even know that Nastria is dead. Almiri begs and pleads for us to go to war. My husband-to-be is alive and still hasn’t found his way to Sand. His father, King Sirion, continues to shout for revenge for Hyram’s death but can’t decide whether it’s Zafir or Shezira who should feel his wrath. And I, I just feel that my time is running out. I want to climb onto Silence and fly away. Far, far away and never come back. Except Silence is gone.”

  Isentine screwed up his face in horror. “Holiness!”

  “Highness!” Jaslyn scowled.

  “Highness! You cannot—”

  “Cannot speak like that, Eyrie-Master? If not to you then to whom? Our knight-marshal is dead and our queen is imprisoned for treason. I’m surrounded by men and women I barely know who wear long stern faces and expect me to be my mother when I’m not. My elder sister only wants my dragons and my younger sister Lystra is far away, married and a hostage to that monster Jehal.” She clenched her jaw. Sometimes when she thought of Lystra she wanted to cry, but that wasn’t allowed, not even where only Isentine would see. “I miss her most of all, Eyrie-Master. In her letters she, at least, sounds happy.”

  “Perhaps, Your Highness, she will persuade . . .”

  “My—Queen Shezira and King Valgar have been in the speaker’s dungeons for more than a month. Our knight-marshal plotted with King Valgar to murder Speaker Zafir, and our queen apparently pushed Lord Hyram off a balcony.”

  “Lies, Your Highness. All lies.”

  “Really? I want to believe you, Eyrie-Master. But their accusers are not Zafir’s servants or Jehal’s. They are Adamantine Men. Perhaps they might be bribed
to lie about Nastria, but about Hyram? They were his own Guardsmen. He died under their watch. They failed. Why would they lie? I cannot believe they would conspire against their own lord.”

  “But surely you cannot believe—”

  “What? Can’t believe that my mother would have pushed Hyram to his death? After the way he betrayed her? I remind you, Isentine, of whom we are talking.”

  Jaslyn tore herself away from Morning Sun, walking briskly toward the looming tower of Outwatch. Isentine struggled to match her pace. Walking meant he couldn’t see her face. She wasn’t like her mother. She couldn’t hide it all away. She couldn’t be strong all the time on the outside no matter what she felt on the inside.

  She took a deep breath. “That’s not why I came here, Eyrie-Master, nor why you called me.” Although any excuse would do. She liked the bleakness of Outwatch, sitting on the top of its cliff, presiding over miles and miles of tunnels and caves where the dragons were kept. Liked the flight over endless miles of barren, featureless burning sand and rust-colored stone that brought her here. Liked this isolated and inexplicable oasis of green that just happened to be the greatest eyrie in the north. Now that Isentine knew better than to turn out the guard for her whenever she arrived, it was the windy, lonely, lost place it had always been meant to be, and it drew her in whenever it could.

  “It feels empty here,” she murmured, as much to herself as to Isentine.

  “Most of your dragons are at Southwatch,” huffed Isentine. Of course they were. She’d sent them there, after all, to stand guard over Almiri in case the speaker brought war across the Spur.

  “Yes.” And the few she’d left here spent most of their time in the Worldspine. Wasting their time searching for the remains of the white dragon that had nearly killed her.

  “I might have found the dragon you’re looking for.”

  The words grabbed hold of her as surely as a strong pair of hands. She froze. For a moment she thought he meant the white.

  “What?”

  “There’s been another hatchling, Your Highness. A male. A hunter.”

  Jaslyn’s heart climbed into her mouth. “What color?”

  “Deep blues and greens, Your Highness.”

  Jaslyn started walking again. An overwhelming disappointment settled around her. Not the dragon she was looking for. Not her Silence.

  “But he’s a vicious one, Your Highness. He won’t eat or drink anything we bring him. He attacks the Scales. He’ll die before the end of the week. I’ve never met anything quite like it. We’ve always had hatchlings that wouldn’t take and there have been a lot of them lately, but this . . . this is exceptional. I might even have put him down if it wasn’t for your order.”

  “Does he speak?”

  Isentine didn’t reply. As far as the eyrie-master was concerned, it seemed that anyone who thought dragons could talk probably believed in ghosts and gods and all manner of other foolishness. It didn’t help that the one time Silence had spoken to Jaslyn, as he lay dying, he hadn’t spoken as such; rather, his thoughts had mingled with hers.

  Or maybe she was going mad.

  Silence had been ash-gray. He was dead now, but in his last thoughts he’d told her that he would be reborn. He’d told her that dragons lived in an eternal cycle of birth and death. No one had ever thought to mention this to Jaslyn before, but Isentine had confirmed, when she’d pushed him, that the alchemists believed this was true. It was a secret passed down among them, shared only with kings and queens. She was as good as a queen, he’d said, so now she could know. She’d nearly hit him for that.

  They don’t remember, though. They don’t speak. He’d told her that too. Jaslyn didn’t know whether she believed him or not but she didn’t want to, and so she was looking, hoping that out of all the eyries across the realms, Silence would be reborn to one of hers.

  One of my mother’s . . .

  “I’m looking for a sooty gray, Eyrie-Master.” It sounded like madness, but when she’d spoken to the alchemists, they’d looked at her with shifty eyes as though she’d uncovered some secret that she wasn’t meant to know. Several secrets, in fact. They wouldn’t tell her, and when her demands grew more threatening, they haughtily reminded her that, for now at least, she was a mere princess, and that the alchemists of the realms answered only to kings and queens. Only Isentine would answer her questions and she no longer trusted even him.

  She walked past the yawning doors that led into the cavernous halls of Outwatch, on to the edge of the scarp slope. The wind was strong there, tugging at her hair. At the bottom of the slope was a lake. Above it, caves studded the cliffs, dark holes leading into the tunnels of the eyrie. She couldn’t look at a cave now without a shudder of fear, without smelling smoke, without starting to cough and choke, but if she closed her eyes she could imagine herself at Clifftop, Jehal’s eyrie in the southernmost corner of the realms. A place almost as far away from Outwatch as it was possible to be, but another eyrie built over underground caves and tunnels at the top of a cliff looking out over water. If she tried, she could bring back the smell and the sound of the sea, of the waves breaking at the foot of the cliff. Of Lystra, standing next to her, looking around at her new home with wonder in her eyes and laughter on her lips.

  If you were here, I could do this. I miss you, little sister.

  She opened her eyes again, dispelling the sound of the Sea of Storms and bringing back the hot dry desert winds that filled her mother’s realm.

  “You will take me to this hatchling, Eyrie-Master.” She had to see, after all, even if it wasn’t her Silence. Probably he’d been born in another eyrie, far away. If he’d been reborn at all. If it wasn’t a myth.

  “He will try to eat you, Your Highness.”

  Through the gloom-laden hall of Outwatch, Isentine led the way to an immense pit lit by hundreds of alchemical lamps, a hole in the earth fifty feet across with a spiraling staircase clinging to its side. They went down. He walked slowly, clutching at the guardrail bolted into the stone. Jaslyn had lost count of the number of times she’d come here, yet she’d never been all the way to the bottom. They reached the hatchling caves, but the stairs and the pit went on. She always found herself wondering how many people had slipped and plunged down into the inky blackness, and whether they were still there, still falling. When she asked Isentine what was down there, he only shrugged and told her it was flooded, that no one went down there anymore.

  He led her off the staircase toward one of the higher caves. Jaslyn clenched her fists until her knuckles went white and her fingernails gouged her palms. This used to feel like home. She’d pause and take a deep breath and fill her lungs with the smell of dragons. Now what she remembered was being trapped underground with dragons trying to kill her and all she ever smelled was the memory of choking in the smoke.

  “The hatchery isn’t far, Your Highness.” As if she didn’t know. She’d told Isentine everything because Lystra wasn’t here and she had to tell someone. She couldn’t tell anyone else. If she closed her eyes that made things ten times worse; the stench of smoke in her mind grew so strong that she was almost sick. She tried thinking of cold mountains and running water but that didn’t help either. Nothing helped. Nothing would. Except maybe if she found the reincarnation of one of the dragons that had nearly killed her. Maybe then. Maybe when she understood why.

  “Here.” The eyrie-master stopped at the entrance to a cavern gouged out of the side of the cliff. The end of the cave was open to the sky. Jaslyn wanted to run to it, to embrace the sky and the freshness of the air, but Isentine had a hand on her shoulder. He was offering her something.

  “What is this?”

  “Against the Hatchling Disease, Your Highness.”

  Which she should have known without having to ask. Cross with herself, she took the ointment from him and rubbed it over her hands and face. It was brown and smelled of mud. Then she went over to the opening. With the wind whistling around her, the claustrophobia and the smoke eased away.<
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  A hatchling dragon was chained to one wall. It couldn’t have been more than a few days old, skinny and sickly, but it must have been ten feet long already from the tip of its nose to the end of its whip of a tail. They came out like that, all scales and bones, usually dark-colored. They uncoiled from their eggs like a flower opening from a bud, painfully and slowly. Sometimes it took them days to stretch themselves out. They’d lie there dozing as their skin dried and shrank. And then, usually, they’d wake up and eat everything in sight. Unless they were one of the difficult ones, like this one.

  Jaslyn knew at once that this wasn’t the dragon she was looking for.

  “It refuses to eat and attacks any who come close to it,” said Isentine. “The usual for a hatchling that fails, though more aggressive than most.”

  “It attacks them because it’s hungry.” Jaslyn looked at the dragon curiously. It was curled up with its eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. She wasn’t quite sure how she knew, but secretly it was watching them.

  “No doubt. But we’ve had hatchlings like this much more often these last months. Since . . .” Isentine trailed off, but Jaslyn knew what he would have said. Since the white dragon attacked the alchemists. Since Silence died. He clasped his hands and looked at the floor. “They won’t eat unless they’ve made the kill themselves.”

  “This isn’t Silence.” Jaslyn stepped closer, cautious but curious. The dragon knew she was there, she was sure of it. And she’d left her helmet up above. The rest of her was still covered in dragon-scale armor, but if the hatchling spat fire at her face—

  She didn’t have time to finish the thought. The dragon lunged and snapped its jaws. Fire burst out between its teeth, aimed straight at her eyes. She ducked and raised her hands to shield herself, but the fire didn’t even reach her and all she felt was a waft of hot air. The hatchling must have been desperately weak. Then the chain around its neck jerked tight and it collapsed on the floor, seemingly too drained to move.