by Stephen Deas
“Did you read my mind, little one?” she asked, absently. “Is that how you knew to strike at my head? Or was it simply obvious?” She turned to Isentine. “This one’s going to be dead in a few hours if it doesn’t feed.”
The eyrie-master nodded sadly. Jaslyn looked back at the baby dragon. She wanted to stroke it and nurse it, but even as weak as it was, it was quite capable of biting her arm off. She crouched down and looked it in the eye, careful to keep her distance.
“Can you hear me in there? Can you understand? Do you remember?” What had Silence said to her as he was dying? I remember the flames. “Do you remember the flames?”
The dragon cocked its head and gave her a quizzical look, surprise mixed with hatred. A look that said Yes. She waited to hear it speak inside her head, but nothing came. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and then the dragon closed its eyes and laid its head down on the floor. Maybe she’d imagined it. Just seen what she so desperately wanted to see.
She turned away, away from the dragon and away from Isentine as well. She didn’t want either of them to know of the despair that was welling up inside her. Instead she stared out of the cave, at the sky and the distant fields.
You delude yourself, little one. You do not understand.
Jaslyn almost jumped out of her skin. She whirled around, but the dragon hadn’t moved. Isentine was looking at her curiously. “Did you . . .” Did you hear? But she could see the answer to that straightaway. No.
“Did I?” He peered at her.
Did I imagine it? “Bring it something, Eyrie-Master,” she said. “Something alive that it can kill for itself.”
“We already have, Your Highness.” She sensed the reproach in his words. Of course they’d tried. They tried with every dragon, as hard as they could. “Every—”
“I know, I know. Every hatchling is precious. Do it again. This time, don’t let the alchemists near whatever you bring.”
She still couldn’t bring herself to look at him. The tone of the silence was enough to tell her how much he disapproved of her order.
“They won’t allow it,” he said at last.
“Then don’t tell them.” The alchemists would forbid it, she realized. They’d tell her, again, that she wasn’t the queen of this realm and that they answered only to kings and queens. She didn’t even rule her own eyrie. The thought didn’t help her, but at least it gave her a little anger, anger that she could harness into motion. She swept out of the cave, past Isentine and back toward the pit, heading out to the fresh air and the open skies as fast as she could. The look the hatchling had given her would haunt her, she knew. Was it the look of a spirit that knew what was waiting for it, one prepared to die and die and die again, over and over, rather than become a slave to the eyrie alchemists? Or maybe she was imagining all that, and the look was simply one of hunger and desperation. She’d never know. Isentine would never defy the Order. By tomorrow, the hatchling would be dead.
When she reached the surface again, a messenger was waiting for her. “Your Holiness.” He bowed, and this time she couldn’t be bothered to correct him. “Rider Hyrkallan has returned to Southwatch.”
11
LITTLE SISTER
Lystra stood at the window. This was her window, high in King Tyan’s palace, at the top of one of the towers, in a solar where her husband had once bedded his lovers. The place where he’d brought her, on their wedding night. The room didn’t have much to offer except a luxurious bed and an extravagant view. Most of the windows in the palace looked south toward the sea, but here Lystra had found a view that reached out over the walls of the city, over the sweeping breadth of the Fury River flood plain, and out toward the distant and invisible north. Sometimes she squinted, imagining that if she tried hard enough she might see all the way to the Adamantine Palace, to her lover, her husband, her lord, her prince. To the father of the child growing inside her. He’d been away for a long time. Too long. She was pining.
Sometimes when she’d had enough of thinking and wondering about Jehal, she’d think about her sisters instead. Almiri, who was strong and clever. Almiri, who would always find a way, somehow, to make everyone happy again. And Jaslyn. She thought about Jaslyn most of all. Thin, hollow, mean Jaslyn, who burned on the inside with passions clenched tight and buried deep within her. Starved middle sisters.
Jaslyn whom she missed more than anyone else.
She had ladies to keep her company and they amused her well enough. But when she came to this window she sent them away. Even Lord Meteroa, Jehal’s strange uncle, the eyrie-master who ruled far more than an eyrie, knew better than to bother her when she was at her window.
She was surprised then when she heard footsteps shuffling slowly up the stairs. The tread was unfamiliar. Not Meteroa, who walked briskly and usually viewed a staircase as a challenge to be overcome as rapidly as possible. Not one of her ladies either; they would have coughed to warn her they were coming.
She let her eyes wander for a last few seconds, dreaming that she would see a speck in the sky that would be Wraithwing, Prince Jehal’s dragon, bringing him home. Then she turned, facing the door.
The shuffling stopped outside. The world fell suddenly silent. All at once, Lystra was afraid.
“Who’s there?”
Silence.
With a fluttering heart, Lystra took a step toward the door and then stopped. She could hear breathing, low and rasping.
“Who is it?”
“Princess Lystra,” whispered a voice, “do you love your husband?”
“Who are you?”
“Do you love him, Princess Lystra?”
“Yes, of course.” She took another step toward the door. Lord Meteroa was forever forbidding her this and that, warning her of the constant dangers of assassins sent by the speaker, although why the speaker would want her dead was something he could never quite explain. She’d never paid his warnings much heed. Not until now.
“No,” growled the voice. “Not the right answer. Do you love him? Does your heart yearn for him? Would you give yourself away for him, body and soul? Would you die for him?”
“Yes.” She bit her lip. She knew at once what Jehal would have said: Yes, but do I really have to? Or: Of course, but only when I’m very old, or something like that. He would have made her laugh. At that moment she wished he was there with her more than ever.
“And he for you.” A figure stepped into the doorway. He threw back his hood and Lystra squealed and wept for joy.
“Jehal!” She threw herself into his arms, staggering him.
“Careful, careful!” She couldn’t see him properly for happy tears. He held her tight, just the way she wanted him to. “Ancestors! Next time I make a surprise return, I shall make sure I stand a little further from the top of a long and steep and winding stair before I reveal myself!”
“You’ve been gone for such a long time!”
“Now that is just so typical of your sex,” he chided. “A prince has to work, you know. Weeks away without you, far from home, alone and friendless, toiling away for the good of my kin. Work, work, work, and when I finally limp home, exhausted and saddlesore, all I get are complaints about how long I’ve been gone.” His grip on her didn’t loosen though, so she knew he was joking.
“I wasn’t complaining.”
“No, well, Lord Meteroa got to me before I could find you hidden away up here, and he most certainly was. After that, I dare say you could have thrown daggers and chamber pots and screamed abuse at me and I would barely have noticed.” He pushed her back into the room, still crushing her to him. “Oh look, a bed.” His voice turned sly. “Or did you somehow know that I was coming back?”
She didn’t bother to reply: she was too busy kissing him. And she couldn’t have said whether she was pulling him or he was pulling her or whether the bed was somehow pulling both of them. She stopped him though, when they were nearly naked, and put his hand on the side of her belly.
“Feel!” she said
, and watched his face. The baby inside was kicking, feeding from her own excitement perhaps. She watched his eyes light up, watched his mind working, frantically searching for words and for once failing. Watched an amazed little smile creep across his lips.
“Your son,” she whispered.
12
DIPLOMACY IN ALL ITS FORMS
I’m grateful you came. This used to be Hyram’s favorite place.” Zafir stood high above the City of Dragons, perched on a tiny shelf of rock overlooking the top of the Diamond Cascade Valley. Hyram had brought her here, before she’d become the speaker. Afterward she’d come here with Prince Jehal. Today, she had a king beside her, watching the water rush by, hundreds of yards beneath their feet. Set back from the edge behind her was a tiny lodge, a single room squashed under an overhang. From the bottom of the cliff it was invisible; even from above it was almost impossible to spot unless you knew it was there. It had become a secret place passed down from one speaker to the next. One of several, tucked away up here among the silent crags of the Spur.
“I know. We came here often in the earlier days of his rule. Before the shaking sickness took him.” King Sirion, Hyram’s cousin, stood beside and slightly behind her. Zafir made sure that she was right at the edge. The wind pulled at her. If Sirion wanted to push her over, it would hardly be any effort at all.
“Shezira came up here with Hyram a few days before she killed him. This is where he told her that we were to be wed. She must have stood here, beside him, like we are now. She must have known at that moment he would not name her to follow him. I wonder why she didn’t push him over the edge there and then.”
“Perhaps because she is a true queen, born and bred, forged of steel and honor.” Sirion’s words were stony. “I do not easily believe these stories of murder.”
Zafir ignored him. “Before I came here, I thought the Purple Spur was just another cluster of mountains, like the Worldspine only a bit smaller. It starts that way, over by the Spine. If you fly across the end of the Spur into the realms of the north, that’s what it looks like. But here . . .” She gestured around her. “It’s as though some god reached down and pulled this part of the world up by the roots. There’s nowhere else in the realms like it. No gentle foothills and valleys, just a sheer cliff all the way around. And then on the top . . . These aren’t mountains. Anywhere else and we’d say they were hills. Canyons. Caves. Snow and waterfalls and gushing rivers. The Diamond Cascade here, the Emerald Cascade and the Sapphire Cascade. Cold forests. It’s like a tiny realm all of its own, torn up out of the Hungry Mountain Plain. But not mountains, King Sirion. Sometimes, when you see something from a distance, you do not see it for what it truly is.” She leaned back, fractionally closer to Sirion. “I would never have thought Shezira capable of such a murder either. That she might go to war, yes. I feared that, I admit it. But that she would kill Hyram with her own hands?” She tried to sound a little mournful, a faint tinge of wistful regret, but Sirion was having none of it.
“And very convenient for you that he should fall, eh? And I have known both the Purple Spur and Queen Shezira for many years and have found them both to be exactly what they seemed from a distance.”
“You are cruel, King Sirion.”
Sirion snorted. “Don’t pretend that your heart is broken, Speaker. You may have fooled Hyram but it is clear enough to me that you and Jehal were lovers before and are lovers still. I will not believe in illusions of any affection between you and my cousin. Say your piece, Speaker. Tell me why you have asked me here, alone and far away from prying eyes. I can think of only two things, so which is it to be? Do you plan to seduce me as you seduced my cousin? Or do you mean to murder me? Although I warn you, you will find neither easy.”
Zafir half turned, glancing over her shoulder, and met his eyes for a moment. “Perhaps I mean to do both.”
“Then you will fail twice.”
“Very well, King Sirion. I will not trouble you with sentiment, but with cold pragmatism. Hyram and I had a simple trade.” She turned to face him. “Am I young, King Sirion?”
“Very.”
“How many children have I carried?”
He took a step back. A frown shadowed his face. He peered at her. “None that are known. Why do you ask such a thing?”
“Do you suppose I am fertile?”
He looked distinctly uncomfortable now. Which, as far as Zafir was concerned, was perfectly fine. “I do not know, Your Holiness.”
“Then guess.”
“I . . . I suppose there is no reason to think otherwise.”
She took a step toward him, closing the distance between them. “Am I deformed?”
“I would not say so.” He stepped back, and so Zafir stepped forward again.
“Am I beautiful?”
“Of course.” He tried to step away, but as he did, Zafir caught his hand and pressed it against her breast.
“Am I desirable?”
He pulled his hand away, but for an instant he’d hesitated. Her heart was beating strong and fast. She knew he’d felt it. His face colored. “I am not to be had, harlot.”
Zafir brushed the insult aside. She smiled. “I would not presume such a thing, King Sirion, not from you. But look at me. Look at me with Hyram’s eyes. Imagine for a moment that you are him. Am I desirable?”
“You may well be, Your Holiness. Although I can’t imagine why you would ask such a thing.”
“Hyram made me speaker. In return I shared his bed. I would have made him heirs if he’d lived. He would have kept much of the power that he had. That was the nature of our arrangement. A simple contract, bound by a marriage. Are not all weddings for the same reasons? Heirs and power?” She laughed. “You think I brought you here to bend your ear about Queen Shezira? No. The Adamantine Men have accused her. I’ve heard their evidence and to me it’s strong enough to make her hang, but you can all make up your own minds about that. The kings and queens of the realms will hear the case against her and each of you will make your own decision. I do not care, King Sirion, what fate awaits her. Frankly, I will have as little part of it as my duty allows. I care only that a decision is reached, and that whatever is decided is decided by the rulers of the nine realms and not by me. What I care about, King Sirion, is making sure there is no dragon-war. I care about peace.”
“Peace?” Sirion snorted. “You?”
“A happy coincidence of duty and self-interest, Your Holiness. You may make your own judgment as to how securely I sit on the speaker’s throne now that Hyram is gone.”
Sirion was frowning. Obviously he hadn’t expected such bluntness. “Then why . . .?”
“Why did I bring you here? To ask you a question, Your Holiness. To ask your advice as a great king of a great realm. I am a queen and I am the speaker. I have carried no children. I am, as you have agreed, young, fertile and desirable.” She took another step close to him. “My husband is dead. I should have the pick of all the princes across the realms. There is certainly no shortage of them, and more and more arrive at my court with every week that passes. You see that for yourself and doubtless find many of them as tedious as I do. But they are all southern princes, from the courts of King Narghon or King Silvallan or King Tyan. The peace of the realms requires that I marry to the north, not the south. I do not seek a war with Shezira’s daughters, but nor can I marry them.”
Sirion frowned again. He shook his head. “I cannot offer you any advice. If Queen Shezira had a son, that would be your answer. There are others who carry her blood.”
“Plenty of them. But I cannot marry into her line if she murdered Hyram. If she were to be found innocent then perhaps so, but not if she’s guilty.”
“Valgar has a son.”
“He’s two years old.”
“He has brothers.”
Zafir looked down the sheer drop to the river below. “That is true. Valgar’s realm is small though.” And now, Sirion, the seed is planted. Although you might be too vain and think yourself too
wise to answer me now, the seed is in there nonetheless. For if I cannot marry into Shezira’s realm, and will not choose Valgar’s, then only yours remains. But only if Shezira is found to be guilty . . .
“There is—” She held up a hand and he stopped. She glanced inside. There wasn’t much to the lodge, only a single airy room with open arches instead of windows. At the back were two wide alcoves, both piled with luxurious furs and soft cushions. It wasn’t hard to guess what the visiting speakers had used those for. She’d lain in them, naked, with both Hyram and Jehal; flying here again with Sirion she’d wondered if she might lie there naked again. He reminded her of Hyram though, which was unfortunate.
No. She’d done as much as she could with him. As much as she’d hoped. Now all she could do was trust time and greed and doubt and pride.
He followed her eyes and must have guessed her thoughts, for his face went hard.
“I—”
She struck first, before he could finish. “Don’t flatter yourself, Sirion. You have an unmarried son, Dyalt.”
“Promised to Princess Jaslyn.”
“Promised but not yet given. And promises, as we have seen, can be broken.”
Sirion flushed with anger, but before he could say anything else, dragon shrieks ripped through the air—first one, then another, then several more, answering the first. Cries of warning.
He jumped away from her and half drew out a knife. “What trickery is this?”
Zafir barely heard him. Her skin prickled with an acid mix of fear and fury. The cries were coming from her own dragons, circling overhead, but what they’d seen was flying down the valley, skimming the waters of the Diamond Cascade River. Three dragons were heading almost straight at them. They were hard to see at all against the backdrop of trees and water and broken stone, but they weren’t hers. She squinted, paralyzed with dread. Her lookouts were too high. These new dragons would get to her first, before any of her riders could stop them. If they were here to kill her, she was as good as dead . . .