by Rachel Aaron
“Of course I do,” Bob said. “I’m her brother.”
“That makes it even worse!” he cried. “What kind of brother sits back and lets his sister suffer just to keep around a few dragons who have to be frightened into behaving in the first place? If fear of Chelsie is the only thing keeping this family together, then we’ve got bigger problems than she does.”
“Spoken like a true reformer,” Bob said with a smile. “But I’m not telling you all of this because I have vested political interests. I’m telling you this because I see the future. This isn’t speculation for me, Julius. I already know how everything plays out, and I’m telling you that the road you plan to take us down today doesn’t end well for anyone.”
Julius stared at him in disbelief. “So you’re saying if I free Chelsie from her slavery, the clan is what? Doomed?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s definitely not the path I’d pick,” the seer said. “And I’m not saying she has to stay a slave forever, just that you can’t free her right now.”
“Or what?” Julius demanded. “What future is so horrible that letting Chelsie remain under Bethesda’s boot is the better option?”
“You know I can’t tell you that,” Bob said irritably. “I’ve already explained many times why giving out knowledge of the future to non-seers is a terrible, no good, very bad idea. If I tell you what’s going to happen, you’re just going to argue and come up with a thousand reasons for why I’m wrong and whatever doom I’ve predicted can’t possibly come true, which is exactly why I don’t normally deal in absolute proclamations. I vastly prefer nudging you along with coincidences until you come to the conclusion I wanted from the start of your own accord, but I’m running out of time. I wouldn’t be telling you this at all if it wasn’t vastly important, so you’re just going to have to trust me. Don’t set Chelsie free tonight.”
Julius took a deep breath. “I do trust you,” he said at last. “If you say something bad is going to come of this, I believe it, but that doesn’t change what I intend to do.”
Bob fell utterly silent, his green eyes growing cold. “That is a very stupid decision,” he said at last.
“I’m sure it is,” Julius agreed. “But I don’t care. Whatever is coming, we’ll deal with it, but I refuse to let Chelsie pay for our comfort and security with her suffering one moment longer.”
“But I already said you could free her later,” Bob reminded him. “That’s a compromise! Don’t you love those?”
“Not on this,” he said, clenching his fists. “Another time, maybe, I might have agreed, but I’ve just had the world’s hardest lesson in the dangers of putting things off. You say she’d go free later, but later is never guaranteed for any of us, is it? Chelsie’s already lost six hundred years to this nonsense. I won’t make her give up another minute.”
“Even after she ordered you not to?” the seer growled, dropping the jovial brother act entirely. “We both know she won’t thank you for this.”
“Maybe not,” Julius said. “I don’t even know what kind of secret Bethesda has over her because no one will tell me, but whatever it is, we can take it. We’ll handle whatever comes at us together, as a clan, but I did not waste my last day with Marci getting burned and stabbed by my own siblings so I could become part of the Council for a family that relies on an enslaved enforcer to hold us together.”
“I am well aware of your feelings on the subject,” Brohomir snapped. “But I’m not here to fight over moral high ground. I am telling you as plainly as possible what we need to do to avoid disaster. It also bears mentioning, since you seem to have forgotten, that the only reason you’re even on this Council is because I put you there.”
“I know that,” Julius said. “But—”
“I don’t think you do,” Brohomir said, stepping forward until he was looming over his much smaller brother. “All of your impossible luck, your meteoric rise to power, it was all me. You’ve always been key to my plans, Julius, and I have been very good to you. Now, all I’m asking in return is one teensy tiny little favor. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to not do something, for that matter. I’m only asking for a delay, which I think we can both agree is uncharacteristically reasonable of me. So if you appreciate any of the work I’ve done for you, any of the blessings I’ve rained on your head, you’ll rein in your slightly annoying sense of moral justice temporarily and grant me this one little boon I’m asking to save us all from a great deal of unpleasantness.”
By the time he finished, Julius was pressed against the wall. Bob always made such light of everything, it was easy to forget just how old and scary he could be when he stopped playing. Even worse, his request for a delay wasn’t actually that unreasonable, especially since Chelsie had told Julius repeatedly not to do it. It would be so easy—and probably smart—to just give in and do what they said, but he couldn’t. Maybe if he hadn’t just spent days being eaten raw by the unfairness and pointlessness of Marci’s death, Bob’s plea would have gotten through, because he did owe the seer more than he could ever repay. But even back when he’d been a pushover who did anything his family told him, Julius had never liked debts, and he’d started down this path specifically to end the exact crime Bob was telling him to protect. It didn’t matter if the delay was for one day or a thousand, it didn’t matter how much he owed his brother, it didn’t even matter if a meteor was going to crash into the mountain tonight because of this, what had been done to Chelsie was wrong. Unspeakably, abusively, microcosm-for-all-the-sins-of-the-clan wrong. And he would not let it continue.
His decision must have been clear on his face, because Bob turned away before Julius could say a word, stepping off the elevator as it opened at the dark floor he shared with Amelia with a silence so pointed, Julius was amazed it didn’t draw blood.
“I’m sorry,” he said to his brother’s back.
“No, you’re not,” the seer replied as the doors closed. “And that’s the entire point.”
Julius had no idea what to make of that, but the doors had already shut, leaving him alone in the golden elevator with the fear that he’d just made the second-biggest mistake of his life and the knowledge that he was still going to do it anyway. That was a cocktail strong enough to make any dragon pause, but Julius didn’t have time to recover. He had a promise to keep, and so he pulled himself straight, wrapping his resolve around him like armor as he pushed the button that would take him back up to the top of the mountain.
***
After all that buildup, the inaugural meeting of the completed Heartstriker Council came together surprisingly quickly. Everyone was already there by the time Julius walked in. Including Bethesda and Ian, who were both sitting at what had been his mother’s marble banquet table, which someone had dragged out, chopped into a triangle, and placed in the empty space where Bethesda’s throne used to stand.
As symbolism went, it was a little heavy handed, but that was dragons for you. Personally, Julius appreciated the primal roughness of it. He took his spot at the last empty corner with a feeling of surprising gravitas, folding his hands on the marble’s cold, smooth surface before turning to face his fellow Council members.
“Finally,” Bethesda growled, giving him a dirty look. “Now that we are all here and have thus fulfilled the requirements of the contract Brohomir forced me to sign, unseal my dragon.”
“In a moment,” Julius said. “First, I have a motion I’d like to put forward.”
“It can wait,” Bethesda snapped.
“No, it can’t,” he said, glaring at her. “And if you push me, I’ll just go back to my room, and then you’ll have to wait another day for the vote to unseal you.”
His mother blinked in surprise, and then her face turned sullen. “When did you get this ruthless?”
“I’ve had a very hard week,” he reminded her. “And a very good teacher.”
“Better late than never, I suppose,” she said, waving her hand. “Fine. Let’s get your moti
on over with so I can go flying. My wings ache like you wouldn’t believe.”
Having been sealed for over a month himself, Julius knew exactly how badly her wings ached. Telling her so wouldn’t change a thing, though, so he just moved on to what was actually important. “Now that the Council is assembled,” he said, pointedly not looking at Chelsie, who was standing on the balcony beside Conrad, sharpening her sword. “I’d like to propose a change to the Heartstriker clan structure. For many centuries now, some dragons in this family have had measurably fewer rights than others. Therefore, my first proposal to the Heartstriker Council is that the dragons of F-clutch be recognized as full members of the family with the same rights, privileges, and protections as everyone else, including the removal of the seal placed on their dragons at birth, the right to leave the mountain whenever they choose, and above all, the ability to say no to any order that doesn’t legally come from this Council without punishment.”
“That’s quite was a mouthful,” Bethesda growled. “You could have just said ‘I want to free F-clutch.’”
“I have to be thorough,” Julius replied. “Laws are no good if they’re too broad to effectively enforce. And I wasn’t finished. I also want all of these same rights, protections, and freedoms applied to Chelsie, effective immediately.”
By the time he finished, the room was so silent he could hear the dust sweeping over the desert through the open balcony.
“What?” Bethesda said at last.
“I want to free Chelsie,” Julius translated for her. “Right now.”
Something crashed across the room, and Julius looked up to see Chelsie had dropped the sword she’d been sharpening. Her Fang of the Heartstriker was still rattling on the ground like a cymbal, but Chelsie didn’t seem to hear it. She just stood there, staring at Julius with a look so torn between heart-stopping fear and wild hope that even she didn’t seem to know what to make of it.
“Are you out of your mind?” Bethesda snarled, slamming her fist down on the table to bring the attention back to her. “I absolutely forbid it! Chelsie is vital to our security. If you set her free, you doom us all.”
“How so?” Ian asked. “Personally, I think life without worrying about when Bethesda’s Shade is going to stab me in the back sounds like the exact opposite of doom. And the Fs have always been a pointless waste of resources. Who keeps an entire clutch of dragons as servants?” He turned back to Julius. “I vote yes. On all of it.”
“Then you’re even more of a short-sighted fool than I thought you were!” their mother roared. “No dragon clan runs without fear. This is just more of Julius’s softhearted idiocy. He’s trying to turn us into humans. We’ll be a laughingstock!”
“No, we’ll be an effective government,” Julius said firmly. “I think the run-up to the election proved perfectly just how badly fear works as a unification tactic. But I don’t have to convince you, do I? Because I’m also voting yes, which makes it two against one.” He smirked at Bethesda. “You’re outvoted, Mother.”
For a heartbeat, Bethesda’s lovely face turned a very unflattering shade of scarlet. Then, fast as it had changed, she was right back to her old self, smirking down at Julius like a cat toying with its prey. “It won’t work,” she said in a sing-song voice. “I can’t stop you from freeing the Fs, but my control over Chelsie is a personal debt, which puts it outside the reach of this farce of a Council. You can’t make me give her up.”
Julius began to sweat. He hadn’t considered that angle. Thankfully, though, he was no longer alone.
“Oh, but we can,” Ian said slowly. “I’m sure your hold over Chelsie is dreadful indeed, but whatever deal you struck to make her sign away her soul was made during your long reign as clan head. During that time, you ran Heartstriker as a dictatorship with no differentiation between personal and clan decisions. Obviously, it’s far too late to go back and sort everything out now, centuries after the fact, which means we’re going to have to just pick one. So unless you want to claim that all the mortal insults you delivered and clan wars you started while acting as the Heartstriker were also personal debts incurred by you, and thus yours to deal with alone, you have no choice but to admit Chelsie’s servitude is to the clan, not to you.” He glanced at Julius. “Agreed?”
“Yes,” Julius said, eyes wide. “That was amazing.”
Ian shrugged the praise off and reached for one of the sheets of blank paper someone had stacked neatly in the middle of the table. “It’s what I do,” he said casually. “I was running businesses for a century before you were even born, remember? Fudging the line between business and personal is the oldest trick in the book. Frankly, I’m disappointed Mother didn’t see it coming.”
Bethesda shot him a nasty look, but Ian was staring at his paper as he began to draft a proposal. He wrote for several minutes and then passed the sheet to Julius, who read it over. Sure enough, Ian had written down a more formal version of what he’d just said: that since Bethesda couldn’t differentiate between which decisions had been made as head of the clan and which had been made as herself, all previous decisions were now formally considered to have been made by her acting as the Heartstriker rather than alone. Furthermore, because of this, all of her personal claims on Chelsie—magical and legal—were hitherto null and void. Below these statements, he’d drawn three lines, one for each of them to sign with his own signature already in place. Julius signed next then passed the paper to Bethesda, who looked like she was about to choke.
“I won’t sign.”
“Then you won’t get your dragon form back,” Julius said flatly. “We can’t move forward with a proposal still on the table. You can mark yourself as a no if you want, but if you don’t sign, we’ll never get to the vote to unseal you.”
Bethesda’s chest began to heave, and then she lurched forward, snatching the pen from his fingers. “Fine,” she snarled, scrawling her signature across the line. “Here’s your vote, and I hope you choke on it. But it won’t make a difference. You can’t change what’s in my head. So long as I know what Chelsie would rather die than admit, I’ll always have her by the—”
The moment Bethesda finished signing her name, dragon magic snapped like broken glass. It was similar to what had happened when they’d all signed Bob’s contract to form the Council in the first place, except much more pointed, and much, much older. But while the shock of it put to rest any lingering doubts Julius had about the magical efficacy of the Council’s decisions, it hit Chelsie even harder. He’d been focused on their mother, so he hadn’t actually seen it happen, but that didn’t matter. Julius felt Chelsie’s bloodlust ring through the air like the scrape of a drawn knife right before she launched herself at Bethesda.
“Chelsie!” he yelled, scrambling for his Fang. “Stop!”
But she wasn’t listening. The second the life debt that kept her from actually killing her mother had snapped, she’d gone straight over the table, crashing into Bethesda like a cannonball. Now the two of them were rolling together on the floor. But while it was impossible to tell exactly what was going on between the flying limbs and deadly claws, Chelsie had the clear advantage over her sealed mother. Sure enough, barely five seconds after it had begun, the brawl ended with Bethesda’s neck firmly under Chelsie’s boot. Chelsie had already stomped down hard enough to draw blood before Julius finally got his hand around his Fang, freezing them both under an iron wall of magic.
“Chelsie, stop,” he said again, panting. “You said you didn’t want to kill her!”
“I said I didn’t want you to kill her,” Chelsie growled through clenched teeth, her eyes still locked on their mother with centuries of pent-up hate. “I have no problem at all skinning the old hag from nose to toes for what she’s done to us.”
The unfettered rage in her voice was enough to make Bethesda tremble. In fact, now that Julius’s Fang had ended the fight, Bethesda’s own bloodlust seemed to be vanishing altogether in favor of fear, freeing her from the grip of his Fang as she wigg
led out from under her murderous daughter’s boot.
“You see?” she cried, scrambling to her feet. “She’s insane! This is what I warned you about. She’s never going to stop trying to kill me.” She turned to Julius. “Well, what are you waiting for? Attempted murder is still illegal in your little hugbox utopia, isn’t it? Punish her!”
She actually tapped her foot as he finished, looking at Julius as if she seriously expected him to order Chelsie’s execution. But as he stared at her in disbelief, Julius realized his mother had just handed him the key to solving the problem of Chelsie’s secret.
“Actually,” he said slowly, “freeing Chelsie and F-clutch was our first vote ever, which means we haven’t actually set any other rules down yet. That’s too bad for you, but really, what else did you expect? If you abuse and blackmail someone for six centuries, they’re going to want to kill you.”
Bethesda began to look more nervous. “But we don’t do that anymore,” she said quickly. “Isn’t that what you’re always going on about? Ending the cycle of violence? If you let her kill me, you’ll be breaking your own rule.”
“You’re right,” Julius said, glaring at her. “I didn’t go through all the headache and trouble of saving your life multiple times just to let you get killed now. But just because I don’t want any more killing in this clan doesn’t mean that what you’ve done magically goes away.” He tapped his fingers on the hilt of his sword. “I can keep Chelsie frozen, but sooner or later, I’m going to have to let go. When that happens, do you really think I’ll be fast enough to stop the assassin you trained to kill your dragons?”
By the time he finished, Bethesda’s face was ashen. “Then what are you going to do?” she said, her voice shaking. “You’re supposed to protect the Heartstrikers. That includes me!”
“Hey, I’m just a J,” Julius reminded her. “And a failure. I can try, but even with my Fang, we both know I’m no match for Chelsie. Sooner or later, she’s going to find a way.”