Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  “Do you truly believe me so clumsy?” Xarius asked, his tone seething with mockery. “That a scrub girl could note my comings and goings? That you could penetrate my chambers, uninvited, without leaving your blood upon the floor?”

  “An assignment,” said Rohn, rubbing his wrists as the second popped free. “Long overdue. Master Aarhus slew his first at the age of seven.”

  Their words surrounded Kylac like grit in a funnel cloud…clawing…flaying…Traeger. They had wanted him to kill Traeger. Xarius had goaded him, set him on his way. An assignment, his father called it. To slay his first…

  “I’ll admit I doubted you,” Rohn said, while Kylac’s gaze slipped toward the dark pool in which the mutilated body of the captain of the city watch now bathed. “I feared you lacked the fortitude.”

  “But all men have it in them,” Aarhus added, placing a reassuring hand on Rohn’s shoulder. “The hunger to take a life, hold it in your palm, and then crush it in your fist. For some, it is buried deeper, is all. But once unleashed…”

  Kylac’s gaze snagged upon Traeger’s face, his cleft lip barely noticeable now amid the red wash of his lacerated cheeks. He felt no pride in the act, but neither did he feel remorse. Just the hollow sting of inevitability.

  “The first is the hardest,” said Rohn. “Those that follow will become easier and easier.”

  “Those that follow?” His words this time, though they sounded to him a stranger’s.

  “The time has come to assume your place among us, to lay claim to who and what you are.”

  “Seax Lunara,” Kylac whispered. Daggers of the Moon. A fable come to light.

  The magistrate inclined his head. “Aarhus Hafoc, I am known, to those of our order.”

  “Xarius Talyzar.”

  “Rohn Mandrinc, named guildmaster of the Seax Lunara by Ernathian Crennlok.”

  So the slain captain had been correct in that, as well. The rest were puppets, his father who pulled their strings. The servants think him guilty…

  “By rite of passage,” said Rohn, “choose your name.”

  “My name,” Kylac echoed numbly. A mark of initiation. The acceptance of an atrocity committed this night, and those they would have him commit in the future.

  “Any you wish,” his father prodded.

  Hafoc. Talyzar. Mandrinc. Crennlok. Old Entien names all. Hawk. Wraith. Poison. Dread.

  He glanced toward the unconscious Thumbs—Jedrick. One of theirs, given the exchange between Rohn and Aarhus—and the fact that Xarius hadn’t killed him. Positioned here to hold Traeger in check, most likely, should the captain have grown too fervent in his beatings or tired of waiting on Governor Tehric’s arrival. Or had the governor’s vengeful coming been merely another layer of plotting?

  It caused him to wonder vaguely at how they meant to explain away this affair. Traeger would bear the blame for all, he supposed. A zealot, acting out on a known grudge. Xarius? Coerced to plant evidence, later employed by Aarhus to free a man wrongfully detained. With Rohn perceived as a victim, no witnesses to the contrary, and Aarhus as the magistrate in charge, any who sought to press alternate accusation would be pissing against a gale. Shards, the king himself, while shocked and disappointed at these dire failings of a captain of the city watch, might actually be relieved to hear of Rohn’s innocence.

  His father’s innocence. How could he have ever defended it? The only innocence in this chamber lay with Brie’s small, still form.

  Xarius scoffed. “We waste our breath. He’ll never be one of us.”

  “Don’t be foolish, boy,” urged Aarhus. “Name yourself, and let us bear witness.”

  Should he refuse, would they seek to kill him? Would he in turn kill them? It scarcely mattered. The threat, real or imagined, would weigh as wind in his decision.

  When all else was stripped away, he could not refute his actions this night. Nor would he shirk responsibility for them. He would accept them because he must, because they had branded him more surely than any moniker ever could. He would not debase himself further by cowering behind a lie.

  His father’s bark echoed in the stillness. “Who are you?”

  Kylac looked once more at Traeger’s ravaged corpse, then forced his gaze to settle upon Brie. Briallen, whose rare laugh would never again warm his heart. You…You’re…

  “Kronus,” he decided abruptly. “Kylac Kronus.”

  He buried her the following afternoon, beneath a crude cairn he erected beside her mother’s, on a remote steppe too stony for digging. The others had frowned upon his decision to carry her from the catacombs, but had done nothing to prevent it. Neither had they lent aid, ignoring him and his burden throughout the return journey. Xarius had searched his reaction early on, as they trailed past the corpses of murdered watchmen—those he and Brie had left bound on the way in. Unsurprised, Kylac had said nothing.

  His thoughts had been solely with his friend, a maelstrom of emotions fueled by memory, by fantasy—crushing waves of acceptance alternating with riptides of denial. But for the ghastly rent in the flesh beneath her chin, she might have merely been sleeping, her eyelids on the verge of fluttering open. He in turn had refused to rest, holding her close even when his muscles had burned with fatigue and seized with cramp. He had no right to set her aside for personal relief. He’d hoped that if he could bear the pain, these gods he so often heard tell of would reconsider, and give ear to his silent pleas.

  Yet deaf they’d remained, not only while he’d borne her hence, but as she had lain still, pale, upon the bare, unforgiving earth selected for her burial ground. She hadn’t appeared to mind. At peace, she had seemed, comfortable in her endless dreams…

  He stood vigil for some time over the mound of stones, staring numbly at the hilt of her blade where he’d planted it as a marker. This far out, it was as liable to rust as fall prey to grave robbers. He’d considered keeping it as a reminder of the blood on his hands—both Traeger’s and Brie’s—but had imagined Brie’s scornful reaction toward anything so dramatic. It was her blade. She had died fighting with it in hand. Its final resting place would be the same as hers.

  Leaving him without a longsword, since he’d already decided not to return to the gates of Talonar. Throughout the long march from the catacombs, the hard climb to this overlook, and the bloody, blistering hours of scraping together and piling cairn stones, he’d been haunted by Brie’s dying moments. You…You’re… She’d been fighting to tell him something. About himself, perchance. Some defining characteristic, or advice for his future. You…You’re…

  His father had fashioned him to be an agent of death. It seemed he had succeeded. But to what end? Like Brie’s final words, it would be for him to decide. Whatever, it would have nothing to do with the Seax Lunara or any more of his father’s secrets. Given the game that had culminated in Brie’s death, he wished to learn no more from Rohn or his ilk.

  Henceforth, he would be his own instrument, and not theirs to wield.

  He wondered if they might hunt him, but found it difficult to envision. Rohn must have anticipated his possible desertion, yet had done nothing to prevent it. A reaction that suited him. A master smith did not dwell on a flawed piece of steel. He simply tossed it aside and went to work on the next.

  The name, he would keep. Kronus. It was Brie he’d been thinking of when choosing it—of whatever demons she had lived with and stood against. Day after day, suffering, but unbroken. Undiminished. Unbowed. With such a name, he might seek to honor her, living as he imagined might please her, without apology or shame.

  If there was more to it than that, he would learn it along the way.

  He had but one more call to make. A visit that took him to the bowels of the Mire. To the stoop of a rotting shack shunned by even the most sordid inhabitants of that underprivileged district. To a creature whose mere sight curdled his blood.

  “Finally got bit, did she?” her grandfather asked, once Kylac had delivered news of Brie’s death. “I told the little whore t
o tread clear of them vipers. Girl was deaf as I am blind.”

  Kylac flinched, but suffered the words, stinging as they did with a measure of truth. He’d allow that Brie might have been better served distancing herself from Talonar and its machinations—from Rohn and even from Kylac. He’d allow that and more, if only the crusty old mole could manage to shed a tear. A single tear was all Kylac would demand of him, accepting it as a sign of guilt, of remorse, of confession to whatever horrors the old man had inflicted upon her.

  “Well, snake?” the monster asked after a time. “What would you have of me?”

  Rohn had been right. His second kill was easier to stomach than the first.

  Leaving the roaches to feed, Kylac set forth.

  This story began almost two years ago, when the fabulous Erika Swanson made me a plush Temeraire for my daughter to play with, and I asked her for a story prompt by way of thanks. She offered me the lovely idea of the Temeraire-universe dragons encountering early attempts at human aviation. And so when Shawn asked me for a story, I decided to write one about my Victory of Eagles character Perscitia bumping into a hot air balloon.

  Possibly I was asking for it, given that I was writing for an Unfettered anthology, but I’ve rarely had a story so completely dig its heels in and run away in the opposite direction. I don’t want to say anything much about what is in the story, as I think it’s more fun to read unspoiled, but I will say that there are no balloons. A dragon or two may have snuck in, though.

  — Naomi Novik

  IN FAVOUR WITH THEIR STARS

  Naomi Novik

  He woke and did not immediately know where he was, a thick cottony taste in his mouth, bitter, and a small stinging pain near the base of his neck and at his wrists. He was secured in wide straps crossed over his chest and thighs, and his sight was badly blurred and in black-and-white; all he saw above him was a smear of gray light. He put his hands out on instinct and met cold glass only inches away from his face. Fog spread out from his fingers. He shoved on the glass in panic, then pounded against it with his fists, bare feet kicking and toes sliding uselessly against the invisible coffin-lid, his heart thundering rapidly but it refused to yield in the slightest, and a shuddering wave of exhaustion made him fall limply back against the padding underneath.

  He lay there breathing, gasping. He worked his mouth until a little moisture came into it, and he swallowed. His sight began to sharpen little by little. Faint blue outlines began to become visible on the glass above him, and nearly simultaneously, his mind began to function again. He was still in the cradle. That was the ship’s medical bay, outside him; he’d been awoken from shipsleep; and that meant—

  He had barely an opportunity to look up and see the large implacable countdown display; then the cradle dropped abruptly, his stomach following a moment after the rest of him, and the walls of the launch channel rose around him. From instinct, he tried to brace himself against the lid as the roar and white blaze of propulsion echoed at his feet, as useless as that was; then the launch channel was blurring past and gone: the cradle was ejected out into the void, and ten million stars were turning in their stately course all around him.

  The deep dark was comforting, familiar, and the weightlessness that let his body rise and press against the straps. Laurence breathed deeply and let his uncoordinated arms sink again. His body remained all but limp. How he loathed planetary landings: of course he knew the rationale for leaving the muscle relaxants in his system until he was on the ground, and a thousand statistical analyses had confirmed the sense of it, but he could not like the sensation of uselessness; he could not even work the cradle’s diagnostics, his fingers thick and clumsy. He could only watch, his eyes slowly regaining focus. The cradle was curving away from the ship now: he had a final moment to see her, the Reliant, sleek and silver and gleaming with the star’s pale yellow-tinged light behind her, and then the planet was rising in his view: vast and endless green, mazed with clouds, and four of its small moons ringed around it, sweeping gaps in a thin encircling cloud of rings and dust.

  It was an awkward and a choppy landing, buffeted by the debris, and despite the stabilizers, the cradle tumbled over itself two dozen times before it struck the atmosphere: bottom first, the angry red-orange glow blooming at his feet, and the air boiling white over his lid, which gradually blackened with the heat even as gravity took a sure and steady grip upon him. He lay still helpless and now blind in his carbonized shell, falling endlessly. Reason said that he was in fact slowing, the cradle’s landing systems activating; but it was difficult to cling to reason in the close and stifling dark. Though his body was yet chilled through from the long sleep, the air within was stale and hot now, and sweat began to spring out on his forehead; he was still falling.

  And then, quite abruptly, he was not: a massive and unexpected jerk that flung him hard against his straps, and dropped him back again into his padding; he gasped with the jolt. Had he struck on a mountaintop, or one of the trees? His mind was still sluggish, but he remembered those vividly from the endless reams of his briefing: their vast bulk, skyscraper-high and more, the latticed network of their roots like mangroves twisting furiously into the earth. The surveyors had taken dozens of holographs, panoramic, trying to convey the scale of them, of a world that seemed built for giants.

  Of course, the surveyors had failed quite thoroughly to account for that unnatural size and strength, until too late. Laurence hoped very grimly that they had not also failed to properly scan: if the cradle’s systems had been given bad information about the composition of the trees, and he had run into one—but the cradle was still moving, though more gently, no longer in free fall. Laurence could not account for it; he pressed on the coffin-lid with his still-clumsy hands. The console keys glowed blue at him against the charred black, and he managed to fold all of his fingers but one down. He pressed with painstaking care one button after another: the diagnostics showed normal operation, and his elevation was decreasing rapidly; abruptly there was another thump outside, and the cradle stopped upon the ground and ceased to move.

  There was a warning puff of air against the side of his neck; he held still and forced himself to relax as the needle slid in. He drew several more breaths as the purifiers washed through him, carrying away the residue of sleep and inaction; he opened and closed his fists and rolled his fingers. He had to stretch his hands fairly far apart to reach the opening controls, and then use his toes to touch the final panel at the base, an act of coordination entirely beyond the limits of any panicked thrashing, as it was intended to be.

  The lid cracked and bright fresh cool air rushed in, a brisk slap to the face. The halves of the lid raised up and retracted; Laurence seized the sides of the cradle and heaved himself up sitting, teeth gritted against the near-painful heat of the metal shell, and then he looked up—and up, and up, and up: there was a dragon standing over the cradle, a dragon on a scale he had never imagined, peering down at him with narrow-slitted eyes, gleaming blue against a black and armored hide.

  He stared up at it a moment; then he cleared his throat and said, voice a little hoarse and rusty, “I am Captain William Laurence—”

  “I know who you are,” the dragon interrupted coldly, “—you are from the Navy, and you have been sent to tell us that we ought to let you break up our home, all for this nonsense of trinium; well, I am Temeraire, the governor of this colony, and you may as well know straightaway that we will not put up with it at all. You had much better never have come.”

  Of course, the situation was nothing so simple. Young dragons always had a certain tendency to see matters in their most straightforward light, as Laurence well knew; he had worked alongside dragons in the Navy all his life, of course, and that had in no small measure marked him for this mission. But he had not entirely appreciated—nor, he thought, had his superiors—the very real, very marked difference between the kind of dragons which served in the Navy, and those ancient lines which had been sent to populate New Atlanta.
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br />   Levitas, a supply officer on Laurence’s last command, was some five meters in length, and a ton; Yu Shi, the communications officer at Viro Station, was only three meters—although her wingspan was somewhat wider—and not half a ton. Laurence did not think there was a beast in the service more than five tons, even on the heavy-armor landing crews; and he had been thoroughly impressed on the occasion he had met one of those dragons, a monstrously built—he had thought at the time—tank-like creature, who had worn her four hundred pounds of body-plating as lightly as if it had been made of lace, and had cheerfully eaten sixty pounds of solid protein-carbohydrate mix straight from the vat in a single sitting.

  The laws of nearly every settled world firmly required the engineering of dragon eggs, of necessity; the mania for size that had possessed the dragon-breeders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had crowded the gene pool with tendencies toward wholly unsustainable, impractical mass. But New Atlanta was a private colony, a business endeavor aimed at the very oldest and wealthiest of dragons; the marketing Laurence had seen had promised “a pristine haven untouched by industrialization,” as the sales literature had put it, “where your eggs, having been transported in the finest commercial liner available, attended by a devoted and highly trained staff of nursery personnel, will hatch and develop to their fullest and most extraordinary potential in a lush and luxurious setting, while funds you set aside for their care appreciate tax-free in guaranteed liquid instruments.”

  Only such a private colony could offer free and unfettered breeding to dragons, and those places were much sought-after by the small but fiercely proud coterie of aristocratic dragon lines still preserved from the era of pre-industrial combat. There had been only a thousand places sold, at a million federals each, shockingly outrageous prices even for a luxury colony; but they had sold nonetheless. To dragons like this.