Kingdom of Ashes

by Rhiannon Thomas

  “Of course, Laney,” Finnegan said. “Thanks for your help once again.”

  “Stay safe,” she said, before she sailed away.

  “You never mentioned the charms,” Aurora said to Finnegan, as they began to walk. “You were going to leave me unprotected?”

  “They don’t work,” Finnegan said. “I thought you wouldn’t be one for a little superstition. But wear it, if it makes you feel better. Maybe it’ll balance out that dragon’s blood.”

  She slipped it around her neck and tucked it under her shirt. It was cool against her skin, the weight grounding her. “It was a nice thought for her to give me one.”

  “She won’t know the difference.”

  “I will.”

  Weeds grew in the gaps between bricks, weaving their way up to the roofs, but even they did not grow where the stone had burned black. One wall had graffiti near the base, a collection of names: Anna and Rachel and Matthew. Marks left by real people, people who may have looked up and seen the dragons descend.

  Aurora closed her eyes then, feeling the remnants of the cobbles beneath her feet. She imagined she could hear the voices on the wind, the bustle of the waterside town.

  She opened her eyes. “What was this place?” she asked. “Before the dragons came.”

  “A town,” Finnegan said.

  “That wasn’t what I was asking.”

  “We call it Oldtown now,” he said, “but I don’t know if they called it that then.”

  “We did,” Lucas said. “It was mostly a trading town. A place to be if you wanted to get elsewhere.”

  Had those names on the stone wanted to go elsewhere? Aurora hoped they had made it, before the dragons came.

  “If it isn’t safe to cross the river,” Aurora said, as they walked between more burned-out buildings, “how did you find someone to take us so easily?” The journey had almost seemed routine to the girl on the boat.

  “It’s forbidden to come here,” Finnegan said, “but that doesn’t mean no one does. Thrill-seekers, researchers, historians, treasure hunters . . . there’s always someone willing to ignore the danger. The treasure hunters are the least likely to return alive. They take big risks for whatever they think might have been left behind.”

  As they walked farther, the scarred buildings faded away, and the weeds along with them, leaving the Vanhelm Aurora had seen from the boat—hard, red-brown earth, with shells of buildings scattered along the horizon. It was harsh and hot, the air suffocating.

  “Careful now,” Lucas said. “It’s dangerous, going across the open.”

  “It’s early in the day for dragons,” Finnegan said.

  “They do tend to rest in the early morning,” Lucas said, “when the mist is in the air. But once it burns off, they will be about, day and night.”

  “How many are there?” Aurora asked.

  “At least fifty. All adults. But who knows how many there are farther inland, keeping away from the shore, where there’s less water.”

  On the horizon, Aurora could see the beginning of a small lake, or maybe a pond, shimmering in the sunlight. Grass and reeds grew around it, dipping into the water, a small splash of green.

  “If they can’t bear water,” Aurora asked, “how do they drink?”

  “They don’t drink,” Finnegan said. “Or we don’t think so.”

  “I’ve been studying them for my whole life,” Lucas said, “but still we know so little. They seem to eat stone. The charred earth they make. Meat occasionally, although they don’t seem to need it. Metal too. We think the mountain they live in is full of the stuff, although no one has had the courage to check. Even before the dragons came, that mountain was considered too dangerous to enter. Too large a risk of a cave-in, you know. It was lucky, in the end, that we never tried to mine there. The mines nearer the river proved dangerous enough, until we built a moat around them to protect them.”

  “Yet people were still willing to work there?” Aurora asked.

  “People need money,” Finnegan said. “The mines pay better than anything. And people working there are rarely burned anymore.”

  “Rarely burned?” she said. “But it happens?”

  “Only to the foolish. People who don’t take the necessary precautions. Like us.”

  “And what happens to people like us, if they do get burned?”

  “They die,” Finnegan said. “Nothing lives where dragons burn.”

  “You can see for yourself, Rose,” Lucas said. “Plants can’t grow where the ground has been scorched, even after fifty years. Skin can’t recover from that. Even if people aren’t killed straightaway, it’s a painful and inevitable death.”

  The wind was harsher out in the waste, with little but the rise and fall of the land to shelter them. It whistled in Aurora’s ears, as sharp as the cry of a dragon.

  Lucas stopped and raised a hand. “Wait,” he said. “On the horizon there.”

  In the distance, a long red shape burned across the sky. A dragon. It hovered for a moment, its wings held aloft, then snapped its body downward and dove out of sight.

  Aurora stared at the spot where the dragon had disappeared. It should have been impossible. Impossible for her to stand here, over a hundred years after she had been born. Impossible for dragons to exist. Yet here they both were. It made her think of childhood stories, childhood dreams, that yearning for adventure. . . . Was this what others had felt, when the king announced that the sleeping princess was awake, when the dazed girl stumbled out before them? That all things were possible, now this time had come?

  “See, dragon girl?” Finnegan said. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist them.”

  She looked away. “You don’t know as much as you think you do.”

  They walked on through the waste, until the sun was high in the sky and Aurora’s legs ached underneath her. A few more dragons flew on the horizon, but none came close. Sometime after noon, they reached another abandoned settlement, with black, melted buildings. A steep slope sheltered the town on one side, while a small river wove around the other.

  “We should stop here,” Lucas said. “Have something to eat.”

  They sat in what must once have been the town square. A stream trickled past, flush with greenery on either side. The grass tickled Aurora’s feet, extra soft after the unyielding earth.

  “Is the water safe to drink?” she asked.

  Lucas nodded, so she leaned forward and cupped some in her hands. It tasted different, like it was a little charred too. It held a trace of dragon fire, as though even the things that dragons could not touch were tainted by their presence.

  They ate in silence. Aurora stared at the ruins, trying to imagine that people had lived here once. And not just people, but people like her, women who had been born the year that she was born, women who might still have been alive when the dragons swooped out of the sky. Children who might have been the age of her grandchildren, if she had not fallen asleep.

  The sky rumbled, and Aurora flinched and looked up, almost expecting to see a dragon descending. Instead, a large drop of rain landed in her eye, followed by another on her chin. Her shirt was soaked in seconds, sticking to her like a second skin.

  “Let’s get inside!” Finnegan yelled. He was barely audible above the roar of falling water. “There’s got to be somewhere with a roof.”

  They scrambled through the streets and into a tall, lopsided building. The door was missing, but the rush of water quieted as they ducked inside.

  If not for the decay of fifty years, Aurora could almost imagine that someone still lived in the house. A table stood in the center, slightly crooked, and the back wall was covered in shelves. A pile of rotting clothes waited on the table, as though someone had washed them and got distracted before the clothes could be put away.

  Finnegan ran a hand through his hair, sending more droplets pattering to the floor.

  Lucas sat on one of the abandoned chairs, apparently trusting it not to break, and Finnegan walked arou
nd the ruin, investigating the remains.

  Aurora leaned against the doorframe, looking out at the sheets of rain. Alyssinia seemed far away. The capital, with rules and walls and Queen Iris’s disapproval, seemed even farther, impossibly far, like it too had been part of another world, part of the dream while she slept, and she was finally, slowly waking up. This place was another kind of nightmare, she thought, but at least she could walk freely in it. At least she could be here to see it.

  And she wanted to see more.

  “I’m going to explore,” she said, after ten more minutes of heavy rain.

  “I don’t think that’s wise—” Lucas said, but she was already stepping out of the door. She turned on the balls of her feet.

  “Dragons don’t come out in the rain,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Want company?” Finnegan asked.

  She shook her head. “I want to wander around. By myself. I’ll be back soon.”

  The rain clung to her clothes, her hair, her skin. It pounded on the ground, drowning out all other noise. The sky was clear and blue, even as thunder rumbled across it. One of those freakish storms, the kind that should be impossible, like the dragons, like this place.

  The abandoned town was a maze, and the rain blurred her vision, making it hard to even guess where to go, so she moved on instinct alone, running her hands along the stone. She could feel so much in the twists of the walls, the melted smoothness, the nicks and dimples, the occasional place where more names, more messages, had been scratched. Perhaps this town had stood when Alysse herself was born, when Aurora’s ancestors set off across the sea.

  Her wanderings led her to the edge of the town, where the ground sloped upward, gently at first, and then steeply, forming a hill that was almost a cliff. From this angle, it seemed to stretch up forever, blocking her path all the way to the sky. But there were a few ruined buildings on the slope too, more damaged than the rest, the ground so hard that even the rain had not yet churned it into mud. And some cracked stones remained, forming something that might once have been a path.

  Aurora wanted to climb it. She wanted to stand at the top of the hill, to look over everything, to see it all for what it really was. A girl in her tower, looking out at everything she might touch one day.

  She scrambled up the path, hooking her toes into the cracks between the cobbles to stop herself from falling. The rain slowed to a drizzle, quieting as quickly as it had come, but Aurora pressed onward, her knees aching with the effort. She glanced over her shoulder, and already the town was shrinking behind her. She could see the places where the roofs had bent and collapsed, the buildings that had lost their roofs altogether.

  She kept climbing.

  The rain faded away. The sun shone warm and bright, soothing Aurora’s skin.

  Above, she saw a cave.

  “Aurora!” Finnegan, far below her, shouted into the space between them.

  “In a moment,” she said. “I just want to see.”

  She could hear Finnegan following, his feet pounding on the ground, and she frowned. She had told him she wanted to be left alone. How like him, how arrogant, to assume that he could interrupt her after all. And she was so close to the top now. So close. The cave loomed beside her, the inside black as night, the air around it warmer, heavy.

  She paused beside the entrance for a moment, her toes clinging to the earth, and then there was a sound like a roar, like a crowd bearing down, filling her ears, echoing through the ground.

  A dragon emerged from the cave. Its head appeared first, gleaming with red scales. Its deep-set eyes were red too, like the necklace, full of hunger and vengeance and rage. Black lines ran from its eyes down to its crocodile-like nose. Each tooth was the size of Aurora’s hands. Before Aurora could react, the head snapped past her, revealing a long neck, and then a body that went on and on, red and terrible and burning with heat that would have made her flinch, if only she could move. The dragon unfurled its wings, so close that Aurora could see the webbing between the bones, delicate and strong as a spider’s web, so large that for a moment they were all she could see. Her world turned red.

  It was the most terrifying and beautiful thing she had ever seen. Heat pulsed off its skin, heat that settled within her, surging with her blood. The tail flicked past her, covered in black spikes, ending in a narrow point, so thin that she could have caught it in one hand.

  Nothing existed except the dragon. She could almost taste its fire. And she knew what Finnegan meant, why his careful smile turned into genuine excitement when he spoke of these creatures. They were magnificent, uncontainable, bursting from the earth itself and refusing to sleep again.

  The dragon twisted. It snapped its jaws and looked at her for no longer than a heartbeat. She looked back, her mouth slightly open, unable to breathe. Then the dragon gave its wings one powerful sweep and shot off over the top of the ridge. Aurora turned to follow its progress. A trail of fire burst into the sky, and then the creature was gone.

  She could see Finnegan, waiting halfway down the slope. Her heart was still pounding, her blood hot and alive, possibility surrounding her. The waste did not seem quite so haunted now.

  She began to run down the slope, slipping on the stones. “You were right!” she said. “I can feel it. We have a connection. You were right!”

  “Of course I was right,” he said, as though that were the only possible answer, as though he had known it all along. And for once, Aurora didn’t care that he was smug, didn’t care that he thought he knew everything and that nothing surprised him. Out here, the heat of the dragon still filling the air, anything else seemed laughable. And so she laughed. He grabbed her waist, and she twirled around him, dizzy with the thrill of it.

  Lucas stood a few paces behind Finnegan. He gaped at her. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “You should be dead.”

  “But I’m not,” she said. “I’m not.” Because Finnegan was right. Because of her magic. “Where can we find more?” She struggled to regain her balance. “Where are the rest? I want to see them.”

  “They live in the mountain,” Lucas said, nodding toward the horizon. “But I really don’t think—”

  “We’re going there,” she said. “We have to go there.” She spun on the spot, still laughing, joy swelling inside her. “I’m Princess Aurora, and I command you to take us there.”

  Lucas raised his eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware I was in the presence of Alyssinian royalty.”

  Something tugged at the back of her mind, insisting that she should deny it, that she should not have said that, but she felt so good. So powerful. And if seeing a dragon felt like that, how would it be to use her magic, to connect with them? “We have to find more dragons,” she said. “Go to the mountain. Right, Finnegan?”

  “Right,” he said. “But maybe we should do a little preparation first. Make sure we have food? And a plan?” He rested his hands on Aurora’s shoulders, as though trying to keep her feet on the ground. He looked straight into her eyes. He wasn’t smiling. “We should get back to the palace,” he said. “Before my mother realizes anything is wrong.”

  The seriousness of his expression made her pause. “All right,” she said.

  But her heart still pounded as they walked away.

  SIX

  THE ADRENALINE LASTED THE ENTIRE WALK BACK TO the river. Finnegan and Lucas talked—about the dragon they had seen, about its reaction to Aurora, about the abandoned towns that they passed—but Aurora did not speak. She wanted to be alone in her wonder for as long as she could.

  Vanhelm seemed even more hectic after the stillness of the waste. People hurried by on the streets, and preachers shouted at them, their promises of cleansing fire ringing more clearly in Aurora’s ears now that the dragon had warmed her skin.

  Yet after they bid Lucas good-bye and headed toward the palace courtyard, Aurora began to doubt once again. The dragon had given her such a rush, but it seemed to have knocked away her good sense as well as her fe
ar.

  “That was foolish of me,” she said, as they walked past one of the courtyard’s many fountains. “I shouldn’t have told Lucas who I am.”

  “Probably not,” Finnegan said. “But I would trust Lucas with my life. He’ll keep your secret.”

  But even if she did not worry about Lucas, she needed to worry about herself. What had possessed her to speak so freely, so recklessly? She had been almost arrogant in her joy.

  They entered the entrance hall as two women swept down the central staircase. The elder one had long black hair, streaked with gray. Her pale skin was lined around the eyes and the corners of her mouth, and the crown she wore suggested that she must be the queen. She was deep in conversation with a tall girl not much younger than Aurora, with long, rust-colored hair and freckles covering her nose. Her green eyes were huge, and they were focused now on the queen, a serious expression on her face.

  “Finnegan,” the queen said. She paused halfway down the stairs and frowned at him. “You’re late.”

  “I was delayed.”

  “You always are.” She looked at Aurora. “And this, I suppose, is what delayed you. When were you going to tell me that we have Alyssinian royalty staying with us?”

  “Right now,” Finnegan said. “May I present to you Princess Aurora, heir to the throne of Alyssinia?”

  Aurora curtsied. The queen did not curtsy back. She finished descending the stairs and looked Aurora up and down.

  “Don’t curtsy,” she said. “You’ll damage your knees.”

  “That isn’t true,” Finnegan said.

  “Maybe not. But it’s a waste of energy.” The queen glanced at Finnegan. “Why did you not inform me of her arrival before now?”

  “She only came yesterday,” Finnegan said. “I did not want to concern you until we knew she intended to stay.”

  “Did not want to concern me?” The queen laughed. “Oh, your lies can be so pretty, Finnegan. I do not know where you learned them.”