House of Dragons

by Jessica Cluess

  She only had to do the thing she hated most.

  “Please no,” Julia wept, backing away with her hand outstretched in some flimsy attempt at protection. “Hyperia, no! Not again!”

  Hyperia flinched, biting down on her tongue. It’s trying to trick you.

  This time, the crown would be hers, and her sister would already be dead.

  “Please!” Julia’s ghost sobbed.

  “I’m sorry,” Hyperia said. With a cry, she swung the sword and sliced through the phantom’s neck. Julia vanished in an instant, and Hyperia was left alone in the dark, the sword dangling from her hand.

  Was that it?

  Hyperia traced a thumb across the ruby set in the dragon’s eye. She waited in that darkness, waited for the fanfare of trumpets. She waited for a moment of serenity that did not come, and an indescribable feeling began to bloom in her chest like some poisonous flower.

  The void, the Truth, whatever this place was…

  She felt like it was looking at her.

  Judging her.

  What if…what if she’d chosen wrong? As the seconds crawled past and she lingered in nothingness, her pulse began to race as unwelcome thoughts bombarded her. If this was wrong—if she’d done the wrong thing now—then she must also have failed before.

  When she…

  “No!” Hyperia screamed into the blackness.

  And then—

  After Emilia exploded Huigh’s heart and lungs, she became difficult to manage. By the time she was fourteen, she’d been locked away in a castle and under her parents’ eye for nearly a year. Emilia had insisted that this treatment was barbaric. Why couldn’t she leave the castle grounds? Why did she have to stay so far north, where the sun barely rose in the winter? Finally, her parents seemed to relent. They took her and Alexander to the nearest village. A chaotic had been discovered in their midst.

  A girl, barely older than Emilia.

  As the lord and his family watched, seated on a raised dais, comfortable on velvet cushions with cups of spiced wine in hand, the villagers had jeered while the girl was led to a platform. The girl had worn the helmet signifying a chaotic. The locals called it a “beetle helm,” but to Emilia it resembled a crude bird’s head. A black metal contraption affixed in two sections, the upper part of the helmet jutted out a bit, sort of like a beak. There were no eyeholes, no mouth hole, so whoever was locked inside the thing could not see or communicate in any way. Apparently, inside the helmet’s lower section, which was strapped around the neck, a kind of clamp held a chaotic’s tongue to prevent them from casting spells.

  I’ve never needed to speak to do magic, Emilia had thought, but wisely said nothing.

  They started by unshackling the girl’s hands and removing the helmet. Beneath, the crowd discovered a scrap of a thing, pale, with wide blue eyes and a snub nose. Someone had cut all her hair away with a knife; her scalp bled in patches. The girl began to hyperventilate as the constable took a hot blade from a nearby brazier. Its tip glowed molten orange as they forced her head back.

  “Please. Stop this.” Emilia had tugged at her father’s sleeve, and he’d given a withering stare.

  “Watch and learn,” he’d growled. Emilia’s guts had felt full of twisting worms when the constable sliced out the girl’s tongue with one deft movement.

  Emilia recalled how the girl’s mouth overflowed with dark, rich blood. It looks like berry sauce, she’d thought numbly. Then she’d started to shake.

  Her chaos slept dormant in her soul. The horror on display overpowered every sense.

  The girl had been laid out on a table, chained, and the wound of her mouth cauterized so she didn’t drown in her own blood. They’d made a science of torture.

  First, they drove iron nails through the girl’s hands and feet, binding her to the table completely. Emilia flinched with every pound of the hammer. The girl was pinned like some sick imitation of a captive butterfly.

  Then they’d taken boiling lead and blinded her with it. The muffled screams, the way her legs shot out like she’d been struck by lightning, remained in Emilia’s mind more vividly than all the blood. She clung to Alex’s hand. Her brother bore the half-moon imprints of Emilia’s fingernails for hours afterward.

  They then sliced open the girl’s belly in front of the crowd, pulling out her liver, examining the jellied red-and-purple of it, unspooling her intestines like yards of pink sausages. That thought, of breakfast sausage, nearly made Emilia throw up.

  “Contain yourself,” her father had murmured when she started to breathe heavily and bent over to clasp her knees.

  Emilia didn’t know at what precise moment the girl died. She had clearly soiled herself before it happened or perhaps at the instant of release. The constable threw each of her organs in turn into a fire, and the smell of roasting offal and shit wafted through the air as the people cheered, and dancing began. Emilia caught sight of two people, a man and a woman, both prostrate on the ground with grief. The girl’s parents.

  “It’s over now.” Alex had kissed her head.

  When they returned home, her parents asked if she wanted to prance around the Hibrian Isles doing as she liked. She went to her room and lay in bed for two days straight. Emilia couldn’t close her own eyes without seeing the girl’s. She smelled blood in every cup of tea her brother tried to get her to drink.

  That had started her love of coffee, actually.

  And when Emilia finally started crying, and cried for almost eight solid hours while trapped in a corner of her room, her power splintering her dresser and exploding the heads of her dolls, only Alex had been brave enough to come inside, knowing she wouldn’t hurt him. He cuddled her on the floor and made a promise.

  “When I take the throne, my first order will be to stop butchering chaotics. I swear to you.” He kissed the side of her head. “Just hold on a little longer, Emi. I’ll make it all right.”

  * * *

  Emilia had not seen this girl in four years and had thought never to see her again. Now Emilia stood by the executioner’s table, hands limp at her sides as she looked upon the victim. They’d already nailed her hands and feet and boiled her eyes. They’d even vivisected her, her stomach sliced open and the raw red of her innards on display, though the feeble twitch of limbs showed that the girl was still somehow alive.

  “I’m sorry,” Emilia whispered, reaching out to touch the thin white arm.

  Out of the silent darkness a mass of people emerged. Emilia’s head snapped up. She looked at the cheering, jeering throngs on every side of her. They began to clap, to throw things, and to shout, “Death! Death!”

  “She’s a child. She’s only a child!” Emilia screamed at them, turning every which way, but wherever she looked she faced rows of snarling, ravenous faces.

  We were born with an evil affliction, Emilia had thought when she first beheld the girl. Evil. Yes, they’d been born evil, though not by choice. At the time, she hadn’t thought this butchery was wrong. Horrible, yes, but not wrong.

  But now…

  Alex had told her he would make it all right when he took the throne, but Alex was not here. She was. Emilia felt the prickle of power along the ridge of her spine, and the flow of chaos deep in the lines of her palms. Her body was a vessel, filling with a naked and uncontrollable energy. Her hair seemed to spark at its ends, and she tasted something metallic on her tongue.

  “You. You good people,” she snarled, looking at their cursed faces. The girl continued to mumble and sob, struggling to free herself. Emilia blinked.

  Who had placed a sword beside the girl?

  It was gold, the pommel shaped like a dragon’s head.

  Emilia brushed the damn thing aside. She had other, better weapons.

  People always feared a girl of too much feeling.

  She would show them they’d been right to f
ear her.

  Gritting her teeth, Emilia held out her arms on either side, her palms up.

  “Should I do this?” she whispered, more to herself than anyone else. But that voice that she had heard on the island right after the Hunt—that rumbling, masculine voice—echoed through her head…and spoke her name.

  Emilia.

  She felt the power sizzling under her fingernails, welling beneath her rib cage. Emilia opened her eyes and looked out at all these good, ignorant, self-righteous people, and she felt the hatred rise. The chaos mixed with that hatred—and she let go.

  She unleashed the power, watched as the world around her ripped away.

  The girl on the table vanished. The people in the stands vanished. The darkness itself vanished.

  A screeching began, the squeal of twisted metal. Emilia clamped her hands to her head but could not force that sound out. In this churning gray void of nothing, images flashed in her mind.

  A leather vial.

  A golden throne.

  Some symbol, lines and curves she could not understand.

  Emperor Erasmus, hands placed over his breast, his eyes closed in death.

  A great orange dragon’s eye as it opened. As it beheld her.

  And…

  Dragonspire in flames.

  The buildings reduced to rubble, smoked to a cinder. The smell of charred human flesh, as sickly sweet as roasting pork, heavy in the air. Bodies, dozens of them if not hundreds, scattered about as numerous and pitiable as a drowned colony of ants. In her gut, Emilia felt the tugging horror of inevitability as she beheld this dead world.

  And in the rubble, she glimpsed five particular bodies. Hers and the other competitors’, all blood-soaked, with lifeless eyes turned toward the blue above.

  Emilia!

  And then—

  * * *

  Emilia stared at the clear blue sky. Her body shivered as she pushed herself up on her elbows. Around her there were coughs and moans as the others rolled about on the ground. Lucian. Vespir. Ajax. Hyperia. They were all here.

  And the Truth…

  Now it looked like any other stone archway in a garden. Through it, she could plainly see a stone bench and a bush of pink flowers. Emilia tilted her head back and found Petros and Camilla standing over her, blocking out the sun.

  “What in the depths happened?” Camilla cried.

  Vespir sat beneath a pear tree, clenching and unclenching her jaw. How long until the priests would fix whatever had gone wrong with the test? How long until they would know who had won? If she had to wait much longer, she might go screaming mad. Ajax sat to the right of her. For nearly an hour, they’d been stewing together.

  “Think they’re gonna get it set up again soon?” Ajax muttered. His outstretched leg jiggled rapidly. Ahead of them, the two priests circled the stone doorway. Camilla would walk through it and Petros would follow, clearly arguing with each other. Camilla began flapping her arms out of sheer frustration, like a great gaudy bird.

  “I don’t know.” That had been her constant refrain to Ajax’s questions. Vespir regarded the other three competitors, clustered together out in the sun. Emilia sat by the edge of the pond, hair shielding her face as she trailed fingers through the water. Lucian stood beside her, hands on his hips, the pose of some heroic statue—he often unconsciously did that. Hyperia had seemed oddly disturbed since they all were thrown out of the gateway. At first, she’d sat away from the others, rubbing her arms as if cold. Now she seemed to have returned to herself and spoke to Lucian while casting glances at Vespir and Ajax. Her attention set Vespir’s teeth on edge.

  “Here.” Ajax flung something up into the branches, and an instant later a pear with a knife’s handle sticking out of it plopped beside Vespir’s hand. It smelled divine.

  “Thanks.” Vespir took a bite, the flavor exploding in her mouth. She wiped her chin, passed the fruit to Ajax.

  “Uh, I thought you were gonna cut a piece, but sure. I’ll eat your spit,” he said. Vespir chewed as she leaned her head against the trunk and closed her eyes. Why had the doorway broken? And…had she passed the test? Vespir tried to recall everything she’d seen.

  “What did you see in there?” she asked.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be private?”

  “I don’t see why we can’t talk to each other about it. Besides, I thought you didn’t care about rules.”

  “Yeah, but in a smolderingly appealing way, not a stupid way.” Scuffing his shoe along the ground, he said, “I don’t think I passed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “A feeling. Am I not allowed to have feelings anymore?”

  “Well, you don’t need to take my head off,” she said.

  “Trust me, if I win no one’s getting their head cut off. I’ll be generous. For the execution, I got the idea of this amazing twelve-tiered cake that you guys had to keep eating until you died. At least you’d go out with a smile. And cake.”

  “Anything else?”

  “It’d be chocolate.”

  “No.” Vespir sighed. “During the test. Anything like…images?”

  Silence. The wind rocked the leaves above them.

  “A weird eye? A throne?” he asked softly. Vespir’s breath hitched.

  “The city?” she whispered. Ajax shifted.

  “Dead.” The word dropped heavy on the ground between them. Neither wanted to pick it up. “All of us, too. Dead.” His voice cracked. Vespir’s throat constricted. She’d been hoping that the competitors’ dead bodies was a nightmare vision all her own.

  “I wonder if the others…” Her words trailed away as the three strode toward them. Even after the Race and their talk last night, Vespir still felt the urge to lower her head when the “legitimates” were around.

  The five of them knotted together, and Vespir noticed how Hyperia and Lucian instinctively blocked the view of the priests. They were in their own world now, united.

  “We wondered if you saw anything odd during the test,” Emilia said.

  The whole experience had been odd, but Vespir knew what the girl meant. She didn’t have a chance to open her mouth before Ajax leapt in.

  “The flask. The throne. Uh, some weird symbol. The emperor. Some freaky eye. The city.” He swallowed. “Us.” He and Vespir got to their feet. “You too?”

  “Perhaps it’s part of the test?” Hyperia said. Her face was ashen. The Volscia girl had spent so much of this Trial separate from them that to have her in their little group was weirdly unsettling.

  “Maybe.” Emilia pressed a finger to her lips. “But it happened just before we were thrown outside. Judging by the priests’ behavior, this can’t be normal.”

  Vespir peered past Lucian to find Camilla with a hand on the stone lintel, speaking rapidly. Impossible to catch the words, but Petros’s high, furious swear was easy to understand.

  “I can’t stop seeing the fire at the end.” Hyperia shuddered. “It felt like I was there.”

  “You were there, remember?” Ajax muttered. “You were covered in blood. Though I guess you’re more used to that than the rest of us.”

  Hyperia flared her nostrils but did not look at the boy.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Hyperia sounded hollow. “I felt like it was about to happen, and I couldn’t stop it.”

  Silence. Everyone agreed. Vespir shut her eyes and rode out a wave of nausea.

  “So we all see a weird set of images, then the Truth breaks and we’re shoved outside.” Ajax stroked his chin. “Is it, like, a puzzle?”

  “It couldn’t be, or the priests would have anticipated it. They’ve conducted an Emperor’s Trial before,” Emilia whispered. Her voice naturally lowered when discussing the priests. “No, whatever transpired in there had to be unusual.”

  “Does anyone think they passed t
he challenge?” Hyperia looked to each of them in turn. Both Ajax and Lucian cast down their eyes.

  Vespir had felt sick to see Lord Pentri kneeling, right before those bizarre images appeared. It’d been as unnatural as snowfall in summer. That couldn’t be winning, could it?

  “What happens if none of us passed?” Vespir murmured.

  “Maybe that’s why the Truth kicked us out?” Lucian guessed, turning to Emilia.

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  “The lack of an emperor would explain why Dragonspire was destroyed,” Hyperia croaked. “And we all died.”

  “Looks like we might get an answer. Their Graces are gracing us with their gracious presences,” Ajax muttered. The five spread apart, opening the group from a tight bud to a bloom. Camilla and Petros wore scowls that could mean nothing good.

  “There’s been a problem with the gateway of Truth,” Camilla said gravely.

  “Yeah, mine breaks all the time, too,” Ajax said. Vespir elbowed him.

  “Unfortunately, no final decision shall be rendered until it returns.”

  Hyperia made a noise like she’d been punched. Vespir imagined that the girl was halfway convinced she’d been right. There’d be no ruler, and chaos—and death—would follow. It made Vespir a little sick, too.

  Emilia had questions, of course. “Does this gateway communicate with you? Does the Dragon? Are you certain that this test was able to take the measure of each of us? What even is it? Is it a naturally occurring phenomenon or the result of orderly magic? How do we know the gate will return? What are we doing to retrieve it?”

  “Allow faith to guide you, my lady,” Petros said, eyes narrowing. “You must trust in us.”

  Vespir glanced at Emilia. I don’t think Emilia trusts anybody.

  “Uh, while you’re both here, we had some questions.” Ajax jiggled his leg at an incredible speed; clearly he was nervous. “We all saw some things that—”

  “No.” Camilla’s voice was like a slammed door. “It is forbidden for us to hear of what you saw.”