House of Dragons

by Jessica Cluess

  “Find anything?” Hyperia asked, sheathing her sword.

  “Oh. No.”

  Lucian noticed the discreet palm Ajax laid against his trouser pocket.

  “What is that?” Lucian strode nearer.

  “What’s what? Aaah!” Ajax yelled as Hyperia grabbed him by the collar and pinned him against the door. She reached into his pocket while he squirmed. “Wait. Wait. This is my number-two fantasy, but you need to be gentle.”

  She made a disgusted noise as she pulled out an iron key.

  “Once a thief,” Lucian growled.

  “Twice a rich man. Isn’t that how the saying goes?” Ajax bared his teeth. “Look, I enjoy our little bonding exercises, but this is still an Emperor’s Trial.”

  “The emperor was murdered,” Hyperia said.

  “What?”

  Hyperia took the key to Aufidius’s stall. Lucian stepped toward Emilia, keeping his back slightly to her in case the dragon lunged. The Hydra blew a line of troubling smoke as his rider approached. Apparently he was not in the mood to obey anyone right now.

  “I can try luring him out with candied pork.” Vespir paced behind Hyperia. “I’m sure the cook will let us have some. We could also try coaxing the dragons into song. That often relaxes the alpha—”

  “Aufidius.” Hyperia’s voice boomed. She extended her hand, long, slender fingers curling. “Come to me now.”

  The Hydra gnashed his teeth and growled; embers flared in the smoke. Vespir cursed, knocking back into Lucian. He gripped her arm, trying to get the girls and Ajax out of the aerie. If that damn monster blew flame in here, they’d be reduced to ash within seconds.

  “Now,” Hyperia snarled. She bared her teeth in the same manner as her dragon. Lucian felt the twitch of something intangible between the pair of monsters. “Now, Aufidius. You are mine.”

  “What’s happening?” Emilia whispered.

  “She’s challenging him,” Vespir muttered. “If he doesn’t accept her as alpha, he’ll charge.”

  The Hydra extended his perfect neck, jaws open. One step. Two. The monster shuffled out of the stall, tail dragging behind him. The golden wings opened, the span so enormous they were all nearly knocked to the floor, and then shut. Hyperia pressed her palm to the creature’s snout. Aufidius closed his eyes and gave a rumbling growl that Lucian could feel in his breastbone.

  “Stay.” She nodded to the others. “Come, and don’t dawdle.” She swept into the stall, knelt, and fit the key into the lock. With a click, Hyperia lifted the door.

  “I want her to crush me,” Ajax whispered.

  Lucian led the others to the hole in the floor. It was dark, though Lucian could discern a few stone steps and smelled stagnant air. He made a face.

  “I’ll go down first,” he said. Quickly, he went out and grabbed a few tallow sticks and flints, standard for nightly visitors to the aerie. They lit a torch each, and he stepped into the blackness below. A few steps later, Lucian was lost in the dark. The light barely showed him the next step; the black was that oppressive, like a body standing in his way. He dimly heard the others as they followed, their flames lighting the close, mildewed underworld. The steps were uneven, sporting dips that had been pounded into the stone by generations of climbing feet. Cold seeped into the pores down here; Lucian guessed this tunnel led somewhere back into the bowels of the palace, but he couldn’t guess where.

  Bare sconces began to appear. Once, torches had lit this path. The walls nearly scraped Lucian’s broad shoulders, and he winced as a spiderweb broke across his face. Slowly, the tunnel around them widened, and four more steps led to a rounded chamber. Lucian halted abruptly at the change of scene, and Vespir and Ajax barreled into him. He entered the room cautiously, holding his breath as if it might be filled with poisonous gas.

  Pillars carved with constellations supported the room. Upon the ceiling, the faded painting of a great orange eye observed all below. Unlit candles waited all around the chamber. With Vespir’s help, Lucian lit them. Gradually, the room glowed. Parts of the rounded walls were mirrored, morphing the reflection into an endless, wavering sea of light.

  There were also bookshelves in this chamber, at least eight, and all of them stuffed to capacity. In the center stood a writing table and chair, with pots of ink, pens, and a stack of papers. Emilia went right for the desk, lifting a page off the top. She frowned.

  “ ‘I believe that this is the end,’ ” she read aloud, squinting. Lucian peered over her shoulder. “ ‘This next volume must wait until another comes in my place to finish.’ ”

  “Erasmus?” Lucian asked.

  “I think so. The books.” He went to the shelves with her, Emilia glancing quickly across the spines. “Here!” She pulled a thin leather pamphlet and raised it over her head. A flaking gold number had been stamped upon it. “Volume twenty-four!”

  “What is it?” Lucian asked.

  She read the title. “On the Depravity of Wrongful War.”

  “What?” Hyperia’s voice was like a slap. “What kind of an Etrusian uses that for a title? No, the emperor didn’t write that. This is clearly storage for seized heretical literature. It’s not…” Her voice failed.

  Emilia continued. “Here’s the first page. ‘I, Erasmus Sarkonus, once of the Tiber, never a good man, sit upon a mountain of corpses as I write these words: I declare wrongful war to be a chaotic action. All that which is wasteful, all that which is cruel, and all that which is unsociable is to be found on the unlawful battlefield.’ ” Emilia flipped the page, scanned more, flipped, and repeated. Lucian marveled at the way she slipped through the maze of words straight to their meaning. “He differentiates between defensive war—defending your home from invasion or marching to stop a threat, which safeguards the empire—and offensive war—plundering a territory solely for its resources, which creates strain on the empire, and all that the Etrusian army currently does.”

  Could this really be the man who had slipped a golden medal around Lucian’s neck and declared him a hero? For defeating an enemy that had been lean and hungry-eyed, whose defenses could not hope to last against the inexhaustible Etrusians and their dragon lords? Lucian had felt so alone the day he received his medal, so numb to the applause, and all along Erasmus had been twice as lonely and twice as cold.

  “He doesn’t say that!” Hyperia roared, charging for the book. Lucian shoved himself before Emilia, stopping the Volscia girl’s advance.

  “Think,” he murmured. “The emperor was poisoned by the priests. Why do you think they did that?”

  “If this is true, maybe the emperor—” Hyperia bit her lip, as if to stop the words.

  “Deserved it?” Lucian finished. “We all remember what the orderlies at Delphos consider the most sacred rule of the church. Care to repeat it, Hyperia?” She turned from him and leaned against the desk. “ ‘The emperor is the living embodiment of the Dragon on earth, and all that is order flows from him. Therefore, his life is eternally sacred and inviolate.’ But the priests couldn’t stand what he was thinking. From what Rufus told me, the emperor argued with them all the time.”

  “There’s more.” Emilia had started snatching additional volumes from the shelves. She crouched behind Lucian, flipping through pages. “Two volumes later, in a book titled The Northern Conflict, Erasmus talks about wanting to halt the war against the Wikingar clans. He says the ongoing struggle is depleting the empire’s resources and killing its soldiers for very little hope of reward. The Wikingars don’t threaten us like the Wroclawians did when we conquered them, and they don’t offer a rich prize like Karthago or the Ardennes. But he writes that ‘their eyes are all around me, and there is no one to trust.’ These books were part journal, part manifesto.” She flipped through more and more, lost in her thoughts. Lucian stood guard over Emilia, but Hyperia’s shoulders sank further with every word. Her shoulders had n
ever sloped before.

  “What’s this mean?” Vespir asked.

  “It means…” Lucian had never felt so tired. “The emperor was against everything the empire stood for, and the priests killed him because of it. Maybe he was planning to pull troops, and they panicked.”

  “Perhaps,” Hyperia said, “this is why the calling was so off. If the priests violated the most sacred commandment, perhaps the Dragon chose differently in reaction.”

  “I still don’t think the Great Dragon chooses anything,” Emilia said, standing. “But, Hyperia, that’s a decent theory.” A strange glow lit her eyes. “The priests set the world out of balance. Into chaos. And ironically, before that they’d had too much order. We keep expanding the boundaries of our empire not because we need to, or to save us from a threat, but because that’s just what we’ve always done. It’s mindless. It’s tradition without thought.”

  “Uh, getting back to the point. So we’re all here because the priests are murderers?” Ajax frowned. “But why? Why us?”

  No one had an answer to that.

  “What do we do now?” Vespir murmured.

  Lucian helped Emilia reshelve the books.

  “We can’t let Petros and Camilla get away with this,” he growled. His eye twitched to think of Erasmus trying to end the bloodshed, and the priests blocking him at every turn. Monsters. Liars. Murderers.

  Lucian had no right to judge anyone else for murder, of course.

  “We do nothing,” Emilia said quietly. Ajax snorted. “Not until one of us is crowned.”

  “Why wait?” Vespir asked.

  “Until a new emperor is chosen, the priests are the sole authority in the empire. It’s tradition.” Emilia looked quite pale now. “If we tried to reveal what they’ve done, they might be able to silence us. The imperial guard is sworn to obey them until one of us wins.”

  Lucian understood.

  “So, whoever wins takes control of the guard and arrests the priests—”

  “Exactly. And…” Her eyes widened. “Pardons the others from the Cut.”

  “Excuse me?” Hyperia turned.

  “If we were called because of a crime the priests committed, that means there was an error in the selection. So none of us should face the consequences of losing.” She grabbed Lucian’s arm. “Everyone swear right now.”

  “All this swearing in a circle and hugging bullshit is too much,” Ajax grumbled.

  But to Lucian’s surprise, Hyperia agreed first.

  “Fine.” She stared at the eye painted above. He could not guess at her feelings.

  “Yes,” Vespir said, elbowing Ajax in the side.

  “Fine,” he grunted.

  “I don’t think I need to ask you,” Emilia said to Lucian. The corners of her mouth curled lightly in a smile.

  “No. You don’t.”

  “Of course, the winner will be one of you three.” Ajax headed for the stairs with his hands shoved in his pockets. “We already know it won’t be me or Vespir.”

  “At least you’ll be alive,” Hyperia snapped, following. Lucian trailed the others, stopping quickly to blow out the candles, leaving the room in smoky darkness. As he walked behind Emilia, he wondered how he should feel. Ah, but there would be time to decide how to feel. If they all made it to the end of this damned Trial, there would be time for everything.

  “Hey,” Emilia whispered. She stopped on the stair, and he fumbled into her. She looked over her shoulder, and her breath tickled his temple. “Will you meet me tonight, after everyone goes to bed? I need to discuss something.”

  “Of course. What?”

  “Not now. Tonight.”

  He wearily followed her back outside, another mystery ahead of him.

  Emilia had never known fear like this, not even when Chara first settled upon the calling circle and demolished her tidy life. As the city bells tolled midnight, she left her rooms and walked to the back gardens. She hurried along the gravel path, past the night-blooming jasmine and the gentle murmur of the fountain. Now she looked out onto the vast spread of flickering lights. They kept the public lamps lit from dusk to dawn, every boulevard and avenue illuminated for the emperor’s pleasure. In Dragonspire, there was no such thing as going to bed at a reasonable hour. The city was the imperial playground, a feast of many different delights.

  If she became empress, honesty would be the sweetest delight of all.

  And if someone else won the throne…

  Right now she could scarcely think that far ahead. She was numb enough with fear just anticipating the next few minutes.

  Fear is the darker twin of love. The poetess Acantha’s words flashed through her mind, startling Emilia. No. Her face felt hot. Ridiculous, fanciful musing.

  No, she was afraid for a much saner reason.

  The crunch of footsteps made her turn and force a smile as Lucian arrived. She felt her pulse in the very tips of her fingers. Already the chaos clawed at her throat, begging for attention.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Lucian yawned, pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. His sleeve slipped, and Emilia got another look at the muscled arm and the light pattern of scars against his dark skin.

  “You may have noticed that I have been a little…odd…during this Trial.” By the blue above, why couldn’t she have a natural conversation? Why did she start discussions as if delivering a formal lecture?

  Lucian laughed. Oh. She was funny, apparently. Emilia had to suppress a flare of happiness.

  “You’ve always been odd. That’s why I like you.”

  Don’t say something awkward. Don’t say something awkward.

  “I…like that you like me.” Emilia’s skin felt too tight. For the sake of the Dragon Himself, she wasn’t looking to seduce this boy.

  “You like me, too. Yes?” He stepped nearer; Emilia tasted her own heart. “I only mean, you agree we’re friends.”

  “Yes.” She inhaled. “If you still want to be.”

  He frowned. “Of course I do.”

  “Say that again in a moment.” She extended her left hand to a rosebush situated nearby and flexed her fingers. The chaos tickled her brain. Lucian gasped as the roses hardened, transforming from bud to crystal. The leaves frosted over, and soon the entire bush looked as if it had been blown painstakingly from glass. The thorns glittered with starlight.

  Lucian crouched to inspect it, and as he did, Emilia pressed her palms together and prayed to the Dragon above, the one she didn’t believe could hear her.

  Don’t let him run away.

  “How did you do this?” Lucian whispered. Now. Too late to turn back.

  “Chaos,” she said.

  He sprang to his feet. “What?”

  “I’m a chaotic, Lucian.” The words stumbled on their way out. I’m evil, she might as well have said. “It started when I was thirteen. The first boy I kissed, I…I exploded his heart and lungs.” She had to tell the truth, no matter how unpleasant. “I didn’t mean to,” she added quickly. “But the power comes and goes. It’s unstoppable. At first it was all destruction, the way chaos has always been, but then I discovered I could do this.” She gestured to the rosebush. “No one ever told me about transformation. When we first arrived at the Trial, I was so afraid I’d hurt somebody, but I’m starting to think that sustained interpersonal contact lessens the effects. I—” You’re sounding like a textbook again. She hurried, afraid he’d try to cut in. “I crumbled the cliff and brought down the basilisk, and I broke the ceiling at Hyperia’s palace. The ability seems to be linked to my feelings, but I’m controlling them better now. There’s so much I want to learn.” Her entire body began to quake, but she stood her ground. “After what we discovered, I wanted to tell you the truth. You alone. I hope that you won’t hate me.” The boy who had burned people alive was the boy who might understand wh
at it meant to be monstrous. “And. And maybe, even if you’re afraid of me, you could get to know me—the real me—again.”

  At that, her breath failed, and Emilia sat down hard on the edge of the wall. She gripped the stone and refused to look up.

  He knelt before her, took her hands in his. She jolted from the contact.

  Lucian tilted her chin. “I’m so sorry you were alone.”

  Then he pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her. He simply held her, warmed her. Emilia began to shake. Thank the blue above she’d already spent her chaos, because this would have turned the whole garden to glass. Emilia gave a deep sigh, feeling her body expand in his embrace. She wrapped her own arms around his neck and laid her cheek against the warm slope of his shoulder.

  She had forgotten how nice it was to be held.

  “This is why your parents wouldn’t let you come to Karthago with Alexander.” He swore. “They said you were engrossed in your studies. I was an idiot.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “No. It’s not your fault.” He pulled away then, held on to her shoulders. Their faces were near enough that she felt the heat of his breath. She had not been this close to anyone since Huigh. The heavy awkwardness of her body lifted. “You are not evil, Emilia.”

  She had yearned for someone who was not Alex to say those words. She imagined settling back in his arms and simply resting.

  “I had to keep it secret because—” she began.

  “I know.” He winced. “The priests. They’re the ones who’ve done wrong. It’s not your fault you were born with an evil affliction.”

  Emilia’s smile withered.

  “I’m not sure my ‘affliction’ is evil,” she muttered.

  “But…it’s chaos.” Lucian appeared puzzled. “Oretani tried to burn everything to the ground with it.”

  “I’m not Oretani,” she snapped. The bubble began under her skin again, the hissing in her brain. Emilia stood. “Didn’t we just learn how the priests have lied to us? Who knows what’s true about chaos. Did you ever think I could do this?” She waved again at the glass roses.