Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  ‘Tomorrow, mistress. The sea lord wishes to see you tomorrow.’ They bowed to her and put everything down and backed away. ‘Do you wish us to dress you, mistress?’

  ‘In the morning. Now go away.’

  They left and she glimpsed Taiytakei soldiers outside her door as they did, frightening forms armoured in great clattering plated layers of glass and gold that made them look a little like giant insects, but tall and broad-shouldered like her Adamantine Men. Their faces were like coal and their eyes like lamps beneath their helms and their gold-glass visors. They carried swords, short narrow stabbing things, and great spiked clubs, and golden-glowing wands at their belts where their hands rested. Over each glittering carapace of armour were draped streamers of colourful cloth and great black cloaks made of feathers. But she saw their faces too, looking back in at her, saw how nervous and uneasy they were. She smiled to herself and took strength from that. So they should be, for they had a dragon-queen in their cage.

  She ignored the tray and the clothes and the chest, staying at the window as the sun set, looking out at the distant city far across the waves. Lights filled one part of it, the highest part, raised on a little hill and overlooking the sea at one end of the bay. Not a castle. Something else. It was the place where the flying ships of glass had gone.

  The food had turned cold by the time she looked away but she ate it anyway. The meats and vegetables were things she didn’t recognise but they were spiced with flavours she knew from the Taiytakei traders who’d once come to her mother’s kitchens in the Pinnacles. She pulled the leaves out of the glass of water and threw them away. They had a flavour to them that she remembered from long ago but couldn’t quite place. A visit to King Tyan in Furymouth, perhaps. Perhaps the first time she’d met the young Prince Jehal.

  She paused for a moment, caught in that memory. The first day they’d seen each other they’d both known what would happen. She’d had a fire in her for him from the moment she’d seen him, and she’d lit one in him as well. He wasn’t her first conquest but he was certainly her quickest. There hadn’t been anything in the world more important than finding a way to get away from her family, to drag him to a place where they could be alone. They’d understood each other in the merging of sweat in a way that no one else ever had. They were perfect.

  The glass shattered in her hand.

  One day, be it tomorrow or ten years from now, she’d find a way home to watch him burn. To flay him and scatter his body with salt and listen to him scream. She’d do it herself.

  She was bleeding. The glass had cut her. Not deeply. She ripped a piece from the silk sheets – another reminder of Jehal, since all the sheets they’d stained between them had come from the silk farms that Jehal and King Tyan guarded as though they were dragon eggs. There’d been trouble with the Taiytakei about the silk farms once. Long before she was born and she didn’t know much about it and didn’t care either, but someone had tried to teach her some history once and Tyan’s silk farms and the Taiytakei had been a part of it. Tyan’s dragons had burned their ships. She didn’t remember why.

  She wrapped her hand and squeezed it tight, watching the blood ooze, savouring the pain. Sometimes any feeling at all was better than nothing, and when she let her head sink into the soft Taiytakei pillow and closed her eyes, she dreamed of Jehal. Not of the revenge she yearned for but of more pleasant things. Of the times before Evenspire when they’d been lovers. Of what they used to do and how it had felt and how she knew it had felt to him, how it should still have been. She yearned for the comfort he used to bring and how he’d made her be not alone any more. When she woke in the small hours of the morning her pillows were damp with tears, and she clenched her fists and raged at herself and flapped the silk until it was dry so that no one would see and then lay there in the dark, staring up at the faceless wood over her head.

  Her broken birds came back at sunrise. Hers? Yes, she was beginning to think of them that way. They looked at the blood on the sheets and on her hand and gasped when they saw the broken glass. Perhaps they thought she’d opened a vein rather than be taken by whoever this sea lord was. Zafir, as she rubbed her eyes, laughed at their horror.

  ‘I am not some pampered harem lady,’ she spat. ‘I am a dragon-queen. I’ve burned cities and I’ve killed men, and women too. I’ve gone into battle armoured in a dragon’s skin. I’ve stood and fought with sword and axe. Look at you, staring at blood as if it’s some terror.’ She tore the silk bandage off her hand, opening the wound again so that a line of crimson ran down her arm and dripped onto the bed. She clenched her fist. ‘Blood is life. What are you, if you don’t understand this?’

  They paled and Zafir laughed again. She thought of taking a shard of the broken glass, of hiding it somewhere in her clothes as a weapon, but whom would she cut with it? One of these poor pathetic slaves? To what end? Out of spite? No. A fearsome slave she would be, proud and unbroken until some man came with the desire and the strength to tame her, and she would let him, at least until the moment came to cut out his heart and be free.

  ‘Dress me.’ She let them have their way with her this time. They cleaned her wound, took precious jewels and silver and draped them around her neck and her wrists. They painted her face, darkened her skin, drew delicate designs onto the backs of her hands and wrapped her in violet silks that would have been the envy of any princess. When they were done with her they sat silent and still, waiting.

  ‘Why are so you afraid?’ she asked, for they were shaking, but they wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even look at her today. She stared at them. Looked them over one more time, trying to read their stories from the way they held themselves and finding almost nothing.

  ‘Do you come from the desert?’ she asked them.

  She got a look from Onyx, of all of them, a pleading look with a hint of wondering whether she was mad to ask. The other two didn’t flinch.

  ‘What became of my dragons? Do you know? Did they simply fly away?’ Nothing, and she was left to wait in silence.

  The sun outside her little window reached its zenith and moved on. Gleaming specks rose from the city once more and drifted towards the ship. The waiting gnawed at her.

  ‘Some bread.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘And a little honey. You do have honey?’ Her stomach rumbled. Half a day with nothing to eat, nothing to do. She was hungry and bored and tense as a tripwire but her broken birds didn’t move. Out in the sky the glasships drifted closer. Zafir refused to look at them today, to even acknowledge they were there. Alone she might have gawped but not here and now, not with these women. With her slaves’ eyes watching her, these miracles were nothing. Nothing to a dragon-queen. She wouldn’t allow it. You must have a heart as hard as diamond now. Her mother’s words after she’d woken for the first time to find blood between her legs.

  ‘If I don’t have something to eat soon, I’ll have to eat one of you.’

  Brightstar twitched. They were still afraid of her. It had been that way from the moment the hatchling dragon had come smashing through the wood and she’d faced it down but today it was crawling all over them. Afraid of what? That she’d call back the dragons to her? But if she had power to do that then she’d have used it long ago.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ she said a few minutes later. ‘Why would I?’

  The door crashed open, thrown wide without any warning. A Taiytakei stood before her, dressed as she’d come to know them in the City of Dragons. Coal-skinned as they all were but his clothes were rainbow-bright, a dazzle of swirling colour embroidered in exquisite silver and gold and laced with more jewels than she could count. Gaudy to her eyes, but she knew this was the Taiytakei way. Over his shoulders hung a cloak of silver feathers. Two soldiers stood behind him in their plated armour of glass and gold. Their feathered cloaks were black like the ones she’d seen before but the streamers of silk they wor
e beneath were lurid and filled with shapes and colour. Two brilliant lightning bolts crossed over their chests.

  This is the sea lord? Zafir met his eyes. Myst and Brightstar and Onyx fell to their knees beside the bed and pressed their faces into the wooden floor but Zafir didn’t move. He was a handsome enough fellow if you looked past the garish clothes and the colour of his skin. Tall. Strong. Well muscled. She looked him up and down, appraising him as she might a horse or a hatchling dragon. A little flicker of heat stirred inside her. She licked her lips. That would be what he wanted, after all. Men always did.

  ‘Shrin Chrias Kwen,’ barked one of the black-cloaks. ‘Heart of the Sea Lord.’

  ‘Bend your knee, slave!’ snapped the other. His accent was so thick that it took a moment for Zafir to understand what he’d said. They pushed into the room but she ignored them and kept her eyes on the one with the silver cloak. The one who thought he was the master here.

  A black-cloak drew back a hand to strike her. She would let him, she decided, but silver-cloak stopped him. ‘Don’t! Don’t mark her. The sea lord will see her as she is.’

  So that’s not you? Then you’re no longer important to me. She felt a small pang of disappointment even as she lost all interest in him. Pity. She held out a languorous hand, still with the silver chain sealed around her wrist, every gesture made with exquisite care to show how little he mattered to her. He would have to release her now. ‘Shall we go?’

  Her broken birds still quivered on the floor and their terror filled the room. Zafir drank it, savoured it like a fine wine. Silver-cloak bared his teeth at her. Perhaps it was supposed to frighten her but dragons had done the same many times over the years. She raised an eyebrow very slightly, contempt hurled in his face. The muscles in his arms tightened. ‘You are a slave,’ he said to her. ‘A nothing. When you meet the sea lord, you will bow. You will press your face to the floor as these women are doing, and you will keep it there unless you are told otherwise. And you will show me, now, that you understand.’ He spoke with deliberate care. The words sounded awkward coming out of his mouth as though he was in the middle of eating something. But she understood them. She smiled and spoke slowly back.

  ‘You wish me to be like them. I understand. And I will not.’ Once more she held out her hand. ‘Shall we go?’

  Silver-cloak snapped out some more words, too harsh and sharp and fast for Zafir to follow. Without hesitation one of the black-cloaks unsheathed his sword, narrow and pointed. A thing for finding gaps. Zafir barely managed not to flinch but the black-cloak’s eyes weren’t on her. He lifted his sword high and drove it down into Brightstar as she kowtowed, trembling and almost weeping with her fear. He drove it straight through her heart and she died without a sound. A stain of bright blood spread across her white silk shift and pooled on the floor. Silver-cloak never took his eyes from Zafir. ‘Show me you understand,’ he said again.

  Zafir laughed in his face. Killing people she barely even knew? What was that supposed to show? That he hadn’t the first idea what it was to be a dragon-queen, what it was to live around such monsters in a world where people died every day, not out of malice but out of carelessness, out of simply being in the wrong place as a dragon swished its tail or stretched its wings. Yet he’d lit something in her with what he’d done. A cold fury. ‘Do you think,’ she asked him, ‘that any part of me does more than pity you?’ Her smile was wide now. Couldn’t help it. Not long ago it had been a hatchling staring down at her from the hole ripped in the roof of her cabin, a hatchling awake and with every reason to burn her and crush her and eat her. And here was a man, a nothing more, who thought to frighten her? She shrugged. ‘Kill another if you must. Lessen yourself even further.’

  ‘Show me you understand!’ he ordered again but his face already told her that she’d won, and oh how he hated her for that!

  Zafir closed her eyes and shook her head, soft and sad. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘that people will die. People around me. People who stand too close. So it has always been.’ She opened her eyes again and fixed him with them. ‘I understand that I am a dragon-queen, Shrin Chrias Kwen, Heart of the Sea Lord. And you are standing too close.’

  The black-cloaks unlocked the bracelet from her wrist then, and silver-cloak gut-punched her so hard that, even seeing it coming, she doubled over and gasped. They forced her down, all of them far stronger than her, until her head touched the floor, and then dragged her away. She half expected silver-cloak to kill her other broken birds out of spite, simply not knowing what else to do, but he didn’t. It was to his credit, she thought. Not that it would save him when the time came.

  Shrin Chrias Kwen. Heart of the Sea Lord. She wondered what that meant.

  24

  An Understanding

  Tsen wished he could take Kalaiya with him to Khalishtor but such things weren’t done and so he left her behind in Xican and took instead a pang of regret and a small hole in his heart. Xican to Khalishtor by glasship was four days without a break, even in the smallest gondola, which crammed him into a golden egg not much bigger than the bath in his bathhouse. Other men might have taken longer, overnighting on the Bal Ithara and in Shevana-Daro, or at least breaking the journey for a night in Zinzarra. But LaLa had left him in no doubt that time was of the essence and he preferred to spend what little of it he could spare in his bath in Xican; then, too, it didn’t escape him that hanging in a tiny golden sphere drifting through the air was probably the safest place he could possibly be. Encased in metal was the one place an Elemental Man couldn’t reach him.

  He sighed. The stupid nasty little thoughts kept bothering him. He and Kalaiya had talked for hours after LaLa had gone about what had happened, what it meant, what it might mean and last of all – because the stupid nasty little thoughts had to have their way – about who else might become Quai’Shu’s heir; and by the time she’d finished pointing out exactly how many would have their eyes on such a prize and thus might see him as a threat now, all he wanted was to curl up deep in his apple orchards and live out his days making wine. She’d talked him out of that but they’d agreed that he should stay in the glasship.

  Quai’Shu’s fleet, when Tsen reached Khalishtor, had already been anchored out in the islands for a day. Shrin Chrias Kwen was there ahead of him – of course he was – trying to work his head around what in the eight worlds had happened. Jima Hsian, as far as either of them knew, was either in Vespinarr or Dhar Thosis and had no idea that the fleet had arrived back. Neither of them felt inclined to hurry the news to him. Every day, after all, was an advantage, and hsians – more than any other – hankered to be their own masters.

  He wondered vaguely if LaLa could be persuaded to kill Chrias for him – how immensely helpful that would be – but the Elemental Man served Quai’Shu, not him, so he made his own arrangements and now here he was, sitting in his gold-handled chair in the cabin of his glasship with a slightly perplexed expression on his face, surrounded by all the things that made four days in a ridiculously expensive prison vaguely bearable, hoping without much hope that someone would find him some decent food and wishing he was back in Khalishtor in Quai’Shu’s tower in the Palace of Glass, gazing out over the glorious Crown of the Sea Lords and the Proclamatory with a glass of apple wine in his hand, looking forward to a nice hot bath and without a single thought wasted on who among his many ‘friends’ would be the first to try and have him murdered.

  All in all not exactly the best of moods.

  Behind him a tiny hatch led to where the pilot golem did whatever it was that made the glasship work. Tsen left that sort of thing to others. Experts. He knew how sails worked and he knew how money worked, and, when he put his mind to it, he knew how people worked; and that was quite enough. He’d had a good look, though, over four days of having no
thing much else to do, and yes, if you tried hard, you could squeeze an assassin inside if you wanted to. Just as well no one had. But apparently assassins and all the nasty little ways they’d soon set about murdering each other would have to wait, at least for a little while. Apparently there was something more important.

  And what, in the name of sea and sail, shall I do with you?

  The woman in front of him was dressed like an exquisite harem slave, if you ignored the bandage around one of her hands – dressed like one, but clearly she’d never spent a day being taught how to hold herself or how to behave. She stood between two soldiers – Quai’Shu’s personal guard, by the black feathers of their cloaks – who were holding her surprisingly tightly, one gripping each arm. Shrin Chrias Kwen stood to one side puffed up like a peacock in all his formal glory, an extremely angry peacock today although he tried hard to hide it. In fact, out of all of them, the only one who looked at ease was the slave herself. The dragon-queen. The one who’d killed Zifan’Shu, driven Quai’Shu insane by some accounts and Chrias to a repressed fury that verged on incandescence; and now here she was meeting his eye as though he was the one who ought to be on his knees with his face pressed to the floor. He almost couldn’t help liking her. He had a soft spot for unruly slaves, especially ones who rubbed Chrias up the wrong way. Perhaps his own inner meekness admired them for being fierce. The thought made him smile. Just ask Kalaiya.

  ‘You wanted to see her, T’Varr. Well, here she is. And now she’s to be hanged.’ Chrias spoke shortly, sharply, before Tsen could say a word. The kwen’s jaw was clenched tight, drawing the muscles in his neck taut and making them stand out from his skin. Tsen raised an eyebrow. Inside he tutted to himself. Our kwen barely on his own leash? My, my, what did you do, slave? I think I like you more and more. He nodded to himself at his own wisdom and then grinned at his own folly.

  ‘A visiting monarch from another realm?’ Tsen cocked his head. ‘And you wish to hang her?’ Careful now, tongue, before the nasty little thoughts make you lash him. Our dear kwen surely sees himself as the next sea lord, and he has the favour of the lady of Xican behind him. What do you have? Not so much. So careful, tongue. Careful.