Sam found himself not quite able to roll.
“We’re not really alive, are we?”
Annabel came to a stop and faced him. “Of course we are. I don’t feel like I’m something you made. I feel autonomous. I feel like I’m inside my own body. Like my thoughts are inside my own head. Don’t you feel that way?”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“But you’re not. You’re magical trace elements. You’re the vapors of what’s left of you.”
“This is making me feel fairly awful. Can we talk about something else?”
She resumed her brisk pace.
“What I’m saying is: You still have consciousness. And a conscience. You have intentions and morals. That’s more alive than many people I met before the Hierarch ate me.”
Sam liked when people said nice things about him. And he liked that he could still like things. He didn’t think much about morals and ethics, except he knew he had some decent ones, and the man who created him did not.
He realized he should say something nice and encouraging to Annabel, preferably something that would help her feel a little more alive, and he was about to do exactly that when she gasped.
“Oh my god.”
Like a fly caught in a spider’s web, an emaciated giant hung in a tangle of trunks and branches. Ribs as thick as baseball bats pushed against mushroom-white flesh. Limp white hair hung in his face. From the top of its head to its clam-shell toenails, it was twelve of fifteen feet tall.
Sam and Annabel crept closer.
“Is it alive?” Sam hoped the answer would be no.
But then the giant shuddered. Pulses of light flowed through the webbing, traveled along the giant’s limbs, up his neck, crackling around his head like a crown of electricity.
Sam reached for Annabel’s wrist. “I’m all for running away.”
“Wait.”
The giant raised his head. He blinked, staring out with eyes like fish bellies.
“Please don’t go.” Its groaning voice echoed through the chamber. It seemed to echo through Sam.
And Sam saw it then: The giant was Sam.
The planes of its face, the set of its brow, even the voice, all a version of Sam.
When the giant smiled and began climbing down from its web of brain tendrils, Sam grabbed Annabel’s arm, and they raced through the white forest of the dragon’s brain.
“Please don’t go,” the giant wailed. “I need your help.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Sam said.
“Wasn’t going to.”
He didn’t turn to look back, but Sam could hear the giant crashing behind them. When the nest of white limbs grew too dense to keep running, Sam and Annabel climbed.
“Please stop running. I just need your help.”
“What for?” Sam didn’t much care what for, but Daniel taught him that when people talked, they usually stopped paying as much attention to what was going on around them and started paying more attention to themselves. Getting someone talking could be a useful diversion if you wanted to palm a small item or make a getaway by chucking yourself out a window.
“Really, if you would just stop a moment.”
The giant was directly below them now, reaching up with white fingers the length of Sam’s forearms. Its teeth looked like shovel blades.
Sam stopped climbing. He motioned for Annabel to scrabble up above him, and once she was clear, he brought heat to his fingers and poured flames on the giant below.
Its shriek of pain was very satisfying.
Sam resumed the climb, the brain tendrils thinning to carrot-width vines. The traveling light pulses sent painful shocks through his hands.
“Please,” the giant cried, pulling itself up on the web. “Please stop. I need you. I’m begging you.”
There was a moment, just a second, when Sam pitied the sorrow in the giant’s voice. How long had it been alone inside the brain, tortured by light pulses of thought and sensation? What kind of help did it need? What kind of help could Sam give it?
Of course he shouldn’t help it at all. He knew what the giant was.
Just as Annabel Stokes was part of him, so was the giant.
It was the part of him that had melted out when he threw himself into the firedrake’s gestational tank. It was the oldest part of him. The part of him that preceded himself. It was the part of him that created himself. The magic that Sam was born from.
It was the Hierarch, and it was the part of him that was awful.
Sam rained down more fire on it.
The giant’s flesh reddened and blistered and charred. Bleeding, smoke curling from its body, the giant stretched and reached up with its long, scrawny arm, past Sam. White fingers closed on Annabel’s ankle.
“Sam!”
“You smell so green,” the giant said. “Is that hydra? Oh, yes, I think it must be. Just what I need.”
“Let her go!” Sam screamed. He loosed more fire, but the giant didn’t release Annabel. Like plucking a suction cup from a wall, he pulled Annabel away from the tendrils. He upended her and stretched his jaws wide, and he put Annabel’s head in his mouth and bit.
She didn’t scream, because she no longer could.
But Sam screamed as the giant chewed.
TWENTY
Daniel spent the day in his suite, contemplating his reassembled diorama of the treasury while practicing palming skills. He’d warmed up with coins, moved up to shot glasses, and was now working on making candles disappear.
Moth watched him. “You’ll never be as good at that as Cassandra.”
“The student does not always overtake the master.”
Moth stopped watching Daniel’s hands and now watched him. “You okay?”
Daniel moved some of the archer-stand-in toothpicks, using the movement to snatch up a six-inch candle and conceal it along his right wrist.
“Of course I’m okay.”
“I said Cassandra’s better at thiefcraft than you, and you didn’t even get mad.”
“Why would I get mad? She’s better than you, too.”
“I have the dexterity of a spider and the cunning of a rat. Also, thieving isn’t hard if you just bang someone on the head and take their things. What I’m saying is, this is high-stakes stuff. Sleight of hand isn’t your game. I like it better when there’s lightning shooting from your eyes.”
Daniel reached up to scratch his head with his right hand and dropped the candle down the back of his shirt. “Hm.”
“We haven’t talked about your audience with the Hierarch.”
“Yes, we did. Like I said, she’s pretty scary, smells potent, and I didn’t blow my cover.”
“Yes, that is what you said,” Moth agreed. “It’s the stuff you’re not saying that’s bothering me.”
Daniel stretched his back, retrieved the candle from his shirt, and hid it along his left wrist.
“She may have gotten to me a little,” he admitted. “She made me feel … ambitious.”
“Thinking of taking a crown as well as an axis mundi bone?”
“Maybe a little. But that’s just magic talking, not my brain.” Moving around some matchstick guards, he pushed the candle past his fingertips with his thumb and returned it to its original place. “Don’t worry, I’m focused.”
“Yeah. Okay.” If Moth noticed the trick with the candle, he didn’t say anything. “Better start getting dressed. You’ve got dinner in an hour.”
Dinner was an intimate affair for thirty. Daniel was seated only two chairs down from the head of the table, where a pair of thrones of interwoven fangs remained empty, presumably awaiting the arrival of the royal couple. On his left, Professor Cormorant stuck his nose deep down his glass of white wine and was either closing his eyes in concentration or dozing. Across from him sat Cynara and Allaster Doring, both keeping their arms rigid at their sides as if struggling against the urge to drive their elbows into each other. They wore stiff, black military dress jackets plastered with ribbons and medals and
family crests. Moth had quizzed Daniel on all their meanings and significance, but considering he was trying to plan a heist and worrying about Cassandra’s team and fretting about Ethelinda and assassination attempts, he couldn’t even keep track of the medals and ribbons affixed to his own jacket.
At Daniel’s right was an empty chair. They didn’t use place cards here, so the identity of his missing dining companion remained a mystery.
Other dukes and barons and generals filled out the table, waging a silent battle of scowls, suspicious squints, and ostentatious avoidance of eye contact. Butlers and footmen kept the wineglasses full and brought an appetizer of slivers that looked like light-colored oyster meat.
“Impressive work,” Daniel said, indicating the stained-glass windows ringing the ceiling. They told a story in pictures, beginning at one end with a scene of devastation—a flaming city, buildings collapsed into piles of crumbled bricks and masonry, dead people and horses in the streets. In the next panel, a girl with skin rendered in golden glass emerged from a fissure in the earth. And damned if she wasn’t wearing a halo. Other panels showed her quelling fires, healing the wounded, bringing back the dead. This was the benevolent Hierarch’s rise to power.
Cormorant emerged from his wineglass. “I should think you’d find them impressive. They’re by Nazaretti.”
Allaster’s smile was positively vulpine. “I’m sure my lord Paul recognizes her hand. I’ve always thought the domes of your bell towers were her finest work.”
Daniel hadn’t really taken notice of the stained-glass domes at San Simeon. Paul collected a lot of stuff in his big house.
“The reds in the flames are breathtaking,” he said, only slightly changing the subject.
“Well, she made the pigment with her own blood. We’ll never see her likes again.”
Considering how many red panes of flame were in the windows, Daniel got a sense of why Allaster referred to her in the past tense.
Cormorant thoughtfully chewed a piece of his appetizer and closed his eyes in bliss. “Wherever did Her Majesty come by barnacle goose?”
“From the frozen Northern wastes.” The voice belonged to a new arrival, and without turning around, Daniel knew who she was. He wasn’t sure how he managed not to react.
No one stood as Messalina Sigilo took the vacant chair next to Daniel.
“My lords and ladies,” she said. And then she turned to Daniel.
He’d known this moment would come. He couldn’t expect to run around the Northern realm and not bump into his mother. Once he saw the empty chair next to him, he’d even suspected she’d end up sitting in it. He’d hoped otherwise.
And he knew this moment would hurt. Looking into her eyes was like looking into a mirror distorted by age. Her skin tone was his, only a little more freckled. Her nose was his, only never broken. People liked to remind him that he was Sebastian Blackland’s son. But his mother had raised him till the age of twelve, and as painful as it was seeing his father murdered and eaten before his eyes, watching her take Paul by the hand and leave Daniel behind was worse.
But he expected this pain, and he was no longer a twelve-year-old boy. He’d made his own life. He’d taken on Sam and given him what his own parents couldn’t.
What he didn’t expect was the pain of seeing his mother’s face staring back at him and not being able to read a single emotion, a single intention. Messalina Sigilo was very much alive, but for the first time, he felt her death.
“Mother,” he said, with courtesy and feigned warmth.
If she blew his cover and called him Daniel he would flare with lightning and dragon fire. He would burn Allaster and Cynara and anyone else who moved to do him harm. He would fight the Hierarch’s guards, and her consort, and even the Hierarch herself if he had to. He would go to war.
But if she called him Paul, he would just sit there and eat his shaved barnacle goose.
She nodded. “Son.”
Two panels of the wall slid open where Daniel hadn’t even noticed a seam. From a dark space—a closet, a vestibule, a passageway, or a yawning chasm—the Hierarch entered, with Lord General Creighton a pace behind.
Daniel had only glimpsed her during his audience, peering up at her high upon her throne. He assumed she’d be some kind of monster. But she wasn’t so far removed from the girl depicted in the stained glass. Tall and regal, she was no beast or wraith. She wasn’t constructed of exterior bone or armored skin plates. She wasn’t covered in scales. She was a lovely, silver-haired woman apparently in her sixties, though, if history was to be believed, she was more than a century old. Her only badge of office was a simple diadem of silver set with a single griffin’s claw.
The dinner party rose to their feet. Some, like the Dorings, stood gracefully. Others nearly fell over themselves, chair legs scraping on the glass floor.
Creighton pulled the chair out for his wife and liege, and the Hierarch took her place at the head of the table. Everyone took Creighton seating himself as the signal that they could stop standing at attention with backs so rigid that Daniel imagined them toppling like dominos.
Footmen in red livery flowed in and out of the room, bringing wines and plates of vivid purple mushrooms and gloppy soups and gelatinous swirls and the teeth of some herbivore prepared in a way that made them spongy and chewable. Every course was delicious, and Daniel would have given a lot to hang out in the Hierarch’s kitchens.
The Hierarch set down her fork and dabbed her lips with a napkin. The footmen removed plates of crunchy black quills, whether or not people had finished eating them.
There was an interval of silence, and the air pressure seemed to decrease, like in the moments before a storm.
“My lords and ladies, we have a problem,” the Hierarch began. “Arrayed before us we find our most respected osteomancers, four of whom we see fit to consider as our High Grand Osteomancer, an office that has sat vacant for too long. We would be displeased to see it continue as such. Fortunately, our realm is rich with talent. We have Lord Professor Cormorant, the most learned of our osteomancers, whose scholarship has advanced our art further than any other of our subjects we can name.”
Rather than swell with pride, Cormorant seemed to shrink a little. He really seemed not to want a promotion.
“But the duties of the office are not only those of the scholar,” the Hierarch continued. “We depend on our High Grand Osteomancer’s counsel in matters of war, and internal security, as well. And is that where Lord Cormorant’s passions lie?”
Cormorant issued a tiny grunt, as if to say, “Hell, no.”
“As for Lord Allaster Doring, no one could question his passion for security and war. Nor his power. But, though we are not prejudiced against youth, we worry that Lord Allaster’s wisdom lags behind even his modest age.”
Daniel watched Allaster’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
“We are most delighted and relieved to welcome Lord Paul back to our bosom. Only the Lord Professor’s knowledge of magic surpasses his, and his hunger for innovation is unmatched. A man who can build a living dragon from scraps is certainly fit to take a unique place beside our throne.” She paused, and everyone seemed eager for the other shoe to drop. Daniel was, too. Her judgment determined who would be touched by the axis mundi scepter.
She went on: “But what are we to make of a man who both makes a dragon and loses it?”
That could have gone worse, Daniel thought as the Hierarch turned finally to Cynara.
“And we come to Lord Cynara, whom we have loved well since her birth. If she built a dragon—and we believe she could—we have confidence she would not then lose it. We do not, however, have full confidence that she would turn over such a wondrous creature to her Hierarch.”
Her tone was that of a gentle scolding, but she’d just said that she suspected Cynara capable of treason. Cynara opened her mouth as if to protest, but apparently thought the better of it when the Hierarch stood abruptly. The dinner party scrambled to their feet
again.
“The investiture is in two days,” she said. “You shall know of our decision then.”
When she returned to the black recess behind the glass panels, Daniel felt the air pressure rise again. His shoulders and neck ached.
More dishes were brought out, and the table hummed with conversation. Cormorant talked about wine and grapes, and Allaster made a joke, and Cynara asked Daniel’s mother about espionage intelligence in the Southern realm and Daniel’s mother countered by asking about Ethelinda.
When the dinner came to a merciful end, Daniel’s mother touched his arm. “The moon bridge,” she whispered in his ear. “Tonight at two.”
* * *
Daniel went alone to meet her in the palace gardens. Japanese maples provided an illusion of concealment, but Daniel knew guards lurked among the croaking frogs in the dark. His mother was waiting for him on a decorative bridge arched over a pond sprinkled with cherry blossoms. Daniel drew close enough to touch her, but he didn’t offer an embrace. He knew that made her sad.
“We can speak freely, Daniel. We’re surrounded by meretsegar serpent dust. No one can overhear.”
Daniel smelled dry bones and sand.
“You didn’t fink on me at dinner.”
“Of course not.”
“No. Of course not. If you were going to tell the Hierarch I’m not Paul, you wouldn’t do it in front of the court sorcerers. Secrets are your coin. You wouldn’t splurge it on that bunch.”
“I wouldn’t do it because you’re my son.”
“I honestly don’t know what that means.”
“It means I love you.”
Insects chirped. Water from the streams and fountains trickled in the night.
His mother looked into the pond, as if searching for something in the dark waters.
“Do you want to hear it now?” she said.
“Hear what?”
“The explanation. My story. The reason I abandoned you.”
There was a time when Daniel did. All those years, being raised by Otis Roth instead of a parent, always feeling there was a big, empty pit beneath him where the life he was supposed to have led had fallen away.
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