A Name for the Beast

The walls of the Mirror God Tower were made of black glass, and for fifteen days the girl had been forced to look at a stranger.

The stranger looked back from every direction. She had hollow cheeks and a cracked lip and a tangle of dark hair that someone had at least been kind enough to wash. She sat on the stone floor with her back against the one wall that was not polished, her wrists chained in front of her in bands of red-veined crystal, and she watched the stranger watch her. The eyes were the worst of it. Deep violet, ringed with faint patterns that moved when the light did, like scales settling on a sleeping animal.

She had never seen her own face before. That was the strange part. Somewhere beneath the empty place where her memories should have been, she was certain of it. A face was something a person was supposed to know.

"Don't look at me like that," she muttered at the glass.

The stranger's lips moved with hers and said nothing back.

She dropped her gaze to the shackles. Blood Ice Crystal, the guards had called it, with the reverence people usually kept for saints. A metal that drank magic. Three thousand arrays wound through the stone of the tower to make sure nothing she did could leave this room, and she had spent most of the fifteen days learning exactly how much of that was true.

Less than they hoped. More than she liked.

The crystal bands had cracked on the third night, hairline fractures that wept pale light when she flexed her fists. Every time she pushed against them the pain came, a hot wire threaded through the bones of her arms, and every time she pushed through the pain the fractures spread a little further. She did not need to remember her past to understand arithmetic. A week more, perhaps ten days, and the bands would fall off her wrists like dead leaves.

Then she would kill the first guard who opened the door, take his boots, and find out how far a woman could run in a kingdom made of snow.

It was a good plan. It had one flaw, which was that she had no idea where she was running to.

Beneath the bread she had hidden in the lining of her sleeve, the one thing she had not told anyone about, the fever still burned low in her chest. Weaker now. The Church's poison had not killed her, and the white flame that had burst out of her skin had burned the old sickness down to embers, but something beneath it was still there, a locked door she could feel the weight of and not the shape. Sometimes at night she lay awake with her palm pressed against the floor, and sometimes, very faintly, through all that stone, she thought she could feel a pulse.

Once every ten minutes. Slow as the sea.

She had counted it the first night. She had been counting ever since.

Thump.

Somewhere to the north, a long way off, the world's slowest heart beat once.

The door opened.

It did not open the way it had for the guards, with the scrape of three bolts and the nervous shuffle of men who did not want to be the one holding the key. It opened quietly, as if the person on the other side had no reason to be afraid of what he would find.

She knew who it was before she raised her head.

The air changed. That was how she would have described it, if anyone had asked. The Dark Magic rolled in ahead of him like cold fog, thick and bitter, with that smell of old graves and iron that had clung to the border snow the day he came. Every nerve in her body knew that smell. Her hands curled into fists without her permission.

"Out," Kieran said.

It took her a moment to realize he was not talking to her. Two Black Guards stood in the doorway, armor gleaming, hands on their sword hilts. They looked at the Emperor. They looked at the beast on the floor.

"Your Majesty—"

"Out." He did not raise his voice. "Close the door. If either of you listens at it, I will know."

They went. The door shut. The three bolts did not slide home.

The girl stayed where she was and made herself breathe slowly.

He was not wearing armor tonight. She had never seen him without it except in the gold bedchamber, half-dressed and bleeding, and the sight of him now in a plain black coat buttoned to the throat was somehow more dangerous than any of it. Ash-gray eyes. Black hair falling past his jaw. A face so sharp and handsome that it seemed cut for coins, and a mouth that looked as if it had never once been taught to ask for anything.

He crossed the room and sat down on the floor.

That was what stopped her. Not the shackles, not the cold. The Emperor of the Ice Kingdom lowered himself onto the bare stone a few feet away from her, rested his forearm on one raised knee, and looked at her the way a man looks at a fire he has decided not to put out.

"Fifteen days," he said. "You've been eating?"

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a question."

"Then yes. Someone left a bowl of something gray. I'm told it was food." She tilted her head. "You look tired, monster. Sleeping badly?"

The corner of his mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. "Worse than you know."

She said nothing. He had not come to talk about sleep, and she was not going to be the one to wonder why he had.

"You have been called a great many things in my palace," Kieran said. "Beggar. Wench. Beast. Devil, by the cardinal, who has since been sedated by his physicians." His gaze traveled over her face, unhurried, intimate, as if he were reading a map of a country he meant to take. "I think I have been unfair to you. A beast is a thing that has no name. So I have brought you one."

Her heart gave one hard, ugly knock.

"I have a name," she said. "You gave it to me. Wench. Remember?"

"I remember. I said it for the animal under the wagon." His voice dropped. "This is for the woman I intend to keep."

"You intend."

"Solaia."

The word fell between them in the cold, and something in her chest went quiet.

It was a simple name. Three syllables, a soft s at the front like breath through teeth. He had said it carefully, without any of the mockery he used for everything else, the way a man sets down something he is afraid might break. And it fit. That was the horror. It slid into the empty place where her own name should have been and settled there as if it had been waiting, and she hated it, hated it all the way down.

"Solaia," Kieran repeated. "Solaia Ashvale. The last daughter of House Ashvale, mage-lords of the northern border."

"I have never heard of them."

"No. You wouldn't have. You lost your memory when they burned." He watched her closely. "Their keep stood three days' ride from where I found you. A minor house, sworn to no one. They resisted my border campaign three years ago, and I destroyed them. There was a daughter no one ever found. I believe that was you."

The cold in the room sharpened to a point.

"You destroyed them," the girl said slowly.

"Yes."

"My family."

"Your story." His eyes did not leave hers. "That is the one I will tell the court. The one the Church can check and find true. A girl who lost everything, wandered the ash for three years, and was picked up by the man who ended her people. Unfortunate. Almost poetic. And entirely believable."

She understood a moment before she moved. It was nothing she had decided. It was the shape of her body deciding for her, as it had under the wagon, as it had on the banquet table, the same flat clarity in the muscles before the mind could catch up. She threw herself across the floor with both wrists raised, the cracked crystal bands swinging like a mace, and drove them at the side of his head.

He caught them.

He caught both of them in one hand without even leaning back, and the impact shuddered down her arms so hard her teeth clicked. The Blood Ice bands screamed. A web of light cracked across them, and a thin line of pale fire licked along the fractures and died.

Kieran looked at it.

Then he looked at her. For one second something raw and terrible moved behind his eyes, something not at all like anger.

"There," he said softly. "Do you feel that? The hatred. It's real. You didn't need a memory to make it." His thumb pressed against the inside of her wrist, just above the cracked metal, over the place where her pulse beat wild and fast. "Keep it. I would be disappointed if you didn't. But you will hate me better with a full stomach and a window."

"Let go of me."

"In a moment."

"I will kill you."

"I know." He said it with such calm that she nearly believed he was pleased. "You've said so. The cardinal's physicians have been reading it back to me for two weeks, like a prophecy. Now listen to me, Solaia, because I am about to be very honest, and I will not do it twice."

She bared her teeth.

"The Church wants you dead. They tried it with the poison and they will try it again with something quieter. The nobles want you dead because you embarrass them. Half the Black Guard wants you dead because you frighten them. If I leave you in this tower, someone will find a way through three thousand arrays, and it will not take a month." His hand tightened, not painfully. Just enough to hold her still. "If I open this door and let you walk out alone, you'll be dead in a week. You know it. I watched you count the guards through the keyhole."

She went still.

"Yes," Kieran said. "I noticed. You also learned the shift change by the fourth night, and you've been working on those shackles since the third. I'm told you broke a wooden bowl and tried to pick the lock of the window." The faintest edge of dry amusement touched his voice. "It was a good attempt."

"You were watching me."

"Every night. Through the glass."

She turned her head, slowly. The black walls gave her back a dozen versions of her own furious face.

He had been in the mirrors. All fifteen nights.

Something unpleasant crawled up her spine, and with it, treacherously, a little sting of something else. No one had ever watched her like that. She had spent her whole life, as far as she knew it, being something people looked past.

"What do you want?" she said at last.

"The truth is that I don't know yet." He released her wrists. Only then did she realize how long he had been holding them, how warm his hand had become, how it had stopped being cold at some point. "What I can offer is this. You come out of this tower. You live in a pavilion with a garden and a bed no one will poison. You eat. You learn the name and the story. And in time, when I have the answers myself, I will tell you who you really are."

"In time."

"I'm not going to lie to you about the shape of the cage. It is a cage. But it has a roof, and a window, and a man at the door who has decided you are worth keeping alive." He paused. "It is more than anyone else has offered."

She hated that it was true.

She hated how clearly she could see the edges of it. The Church's ice-cold hunger. The nobles' contempt. The faceless, endless white outside these walls where she had lain in the ash for what might have been a year. She could kill him now, or try. She could break the crystal and run and die somewhere in the snow with a stolen sword and the satisfaction of having refused. Or she could take the roof, and the window, and the bread, and stay alive long enough to find out what was beating under the ground in the north.

Survival was a coin with two faces. She had never once been able to spend only one.

"I don't kneel," she said.

"I haven't asked you to."

"I won't call you Majesty."

"I would be insulted if you did."

"And when I remember who I am—" She heard how she said it. When, not if. The word seemed to land on him. His face did not change, but his stillness did, a faint drop in the fine tension of his shoulders. "When I remember, and I'm not Solaia Ashvale of nothing, I will walk out of your palace and you will not stop me."

"Then I had better make certain," Kieran said softly, "that you do not wish to."

He took a key from the pocket of his coat. It was not a key. It was a sliver of black crystal, no longer than her finger, and when he pressed it to the first shackle the cracked band split cleanly open and fell to the floor in two pieces, chiming like a bell. The second followed it.

Her wrists were raw. Bruises ringed them, black and yellow and green, with a few shallow cuts that had bled into her sleeves. The air touched them and she hissed.

Kieran looked at the marks.

For a long moment he did not say anything. His fingers moved, almost without his permission, as though he were going to touch them, and then curled slowly into his palm.

"Dark Gold and Blood Ice," he said, in a voice she could not read. "I have been told they are very beautiful."

"They were heavy."

"Yes." He rose, in one fluid movement, and held out a hand. "Come."

She looked at it.

She could have refused. She understood that perfectly. This was a test too, quieter than the others, a door held open to see if she would run or crawl. If she took his hand, it meant something. If she stood on her own, it meant something else. In either case he was learning her.

So the girl who had been a beggar, and then a Wench, and who was about to become a name that did not belong to her, planted her palm against the black wall of the tower and pushed herself up without his help.

Her knees shook. She locked them.

Kieran's hand lowered. He did not seem offended. If anything, the ghost of that not-quite smile crossed his mouth again, thin and satisfied, as if she had just told him something he had hoped to hear.

"Solaia," he said.

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you own it."

"I named it," he said. "That's nearly the same."

She walked past him to the door. She did not look back at the glass, or the stranger in it. She was halfway down the spiral staircase, with the Emperor's footsteps measured and silent behind her and a hundred black windows turning the sunrise into broken red ribbons, when she realized she was whispering it to herself under her breath.

Solaia.

It sat in her mouth like a coal she had been meant to swallow.

At the bottom of the tower, the great doors swung wide, and cold morning air washed across her face. The courtyard beyond was white with new snow. And in the middle of it, gigantic and motionless, with its crimson scales steaming faintly in the dawn, lay the Blood-Red Dragon.

Gron lifted his head.

The guards along the walls went rigid. A horse somewhere screamed and was quickly silenced. The enormous golden eyes, each as wide as a dinner platter, swung away from his master, past the rows of armored men, and settled with terrible, tender attention on the girl standing in the doorway.

Behind her, very quietly, Kieran stopped walking.

The dragon did not roar. It did not rise. The pupils in those enormous eyes narrowed to thin gold threads, and then, slowly, deliberately, the great lids came down and went up again. It was the long blink of an animal that has looked at a stranger and decided she is not prey. A breath left its nostrils, shuddering, and melted a perfect circle in the frost.

Nobody in the courtyard moved.

"Interesting," Kieran said, so quietly that only she could hear it.

He did not sound like a man who thought it was interesting. He sounded like a man who had just heard something crack, far down inside a wall he had built himself.

And far away to the north, beneath hundreds of miles of ice, something very old turned over in its sleep.