The Aerie

She did not mention the painting again, and neither did Berylla.

It sat between them for the rest of that day and the whole of the next, an unspoken thing, heavy as a stone in a pocket. Berylla brought her meals and laid out her clothes and ran her bath with the same exact precision as ever, but there was a new quality in her silences now. She watched Solaia sometimes from the far side of a room, when she thought herself unobserved, with the narrow, calculating look of a gambler who has just realized she is holding a very strange hand.

On the third morning, Solaia put down her tea and said, "Where do they keep the dragons?"

Berylla's cup did not rattle. It was a near thing.

"My lady?"

"They're real. The Emperor has one. I've seen it, I've been carried by it." She gestured toward the window, and the pale mountains beyond. "The mural said the Church wiped them out. And yet there's one lying in the snow outside the Tower, and the guards are afraid of it, and no one's said a word about where it came from."

"Blood-Reds are bred in the Aerie," Berylla said slowly. "Under the Church's license. They are not wild beasts, my lady. They are... a kind of weapon."

"Then I'd like to see the weapons."

"It is not a place for ladies."

"I'm not sure what I am," Solaia said. "But I don't think I'm that."

There was a very long pause. Then Berylla let out her breath and said, with the air of a woman signing her own warrant, "I will have the carriage brought."

…

The Aerie stood on the northern cliff, where the palace gave out its last pretense of grace and became a fortress.

It was not so much a building as a wound in the mountain. A vast cavern had been hacked into the rock and walled with black iron, and from its mouth, as the carriage rattled up the final switchback, came a smell that stopped her breath. It was hot, and rank, and strange. Brimstone and warm leather and something she could not name, rich and sour and old, like a freshly turned grave. It was the smell of a living animal the size of a house.

She knew it at once. She did not know how.

"Lady Solaia." A man was waiting at the iron gate, bareheaded in the cold. "Dragonwarden Brannoch Hale, at your service. The Emperor's order came this morning. I confess I did not expect to see you so soon."

He was a lean, weathered man of sixty, with a cropped gray beard and a face like a hillside cut by many winters. His left sleeve hung empty and pinned at the elbow. In its place, a hook of dark iron gleamed at the end of a leather harness, and he held it carefully away from his body as though he were ashamed of it. His eyes were a pale gray-green. They went to her face and stayed there.

Then they dropped, quickly, to the ground.

"I've come to see them," she said.

"Aye, my lady." His voice was gruff, and not quite steady. "They'll be glad of the company."

Glad. It was a strange word to use for beasts bred as weapons.

He led them in.

…

She had imagined it would be like the courtyard. A single huge shape in the snow. A creature of fear.

She was not prepared for the number.

The cavern went back into darkness, tier upon tier, in a great ring of stalls and pens and iron cages cut into the living stone. Ladders and catwalks crisscrossed the air. Torches burned in sconces along the walls, throwing a restless orange light across hundreds of shifting shapes. And in every pen, chained at the neck and the wing and the ankle, lay a dragon.

Blood-Reds. They were everywhere. Crimson and rust and a deep, dull garnet, some no bigger than a plow-horse and some the size of a barn, their scales dull with grime and their great wings pinned flat with iron bars. They lay in the straw with their heads on their forelegs. Some were asleep. Most were not. Their eyes followed the three humans on the catwalk with the dull, patient hatred of creatures who have given up expecting anything else.

At each neck, a thin silver collar glinted. A faint red glow pulsed in it, steady as a pulse.

Solaia stood very still.

Soul-Chains, said Brannoch quietly, beside her. The Church forges them. A thread of its holy fire, bound into the beast's own spirit. It keeps them quiet. And it... doesn't keep them well.

She understood. She understood it from the way they lay, from the lines of old scars on the garnet hides, from the dead patches where scales had worn away beneath the metal. A collar did not just hold. It hurt. She saw it in the dragon nearest her, an old male the color of dried blood, who flinched, all at once, with a shuddering twitch of the whole great body, as though something had bitten him from within. His eyes rolled white. A thin, hoarse, wounded sound rose in his throat.

And then it came to her, in a way she would never be able to explain.

It was not a sound. It was a meaning.

It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. Why does it hurt.

Solaia's knees almost gave way.

"My lady?" Berylla was at her elbow. "What is it?"

"Nothing." She dug her nails into her palms. "I'm fine."

She was not fine. The whole cavern was speaking. It was not language, exactly. It was nothing she could have written down. A low surf of feeling, rising and falling under the iron and the torchlight, a thousand small mournful pressures at the edge of her mind. Cold. Hungry. Tired. Where are the others? Where is the sky? It came from every pen, every cage, every drowsing flank. The ocean of it was so enormous that she felt she might drown.

And as she walked down the catwalk, as the slow, grieving murmur of it washed against her, something strange began to happen.

The dragons were turning their heads.

One by one. Not a ripple of panic, as in the courtyard. Not the terror of guards. They simply turned, in the shadows of their stalls, to follow the thin figure in the dark wool gown. The old male with the white-rimmed eyes lifted his heavy head. A young one lashed its tail once and then, startled, lay still. And the silence, in the wake of her passing, spread slowly out in a circle, like ripples on a pond.

Behind her, very low, Brannoch said a single word under his breath. It might have been a prayer.

…

She found the hatchling in the last pen.

It was a small cage near the back of the cavern, empty of straw, with an iron door and a single narrow window. A shape lay curled in the corner. At first she thought it was a rag. Then it breathed, a faint rattling wheeze, and she saw the narrow ribs, the stubby limbs, the wings no bigger than a bat's folded flat against its back. It was the color of ashes. Not the rich red of the others, but a dull, smoky gray, mottled with black, like a coal that had burned out and been trodden underfoot.

"What's that?" she said.

Brannoch did not answer at once.

"A runt," he said, finally. "Hatched three weeks past, out of the Black Mother's clutch. She laid eight. Seven are red, and strong, and they'll be fit to ride in a year. This one..." His iron hook scraped on the bars. "It's the wrong color, and it doesn't breathe fire. Hasn't so much as a spark. The Church inspector came yesterday. He's marked it for the cull."

"The cull."

"Any hatchling that can't take a Soul-Chain. Or won't. They call it the Plague-Seed. Ill luck, a defective beast, a risk to the line." He kept his voice very level. "It's done at dawn, my lady. Quick. We aren't cruel."

She said nothing.

She had crouched down by the bars, without noticing she was doing it, and her hand was lying on the cold iron. In the corner, the little gray creature had lifted its head.

It was a very small head. Narrow and sharp-snouted, with two stubs where horns would one day grow. The eyes in it were enormous, much too large for the skull, a deep, wet, smoky gold. It looked at her. And she felt it, a thin, faint, whimpering thread at the edge of her mind, so fragile that she almost mistook it for her own pulse.

Cold. Cold. Where is Mother?

"Open it," Solaia said.

"My lady—"

"Open the door."

Brannoch's gaze flickered to Berylla. Berylla, to her astonishment, gave a minute, helpless shrug. After a moment, with the air of a man stepping off a cliff, the Dragonwarden took a key from his belt and turned it in the lock.

The door swung open on a shriek of rust.

The hatchling shrank into the corner, hissing, all its stubby spines raised. Solaia stayed where she was, on her knees on the filthy stone floor, and did not move. She had been hungry. She had been the thing in the corner. She knew precisely what it wanted, and it was not to be looked at.

"It's all right," she said.

The words came out of her in a language she did not know.

It was nothing she chose. It was soft and low, a murmur of rising and falling syllables, round and warm and ancient, like water running over stones. It came from somewhere beneath her ribs, as easy as breathing, and it was in her throat and her mouth before she understood that she was speaking at all.

Behind her, Brannoch Hale made a small, strangled sound.

The hatchling stopped hissing.

It stared at her, gold eyes enormous. Then, very slowly, it unfolded from the corner and came across the floor in a series of clumsy, wobbling hops, and set one small clawed forefoot on her knee. It sniffed her fingers. Its tongue flickered out, rough as a cat's. A great shuddering sigh went through the whole small body, and it crawled, shaking, into the crook of her arm, and tucked its snout against her collarbone, and went limp.

It was warm. Hotter than a child with a fever. And somewhere against her ribs, under the thin gray skin, something fluttered, tiny and furious, like a heart that had made up its mind to live.

Solaia held very still.

"Well," she said at last, softly. "I seem to have picked up a stray."

…

"I cannot give you that, my lady."

The Dragonwarden had gone gray around the mouth. He stood in the doorway of the pen with his hook clutched against his chest, and his hand, the good one, was shaking. "The inspector counts them. Every dragon on the Church's rolls, down to the egg. If it's missing at dawn, there'll be a hearing, and the Pontiff will want to know why a lady of the court—"

"Then write that it died."

"My lady?"

"Of a fever. In the night. Poor thing, it was sickly." She stood up with the hatchling still tucked inside her collar, a small hot weight that settled against her shoulder like a living scarf. "Bury something small in the yard. If the inspector wants to dig it up, tell him to take it up with me."

"You'd be seen, my lady. A lady of the Emperor's household, carrying a Plague-Seed about the palace—"

"Then I'll be seen carrying a lapdog." She met his eyes. "Count me, Dragonwarden. Put my name in the book. If anyone asks, I'm the one who has it. And if the Church doesn't like it, they can come and tell me so themselves."

For a moment he only stared at her. The torchlight caught in the pale gray-green of his eyes and threw it back in a thin, wet shimmer. A muscle moved in his throat.

Then, slowly, with something very like reverence, the old soldier bowed.

"Aye, my lady," said Brannoch Hale. His voice cracked on the last word. "I'll write it that way."

"What's its name?"

"The Plague-Seed? None, my lady. We don't name them."

She looked down at the small gray head tucked under her chin. It was breathing steadily now, and a tiny wisp of smoke curled out of one nostril, the faintest ghost of heat, and vanished.

"Soot," Solaia decided.

…

They were leaving the pen, the Dragonwarden leading, Berylla following with a face like a woman who has seen too much to protest, when the sound came.

It rolled up out of the depths of the cavern, a long, harsh, thundering roar, and the whole mountain shook. Dust sifted from the roof. In every pen the dragons flinched together, and a wave of terror went through the caverns like a wind through wheat. The hatchling cried out against her neck.

"That's Gron," said Brannoch hoarsely. "The great stall, at the end. He hasn't made that sound in years."

"What does it mean?"

"It means," said the Dragonwarden, "that His Majesty has come."

And a moment later, with a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, she felt it. The old cold. The smell of graves and iron, creeping up the long passage between the stalls, and every dragon in the Aerie lowering its head.