Lantern Night

The warning reached her on the sixth day, folded into the lining of a book.

It was Osric who found it. He came shuffling up out of the Lower Archive with a volume of grain tallies held out in front of him like something dead, and a look of pure scholarly bewilderment. "It was in the returns box," he said. "Nobody has returned a book to that box in six years. I thought it was a mouse." He opened the cover. Tucked inside, on a slip of cheap paper, in a hand so careful it seemed disguised, were eleven words.

Take the beast from the square. They mean it to run mad.

Solaia read it twice. Then she folded it very small and walked, not ran, all the way across the palace to the Frost Chamber, where Kieran sat with Crane and a pile of maps, and laid it on the table in front of him without a word.

He read it. Crane read it over his shoulder. For a long moment, nobody breathed.

"Who wrote this?"

"I don't know."

"Someone inside the Cathedral." Kieran's thumb moved slowly over the paper. "No one else would know the Rod exists."

"The what?" said Solaia.

He looked up at her, and she saw the knowledge go across his face like a shadow across water, and settle. "A thing the Church keeps in its cellar," he said. "My grandfather saw it used once, on a rebel lord's dragon, at the siege of Tarn. He did not speak of it." A pause. "I had hoped it was a legend."

"Then take Gron out of the square."

"I cannot."

"You can. You're the Emperor."

"The Festival of Lanterns is the oldest rite in the realm." He said it flatly, like a man reading a charge. "On the last night of the year, the Emperor's Blood-Red stands in the Cathedral square, chained, so that the people may see their sovereign's strength kept in check by the Church's hand. It has done so for four hundred years. If it is absent, the Pontiff will announce that the Throne is afraid, and a hundred thousand people will believe him." His mouth thinned. "And he will be right. I am afraid."

"Then fight it."

"With what?" It came out almost gently. "Soldiers cannot cut a thread. I could strip the collar from his neck, but the collar is the only thing that stops him from tearing the city down when I am not looking. If I take it off, he will go to you. And then the Church will say that the Empire's Dragon has been tamed by a witch." He rubbed his eyes. "I have been awake for four nights, trying to find a way through. There isn't one."

Crane cleared his throat. "There may be a half-measure, Majesty."

"Say it."

"Triple the guard around the square. Archers on every rooftop. Heavy ballistae at the four gates, loaded with weighted nets. And a cordon around the Cathedral steps that the crowd cannot pass." The old soldier's face was grim. "It would not save the beast. But it might save the people."

"Do it," said Kieran. "Quietly."

"And Gron?" said Solaia.

Both men looked at her.

"What happens to him?"

The Emperor was silent. And in that silence, she understood that he had already answered, a long time ago, in a cold room with a locked door, in the voice of a man who has learned that some prices are only ever paid by someone else.

"I will do what I can," said Kieran.

It was the most honest thing he had ever said to her. She hated it.

…

The city was transformed.

She had thought the capital a gray and frozen place. On the night of the Festival, it blazed. Lanterns hung from every eave and window and cornice, in strings and ropes and glittering webs, red and gold and white and a deep ocean blue. They floated on the canals. They rose from rooftops on cords of silk. They were carried in children's hands, little paper moons bobbing along the cobbles, so many that the whole dark city seemed to have been turned inside out, and the stars poured down into the streets.

Solaia stood on the terrace of the Cathedral's east gallery with a lantern of her own in her fingers, and could not stop looking.

"It is a custom," Berylla had said, helping her into the gown. "Each person writes a wish and sends it up. They say that if the light stays lit until it vanishes over the mountains, the wish will be granted." She had said it without expression, pinning a silver comb into Solaia's hair. "I do not believe a word of it. But I have sent one every year for thirty years."

"What did you wish?"

"That the Emperor would stop pretending he was not lonely." A tiny pause. "It has not come true."

The gown was black velvet, as the Emperor had ordered, and plain, and so cunningly cut that it made her look like a girl from a story. Her hair was loose. There was a small gold pin at her throat, in the shape of a snowflake. She had not asked where it came from. She had not asked, either, why he had looked at it, for a long moment, when she put it on.

Now she stood alone in the cold, and the music of the Festival came up from the square in a long rising swell of pipes and drums, and she felt a stillness settle through her that had nothing to do with fear.

"You are not on the dais."

She did not turn.

"I'm hiding," she said.

"From what?"

"From four thousand people who are all pretending not to stare at me."

Kieran came to stand beside her at the rail.

He wore the full regalia of the Empire, black and silver and the heavy chain of office, and his hair was bound back, and a thin circlet of iron sat on his brow. He looked like the man in the portraits. Like the man the court had been taught to fear. And yet he moved, she noticed, as though he were very tired, and he stood closer than he needed to.

"It is a handsome gown," he said.

"It's a black one."

"It was always going to be black." He paused. "I thought you might prefer it to white."

She glanced at him. His face gave away nothing. But a faint color had risen along his cheekbone, and she was fairly sure it was not the cold.

"The pin," she said.

"My mother's." He said it to the lanterns. "She wore it the night she died. I do not know why I kept it. I do not know why I gave it to you."

"Then take it back."

"No." It was swift, and quiet, and almost rough. "No. Keep it."

They stood together in silence, and below them the great square filled with light.

It was an astonishing sight. A hundred thousand people packed into an ice-bound plaza, shoulder to shoulder, every face turned upward, every hand holding a glowing paper moon. Priests in white lined the Cathedral steps. A choir sang something slow and sweet. And at the center of the square, on a platform of black stone, chained at the neck and wing and leg to iron rings the size of cartwheels, lay Gron.

He was very still. He lay with his great head on his forelegs, and the lantern light slid red and gold along his scales, and he did not look at the crowd at all. He was looking up, toward the terrace. Toward her.

I'm here, she thought, as hard as she could. I'm here.

The great golden eye blinked, slowly. Once.

"He is calm," Kieran murmured. "Perhaps the Rod will not—"

"Don't say it."

"No." His hand closed on the rail. "No. I won't."

Then, to her astonishment, he spoke again, so softly that she almost lost it under the music.

"I should like to tell you something. Before. In case I am not able."

"Kieran—"

"When you first came into the tower," he said, "I thought: there is a thing I cannot have. It was the first time I had ever thought it. I had had everything, you see. I had been given a crown at twenty, and a dragon at twenty-two, and it had not occurred to me that there was anything in the world I had to ask for." He did not look at her. "And then you stood in front of me in a ragged gown, covered in ash, and told me to go to hell. And I wanted, very badly, to hear you say it again."

She laughed. It came out wet.

"That's a terrible thing to say to a woman."

"I know." The faintest curve touched his mouth. "I am out of practice."

Slowly, very slowly, he turned his hand over on the rail and held it palm up between them. It was an invitation, and a question, and a surrender, all in one. His fingers were not quite steady.

She looked at them for a long time.

Then she put her own into them, and felt the old, impossible cold go still.

…

Afterward, she could never decide exactly when it began.

It might have been the last note of the choir. It might have been the dying of a single lantern, somewhere in the crowd, snuffed by a gust of wind. Or it might have been nothing at all: a feeling, only, a prickle along the back of her neck, as though someone far away had drawn a breath.

Then Gron lifted his head.

It was a small movement. But the whole square felt it. The music faltered. A child laughed, and was hushed. The great golden eyes had gone wide, and white-ringed, and in them was a kind of astonishment, as though something had reached into the middle of him and taken hold.

Hurts, said the dragon, in the place beyond words. Hurts. Hurts. It HURTS.

"Kieran," Solaia whispered.

He had already let go of her hand.

The silver collar flared white. Not red; white, a blinding, terrible white, and in the same instant a thin line of fire ran out from it along the stones of the plaza and into the Cathedral, bright as a sun. Gron's mouth opened. What came out of it was not a roar. It was a scream. A sound so vast and raw and wounded that every lantern in the square shivered on its cord.

The chains snapped.

She saw it happen. She saw the iron rings the size of cartwheels burst out of the stone like corks from a bottle, and the great scarlet wings rear up, filling the sky, and the whole dark mass of the dragon heave itself upright with a groan that shook the Cathedral's spires.

A hundred thousand people began, all together, to scream.

"Crane!" Kieran shouted. "The gates! Now! Get them out!"

The Dark Magic went out of him like a wave. She felt it pass through the stone, a chill black pressure that ought to have knocked the dragon to its knees. For one terrible instant it did. Gron staggered. But the white thread burned, and the pain in it was stronger, and the vast head came up again, and the golden eyes were blind. There was no one in them at all.

He opened his jaws.

A river of fire poured over the crowd.

She never forgot the sound. It was not the screaming. It was the lanterns: ten thousand paper moons, going up in a single rushing breath, and the dark rooftops of the capital flaring, one after another, gold and red and white, as the city she had thought so beautiful began to burn.

"It's not enough!" Kieran's voice was raw. His hand was out, trembling, and the black veins had crept to his wrist. "I cannot hold him! The thread is too strong, I cannot—"

Gron rose into the air.

He climbed in a spiral over the square, shedding sparks, a great ruined thing of flame and fury, and below him the crowd broke like a wave on stone. Priests ran. Soldiers fell. The archers on the rooftops loosed in blind panic, and their arrows rattled off the scarlet scales and did nothing at all. A woman was dragging a child through the press. A man was on his knees, praying.

And high up on the terrace, in the roaring heat, with the Emperor's trembling hand at her shoulder and the whole burning world spread out below, Solaia felt something wake in her chest.

Not a thought. Not a memory.

A voice. Vast, and slow, and utterly calm. It came up out of her like a tide from the bottom of the sea, and it had one word, and the word was:

Enough.