The Roar

She did not decide to climb the rail. She found herself standing on it.

The stone was slick with cold, and the heat of the burning city rose past her ankles in a long dry wind, and she balanced there on the narrow ledge with her black skirts whipping and her hair streaming loose, the way a woman might stand on the prow of a ship. Somewhere behind her, a hand closed on her arm. She felt the fingers dig in, hard enough to bruise.

"Solaia. Solaia. Get down. What are you doing?"

She looked at him over her shoulder.

His face was white as paper, and the black had crept up past his collar, and his eyes were wild. He was holding on to her as a drowning man holds a spar. He did not know. She could see he did not know. He thought she was running toward the fire, as a child might, out of terror, and he would have dragged her back and locked her in a cellar if it would keep her breathing.

"Let go," she said.

"No."

"Kieran." She said it very gently. "Let go. I can hear him."

"Hear—" His grip faltered. "Gron?"

"He's screaming. Can't you hear it? He's screaming for someone to make it stop." She turned her face back to the sky, where the great scarlet shape wheeled and howled above the burning square. "It hurts him so much. And he's so frightened. He thinks that he's alone."

For a heartbeat, the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom did not move.

Then, slowly, as though each finger had to be argued with, he let her go.

…

She had no plan.

She would remember that afterward, with a kind of dazed wonder. She did not know what she was going to do. She had no spell, no weapon, no ritual. She had a body that was not strong, and a throat that had never been trained, and a name that had been given to her by a man who had lied about it.

But she had something older than any of those.

It rose in her as she stood there, high above the screaming city, with the wind in her hair. A tightness at first, low in her belly, then climbing, and widening. A great pressure under her ribs, as if something had been shut in a box for five thousand years and had finally been told that the lid could come off. She felt it in her bones. She felt it in her teeth. It filled her up like water filling a vessel, up past the heart and the throat and the skull, until she thought she must burst.

Open your mouth, said something in her, with infinite patience. Open your mouth, little one. And tell them who you are.

She did.

The sound that came out of her was not a human sound.

It began low, so low that the stones of the Cathedral hummed with it. A deep, round, trembling note that rolled outward from her chest across the square like the first breath of a storm. Then it rose. It split into harmonies, one over another, a chord of a dozen voices at once, each in a different register, each speaking a word in a language that had been dead for five thousand years.

SIT. HEAR. ENOUGH. CHILD. I AM HERE.

It was not loud. That was the strangest part. It did not shake the glass or burst the ears of those below. It simply went through them: through the crowd, through the flames, through the dark walls and silver spires, like light through water.

And the city stopped.

All of it. Every person in the square froze where they stood, with their mouths open and their lanterns burning in their hands. The wind died. The fire, for the space of a single heartbeat, hung quivering in the air, and did not spread.

Up in the sky, Gron stopped screaming.

He hung there, with his wings spread wide, and every muscle in his huge body shuddered once, as though a hand had touched a nerve. The blind gold of his eyes cleared. Very slowly, he turned his head, and found the tiny black-gowned figure on the terrace.

Mother, said the dragon.

It was not a word. It was a thing so enormous and so tender that she felt her own knees give.

He came down.

He came down out of the burning sky in a long, slow spiral, his great wings beating the smoke into tatters, and he did not roar, and he did not breathe fire. The people in the square flung themselves flat on the cobbles as the shadow passed over them. He landed on the Cathedral steps with a thud that cracked the marble, and the whole plaza shook. For a moment he stood there, huge and scarlet and trembling, wreathed in cinders.

Then he folded his forelegs beneath him, and lowered his head, and bowed.

Not the cringing of a beast. The bow of a vassal to a sovereign. His snout touched the stone. His wings drooped on either side of him like banners. And from his throat there came a long, low, shuddering note, rolling out across the silent city, in words she could now understand.

Forgive me. Forgive me. I did not know you. I was so lost.

"It's all right," she whispered. Her voice was a thread. "It's all right, brave one. I've got you."

The white thread in his collar was still burning. She could see it, a thin bright wire, running away across the roofs toward the Cathedral's hidden heart. Somewhere beneath the stones, a man was gripping a black silver rod and pulling with all his strength. And the dragon was kneeling in front of her, trembling, and she thought: no.

She had not known she could be so angry.

Enough, she said again. And this time she did not say it only to Gron.

…

The sound that answered came from the north.

It began as a tremor. A deep, slow quiver in the paving stones, like the first stir of an earthquake. Then, far off, over the roofs and the frozen river and the black shoulder of the mountain, came a cry. A single dragon's voice. High, and cracked, and rusted with age.

Another answered it. Then another.

She turned her head and saw them.

They were rising from the Aerie. Dozens of them, hundreds, a vast dark river of wings pouring up out of the cavern on the northern cliff and spreading across the sky like a wave. Blood-Reds in their chains, hauling at the iron bars. Storm-drakes screaming. The old male with the white-rimmed eyes, huge, ancient, grimly beating his way up into the air with a cart-sized lump of masonry still dragging from his collar. And behind them, far to the north, so far away that she could scarcely credit it, there was something else. A wild, wordless howl. The Frost Wyrms, answering from their ice-fields. Calling.

Mother, said the sky.

Mother. Mother. Mother.

They did not attack. They did not fly toward the Cathedral. They simply came, one after another, and circled the city in an enormous slow ring, high above the burning spires, with their great shadows crossing and recrossing the stars. And all of them were looking at her.

She felt it like a hand on her heart.

She had been so lonely. She had not known it. For months, for years, for all the unrecorded centuries of her sleeping, she had been a single small creature in a cold world. And now the whole sky was full of eyes, and every one of them knew her. She would have laughed, if she could. She would have wept.

Then the thing in her chest went quiet.

It did not stop. It opened. Like a door in a wall she had not known was there. A great golden light poured through it, soft and warm and unbearably bright. She heard a voice, her own, calling in a tongue she had no name for. And she felt, with a dreadful certainty, the air above the city begin to tear.

It happened without a sound.

High over the Cathedral, in the black bowl of the night, a line of pale gold appeared. It was no thicker than a hair. It ran across the sky from east to west, shimmering, widening, a thin bright seam in the fabric of the world. And through it, faintly, as through the crack of a door, came a glimpse of something else.

A sky the color of honey. A sun she did not know. A great, glittering shape, so far away that it seemed no bigger than a bird, wheeling in a gold-washed dawn.

Home, said a voice, in her head. A woman's voice. Low and tired and unspeakably fond. Oh, my heart. It's so far.

"Solaia."

The terrace swayed.

She had forgotten she was standing on it. Her fingers had gone numb, and the rail was cold as iron beneath her bare feet, and she could feel her blood running out of her like water out of a cracked cup. Black spots danced across her sight. Somewhere in the white roar of her ears, a man's voice was shouting her name.

"Solaia! Solaia!"

She tried to answer. She could not.

Through the failing light she saw it all at once: the burning city, and the kneeling dragon, and the great ring of wings, and the seam of gold that ran across the heavens like a wound. She saw the crowd below, thousands of white upturned faces, every one frozen in the same expression of terror and wonder. She saw a tall figure in white standing alone on the Cathedral steps, a silver mask turned up toward the sky. He had not run. He stood with his long hands hanging at his sides, utterly motionless, and she knew, though she could not have said how, that he was smiling.

There you are, said the Pontiff, in the silence of her mind. At last.

The gold seam closed.

It closed all at once, like an eyelid. The wind rushed back, and the fire roared up, and every dragon in the sky cried out together in a long, grieving note. Gron lifted his head from the stone. The crowd began, slowly, one voice at a time, to scream again.

And Solaia, who had spoken to the sky and made the sky answer, felt her legs go out from under her like cut strings.

She did not feel the fall.

Two arms caught her before she could hit the stone. She had a confused impression of black velvet and cold iron, the smell of smoke and snow and something sharper, and a face above her, white, and wild, and utterly stripped of every wall it had ever built. His lips were moving. She could not hear what he said.

"Kieran," she tried to say.

"Don't talk." His voice cracked. "Don't. I have you. I have you."

"Gron—"

"He is fine. He's fine. You did it. Solaia, look at me." He gathered her against his chest, so tightly that she felt his heart slamming against her ribs. "Look at me. Do not close your eyes. Do you hear? Do not dare."

But the dark was already coming up, soft and deep and kind, and she could not hold it back. The last thing she saw was the sky over his shoulder, empty of gold, full of wings, and the lantern light on the cathedral walls, rippling, rippling, like the memory of a sun.