The Road North

They left while the capital was still dark, when the only light came from the cold stars and the red glow of the Aerie.

Gron was waiting in the courtyard.

He had been kept unchained since the Festival. The Dragonwarden had tried it as an experiment, and then as a risk, and finally as a simple fact, because there was no collar left in the realm that would fit the great scarlet throat and no bar that could have held him if he did not wish to be held. He lay on the packed snow with his wings folded and his head up, watching the gate. When Solaia came through it, bundled in fur from chin to boots with a small gray lump wriggling in her collar, a low rumble went through the courtyard like distant thunder.

You came, said Gron.

"I'm always going to come," she said, and put her palm against his cheek.

He leaned into it with a shuddering sigh. The dragons she had met in the Aerie had been creatures of muscle and fear. This one was something else now. The ruin had gone out of his eyes. They were clear gold, and steady, and old in a way she was only beginning to understand, and when he looked at her it was as a subject looks at the one person in the world who has ever asked his permission.

"He has not eaten properly in a week," said Brannoch Hale gruffly, from behind. "Not since the Roar. He's been waiting at the gate. I think he thought you'd gone."

"I was in the next building."

"He's a dragon, my lady. It's all the same distance."

She laughed, and it hurt a little, and she kept her hand where it was.

…

The Emperor came last.

He wore plain traveling leathers and a long dark cloak, and he carried his own pack, which scandalized three footmen and the Master of the Horse. Crane walked at his shoulder with a sealed satchel of maps. Behind them came a single sleepy groom leading a pack-dragon, a small tame creature the color of wet slate, loaded with tents and furs and a quantity of dried meat that would have fed a regiment.

"You are certain of this," said Crane, low.

"No."

"The Church has spies in every—"

"I know. Let them follow." Kieran did not look back at the palace. "They will find an Emperor and his mistress gone hunting in the north. They will be pleased. It will confirm everything they believe about my character."

"Majesty, you have already spent twelve of the thirty."

"Eighteen days remain. Enough." He buckled the last strap on Gron's harness with his own hands. "If I do not find what I am looking for in the mountains, I will have lost nothing. If I find it, I may have bought us a year."

"And if the Pontiff moves against the capital while you are away?"

"Then he will find Marenne's friends in the Conclave, and Verre's friends in the Inquisition, and a hundred thousand people who saw a dragon bow to a girl." The smile was thin. "I am rather counting on it."

Crane sighed. Then, unexpectedly, he reached out and gripped the Emperor's forearm, hard, soldier to soldier.

"Come back," he said.

"I always do."

"That is a lie, Majesty. But I will take it."

…

She had thought she would be afraid.

She had been carried on Gron once before, bound and furious, a sack of rags slung across the front of the saddle, and she remembered only the sick whirl of the ground and the fear of falling. This was different. Kieran lifted her into the saddle in front of him, as he might lift a child onto a horse, and then climbed up behind and settled his arms around her, and said into her hair, "Hold the pommel. Do not look down until you are ready."

"I'm ready."

"You are not."

"I'm ready, Kieran."

"Very well." A breath of laughter against her ear. "Gron. Up."

The ground fell away.

It did not fall as it had before, in a lurching plunge. It simply let go. The great scarlet wings drove down, once, twice, and the courtyard dropped away beneath them in a swirl of snow, and the palace shrank to a toy, and then the whole sleeping capital lay spread out like a map: the gray rooftops, the frozen river, the black scar of the burned east quarter, the thousand little red lights of the dawn watch. And above it all the cold dark sky was opening, slowly, into rose.

Her breath caught.

She did not look down. She looked out, and the world went on forever.

"Oh," she said, in a very small voice.

"Yes."

"Is it always like this?"

"No." His arms tightened. "Not for me. It was never like this for me. I rode him for years like a man riding a storm. I held on. I never once looked."

The wind tore at her hair. A flock of gulls wheeled below them, brilliant white against the blue-black river. Gron's wings beat with a vast slow rhythm that she felt in her ribs, and somewhere ahead of them, under the pink and gold of the climbing sun, a long dark line was rising out of the horizon.

"Gron is happy," she said.

"How can you tell?"

"He's singing." She tilted her head. "Can't you hear it?"

Kieran was silent for a moment.

"No," he said. "I cannot."

"It's very low. Like a hum in the bones."

"I should like to hear it."

"Maybe someday."

"Maybe," he said, so quietly that the wind almost took it. And his cheek came to rest against her hair.

…

They flew for hours.

The land changed beneath them. The farms and orchards thinned, then vanished, and there was only the endless rolling white of the tundra, scored with the blue ribbons of frozen rivers. A herd of snow-deer thundered across a plain, a tiny dark stream against the glare, and Soot, who had been dozing, woke up and screamed with joy. They passed a village of black turf huts with smoke curling from every chimney. Children ran out into the snow and stood with their faces turned up, mouths open, tiny against the huge white sky.

She waved. After a moment, one of them waved back.

"They are afraid of him," said Kieran, behind her.

"They're not afraid. Look at them."

He looked. The children were still waving. One had climbed onto a sled and was bouncing up and down, shouting.

"They do not know what he is," he said slowly.

"They do. They just aren't scared of you." She twisted to look at him. "It's the first time I've seen it. Someone who doesn't flinch."

His face did something unreadable.

"I would give a great deal," said the Emperor, "to be the sort of man a child waves at."

"You're doing it now."

"I am being carried by a dragon that is carrying a girl who is holding a lizard."

"He's a dragon."

"He is a lizard with ambitions." But the corner of his mouth lifted.

They stopped at noon on a rocky outcrop beside a frozen lake, and made a fire, and ate dried meat and hard bread with their fingers like peasants. Gron went hunting and returned with a snow-elk in his jaws. He laid it before her with extreme ceremony, then sat back to wait for her approval. She scratched his chin until he shuddered. Kieran sat with his back against a rock and watched her do it, the pale light on his face, an expression she could not name softening the hard line of his mouth.

She saw him looking and did not say anything. It seemed to her that this was a thing he would take back if she named it.

They flew on.

…

Late in the afternoon, she saw it.

It was far off, a faint blue-gray smudge along the whole northern rim of the world, so pale that she thought at first it was cloud. But the cloud did not move. And as they flew on, hour by hour, it grew, not like a cloud but like a wall, rising out of the white until it filled a third of the sky.

"What is that?" she whispered.

"The Ice Range."

"It's enormous."

"It is eight hundred miles long and, at the center, forty thousand feet high. No army has ever crossed it. No bird flies over it. The Church calls it the Wall of God." Kieran's voice had gone strange. "My father's riders went in once, to the edge of the first glacier. Three came back. They said that the ice made a sound."

"What sort of sound?"

"They did not say."

The sun was sinking. The great pale mass ahead of them took on a slow rose-gold flush, and shadows crept into its folds, and as the light shifted, as the long ridges and shoulders and drifts of snow slid into focus, she saw a thing that made the hair stand up along her arms.

It had a shape.

Not a mountain's shape. A long, low, coiling mass, with a ridge like a spine, and two great rounded flanks, and at the very center a vast curved shoulder that rose and fell with the clouds. The head lay to the east, tucked under a drift of white. A tail trailed away to the west across the glacier. She could see, quite clearly, the place where a wing would fold against a side.

She could see the place where a heart would be.

"Kieran," she said.

"I see it."

"It's a dragon."

"I know," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, in a very quiet voice. "I have known for two years. I did not want to say it aloud."

Below them, in the long shadow of the range, Gron had gone quite silent. His wings still beat. His body still flew true. But the song that Solaia had heard in him all day, the low warm hum in the bones, had stopped, and in its place, rising from the center of the mountain like a note struck on a bell the size of the world, came a slow, vast, patient sound.

Thum.