Under the Mountain

Morning found her sitting alone on the lip of the glacier, with her knees drawn up and her eyes on the black door.

She could not see it from here. The cave lay a mile east, folded into the foot of the skull, hidden by the long white curve of a snowfield. But she did not need to see it. It sat at the center of her thoughts like a stone in a shoe, and every few moments, no matter what she did, her attention slid down to it and rested there.

Little one.

Kessa found her at sunrise. The old woman climbed the last yards of the slope slowly, with her black staff striking the ice, and sat down beside her without being asked. For a time neither of them spoke. The sun came up behind the range in a sheet of rose and copper. Light poured down the long flank of the sleeping thing and found, one by one, its ridges and hollows: the vast curve of the shoulder, the tumbled drifts that were a folded wing, the broken pinnacle of the crest.

"It is very beautiful," said Solaia at last.

"It is."

"I keep thinking it should be sad. A grave." She picked at a thread on her glove. "But it doesn't feel like a grave when I look at it. It feels like somebody's holding her breath."

"Yes." Kessa nodded slowly. "That is what my grandmother said. She said you do not bury a thing that is only waiting."

"Who is she?"

"Her name is Obsyra."

The name went through Solaia like a struck bell. She had never heard it. She knew it perfectly. It lay in her mouth with the shape of an old coin, worn smooth by a thousand rubbings.

"She was your companion," said Kessa. "The dragon of your house. The great-grandmother of the last three bloodlines, and the one you rode on the day you were crowned. When the burning came, your mother laid her to sleep under the ice with a spell. She said she would guard the thing that could not be guarded." She looked sideways at Solaia. "That is all we know. The rest is in her."

"And if I go in?"

"Then you will learn it."

"Is it safe?"

"No," said Kessa, with great calm. "Nothing has been safe for five thousand years. I will not lie to you, Mother. The door was made to open once. If you go through it, and she wakes, and you are not what she waits for, the mountain will fall."

Solaia laughed. It came out thin. "That's very comforting."

"I have never been accused of comfort." The old woman's slate eyes crinkled. "But I will tell you what my mother told me, on the night she died. She said: the Queen will be afraid, and she will go in anyway. She said it was the only prophecy that never changed in any telling."

She was silent for a long moment.

"All right," she said.

…

Kieran did not take it well.

She had expected that. She had even prepared for it, in the way one prepares for a cold plunge, by standing quite still and not thinking. He listened to her in the doorway of the turf hut with his arms folded and his face going gradually, step by step, to stone. Crane stood behind him with the expression of a man who has been present at too many such scenes to be surprised and is only wondering who will be the first to die.

"No," said Kieran.

"I haven't finished."

"You have finished enough." His voice was very quiet. "You propose to walk alone into a sealed tomb at the heart of a mountain, to wake a creature that has been asleep since before the Church was built, which is, in the opinion of every legend we have, either the savior of the world or the end of it, and you propose to do it on the strength of an old woman's feeling."

"Yes."

"I forbid it."

"You can't."

"I am the Emperor of—"

"You're a man who slept for the first time in ten years last night, in a hut, on a pile of furs, after I told you a story about a baker." She said it gently. "I don't think you're going to stop me by shouting."

He opened his mouth. He closed it.

Crane made a short choked sound that might have been a cough.

"I am coming with you," said Kieran.

"You can't. The door is shut. It won't open for you."

"It will open for the Emperor if the Emperor stands next to—"

"It said your name, Kieran." She stepped closer. "It said it very clearly. Last night, I asked what it meant. Kessa says the dead don't call the people they intend to forgive." She laid her palm against his chest. "So I think, if you're in the room when I wake her, we won't find out what she's going to do with you."

He went white. She felt his heart slam once against her hand.

"I would rather it were me," he said. "If she is to take someone."

"I know."

"I would rather be anyone else."

"I know that too." She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, quickly, on the corner of the mouth, and felt him break a little under it. "Stay outside. Keep your sword in your belt. And if I'm not out by dark, don't come in after me."

"Solaia—"

"Promise."

A long silence.

"I promise nothing," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, hoarsely. "But I will wait."

…

The cave was exactly as they had left it, and nothing like it.

She came in alone, with a single torch in her hand, through the long blue throat of the passage, and the light of the flame ran across the walls and set them glittering. The ice was thick here, thick as a house, clear as glass, and she could see things in it. A pale leaf, perfectly preserved, as though it had fallen a moment ago. A bird's wing. The long shadow of something moving far down in the deep, which she decided was only her own reflection.

At the end of the passage, the door stood waiting.

She stopped a few paces from it. The torch hissed. In the silence, the heartbeat was very loud, close enough now that she could feel the air shift with it, a slow soft pressure against her face. She set down the torch in a crack of the ice. She took off her gloves, one finger at a time, and laid them on a ledge.

Then she lifted her empty hands, and did the only thing she could think of.

She spoke.

It did not feel like speech. It felt like remembering a word she had always known. It came out of her in a low, level, ringing tone, quite unlike her ordinary voice, and the syllables fell from her lips and spread across the ice like ripples. She did not know what she said. She only knew that it was a greeting, and a name, and a question, and that at the end of it, her own voice, lower than she had known it could go, had said in a language older than the world:

It is I. I have come home.

For a long time, nothing happened.

Then, with a sound like a very large breath being let out, the door opened.

It did not swing. It did not slide. It unfolded, the slab of black stone separating into a hundred thin curved plates that drew apart from the center like the petals of a flower, each one sliding back into the walls with a dry whisper. A wave of warm air poured out of the dark. It smelled of smoke and iron and old, deep earth, and under that, very faint, of something sweet. Something she remembered. Honey burning.

She walked through.

…

The chamber was larger than the sky.

That was her first thought, though it was nonsense. It was a cavern, vast and domed and perfectly round, cut out of the living heart of the glacier. The walls rose in a smooth sweep to a ceiling she could not see. The floor was black glass, polished to a mirror. And in the center of it, on a low rise of dark stone, lay a shape so huge that she mistook it, at first, for part of the architecture.

Scales. Black scales, each as large as a shield, overlapping in endless rows and glinting with a deep violet fire where the light touched their edges. A spine like a mountain range. A tail that curled away into the shadows and returned. A great wing, folded, with a membrane thin as smoke, veined in gold. And at the end of the long coil of the neck, resting on the stone with its chin upon its claws, a head.

It was enormous. It was longer than a house. It had a brow ridge like a cliff and a muzzle like a ship's prow, and horns that swept back from the skull in two long spiraling curves, ringed with silver bands worn almost smooth by time. The eyelids were closed. A faint rime of frost lay over the whole of it, over the brow and the nostrils and the long fine whiskers, glittering in the light of the lamp she had not realized she carried.

She walked toward it across the mirror floor, and her reflection walked up to meet her.

She could not tell how long it took.

When she stood at last before the great face, close enough to feel the breath that moved the frost on its nostrils, she found that she was crying. She did not know why. It did not feel like grief. It felt like coming in out of a long storm to find that the lamp had been left on.

"Obsyra," she said.

The eyelid moved.

Slowly. Very slowly. A vast ridge of black scale, rising, trailing a veil of ice crystals that fell like stars. Beneath it, a line of light. A crescent of deep, impossible violet, shot through with veins of black, with a pupil in it that was not round but narrow and tall as a doorway.

It looked at her.

She had been looked at before. By guards, by lords, by an Emperor. She had been weighed, and priced, and feared. But nobody had ever looked at her like this: as though she were the whole of a very long story, and had been, from the first word. The eye was larger than her torso. It held her whole body in its curve like a mirror. And she felt, with a dizzying lurch, that she was being read. Every moment of her life, down to the smallest, was being turned over in that vast dark attention, one after another, and found, not wanting, but dear.

Child of mine.

The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. It was not a sound. It had the slow weight of the mountain's heartbeat, and the warmth of the stone, and a note in it that she knew, a tired, ancient, unbearable tenderness.

Child of mine. I waited.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't know. I'm so sorry. I'd have come."

I know.

"I don't remember."

I know that, too. A slow breath, warm as an oven, rolled over her face. It is how she meant it. Your mother. She had to take it all, to keep you alive. I have it here. Something touched her mind, soft, huge, careful. I have all of it. Every day. Every name. It is sleeping in me, like a seed in the ground. I cannot give it to you yet.

"Why not?"

Because you would not survive it. The eye did not blink. The Veil is not a lock. It is a bandage. If it is torn off, the wound will open, and you will bleed out into the sky. A pause. There will be a day. It will come in pain. You will know it. Until then you must walk in the dark, and be brave, and let the others lead you wrong.

"Lead me wrong?"

They will offer you a gift. A kind one. Silver-faced and sweet. They will say that it will make you small. The violet depths seemed to deepen. Do not take it.

Her breath caught. "What gift?"

You will know.

"Obsyra—"

And the man.

She stopped.

The one with the ash eyes. He stands outside my door with his hand upon his sword. I can feel him. The line of the Marshal is strong in his blood. The great head tilted, a degree. He is not what he looks. He is not what you fear. He is, also, not what you hope. He is a man who will do a terrible thing for love, and call it mercy, and believe it.

"What do I do?"

Love him anyway. It was almost a smile. You always did. It was your gravest fault, and the greatest gift to the world.

The floor tilted under her. She saw her own hand come up, as if from a great distance, to touch the cold black muzzle. The scales were warm. Beneath them something moved, deep and slow, a great engine turning over after a very long idling.

The chamber blurred.

Sleep, little one, said the voice, very softly. I have you.

She felt the dark come up to meet her like water. And the last thing she heard before it closed over her head was the heartbeat, vast and gentle and close as her own skin, saying, in the rhythm of a lullaby she could almost remember, thum. Thum. Thum.