The Debt of the Throne

I have done a thing I cannot undo.

Kieran read the line three times before he could make himself turn the page.

"I will leave you," said Osric quietly. "The lady needs rest, in any case. She is still gray about the mouth." He drew the blanket from the chair and folded it over his arm. "You will find the hours move strangely. Do not be alarmed. If you require anything, ring for Berylla. She has been feeding me for a week, and I begin to believe she is fond of me."

"Master Osric."

"Majesty?"

"Take her." Kieran did not look up. "Please. And stay with her tonight."

He heard the old man's footsteps cross the carpet. He heard Solaia's, lighter, hesitating at the door. He felt her look at him; he could feel it as a weight between his shoulder blades, warm and uncertain. He thought, with perfect clarity, if I turn around I will not be able to do this. And so he kept his eyes on the page, and said nothing, and after a long moment the door closed.

The room was very quiet.

He lit the lamp. He pulled the chair a little closer to the desk. And he began to read.

…

The Marshal Aldren wrote the way he had fought: plainly, without ornament, and with the terrible honesty of a man who has stopped expecting to be forgiven.

He began with a confession. He had been twenty-three when he swore the oath, a farmer's son from the low country with a gift for horses and a scar across his jaw. He had been brought to the White City by chance, a courier, and noticed by a girl of fifteen on a balcony who had been bored by her tutors. She had set him a riddle. He had answered it wrongly. She had laughed so delightedly that he had forgotten for a full minute where he was.

That was the beginning. I should like it written down. Whatever else comes after, I should like it known that it began with a laugh.

Kieran turned the page.

There were years. A long summer of them, rendered in sparse, startling strokes. The girl had been Queen by twenty. Her father was dead, her mother ill, her council full of old men who watched her with narrowed eyes. The Marshal had held the Sky Guard for her, and ridden at her right hand, and learned the names of every dragon in her stables. He had learned, too, in the quiet of a thousand nights, that he was in love with a woman who thought of him as a brother.

She called me her sword. I should have been grateful. I was a fool.

He read about the first signs of the rot. A delegation of priests from the western provinces, soft-voiced and sleek, who had come to the palace with gifts. They spoke of a new faith. A faith without kings, they said. A faith that would bind the beasts to the service of men instead of the other way round. The Queen had listened with interest. She was always curious. She had asked a hundred questions, and given them a house.

I did not like them. I said so. She told me I was jealous of her attention.

She was right. That was the worst of it.

Kieran put down the book and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

It was a very strange sensation. He had expected a villain. He had grown up, as every child of his house had, on a rich diet of stories about the Saint-General who delivered the world: the brave, bright commander, the hero in the mural. He had built a part of his character on defying the ideal. He had been, he understood now, a much younger man than he had known, and the resentment he had carried against that painted face had been exactly the resentment of a boy who has not forgiven his father for being admired.

And here was the man. Not a hero. Not a monster. A lonely soldier, writing late at night in a cold tent, to no one at all.

He picked the book up again.

…

It took until the small hours to reach the betrayal.

It came on page three hundred and twelve, with no preamble. Aldren had stopped writing for a month. When he resumed, the hand was different: cramped, tight, the pen pressed so hard that it had gone through the paper in places.

They came to me in the autumn. Three of them, in white, with a woman in a gray mask who did not speak. They said that they had seen a vision. That the Queen's reign would end in fire, that the dragons would turn on the people, that only a great sacrifice could prevent it. They said I was the only man who could save her.

I asked what the sacrifice would be.

They said it would be small.

He read that sentence twice. His hands had begun to shake.

They told me that the beasts were the danger. That their fire was a sickness, a hunger, a flaw in the blood. They told me that they could be cured. That the Queen's own power, the white flame, could be taken, and kept, and used to heal a world. They said it would not hurt her. They said she would be, afterward, only a woman. A happy one. Free of the burden of the crown.

They said I could have her.

I have written that down because I promised myself I would not lie in this book. I did not believe it, quite. But I wanted it. I wanted it so badly that I did not ask the question I should have asked. I did not ask what would happen to the rest.

On the next page, there was a single line, and a blot where the pen had stopped.

I opened the gates.

The lamp hissed. Somewhere in the palace, a clock struck three. Kieran sat quite still with the book open under his hands, looking at the blot, and found that he was not thinking anything at all.

It was a very gentle, very final silence. He had sometimes had it in battle, in the instant after a blow he had not seen coming. He thought, so that is what it feels like when a thing you have always believed turns out to be a lie. And then, with the strange detached lucidity that follows great shock, how unsurprising. How ordinary.

He turned the page.

…

The rest was worse, and it was written plainly, and he read it all.

Aldren described the fall of the White City as a man describes a house fire he has set himself: with a dreadful, fascinated precision. The silver masks had come in the dead of night, with the collars. They had put them on the dragons while they slept. One by one, in their stalls, in their eyries on the towers. A thousand of them. Ten thousand. The beasts had woken screaming, and the sound had gone up from the city like a single enormous wail, and the burning had begun.

I stood in the courtyard. I had thought that I could stop it. I had a sword. I had forty men. I stood with my back to the fountain and watched them put the iron on Obsyra's neck.

She did not fight. She looked at me. She was the Queen's own dragon, and she looked at me, and she did not make a sound.

Kieran's throat closed.

I understood then what I had done. I did not understand it in any way that could be used. I only understood that it was too late.

There was more. The fall of the tower. The Queen on the highest spire, in her white gown, with her crown alight, fighting alone against a ring of masked priests. The old woman, her mother, who had come up the stairs in her nightdress with a book in her hands. The terrible white fire that had gone up in the sky, a pillar of it, bright as a second sun, and the silence that had followed.

She is gone. They say that she burned herself to ash to keep it from them. I do not believe it. I saw the light. It was not death. It was a door.

They have taken what they wanted. They have taken it into a great tank of iron and glass beneath the temple, and they call it the Holy Light, and the world will worship it for a thousand years.

They have given me a crown.

I have taken it. God forgive me, I have taken it. I would have taken anything.

The page was spotted with dried water, in a long scatter. Kieran touched it with one fingertip, and did not know whether it was Aldren's tears or his own.

…

He came to the account of the Debt at dawn.

It was not at the end. He was almost surprised by that. It was folded into the middle of the book, between a list of revenues and a note about the grain harvest, set down in the small flat voice of a man recording a boundary dispute.

It begins to be clear what I have bought.

The Pontiff has taught me a thing. He says that when the dragons died, a portion of their power was bound to the men who made them die. The power does not go away. It is borrowed. It sits in the blood, and passes from father to son, and it is called the Gift of Night. It makes our line strong. It will keep us on the throne for ten thousand years.

But it must be paid.

I asked how. He said: with interest.

I have felt the first of it today. A coldness in the hand. A darkness at the edge of the eye. I have been told that it will grow with every generation. That it will crawl up the arm, and into the heart, and into the head, and that the voice will come. And that when the Queen wakes, as the old women in the north say she will, the whole of the principal will fall due.

I asked what that meant. He would not say.

I have found out. I will write it here so that whoever opens this book may know.

Kieran turned the page.

It was the last. The ink was fresher. The hand was wavering, uncertain, the hand of a very old man, and the date at the top said that it had been written forty-one years after the fall of the City, in the winter of the Marshal's death.

She will wake. It does not matter when. A hundred years, a thousand. It will come in a season of ash, and it will come in her own time. And when it does, the debt will be called, and it will be called in the only coin she will accept.

The blood of the line.

Not a tithe. Not a share. The whole of it. Every drop that carries the Gift of Night, down to the last child of my body, will be spent. It is the only way the Veil can be torn from her without her dying. It is the only way to give back what we took.

I do not know who will be the last. I pray it is not a child.

I pray he will be a man who loves her. Because it is the only price she would not ask.

Forgive me, Sol.

The pen had trailed off the page.

…

Kieran did not know how long he sat there.

When he looked up, the window was bright. A gray cold morning light lay across the desk, over the maps, the cups, the ledger. A bird was singing in the garden. Far below, somewhere in the palace, a door slammed and a servant laughed.

He stood up. He closed the book. He walked to the window and put his forehead against the cold glass and stood, for a long time, listening to his own heartbeat.

The whole of the line. Down to the last child.

There was no child. There never had been. He was the last of the house of Aldren; his father had died childless but for him, and he had never taken a wife. He understood, with the dreadful calm of arithmetic, what the book was telling him.

It was telling him that he was the coin.

He laughed, very softly.

I pray he will be a man who loves her. Of course. Of course that was what it meant. He had not needed a prophecy, after all. He had known, since the day he carried her out of the fire, that he would have given her anything she asked.

He had simply not known the price.

"Majesty."

He turned. The door had opened a few inches. Osric stood in the gap, with his blanket over his arm and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, and his round brown eyes were very kind.

"You have read it," said the old man.

"Yes."

"All of it?"

"All of it."

"Then you know." Osric came in, shutting the door behind him. "You know what the book asks. And you know that there is a promise that I extracted from you last night, and that you must now decide whether to keep."

Kieran turned his face back to the window.

"She must never know this," he said.

"Majesty—"

"She must never read that page." His voice was perfectly steady. "Not today. Not ever. I will not have it said of her that she was handed a knife and told that it was a gift. Whatever she is, whatever she wants to do to me when she remembers, I will not have her be the instrument of a bargain struck by a dead man." He drew a breath. "Swear to me."

The old archivist was silent for a long moment.

"I cannot," he said at last, gently. "I would if I could. But I have sworn to a thing older than you, and I think she has a right to the truth." He paused. "I can give you time, Majesty. Not much. But a little."

"How much?"

"Until she remembers."

Kieran closed his eyes.

On the desk behind him, the ledger lay in the cold morning light, shut, with its worn corners and its stitched strip of vellum. Nobody had seen him do it. He had done it very quietly, in the last hour of the night, with the tip of a letter-knife and a hand that did not shake.

The last page was no longer in the book.

It lay folded small in the inner pocket of his coat, against his heart, where the Hollow could not reach it.