Cracks

Neither of them spoke on the flight home.

It was a long flight, and a silent one. The army went by road, a day behind, with the prisoners in wagons and the wounded on litters. The Emperor and his Empress rode ahead on the dragon through a sky the color of old pewter, with the smoke of Harrowmere still smearing the horizon behind them. She sat in front of him in the saddle. He sat behind her with his arms around her waist and his chin on her hair, as he always did, and she could feel the hard shape of his breastplate against her back and the slow cautious beat of his heart.

She did not lean into it.

It was a small thing. She had leaned into it a hundred times. But she kept her spine very straight, and her eyes on the horizon, and she thought: He's holding me as if I might break. Or as if I might leave.

The priest's face kept coming back to her.

The Emperor already gave his word.

She turned it over and over. It was a lie, perhaps. A dying man's delirium. The Pontiff was a past master of lies, and the priest had been his creature, and the whole thing might be nothing more than a last cruel flick of the knife. She had seen Kieran in the doorway. She had seen the blank mask of his face. He was delirious, he had said.

He said it too fast.

She had never, in all her months at the palace, seen Kieran say anything too fast.

They had been flying for an hour when she saw the smoke.

It rose from the north, a faint brown smudge against the pewter sky, very far off, so thin that she thought at first it was cloud. But it did not drift. It rose in a straight thin column, and then another beside it, and then a third, and under them the horizon had a different texture, a darker one, as if something had been drawn on it with a pencil.

"What is that?" she said.

She felt his arms stiffen.

"A burn," said Kieran. "A charcoal-works. The northern forests are being cleared for the new road."

"What new road?"

"The one to the border."

"I didn't know there was a road."

"There has been talk of it for years." His voice was light. Too light. "Do not trouble yourself. It is a tedious matter of commerce."

She said nothing.

She looked at the smoke. She looked at the dark line on the horizon beneath it. And she thought of Marenne's careful voice in the Archive, many weeks ago: the Church's surveyors have been very busy on the Black Ridge.

"Gron," she said quietly.

The great head turned a fraction.

"Go north."

"Solaia—"

"Please."

Yes, said the dragon, simply, in the place beyond words. And with a long, slow, deliberate beat of his wings, he banked.

…

She had not known it was so large.

She had expected a few huts. A quarry, perhaps, with a gang of masons. What opened below her, as they dropped out of the cloud and into the clear gray air, was not a worksite. It was a country.

The Black Ridge rose from the plain like a tooth, a long spine of dark volcanic rock eight miles from end to end, with a flat bare summit that must once have been a bleak and empty place. It was not empty now. Roads climbed its flanks in zigzags, wide as highways, scored deep with the ruts of wagons. Scaffolding clung to the cliffs. Smoke rose from a hundred forges. And over the whole ridge, thick as ants on a dropped sweet, moved the people.

Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.

They were small from here, small as grains of rice, a dark seething crawl of bodies along the ramps and ledges. Some hauled sledges of stone. Some swung hammers. Others, in long lines, passed up baskets of rubble hand to hand along the cliff. She saw whips. She saw a man fall, and a line of gray-robed overseers close over him like water. She saw a cart go by laden with something white and long, and a small stooped figure trudging after it with a bucket.

At the top of the ridge, on the broad flat crown, stood what they were building.

She could not at first understand it. It was white. It was not made of stone but of something paler, smoother, with the sheen of old ivory. It rose from the rock in a great ring: thirty or forty colossal pillars, tall as towers, each curved like the rib of some vast creature and tapering to a point. They leaned inward. Their tips almost met. Between them ran a web of silver cables, glittering faintly in the dim light, and at the center of the ring, on a platform of black stone, a single taller column was beginning to climb.

Her mouth went dry.

She had seen this before. Not in life. In a drawing on three sheets of heavy vellum, in a close beautiful hand, laid out on an oak table in the Archive. She had stood behind Osric's chair with a sleeping dragon in her arms. She had looked at the thin ink lines, the ring of pillars, the lattice, the small bright point at the heart of it.

Burned, she thought. He burned it. He told me. I saw the ashes.

"It is a border-fortress," said Kieran.

She did not turn. She could not.

"A watch-keep, against the Church. I have spent months arranging it. The Pontiff proposed a shrine on the Ridge, as the price of lifting the ultimatum, and I thought it prudent to say yes. A shrine will be built. A great one. It will draw the pilgrims and the money, and keep them in the north, away from the capital. When the Church has finished, I shall take it over as a garrison." He spoke evenly, quickly, like a man reading from a report. "It is a political matter. It will ease our position. I did not wish to trouble you."

"It looks like ribs."

"It is an architectural conceit."

"It looks like a dragon's ribs, Kieran."

"The Pontiff is a man of strange taste."

She turned in the saddle, slowly, until she was facing him. She had to look up. He was very pale. His eyes, behind the lifted visor, were bright and fixed, the pupils too wide. A drop of sweat had run down from his temple to the corner of his jaw. His mouth was set in a smile.

It was a good smile. It was the smile of the tower. And she saw that it had been put on, and not long ago, and with some effort, and that behind it he was waiting.

He's afraid, she thought. He's more afraid than I've ever seen him.

And a second thought, colder, followed it up from somewhere under her ribs:

Of me, or of the question?

"I see," said Solaia.

"You do not seem convinced."

"I'm just tired." She turned back to the front. "It's been a long day. I saw a boy die."

"Solaia."

"I'd like to go home."

He said nothing. His arms tightened a fraction around her waist. Gron turned in the air, and the Ridge slid away behind them, and the pale ring of pillars dwindled to a handful of white teeth on a gray horizon. She watched it go. She did not look back.

She did not need to. She had learned it by heart.

…

She let him make love to her that night, and was ashamed of how little she felt it.

It was not that she did not want him. She did, with the usual blind fierce hunger. It was that some small cold observer in her mind had stepped back and was watching from the corner of the room, taking careful notes. She saw the way his hands trembled. She saw the way he held her, too tight, as if he were drowning, and pressed his face to her neck and said her name over and over, and under it, almost inaudible, something else. She was almost sure she knew what.

Forgive me.

She held him until he slept.

It took a long time. He fought it. She felt him fighting, in the dark, a rigid watchfulness that did not slacken until the small hours, and when at last his breathing slowed she lay with her head on his shoulder, listening, and did not move. The moon had risen. A thin white bar of it lay across the bed. She turned her face into it and looked at the ceiling, with its familiar crack that ran in a long slow curve from the corner to the lamp-hook.

It's a border-fortress. He's told me so.

She tried it on, like a coat. She turned it this way and that. A watch-keep. A shrine. A matter of commerce. It fit. It fit perfectly. It fit so well that she could not find the seam.

And that was the trouble.

Because she had known him now for a year and a season. She knew the way his voice dropped when he lied. She knew the particular stillness that settled over him when he was hiding a thing. She knew, with the sure animal certainty that had kept her alive in a ditch, when a man was telling her the truth and when he was telling her something that had been prepared. And he had told her the second thing, today, on the back of a dragon, with a bead of sweat on his jaw.

He's lying to me.

The words were so quiet she barely heard them. She lay with her hand flat on his heart, feeling it beat, strong and steady and slow, and the thought sat in her mind like a small cold stone.

He's lying, and he loves me, and he's lying because he loves me.

It was the worst combination she could imagine. She would almost have preferred a cruel man. A cruel man she knew what to do with.

She lay awake and counted the cracks in the ceiling until the birds began.

At some point near dawn, so softly that it might have been the settling of the house, she heard a sound from the study next door. A small, dry, careful click. The sound of a key turning in an old brass lock.

She turned her head. The bed beside her was empty. She had not felt him go.

And in the cold gray light, with her heart beating in her throat, she heard the door of the desk drawer slide open, and a rustle of paper, and nothing else at all.