The Crown of Sky

Memory does not come back the way people think.

It does not return as a story, one thing after another, with a beginning and an end. It comes as weather. It comes as the smell of rain on a hot road, as the cold slap of water on a bare foot, as a tune hummed by someone in the next room. It comes through the skin first. And then, all at once, like a door blown open by wind, it comes through the eyes.

Solaia stood on the black glass of the Ridge with the shackles ringing at her feet, and the first thing she remembered was honey.

…

She was six years old, and she was sitting on the roof of the world.

That was how she thought of it. The palace of Vraelyra stood on a hill of white stone above the city, and the hill stood on a plateau, and the plateau stood on the shoulder of a mountain, and from the highest parapet of the highest tower you could see the entire sky. She sat on the cold marble with her bare feet hanging over the edge and a honey-cake in each fist. Below her, the city lay in the morning like a bowl of spilled pearls. Terraces rose above terraces. Fountains threw rainbows. Bridges of white stone arched over the gardens, and on every bridge, in every garden, in every high airy square, there were dragons.

They were not like the ones in the Aerie.

They were not chained, and not red, and not small. They were everywhere. They slept on the rooftops, sprawled like cats, with their wings spread to catch the sun. They dozed in the fountains. They nested in the towers, hundreds of feet up, and as she watched, one of them uncoiled from a minaret and dropped into the air in a lazy spiral, a great glittering sapphire shape with a rider on its neck, and rose with a sound like a sigh.

"You are not supposed to be up here."

She looked round.

A boy of nine sat on the parapet beside her, cross-legged, looking worried. He had a thin dark face, a mop of unruly hair, and an expression of constant faint anxiety, like a puppy that has been told to guard something. His name was Teren. He was her brother. He was the heir.

"I'm allowed."

"You're not. Mother said."

"Mother said I wasn't allowed on the east tower. This is the north." She took a bite of honey-cake. "She never said anything about the north."

"That's a very bad argument."

"It's a very good cake."

He sighed, the long-suffering sigh of an elder brother, and reached for the second one. She let him take it. Together they sat on the roof of the world, sticky-fingered, with their feet dangling over a drop of six hundred feet, while the sun came up over the Sky.

"Sol," said Teren.

"Mm?"

"Are you scared?"

"Of what?"

"Tomorrow." He swallowed. "The Hatching Rite. You're nine, next year, that's when you're meant to go in. They say it's hard. They say the dragons don't always choose. Sometimes there's a child who goes into the Hall and comes out and nobody chose them." He picked at the cake. "I went in last spring. Nobody chose me."

Her heart gave a pang. "Teren."

"It's all right. I'm the heir. I'm not meant to ride." He said it bravely, and the bravery was heartbreaking. "The Throne doesn't need a rider. It needs a King. But you..." He glanced sideways at her. "Mother says you'll be chosen. She says you're the kind."

"What kind?"

"The kind who just knows."

She thought about it. She looked out at the city, at the dragons wheeling in the gold of the morning, and felt the warm hum of their presence in the back of her mind, like the noise of a vast contented hive. She had heard them all her life. She had thought everyone could.

"I'll tell them to choose you too," she said.

"You can't."

"I can ask."

"Sol, that's not how—"

"I'll ask very nicely," said the six-year-old Queen of the Sky, and licked honey off her thumb.

…

The memory changed.

It did it smoothly, as dreams do, with no seam. She was nine, and she was walking down a long cold corridor in a white dress, barefoot, with her heart hammering in her ears. The walls were hung with banners. At the end of the corridor, a pair of enormous doors stood open, and beyond them lay darkness, and from the darkness came a smell she would remember for the rest of her life: warm stone, hot iron, honey on fire.

The Hall of Hatching.

She stepped inside.

It was a vast domed chamber, dark as a cave, with a floor of black sand. Nothing moved. She stood in the doorway, a small figure in white, and the doors swung closed behind her. In the dark, a hundred pairs of eyes opened.

They were gold, and violet, and green. They hung in the dark like lamps. She felt them turn, one by one, with the slow, unhurried attention of enormous things. She felt them weigh her. She was nine years old and terrified, and she knew, with the deep instinctive certainty of a child, that if she ran, she would never be able to come back.

So she walked.

She walked into the dark, across the black sand, with the eyes on either side of her. She did not look at them. She looked at the floor. She counted her steps, and her breath, and her heartbeat. And somewhere in the middle of the Hall, in the center of that vast circle of watchers, she stopped.

Because something was breathing.

It was behind her. It was close. She felt its breath on the back of her neck, warm as an oven. She felt the great slow thump of a heart the size of a house. She felt a shadow fall across her, vast and soft and sweet-smelling, and she turned, very slowly, and looked up.

A dragon.

Not a hatchling. Not a mere beast. The greatest dragon she had ever seen, black as night, scaled in violet fire, with a head as long as a river-boat and horns ringed with silver. Her eyes were the color of storms. She looked down at the small girl on the sand. She lowered her enormous head until her jaw rested on the ground, and the great nostrils flared, and a breath of warm air stirred the child's hair.

There you are, said the dragon.

It was not a sound. It was a meaning, rolling into her like a tide.

I have been waiting a very long time.

"What's your name?" whispered Solaia.

Obsyra.

"I'm Solaia."

I know. The great head tilted. I have known you since before you were born. Your mother carried you under her heart, and I sat outside the door and sang. Did you hear me?

She had. She had always thought it was a dream.

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

Good. There was something in the vast violet depths that might have been laughter. Then you know me. Come, little one. We have a great deal to do.

She put out her hand. It looked so tiny against the black scales. The dragon waited, with infinite patience, and she laid her palm flat on the warm, rough, living hide, and something went through her like a bell.

She felt every dragon in the Hall bow.

It was not a sound. It was a pressure, a kind of release, as when a held breath is let go. A hundred great heads lowered. A hundred pairs of eyes closed, and opened, and looked at her with awe. And the voice of Obsyra said, close and low and tender in the dark, they say you will be the greatest Queen the Sky has ever known.

They have not met you yet.

…

The coronation was a blaze.

She was sixteen. She would remember that as the day when everything ended and began. Her father had died in the winter, of a wasting sickness that no physician could name, and the fever that took her brother two years before had left a hole in the family that nothing could fill. She wore a gown of white silk, and a veil of spun silver, and a collar of seed pearls so heavy she thought it would break her neck. She stood at the top of the Stair of Heaven, three hundred steps of pale marble, with the whole of the city spread beneath her and a roar rising from ten thousand throats.

At her side stood her mother.

The Dowager Queen was a tall, pale, thin woman with black hair going gray at the temples and a mouth that had learned not to show pain. Her eyes were the same violet as Solaia's own. She held her daughter's hand in both of hers, and her fingers were as cold as the marble.

"You are afraid," she said, very low.

"A little."

"Good. It means you understand what you are doing." The cold hands tightened. "Listen to me, my heart. Listen well. There is something I must say, and I have not the right moment, and I fear there will not be one. They will put the crown on you today. They will tell you that you rule. And you will, in the sense that all the rest of them need you to. But the truth is that you are not ruling. You are keeping."

"Keeping what?"

"The peace." Her mother's voice was very quiet. "The balance. Between the beasts and the people. Between the old fire and the new. It is a thing that must be tended, every day, like a garden. Do not let them tell you that it is easy. Do not let them tell you that it is done." She swallowed. "And do not trust anyone who says that it can be made simpler."

"Mother—"

"I am not a clever woman. But I have lived a long time among clever men." A faint, wry smile. "I have noticed that they always want to make things simpler. And that the simplest solution is almost always the one that kills someone."

The trumpets sounded.

Solaia turned her head. Down the length of the Stair, between the ranks of white-clad nobles and the banners of the Seven Thrones, a man in dark armor was climbing toward her. He was tall. He carried a sword in a plain black scabbard, and a plain black helm under his arm, and he walked with the loose, careful, unhurried tread of a person who has spent his life in the saddle. His hair was black. His face was weathered. His eyes were gray, and clear, and fixed on her.

Aldren.

He was twenty-four. She had known him since she was fifteen, and she had thought of him, for a year, as the most reliable creature in the world. He was her friend. He was the only person in the palace who told her the truth when it was inconvenient. He had taught her to ride in the saddle of a horse before she ever sat a dragon. He had stood with her in the cold at her father's funeral.

He reached the top step. He knelt.

"Majesty," he said.

His voice was low, and rough, and trembled a little. She looked down at his bent head and felt a wave of tenderness so strong it took her breath.

"Marshal," she said. "Rise. You'll make me cry in front of everyone."

He rose. He looked at her. And she saw, in the gray eyes, for one unguarded instant, something she did not yet have the wit to name: a hunger, a ferocity, a wonder. It was gone as quickly as it came.

"I'm told," said Aldren gravely, "that I'm to hold your train."

"You're not."

"It's in the ceremonial."

"Then the ceremonial can go hang." She grinned at him. It was her old grin, the one from the roof of the world. "Come on. Walk with me. I want the one person up there who isn't going to make a speech."

He laughed. It was a startled, delighted, unwilling sound. And she took his arm, and turned, and together they stepped through the great doors into the Hall of the Sky, where the Throne waited.

…

It was white. It was enormous. It stood on a dais of seven steps, carved from a single block of pearl-colored stone, and it was shaped like the wing of a dragon, curving up and back, so that the person who sat in it seemed to be cradled in a great arc of light. A ring of tall windows let the sun fall through. It made a pool of gold on the floor before the dais.

The Archpriest stood waiting beside it.

He was a tall, thin man, in a robe of gold and white, with a narrow scholarly face and pale eyes. He was perhaps forty. He carried a cushion of purple velvet, and on it lay a crown: a plain circlet of white gold, with a single stone in the center, the color of milk. He bowed as she approached. He had a pleasant voice, soft and clear, and a smile that crinkled the skin at the corners of his eyes.

"Your Majesty," he said. "May the gods keep you."

"Archpriest Valerian." She nodded. "You've come a long way."

"I am honored to have been asked."

"My mother says you're a great scholar."

"Your mother is too kind." His gaze flicked, briefly, to the Dowager, who was standing very straight in the doorway with her face like marble. Something passed between them, an instant, no more: a flicker of wariness, of old unspoken knowledge. Then he looked back, and smiled again. "I am merely a physician, Majesty. I have spent my life studying the ills of the body. It is a humble craft."

"I'm told you've made a study of the dragons."

"I have indeed." He bowed his head. "I find them fascinating. Such power. Such grace. It is a wonder that the world has been blessed with them." He lifted the cushion. "If Your Majesty would be so good as to kneel?"

She knelt.

The stone was cold under her knees. The crown was cold on her brow. She felt it settle, light as a feather, on her hair, and she felt the whole Hall draw breath. The sun fell on her face. And in the moment before the shout went up, in the instant between one heartbeat and the next, she felt Obsyra's presence at the back of her mind, vast and warm and fierce and tender, and she heard the great dragon's voice, soft as a hand upon her hair.

There, said Obsyra. You are Queen.

Now be careful.

She rose. The shout went up. Ten thousand voices, a hundred thousand, the whole city and the whole sky, ringing in the rafters of the Hall until the windows shook. She turned to face them. She lifted her hand. And over the heads of the crowd, over the banners, over the sea of faces, she saw Aldren, standing at the foot of the dais with his hand upon his sword, looking up at her.

He was smiling.

It was the smile of a man who would, if she asked, walk into fire.

She smiled back.

She had never been so happy in her life.