The Night the Fire Died

The years after the crown were a gold thread, and she did not feel the knot until the night it pulled tight.

There was work, and she was good at it. She rose at dawn and walked the stables with Obsyra's great head at her shoulder. She sat in council with a pen between her teeth and listened to old men argue about grain. She flew the Seven Thrones in a long slow circuit, in a year, and was received at every one with song. The other Queens and Kings of the Sky, tall solemn people with eyes like Obsyra's, took her hands and called her sister. She learned the old tongue properly, and the working of the White Fire, and the thousand small tendernesses of governing a world where the beasts were not property but kin.

She laughed a great deal. She remembered that, now, with a pang. She had been so young, and so sure, and so absolutely certain that nothing could go wrong.

Aldren was at her right hand through all of it.

He rode beside her. He sat at her table. He taught her to fence in the practice yard, on cold bright mornings, and she disarmed him once, and he laughed so hard that he had to sit on the ground. He told her the truth when she did not want it. He told her, in the third year, when a drought parched the western provinces, that she was spending too much on the Aerie and not enough on the granaries. She sulked for a week. She changed the budget. The drought broke. He never said I told you so, and she loved him for it, in the clean uncomplicated way that one loves a brother.

She did not see what was in his face when she was not looking.

It was a thing she would only see afterward, in memory, with the awful clarity of hindsight. His eyes following her across a room. His hand stopping, halfway, as it reached to touch her sleeve. The gray stillness that came over him whenever someone spoke of marriage. She had thought it was shyness. She had thought, in her innocence, that it was sorrow for his own lost family, the farm in the low country where his mother had died.

She was nineteen before she understood. And by then it was far too late.

…

Valerian came to her in the spring.

He came with a retinue of twelve, in the robes of the white order, with a casket of gifts. He was received with all courtesy. She sat in her small council room with her mother at her side and listened to him talk. He was an easy man to listen to. He spoke of faith, and of the soul, and of the great debt that the world owed to the beasts of the Sky. He spoke with real warmth. He had, she thought, a gift for making you feel that you were the only person in the room.

"The danger," said Valerian, "is not in the dragons themselves."

"Then where?"

"In the absence of discipline." He spread his long pale hands. "They are noble creatures. But they are, with respect, creatures. They have no code. No law. They answer only to the heart of the rider, and the heart, as we both know, may err." A gentle pause. "I have seen a dragon go mad. In the south. A young one, newly bonded, whose rider died in a fall. It burned three villages before it was put down."

"I heard," said Solaia. "It was a tragedy."

"It was an avoidable tragedy." His voice dropped. "That is what grieves me, Majesty. We know how to prevent it. We have always known. It requires only a little... structure."

"What kind of structure?"

He smiled. It was a lovely smile.

"A small thing," he said. "A collar."

Her mother's hand tightened on her arm.

She remembered that. It was the first thing that came back, in the cold of the Ridge: the slow, precise pressure of those long fingers, and the silence in the room. She had looked at Valerian. He had looked at her. He had not blinked.

"A collar," said Solaia.

"A very light one. Silver, perhaps. Blessed by the order. It does nothing to the beast when the beast is calm. It would be, to all outward appearance, a piece of jewelry. But in the event that a dragon should run mad..." He turned his palm up. "It would be possible to calm it. To bring it back. Gently."

"You would be able to control them."

"Heal them, Majesty. If I may." He bowed his head. "I am only a physician."

She did not answer at once. She looked at her mother, and her mother's face was like stone. She looked at Aldren, who stood by the door in his dark armor with his hand on his hilt, and Aldren's eyes were fixed on the priest's face, with a look she could not read.

"I'll think about it," she said at last.

"Of course, Majesty."

"I'm not inclined to agree."

"I would never presume." Valerian rose, smooth and gracious, and bowed again. "I merely wished you to know that the offer stands. When the time comes."

He left. He took his retinue, and his casket, and his soft pleasant voice, and the room felt for a long time afterward as though a window had been opened onto a cold night.

"Never," said the Dowager Queen.

"I know, Mother."

"Not for a hundred years. Not if the Throne itself was at stake."

"I know."

"He will come again."

"I know." Solaia took a long, slow breath. "Aldren. Double the guard on the Aerie. Quietly. I want a man at every door. And find out who his friends are in the city."

"Majesty," said Aldren.

He did not look at her as he said it.

…

It happened on a night in the dead of winter, under a sky so clear that the stars looked like pins.

She was in her chambers when she heard the first scream.

She was sitting at the window, in her nightgown, with a book on her knee and Obsyra's great head resting on the sill beside her. She had been reading a treatise on river-flooding. She had not been paying attention. She heard a thin, high, ragged cry from somewhere far below, and then another, and then a long dreadful note that she had never heard before in the whole of her life.

It was a dragon, screaming.

She was on her feet before she knew it. The book fell. Obsyra's head came up, and the great violet eyes were wide and white-ringed, and a voice went through her mind like a lance.

Sol. The Aerie. They are in the Aerie. They are—

It broke off.

It did not stop. It broke, in the middle of a word, like a snapped string. She stood in her nightgown at the window of the highest tower in the world and felt something go out of her. Something vast and soft and warm and familiar, a presence she had carried all her life. It went out like a lamp. She put her hand to her chest and found it wet, and looked down, and saw that her fingers were red.

She was bleeding from the heart.

Not in her body. In her mind. In the place where Obsyra lived. She felt it tear. She felt the great black dragon beside her slump on the window ledge, convulse, and lie still, and she heard herself saying her name, Obsyra, Obsyra, in a high voice she did not know.

There was a collar around the dragon's neck.

She had not seen it come. A band of silver, narrow as a thread, locked about the base of the throat. It glimmered in the starlight. And from it ran a thin cold line of white, up the long scaled neck, into the skull, and she could feel it. It was a hook. It was a thing that reached into the place where the dragon's heart lived and took hold.

Sol, said Obsyra, faintly. Run.

"No. No, I won't—"

It is a trap. They have... the Marshal... the gate...

"Aldren?"

I am sorry, little one. The great eyes were going dim. I am so sorry. I should have seen. I should have—

The voice ended.

…

She ran.

Down the spiral stair, in her bare feet, through the smoke. The palace was burning. She had not known fire could be so loud. It roared in the halls and the galleries; it ate the tapestries; it ran along the beams like a living thing. She passed servants lying on the floor, and guards with swords in their hands, and in the courtyard, where the great fountain stood, she saw the forty men of the Sky Guard standing in a ring.

They were not fighting.

They were standing with their weapons lowered, in a perfect circle, and in the center of the circle stood Aldren.

He had no helm. He stood with his back to the fountain and his sword in the dirt at his feet, and his face, in the red light, was the face of a man in a dream. His hands hung at his sides. His eyes were wide and fixed. And before him, in a long white line, filing through the open gate in a silent procession, came the priests.

They wore silver masks.

Hundreds of them. They came on without a sound, in perfect order, each with a coil of silver cord in his hand. They moved across the courtyard like a tide, and where they passed, the dragons fell. She saw it. She saw the beasts of the Aerie, the great and noble creatures that had slept on her rooftops all her life, brought down one by one with a loop of silver around the throat. They did not fight. They could not. The cord took hold, and the bright eyes dimmed, and they sank to their knees and lay still, and the priests walked on.

"Aldren!"

He flinched.

He turned his head. In the firelight, she saw his face, and the sight of it stopped her like a hand against her chest. It was wet. It was white. It was entirely without hope. He looked at her as a man looks at the ocean in which he is drowning.

"Sol," he said.

"What have you done?"

"I..." His voice cracked. "They said it would be gentle. They said you would be safe. They said it would only be the beasts, and you would be—you would be only a woman, and I could—" He stopped. He closed his eyes. "I am sorry. I am so sorry. I am so..."

"You opened the gate."

"Yes."

"You opened the gate."

"I thought—" His mouth worked. "I thought I could keep you. I thought—"

She hit him.

She did not know she was going to. It was an open-handed blow, across the face, with all the strength of a nineteen-year-old girl who has just watched her world burn. His head snapped round. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. He did not move to stop her. He stood with his hands at his sides and let her, and the tears ran down his cheeks, and he said in a whisper, "Again."

"I trusted you."

"I know."

"I loved you."

"I know." He shut his eyes. "That was the worst of it."

A shadow fell across them both.

It was a tall one. A thin one. It stepped from the line of the silver masks and stood at the edge of the fountain, its pale robes flickering in the firelight. It was not wearing a mask. It had pushed the hood back. The face beneath was narrow and fine-boned and pleasantly lined, and the pale eyes were as gentle as ever.

"Majesty," said Valerian.

She looked at him.

She had never hated anyone before. She had thought she knew what the word meant. She had hated her tutors, once, for a week. She had hated the cold of the north tower in winter. But what rose in her now, looking at that kind and quiet face, was a thing of a different order. It was not hot. It was not loud. It was a cold white silence, like the silence at the bottom of a frozen lake.

"You," she said.

"It was necessary."

"You burned my city."

"I did not. Your Marshal opened the gate. I merely walked through." He lifted one hand, with a faint regretful smile. "I am so very sorry, Majesty. I did try to spare you. I offered you every opportunity to submit. But the beasts were a danger, and you would not see it, and so—"

"Be quiet."

"—it came to this."

"Be quiet," said Solaia.

And the fire came.

It came up from the deepest place in her, from the very bottom of her bones. It poured out of her palms in a white spiral, and the courtyard lit as if the sun had risen. The silver masks screamed. The Sky Guard fell back. Aldren cried out and flung up an arm. And Valerian stepped quickly back from the fountain with an expression of mild alarm, as one steps from the edge of a flooding river, and raised his own hand, and said a word.

A thin silver cord uncoiled from his sleeve. It hung in the air like a snake.

"Your mother," said Valerian, "has been very busy."

…

She turned.

On the highest stair of the palace, at the head of the great flight that led up to the Throne Hall, stood the Dowager Queen.

She was in her nightdress. Her gray hair was loose. She had a book clutched to her chest in both arms, a thick old volume bound in black, and she was looking down at her daughter across the burning courtyard with an expression that Solaia had never seen on her face before. It was not fear. It was not anger. It was a quiet, tender, absolutely terrible resolution.

"Sol!" she called. Her voice rang over the fire. "To the tower! Now!"

"Mother—"

"Don't argue! Go!" The Dowager lifted her hand. "I'll hold them!"

Valerian's pale eyes narrowed.

"Ah," he said softly. "Of course."

He was already moving. The silver cord whipped. And Solaia, with the fire still streaming from her hands and the burning city roaring in her ears, ran toward the stair, with her bare feet slapping on the stones and her mother's voice behind her, calling her name.