The Veil

The tower was the highest in the world, and she climbed it with fire in her hair.

She did not remember the stairs. She remembered only the sound: her own breath tearing in her throat, the slap of her bare feet on the stone, and behind and below her, filling the whole shaft of the spiral, a long ragged thunder that she did not at first recognize. It was the sound of her mother's voice. It was not screaming. It was singing. A low old tune, in the oldest of the tongues, rising and falling through the roar of the burning, and with every phrase of it she heard the clash of steel and the cry of men dying on the stair.

Hold them, she thought. Mother, hold them. Please.

She burst out onto the roof.

It was a small round platform of white stone, fifty feet across, ringed with a low parapet. In daylight it was the loveliest place in the palace. From here, on a clear morning, you could see the whole sweep of the Sky: the seven mountains, the great rivers, the shining plain. Now it was black. The city lay below her like a spilled forge, a sea of red and gold fire, and over it hung a roof of smoke so thick that the stars were gone. The wind was hot. It smelled of burning flesh.

She ran to the parapet and looked down.

The Aerie was dark. The great towers were silent. All over the city, in the terraces and the squares, the dragons lay where they had fallen, in heaps, in rows, like felled trees. Some still moved. She could see a few huge shapes dragging themselves along the ground, trailing silver cords, moaning in the low terrible voice of grief. Some were burning. A gold one, a young one that she had known by name, lay in the middle of the Bridge of Pearls with its wings splayed and its neck stretched back, and a ring of masked priests stood about it, and the silver cord glittered at its throat.

She screamed.

It was not a word. It was every word. It rose out of her like a flame, and the fire went with it, in a white pillar, straight up into the sky. For a moment the smoke was split. For a moment the stars shone through. She stood at the edge of the world with her arms flung out and her face to the heavens and she burned, and the whole city looked up and saw a queen on a tower, afire.

It did no good.

She knew that, even as she did it. The fire poured out and out, and the silver cords did not so much as smoke. They hung on the necks of the dragons like threads of cold light, patient and cruel, and the white flame passed through them like water through a net. Whatever Valerian had made, it was not subject to her. It had been designed, she saw with sick horror, for her. It had been woven out of her own fire, drawn from her own blood, bled off in secret over years, in the gentle visits of a gentle physician with a casket of herbs.

He has been drinking from me, she thought. All this time.

…

"Sol."

The voice was soft. It came from behind her, from the head of the stair, and she turned and saw her mother.

The Dowager Queen stood on the last step, with one hand on the doorframe. She had lost her book. She had lost a slipper. There was a long red gash across her cheek, from the temple to the jaw, and the front of her nightdress was dark and wet. She swayed. But she stood, tall and straight, and her eyes, in the firelight, were as bright and clear as stars.

"Mother!"

"Don't." She held up a hand. "Don't come. There isn't time." She drew a long, shuddering breath. "They are on the stair. I have sealed it. It will hold for the length of a prayer. Perhaps two."

"You're hurt—"

"I am dying, my heart. It is quite all right." A faint smile touched her mouth. "I have known for a month. The sickness your father had. They put it in the wine. I did not tell you, because I did not want to frighten you before the day." She took a step. Blood ran from her hem. "I find that I am rather glad. It is so much easier to be brave when one has nothing left to lose."

"No. No, Mother, no—"

"Hush."

She came forward. She crossed the white stone as she had crossed it a hundred times, her bare feet leaving small dark prints. She reached her daughter, and took her face in both hands, and her hands were wet and cold and absolutely steady. She looked into her eyes for a long moment.

"You have your father's chin," she said. "I always said so."

"Mother—"

"Listen to me. I have very little time, and a great deal to say, and I must say it quickly." Her violet eyes held Solaia's. "They will take the city. They have taken it already. There is nothing to be done for the City now. But there is a thing that can still be saved, and it is you."

"I won't leave you."

"You will."

"I won't leave the dragons! I won't—"

"Sol." Gently, but with iron. "Look at them."

She looked.

The fire raged on below. The smoke rolled. And over the roofs of the burning city, moving slowly, grimly, with the dreadful patience of a flood, came the silver masks. Thousands. They filled the streets from wall to wall. They moved without hurry, and where they went, the white fire of the dragons went out.

"There is no army that can stop them," said her mother. "There is no wall. They have turned your fire against you. The longer you stand here, the more they have. If they take you, they take everything. The Throne, the Seven, the Sky." Her voice shook. "They will make of you a lamp, and burn you for a thousand years."

"Then I'll burn them first."

"You cannot. You have not the strength. Not yet." Her thumbs, very softly, stroked her daughter's cheekbones. "But in a hundred years, in a thousand, there will be a time. There will be a door, and a hand, and someone who loves you. And on that day you will be strong enough. I have seen it."

"You have seen—"

"I am a Dowager Queen of the Sky, my heart. I have a little of the Sight." A smile, wry and tired. "Not enough to have prevented this. Enough to know what to do."

She let go.

She stepped back, and stooped, and from the shadow of the parapet she took up the black book. It was not the one she had carried down the stair. This was a smaller one, thick as a brick, bound in cracked leather and clasped with a tarnished silver hasp. She held it against her chest. She closed her eyes.

"There is a working," she said. "The oldest. It was never meant for war. It was made by the First Queen, to protect a child from a thing that would devour her. It is called the Veil."

"What does it do?"

"It hides you."

"From whom?"

"From everything." Her voice cracked. "It takes the fire from your body and lays it down in a safe place. It takes the memories from your mind and puts them in a deeper one. It makes you small, and plain, and unseeable. It lets you slip between the cracks of the world." She opened her eyes. "It sends you far away. Far from here, far from them. It sends you somewhere they will never think to look."

"And when does it end?"

"When the time comes." A whisper. "Not before."

"And you?"

The Dowager Queen did not answer.

"Mother."

"It takes a life." She said it very quietly. "One life. Freely given. It is a bargain, my heart. It is the price of the curtain. The one who draws it must be willing to be the thread."

Solaia stared.

She had known. Some part of her had known from the moment her mother stepped onto the roof. But the knowledge had been a closed room, and she had stood outside it, listening. Now the door swung open. She saw her mother's white face, her wet nightdress, her steady bright eyes. She saw the whole long gentle life of her: the cold hands, the dry wit, the quiet unwavering love.

She began to cry.

"No," she said. "No. I won't. You can't. There must be another way—"

"There is not."

"I won't let you."

"My heart," said the Dowager, "you have no say."

…

She held her.

She would remember that last. Of all the things the Veil would take from her, that was the one she held on to the longest, and the one she lost in the end: the weight of a thin body in her arms, the smell of lavender and smoke, the sound of a heartbeat against her ear. Her mother's hands in her hair. Her mother's voice, very low, speaking in the old tongue, a lullaby she had sung every night of her childhood.

Under the sky, a throne.

Under the throne, a flame.

Under the flame, a little one,

Who will not be afraid.

"I love you," said the Dowager Queen. "I have always loved you. You were the best thing I ever did."

"Mother—"

"And Sol. There is one more thing."

Her hand slid up, and came to rest against her daughter's cheek, light as a leaf.

"The Marshal," she said. "Do not hate him with all of yourself. I know that you will want to. I want to, a little, even now." A small tender smile. "But a man may love and err in the same breath. It is the commonest sorrow in the world."

"He opened the gate."

"He did. And he will spend his whole life paying for it, and his children's lives, and their children's after them. Blood is a long thing, my heart. It runs on." Her eyes were wet and shining. "One day, long after he is dust, someone of his line will come looking for you. He will not know what he carries. He will be proud, and broken, and very much afraid. When he comes, be kind to what you find."

"Mother, I can't—"

"You will find that you can. You always could. It was your gravest fault, and the greatest gift to the world." She laid her forehead against her daughter's. "The Veil will keep you safe until then. You will not remember. But it will be there, deep down, in the dark, waiting."

"Mother, please—"

"Run, my heart."

The Dowager Queen opened the book.

…

The words were not words. They were a shape, a weight, a chord that rose from the stone and the sky and her mother's chest. They poured from her lips in a slow golden thread, and where they touched the air, it shimmered. She read standing, with her face turned up, with the wind in her gray hair and her feet in her own blood, and her voice was the voice of a queen.

The roof of the tower began to glow.

It came from below, first, a warm gold light that seeped up through the white stone like honey through a cloth. It rose. It wrapped itself about her mother's ankles, her waist, her breast. It lit her from within, so that the thin bones of her hand shone through the skin, and she smiled, and went on reading.

"Sol," she said, between the lines of the spell. "Do not look back."

"Mother!"

"Do not look back. Whatever you hear. Whatever you feel. Run. Run to the north."

The gold light rose to her throat. It reached her mouth. Solaia saw her lips move on the last word, and the book fall from her hands, and the whole thin body go incandescent, a column of pure gold fire. She stood in it for an instant, a woman made of light. And then she was gone, and there was only the fire.

It struck Solaia like a wave.

She felt it go through her. She felt it open her mouth, and her eyes, and the tips of her fingers. She felt it pour into the place where her memories lived and fold them, one by one, like linen in a chest, and lay them down in the dark. She felt her name go. She felt the city go, and the dragons, and the sky. She felt Aldren's face go, and the smell of honey, and the weight of a crown. She felt the whole bright vast wide world close over her head, and in its place there came a quiet, a soft, kind, endless quiet.

She had one thought left. It was very small.

Mother.

And a hand, impossibly, lifted her.

It was not a hand. It was a wind, a warm gold roaring wind, and it tore her off the tower and flung her up into the black of the sky. She went spinning over the burning city, over the silver masks, over the heaps of fallen dragons. She saw them all below, tiny and red, dwindling. She saw a figure on a stair, small and dark, with his face turned up. She saw the great white towers fall, one by one, in a long slow cascade of fire.

And far below the wind, rising out of a vast black mouth in the earth, she saw a shape.

It was huge. It was dark. It had wings like the folded night, and eyes the color of storms. It rose out of the smoke with its throat bare, and the silver collar lay in two bright pieces on the ground. It looked up at the falling queen. It opened its mouth.

Little one, it said, in the vast gentle voice she knew, sleep. I will keep the door.

She fell.

She fell for a long time. She fell through the dark and the cold, past the stars. She fell through years, and decades, and centuries. And somewhere very far down, so far that she had almost stopped being able to hear it, she heard a woman's voice singing a lullaby she could not quite remember, in a language she no longer knew.

Under the sky, a throne.

Under the throne, a flame.

Under the flame, a little one,

Who will not be afraid.

She struck the earth.

It was cold. It was wet. There was mud in her mouth, and a sharp stone in her side, and a gray rain falling on her face. She lay in a ditch beside a road, in a rotten stinking dark, a girl of nineteen with a torn nightgown and no name, and above her a rickety wagon creaked slowly past, and the driver did not look down.

She opened her eyes.

And the last of the Veil, thin as a breath, closed softly over her mind.