The Veil Burns

She came back into her body like a woman stepping out of a river.

The Ridge was exactly as she had left it. That was the first shock: that no time had passed. The violet light still hung over the platform in its slow wavering curtain. The cables lay dark in the air. The old man in the bone throne still stood with his hands outstretched and his mouth half open, and the hundred thousand people on the ramps still stared up at her in wide-eyed silence. A single drop of blood fell from Kieran's fingers onto the black glass. She heard it land.

Five thousand years, and it had taken one heartbeat.

She stood with the broken shackles at her feet and her hands at her sides. She felt strange. She felt enormous. She had spent a year in a small tight skin, and now it had split, and she was spilling out of it, vast and bright and very, very clear. She could feel the Ridge beneath her, every pillar, every cable, every grain of bone in the stone. She could feel the hundred thousand heartbeats on the slopes. She could feel, far to the north, a vast slow pulse waking in the ice.

Obsyra, she thought.

The pulse answered. It was the whole sky, humming.

I am here, little one. I am coming.

She smiled.

…

"Kieran."

She knelt beside him.

He lay as she had left him, on his back, at the foot of the black column. The violet light had gone from the crack in the stone. It had dimmed to a faint pulse, like a bruise. His wrist was still bleeding, slowly, and she took it in both hands and pressed it shut with her thumbs, and a little white warmth went out of her palms and closed the wound. It was a small act. A drop of the fire. She had done it a hundred times. But it was the first time in her life, she realized, that she had done it knowing.

She knew exactly what she was holding.

His face was gray and wet, and the skin around his eyes was bruised with sleeplessness. A fleck of dried blood lay on his lip. His lashes were thick and black. She had never noticed. She looked down at him, at the plain tired young face of a man who had been born under a curse and had spent his life trying to be strong, and she saw in its lines, in the long jaw and the straight stubborn brow, another face, five thousand years gone.

Aldren, she thought. You idiot. You beautiful idiot.

It came to her without anger. She was astonished. She had expected a flood of it: the old white fire, the century-old grief. She had held it, in the dark, a burning coal. But now that she looked, there was nothing left to burn. It had gone out of her somewhere in the last hour, in the red lightning, in the weight of the child within her, and what remained was only a vast sad tenderness.

Be kind to what you find.

"I'm trying, Mother," she whispered.

His chest rose. It was a shallow, shuddering breath. But it was breath, and she felt the Hollow, the cold black coil of it, still in him, not stilled, not gone. It had not been spent. The Debt had been paid, and the Veil had cracked, but the Gift of Night was a living thing, and it clung.

It will be a long road, she thought.

"Wake up," said Solaia, and kissed his forehead.

His eyelids fluttered. They did not open.

…

"It is not possible."

The voice came thin and cracked, from above. She raised her head.

The Pontiff had come down from his throne.

He stood on the top step of the spiral stair, one hand on the rail, with the ruin of his silver robes hanging about him in tatters. The mask was gone. The veil was gone. The cables that had run into his back had dropped away, and where they had been, ragged wounds oozed pale light. He had aged ten years in an hour. The scholar's face was deeply lined, and the pale eyes were red-rimmed, and his thin hands shook.

"It is not possible," he said again. "I made it. I made every part of it. Five thousand years of work. There was no flaw."

"There was one," said Solaia.

"What?"

"You didn't count on love."

He stared at her.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The wind lifted a lock of her hair. The great ring of the pillars hummed softly, a dying chord. Somewhere in the crowd, a child began to cry, and was hushed.

"Do you know," said the Pontiff, slowly, "I have thought of that word a great deal."

"Have you?"

"A very great deal. I turned it over for centuries. I thought: it is a thing that people say. It is not a force. It cannot be measured, or weighed, or used." He came down a step. "It is a story that weak people tell themselves, to bear what they cannot change."

"And now?"

"And now I do not know." A bleak laugh. "It seems I have been wrong about a number of things."

"Valerian."

He flinched.

It was as if she had struck him. His whole body jerked, and the color went out of his lips, and his eyes flew wide. For a moment she saw him as he had been, on a night of fire in a courtyard, a tall thin man in a white robe with a gentle voice and a casket of herbs.

"Nobody," he said hoarsely, "has called me that in five thousand years."

"It's your name."

"It was." He put a hand to his throat. "I had almost forgotten."

"I haven't."

"No." He shut his eyes. "I suppose that you would not."

"You came to my coronation. You put the crown on my head." Her voice was perfectly level. "You held my hand at my father's funeral. You brought my mother medicine for her cough. You sat at my table."

"Yes."

"And all that time you were taking my fire."

"Not at first." He opened his eyes. They were wet. "At first I loved you. I swear it. I loved all of you. The Sky. The Thrones. The beasts. I was a physician, child, and I believed in healing. I thought that I could cure the world. I thought that the dragons were a sickness, a wild unregulated power that must be tamed for the good of men. I thought that if I could only find the right instrument—"

"A collar."

"A collar." His mouth twisted. "It seemed so reasonable. It seemed such a small thing. I had it made in secret, in my own workshop, a little band of silver with a hook of your own fire. I put it on a sparrow first. Then a hound. Then a horse." He swallowed. "It worked. It was a miracle. The creatures were calm. They were happy, I thought. And I said to myself: Valerian, you have done a good thing."

"And then?"

"And then I put it on a dragon."

The silence that followed was dreadful.

"It screamed," he said, very low. "For six hours. In a stable, in the south, in the middle of the night. I stood beside it with my hands over my ears. And I could feel the fire flowing into me, through the collar, through my fingers. Warm. Sweet. Like wine." He closed his eyes. "I should have stopped. I knew I should. I knew it for a thousand years."

"But you didn't."

"I was afraid." It tore out of him. "Of what you would do. Of what the dragons would do. Of the world that would come after if I let go. I told myself that I was the only thing standing between them and ruin. I told myself that it was a duty, a burden, a sacred charge." He opened his eyes. They were red and dry and entirely naked. "I did not tell myself the truth, which is that I liked it."

"I know."

"You know."

"Of course I know." She rose to her feet, slowly. Her gown whispered over the glass. "I've seen your face when the light pours in. I saw you laugh in the throne. It was the happiest I've ever seen a human being."

He bowed his head.

"It was," he said. "It was."

"Then you understand," said Solaia, "why I can't let you keep it."

…

He did not run.

She had thought he would. She had braced for it, for a flash of silver cord, a last desperate lunge. But the old man simply stood on the top step of the stair, with his hands hanging empty at his sides, and looked at her. His face had gone smooth and calm. It was the face of a man who has been carrying a very heavy thing and has at last been given leave to put it down.

"Will it hurt?" he asked.

She considered.

"I don't know," she said. "I've never done it."

"I would like it, I think, if it did not."

"I'll try."

He smiled.

It was the first real smile she had seen on him in five thousand years. It was thin and tired and unexpectedly warm, and for an instant he looked once more like the young physician in the white robe who had knelt at the foot of her throne. He lifted his hand, like a man saying farewell.

"You were a very good Queen," said Valerian.

"You'd know."

"Yes." His eyes crinkled. "I would."

She raised her hands.

The fire came. It came up out of her like the dawn, slow and golden and unhurried, from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. It poured from her palms in two white spirals. It lit her hair, her gown, the stone beneath her. It lit the cracked pillars and the broken web. It lit the faces of the people on the slopes, who had fallen to their knees, who were weeping, who were calling her name in a thousand voices: not Empress, not demon. The old name. The true one.

Solaia. Solaia. Solaia.

The Veil, thin as smoke, burned away from her mind.

She felt it go. It went from her like a skin sloughed in spring. She felt the last fold of it lift, and the last memory settle into its place, and the last of the cold, small, careful self she had been for a year drop away like a husk. She was nineteen. She was five thousand. She was the Queen of the Sky, and the beggar under the wagon, and a woman in a white dress with a man's blood on her hem, and she was all of them at once, and she was whole.

She looked up, and her eyes were no longer gray.

They were violet from rim to rim, burning, with slitted pupils, and the light of them fell on the platform like the light of a sun. The white flame rose around her in a pillar, taller than the pillars, taller than the throne. It stood up out of the Ridge into the dark sky, a column of pure fire a mile high, and the air shook with it.

In its heart, a woman stood, with her arms outstretched, and smiled at the old man on the stair.

"Goodbye, Valerian," she said.

"Goodbye, Majesty."

The fire touched him.

It was very gentle. It folded round him like a cloak. She saw his face as it came, calm, wondering, almost glad. She saw his lips shape a single word, a name she did not catch. She saw the pale robes catch, and the gray hair, and the long thin hands. And then the light grew too bright to look at, and she heard a sound like a sigh, five thousand years long, going out of the world.

When it faded, the stair was empty.

Where he had stood, on the top step, lay a small heap of pale ash, and a single silver ring.

…

The pillar of fire did not die.

She had meant it to. She had meant to let the flame sink, quietly, and bend down, and take Kieran in her arms. But it would not be called back. It had been in a box for five thousand years, and now it was out, and it sang. It went up and up. It lit the clouds. It lit the plain, and the mountains, and the far white line of the Ice Range. It poured through the cracks in the column and down the ribs of the pillars, and she felt the bone answer.

Sister, said the pillars.

It was the voice of a hundred dragons. It was the voice of the dead. It rose up out of the white stone, thin and ragged and wild with joy, and she understood, with a shock that nearly brought her to her knees, what the Fortress was made of.

We are here. We are here. We have been waiting.

"I know," she whispered. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I was late."

Let us go.

She looked at the pillars. They shone, white and shivering, in the fire. She looked at the cables, the web, the ring, the throne. She looked at the crack in the black column, and the faint violet pulse in its depths.

She thought: Kieran.

She turned.

He lay where she had left him, with his hand open on the black glass. The fire lit his face. His eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell, slow and weak, and she saw that the Hollow had begun to creep back into his wrists. It was only a thread. But it was there.

Soon, she thought. Soon. I'll fix it. I'll fix everything.

First the bone.

She lifted her hands.

"Go home," said Solaia, and the pillars began to burn.