The Mother's Oath

She told him everything, over a winter that had no snow in it.

It took forty nights. She did it in the cave above the lake, by the light of a single banked fire, with the boy sitting cross-legged at her knee and the old black dragon coiled around them both like a wall. She began at the beginning, at the egg in the Hatching Hall and the violet eye that had opened in her lap when she was nine. She told him about her brother, who had died of fever. She told him about her father, who had died of the same, and her mother, who had died of it, too, though not before she had done a thing that no queen had done in a thousand years.

She told him about the night of the fall.

She had not said it aloud before. She had remembered it, in pieces, since the day on the Ridge, but she had never put it into words, never given it a shape that another person could hold. Now she found the words coming out of her in a low flat stream, as if she were reading from a book. The Marshal at the gate. The silver masks. The collars. Obsyra, screaming in her mind and then not screaming at all. A courtyard full of fire, and a man's face, wet and white.

"I hit him," she said. "I remember that. I hit him as hard as I could. And he said, 'Again.'"

"Did you?"

"No." She looked at her hands. "I should have."

Veyran said nothing. He sat with his chin on his knees and his violet eyes wide, and when she came to the part about the tower, and the singing, and the golden fire, he put out one hand without a word and laid it flat on her wrist.

She told him about the Ridge.

That was harder. That was a story she could only half remember, a mosaic with the middle gone. She remembered the pillars and the cables and the red lightning. She remembered a man's voice saying Forgive me. She remembered a hand on a lever. But the man himself was a blur, a shadow in a gray coat, with a long jaw and a lopsided smile and a name she could not catch no matter how she reached.

"Papa," said Veyran.

"Yes."

"His name was Kieran."

She went still.

It was a thing she had expected him to say, eventually. She had half dreaded it. But he said it so quietly, so simply, with a child's flat certainty, that the word fell into the cave like a stone into a well, and she felt it go down and down and strike something at the bottom.

"How do you know?"

"I don't know." He frowned. "I just do. I've always known. It's there when I wake up. It's like the house." He touched his chest. "It's right here. Kieran Vael Aldren. He doesn't like honey. He can't cook. He cried once, when you made him a birthday cake, and said it was the first one anyone had ever made him, and then he ate two slices and was sick."

She stared at him.

"How do you know that?"

"Because it's in me," said Veyran, matter-of-factly. "It's all in me. Everything you forgot. Obsyra says I'm a keeper. I carry what the Void takes from you, so it can't have it." He tilted his head. "Do you want me to tell you more?"

Her heart was hammering. "Yes."

"No."

The word came from behind her, flat and grave. She turned, and the old dragon had lifted her head. She was gazing at the boy with an expression of great and terrible care.

Not yet, child.

"But she—"

She will remember when she is ready. It must be a thing she chooses. The golden eye moved to Solaia. If he gives it too soon, it will cost him. He cannot carry it all. A child's heart is only so large.

Solaia looked from the dragon to the boy. He was sitting very still, with his small fists clenched in his lap, and a thin bright sweat on his forehead. He had gone a little gray. She had not noticed. She felt a spasm of shame so violent it was almost nausea.

"Oh, sweetheart," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Don't."

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

"I can do it."

"I know you can. I don't want you to." She pulled him against her. "I'll find it myself. All right? In my own time. Not because you've paid for it."

He sagged against her with a long unsteady breath. "All right."

"You promise?"

"I promise." A pause. "But Mama?"

"Yes?"

"He loved you. I know that part. That part's the strongest." His voice was muffled. "I just thought you should know."

She held him tighter, and did not answer, because she could not.

…

The training began in the spring.

It was Obsyra's idea. She came to the cave one morning, in the damp gold light, and said, with an air of decision: The boy has two flames. He cannot be taught as the others are taught. He must be taught as a Queen is taught, and a Marshal, both at once. And Solaia, who had been looking at the ash of the lake for three months and sleeping badly, said yes before she could think.

She taught him the Tongue.

She taught him the Seven Words of Welcome and the Nine of Restraint. She taught him how to find the edge of a fire in the dark, the thin line where heat becomes light, and how to hold it there with his mind. She taught him the Names of the Kinds: gold, scarlet, green, bone, ember, star, shadow. She taught him that every creature had a name that could be spoken and a name that could not, and that a fire was only as dangerous as the courtesy one paid it.

She taught him to make a flame the size of a pea, and keep it, and put it out.

He did it a hundred times a day. He did it with his eyes closed, and with his hands tied, and while standing on one leg on the top of a rock with a dragon's tail whipping at his ankles. He was very good. He was better than she had ever been. By midsummer he could light a candle across a room without moving his lips, and by autumn he could snuff a torch at a hundred paces.

But the dark flame stayed.

It lay in him like a coiled thing, patient and silent, and it never once rose without being called. She watched for it. She watched every day. She watched his shoulders, his hands, the corners of his eyes. And every night, when he had gone to sleep, she lay awake in the cave with her face to the wall and wondered what else she had not taught him.

…

It was Gron who pointed it out.

He had not spoken to her in months, beyond the ordinary courtesies. He had stayed on the far side of the lake, grey and silent, a sentry. But one evening in early winter he came to the cave mouth, as she was banking the fire, and lay down across the threshold, and said in his deep, slow, creaking voice:

Mother. You are angry.

"I'm not."

You are. It is in your lessons.

"What?"

You teach him to be careful. That is good. But when you say the words of Restraint, you say them as if you were saying a curse. The great head lifted. When you teach him to hold a fire, you show him what it can burn. You tell him about the silver masks. You tell him about the Marshal's face. A long rumble. You are not teaching him to hold. You are teaching him to hate.

Her hands stopped.

"That isn't true."

He asks me about his father, said Gron. Almost every night. He asks what kind of man he was. I tell him. I tell him the truth as I knew it. I tell him he was proud, and afraid, and much too young for the weight he carried. And the boy says: 'Mother says he was a traitor.'

"I never—"

You do not have to say it. He hears it.

She sat back on her heels.

The fire popped. Outside, the wind stirred the trees, and the lake lay black and still under a sky of low gray cloud. She looked at her hands, and for the first time in many years she saw them clearly, a woman's hands, thin and strong, with a thin white scar across the left palm and a ring on the third finger that she had worn so long she no longer felt it.

She had been so careful. She had thought she was so fair. She had said to herself, every night: Be kind to what you find. She had thought that the anger had burned out on the Ridge, in the pillar of white fire, that she had put it down like a heavy coat. But the coat was still there. It had only been folded. She had been wearing it all along, under her dress, and the boy had felt it, as he felt everything, through the skin.

"Oh God," she said. "I'm making him into a weapon."

Yes, said Gron, gently.

"I don't know how to stop."

You could begin, said the dragon, by remembering that you loved him.

"I don't remember."

Then ask the boy.

She shook her head. She was crying again, slowly, without noise. "I can't. He'll carry it. It'll hurt him."

It will hurt him more, said Gron, if you do not.

…

That night, after Veyran slept, she climbed to the top of the cliff above the lake and stood in the dark with her arms wrapped round herself.

The Hollow Sky glowed faintly. Overhead, the true stars of the Void turned slowly, and the seeds of light drifted among them like fireflies. She looked at them for a long time. She looked at the dim silver thread of the horizon where the valley ended and the black began. She thought of a man she could not name, standing in the ash of a burned fortress, with his arm outstretched.

Why did I leave him, she thought.

Because he'd have hurt the child.

Why did I stay away.

Because it was the only door.

Then why am I so angry?

The question hung in the air.

She had no answer. But she knew, standing there on the cliff in the starlight, that the anger was not for the Ridge. It was not for the Hollow, nor the Pontiff, nor even for the Marshal who had opened a gate five thousand years ago. It was for something older and smaller: for the girl in the ditch, with no name, who had woken in the mud. For the beggar. For the nineteen-year-old in her nightgown, who had run down a tower stair with her mother's voice in her ears and had never, ever, been allowed to cry.

She had not wept for her mother in five thousand years.

She sat down on the edge of the cliff, with her legs over the dark, and put her face in her knees, and began.

She was still there at dawn when the boy found her. He came up the path, rubbing his eyes, in his night-tunic, and stopped at the top and looked at her for a long moment with an expression of troubled gravity. Then he sat down beside her. He did not say anything. He only leaned his head against her shoulder, and put his hand in hers.

They sat together while the light came up.

"Mama," said Veyran at last.

"Yes."

"You don't remember that Papa loved you."

"No."

"But I do." He looked at her sidelong. "Do you want me to tell you? Just a little? Just the smallest part?"

She took a long breath.

"Yes," said Solaia. "Yes, please. Just a little."