The Kingdom in the North

The Ashborn had been waiting for nine hundred years, and they were very good at it.

They had learned the art from the mountains. A people who live on the roof of the world, on a plateau of ice and basalt where the wind never ceases and the soil grows nothing but moss, do not learn haste. They learn the slow arithmetic of the seasons. They learn that a field takes a century to make, and a wall a lifetime to raise, and a queen as long as it takes her to come home. They had built their kingdom as the glacier builds its valleys: grain by grain, without noise, in the shadow of an Empire that did not know it was there.

It was called Kessavar.

The name meant Kessa's Hold, in the old tongue of the Ashborn, and it was the second Dragon Kingdom, or so its people liked to say. It had no dragons. It had a seat of government cut from the side of an extinct volcano, a series of tiered terraces climbing a vast scarp of black stone, and a wall. The wall was the pride of the nation. It ran along the northern lip of the plateau for forty miles, white and smooth and tall as a cathedral, and had taken three hundred years to build. Nobody had ever attacked it. That was rather the point.

On the morning of the nine hundred and forty-second year of the Empire of Ash, Wardmother Teodra Kessa-daughter stood on the highest terrace of the volcano with a cup of black tea in her hands and watched the sky go pale.

She was seventy-one years old. She had a face like a walnut and a back like an iron bar, and she had been the leader of her people for thirty-eight winters. She knew everything in the Hold, down to the number of goats. She had not slept in two days.

"It's thinning," she said.

"Yes, Mother."

"By how much?"

"The watchers on the wall say a league a night." The young man at her elbow, a lanky, tousled, earnest creature named Dovik, consulted a slate. "They say, if it keeps on at this rate, we'll see clear to the south by the end of the month."

"Hm."

"Mother—"

"I'm thinking."

She drank her tea.

It was bitter and black, and very hot, and she took a long time over it. The wind lifted a strand of her gray hair. She looked south over the long slope of the plateau to where the first thin gold of the sun was beginning to touch the clouds, and she thought: It is today. It is today, and I am not ready.

…

There was a prophecy, of course.

There always is. The Ashborn had been compiling theirs for nine centuries, from cave paintings and dream-songs and the cracked marginalia of old scrolls, and Teodra had read all of it in her youth. Most was nonsense. There was a long cycle that promised the return of the Mother in a chariot of fire. There was another that foretold a flood, a famine, and a one-eyed bishop. But in the library of the Hold, in a locked iron box at the back of the third vault, there was one document that had passed down through the Wardmothers hand to hand, written on rough gray linen in a cramped and angry hand.

It is not a throne, it began. It is a mouth.

It was the work of the first Kessa, the Mother of the Ashborn, a woman who had stood on a ridge nine hundred years ago and watched the world end. The rest of it had faded, or been burned, or been eaten by damp. But what remained was clear enough. It said that the Queen would come back. It said she would come out of the north, on the back of a black dragon, with a child at her side. It said that the stones would sing.

It said: And when she comes, the Ashborn will be ready to give her a house.

Teodra had never entirely believed it.

It was a pretty thing. It was the sort of promise a dying woman makes to a frightened people. She had read it a hundred times and felt a hundred small doubts. But she was the Wardmother, and the Wardmother's work was to be ready for what might come. And so, for thirty-eight years, she had been raising a house.

It was a very good one.

…

"Show me," she said.

Dovik led her down.

They descended through the terraces, through the market and the granary and the long cold barracks. The people of Kessavar made way for her silently. They were a hardy people, broad and stocky and weathered, in coats of gray wool, and they bowed as she passed with a restraint that was almost shy. She nodded to them. She knew every name. She saw a woman nursing a baby in a doorway and a boy leading a goat and an old man mending a net, and she thought: Please. Please. Don't let me have been wrong.

At the foot of the volcano a gate stood open. Beyond it lay the Hall.

She had built it in secret, in the nineteenth year of her rule, with the labor of two thousand willing hands. It was a vast, plain, high-roofed place of dark stone, three hundred feet long, with a floor of polished basalt and a ceiling carried on forty slender pillars. Its windows were of clear ice. At the far end, on a low dais, there stood a great carved chair of white stone, empty, with a rug of snow-fox fur laid across the seat.

Hanging above it, from the rafters, was the banner.

She stopped in the doorway and looked up at it. She always did. It was twenty feet long and as wide as a wagon, woven in white wool on a ground of black, and it showed a dragon. It was a large, calm, graceful beast, lying curled on its side with its wings half spread and its head lifted toward the viewer, and every scale of it had been worked in separate thread. The eyes were violet silk. It looked exactly as one imagines a dragon should look, if one has never seen one.

The Ashborn had taken a thousand years to make it.

"The sewing was finished last spring," said Dovik quietly.

"I know."

"We still don't know if it's right."

"It's right." She was surprised at how hoarse she sounded. "Kessa herself described it. 'Violet, like the hour before night.' I read it myself. She said she saw it once, on a ridge, in a dream."

"A dream."

"It was a good dream."

Dovik shifted. "Mother, if I might—"

"Speak."

"What if she doesn't come?"

She did not answer for a while. She stood in the doorway of the empty Hall with her cup growing cold in her hands, and the pale light of the ice windows lay on the floor like water, and the white dragon on the banner looked down, serene and violet-eyed, from its place under the roof.

"Then we have a very fine Hall," she said at last, "and a very good flag."

He laughed.

It was a small, startled sound. She looked at him, and he flushed.

"I'm sorry, Mother. I shouldn't."

"Don't be. It's the first sensible thing anyone's said in days." She drank the last of the tea. "Dovik. Listen. I am going to tell you something I have not told the Council."

"Yes, Mother."

"I do not believe in prophecies." She turned the cup in her hands. "I believe in work. I believe in walls and wheat and a good strong rope. I believe a people survives because it does the next thing, and the next, and does not ask the sky for permission. That is what Kessa taught, and that is what she meant."

"But?"

"But I have felt it," said the Wardmother, very low. "Every night, for a month. In my sleep. A note. A long, high, ringing note, like a finger on a glass. And I know, as I know my name, that it is calling to someone. And I know that someone is coming."

She set down the cup.

"So we shall be ready," she said. "We shall be ready for her, whoever she is, and her child, and her dragon. We shall have fires lit and bread on the table and all our doors thrown open. And if she doesn't come, we shall eat the bread ourselves, and we shall have a fine feast. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Good." She put a hand on his arm. "Now go and find the wall-captains. I want every watch doubled. I want the signal-fires laid. I want the children moved off the north terraces, and I want someone to take the banner down and clean it, in case there's dust."

"There's no dust."

"There is always dust."

He grinned and went.

She stood a moment longer in the doorway.

…

It was on the evening of that day that the wall-watch brought the news.

She was in the council room at the time, bent over a map with six sullen grain-masters, when the door burst open and a girl of fifteen tumbled in. She was a skinny, freckled, red-faced child in a patched cloak, with snow in her hair, and her chest was heaving.

"Wardmother!"

"Breathe, child."

"The north wall— the— Mother, there's a light!"

"A light?"

"A big one! A pillar! It came up out of nowhere, over the mountain, the old mountain, the Dead One." She was gasping. "It's white. It goes up and up. It's right to the clouds!"

The grain-masters had risen. Teodra stood up very slowly. She put down her pen. She could feel her heart going, deep and heavy, like a drum.

"And there's a flag," said the girl.

"What flag?"

"On the wall. On the north tower." She was crying, she realised. The child was crying, with her whole face, laughing and weeping at the same time. "Somebody— somebody hung it. I don't know who. I swear it wasn't any of us. It's the white dragon, Wardmother. It's there! It's flying! And the wind's blowing it south!"

The room was very quiet.

Teodra looked at the map on the table. She looked at the little pins, the neat lines of the Empire's frontier, the blue wash of the northern sea. She looked at the one thin river that wound down from the old mountain to the plain, the river the Ashborn had named Kessa's Tear, and she thought of a night nine hundred years ago.

Then she took her cloak from the peg, and wrapped it round her shoulders, and said, in a voice that was almost steady:

"Light the fires."