The Boy's Eyes

He saw the boy before she turned her head, and he knew him before he could see his face.

It was the walk that did it. A narrow figure was coming down from the ridge across the white plain, alone, on foot, small against the huge sky. It was too far to see the features. It was too far to make out the color of the cloak. But the child walked with his head up and his shoulders square and his hands curled into fists at his sides, in the manner of one who has been told to wait and has decided, for excellent reasons, not to, and Kieran's heart stopped in his chest.

He had walked like that himself. He had walked like that into his father's study, at the age of eleven, to say I won't.

"Veyran," said Solaia, without turning. Her voice was resigned. "I told you to stay."

"I know."

The voice carried on the cold air. It was clear and young and had a crack in the middle of it, as a voice does at the edge of change. She sighed. She did not move. And the boy came on, steadily, until he stood three paces behind her left shoulder, a lanky, wild-haired child in a gray tunic that was too short at the wrists, with a pair of dark wings half-opened at his back and a face that was all angles.

Kieran looked at him.

He had prepared for this, in a way. All the way north, in the long nights, he had thought of what it would be. He had braced himself to feel the shock of resemblance, the leap of blood, the uncanny recognition of looking into a glass. He had imagined a small dark version of himself. He had been ready for that.

He was not ready for the eyes.

They were violet. He had expected that; she had written it. Violet, deep and burning and luminous, the color of the sky an hour after sunset. They were wide and long and slanted like a dragon's. But at the center of each, where the pupil should have been round and black, there was a narrow vertical slit the color of ash, and the color was his. It was the exact gray of a winter morning. It was the gray he had seen every day of his life in mirrors, in the polished flanks of armor, in the black surface of a lake, in a thousand faces of his line.

The boy was looking at him.

He was looking at him with perfect, level, unsparing attention, with the bright cool gravity of a person who has been told something all his life and is at last permitted to check.

"Hello," said Veyran.

Kieran opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

…

He did not know how long he stood there.

It might have been a breath. It might have been a hundred years. The wind blew, and the ash stirred around his boots, and the world narrowed and narrowed until it held only a boy's face and the small steady light in his eyes. He could hear his own heartbeat. It was slow and heavy. It was the sound of a great bell, tolling in an empty church.

Ten years old, he thought.

He is ten.

He had known. She had written it. But it was one thing to read the word in a woman's neat hand and another to see it in the flesh: the long thin arms, the knobbed wrists, the down on the upper lip, the particular awkward grace of a body outgrowing itself. Ten years. Ten years he had missed. Ten years of cradles and scraped knees and first words, and he had been sitting in a chair in the dark, looking at a wall.

I have a son, he thought.

It was not a thought. It was a sound, a note struck deep in the bone.

"You're him," said the boy.

"I—" It came out cracked. "Yes. I think so."

"You think?"

"I'm not sure of anything." He heard himself laugh, wetly. "I'm not sure that I'm standing up."

"You're not." The boy tilted his head. "You're swaying."

"Am I?"

"A bit."

"I apologize."

"It's all right." A tiny pause. "Mama said you'd be thin. She said you didn't eat. She said you used to forget until nightfall, and she'd have to bring you a tray."

"She did."

"She said you'd be rude to the cook."

"I was always rude to the cook." He found that he was weeping, and did not care. "She was a very bad cook."

"So is Mama."

"I know."

"She puts salt on the fruit."

"I know," said Kieran, and a sob broke out of him, hoarse and cracked, and he put his hand over his mouth.

The boy watched him. He did not move closer. He stood there with his head on one side, in the cold light, and a curious thing happened to his face. The hard watchfulness went out of it. The wary distance in his eyes eased. He looked, all of a sudden, very young, and very frightened, and very much as though he wished to be held.

"I have something for you," said Veyran.

"What?"

"A message. From Gron."

Kieran went still.

"He died," said the boy. "Last week. In the sun. On a terrace, with a goat." His voice shook, but he held it steady. "He was very old. He wasn't in pain. Mama was with him. I was there, too, a bit." He swallowed. "He said to tell you that he didn't go because he stopped."

The wind dropped.

"Stopped what?" said Kieran, in a whisper.

"Loving you. He said it was only that he couldn't bear to watch you fall." The boy's chin trembled. "And he said..."

"Yes?"

"He said the honey-cake was very good."

…

It broke him.

There was no other word for it. He felt it go, the thing that had held him up for nine hundred years. It went all at once, like a wall giving way. It was not a decision. It was a collapse. One moment he was standing on the white ground with his hand over his mouth, and the next he was on his knees, with his hands pressed to the earth and his head bowed, and his whole body was shaking.

He wept.

He wept as he had not wept since the night of the Ridge. He wept for the beast in the straw. He wept for the stolen cakes and the warm gray flank and the long silent evenings in the stable, when he had sat with his back against a foreleg and listened to a great slow heart. He wept for the thousand mornings that he had walked into the stall and found the animal waiting, with its head lowered, and the bright patient golden eye. He had said once, in the third year of his reign, to a groom who asked if the dragon was lonely: Dragons do not feel such things.

He had been lying to himself even then.

"Oh, Gron," he said into the ash. "Oh, you old fool. You old, old fool. You should have... I would have..."

A hand touched his shoulder.

It was small, and warm. It rested there for a moment, light as a bird. Then it slid, hesitantly, awkwardly, up to the back of his neck, and stayed. He felt the dry heat of the skin. He felt the quick pulse in the wrist.

"It's all right," said the boy, above him. "He said it was all right. He said he'd have done it again."

Kieran lifted his head.

The face was very near. The boy had knelt, too, in the ash, with his wings folded behind him, and his eyes were level with his father's. They were wet. They shone in the cold light like two small lamps. In the center of each, the narrow gray pupil caught the sun and held it.

"Papa," said Veyran.

It was the first time anyone had said it.

He had never heard it before, aloud, in a living voice, directed at him. It was a small word. It was two sounds, soft and blunt, like a thing dropped in water. It went through him like a spear. He thought: I am a father. He thought: I have been a father for ten years. He thought, with sudden clarity, with a joy so large and so terrible that it made his eyes ache: I will never be able to repay this.

He put out his hands.

They were shaking. He did not know whether he was permitted. He held them in the air between them, open, as if offering to a skittish animal, and the boy looked at them for a long moment.

Then he stepped forward, and walked into his father's arms.

…

He was warm.

That was the first thing. He was warm and bony and smelled of woodsmoke and hay and cold air, and his heart went like a bird's. His wings brushed Kieran's shoulders with a dry rustle of feather and leather. He was taller than Kieran had thought, and thinner, and he held on with a fierce, desperate, silent strength, his face pressed into the hollow of Kieran's throat. Kieran held him. He held him with both arms, as hard as he dared, and pressed his cheek against the wild black hair.

He heard her breathe.

She was standing a few paces off. He had forgotten her. She had not moved. She stood with her arms wrapped about herself and her face turned a little away, and the wind lifted her hair and blew it across her mouth. Her shoulders shook. She was not making any sound.

Thank you, he thought, to nobody, to God, to the sky. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And at that moment, the ring on his finger turned to ice.

It was like a knife in the bone. A flash of cold went up his arm, and his heart gave a heavy lurch, and a voice in his skull, thin and dry and exultant, said:

At last.

"Valerian—"

The child. The child. The thin cold whisper shook with something that was almost joy. Oh, you magnificent boy. You have brought me the vessel yourself.

"No."

White and black. Night and Fire. Together in one body, in a heart that loves you. You have no idea what you have done, Majesty. The ring was burning now, white-hot, searing the flesh of his finger. I could not have done it better myself.

"No!"

He tore at it. He wrenched at the ring with his other hand, and it would not move. It had sunk into the flesh, and the flesh had grown round it. The silver gleamed like an eye. The cold climbed his arm to the shoulder, to the throat, and the boy in his arms gasped and stiffened, and looked up with wide startled eyes.

"Papa?" said Veyran. "Papa, what's wrong?"

"Let go of me."

"What?"

"Let go. Run. Go to your mother."

"But—"

"Now!"

Too late.

He felt the Night rise in him like a tide. He felt the Hollow roll over, huge and slow and glad, and the ring blaze, and the world go black at the edges of his sight. His arms tightened. He heard, as from a long way off, the boy cry out, and Solaia scream his name, and then a voice that was not his own spoke, in his mouth, soft and warm and satisfied.

"Hello, little one," said the Emperor of Ash.