The Blood Debt

The Emperor of Ash stood up, with her son in his arms, and smiled at her.

It was a lovely smile. It was gentle and warm and wholly unlike any she had seen on his face before, tender with a patient, courteous, fatherly sweetness. He had the boy clasped to his chest with one arm, and the other hand lay on the back of the boy's head, the long fingers spread in the black hair. Veyran was rigid. His wings stood out at his back, quivering. His eyes were wide, and violet, and blind with terror, and they did not leave his mother's face.

"Mama," he whispered.

"Hush, my heart. Don't move."

"I can't. I can't. It's cold, Mama, it's—"

"I know." She was walking, slowly, across the white ground, with her palms open at her sides. "I know. I'm here. Don't fight it. Just breathe."

"How very touching," said the Emperor.

The voice was his. It had the shape of his voice, the dry low timbre she had known in a hundred dark rooms. But there was a second voice woven through it, thin and cold and precise, and the two ran together like oil and water. It did not belong in that mouth. It rolled out over the plain with the slow gentleness of a priest reading a eulogy.

"Valerian," said Solaia.

"Majesty."

"Let him go."

"I should be delighted." He inclined his head. "In a moment."

"Now."

"No, I think not. I have waited nine hundred years for a body that could hold the Night and the Fire together." The silver ring on the smallest finger gleamed with a pale light. "I have the Night already. I have been wearing it like a coat. And here, in my arms, I have the second half. It is a child. It is sweet, and fresh, and unspoiled, and it loves its father very much. I have only to ask."

"Ask what?"

"For the boy to give it freely." The smile deepened. "He will, you know. A child's love is the easiest of all to use. I have only to tell him that his father is dying. I have only to show him how it can be stopped." He glanced down. "Isn't that right, my dear?"

Veyran made a small sound, like a hurt animal.

"Don't you speak to him," said Solaia.

Her voice was very quiet.

She did not know where it came from. It rose out of the depths of her like cold water from a well, and when it reached the air it was so clear and level that the Emperor's smile faltered. She had stopped walking. She stood twenty paces from him, with the wind at her back and her hands hanging open. The White Fire was a faint gold glow around her wrists. It did not rise. It did not flicker. It simply burned, steady and bright, like a lamp in a window.

"You took my city," said Solaia.

"I did."

"You took my mother."

"Alas. A very great lady."

"You took the fire from the throats of my dragons, and put it into a tank, and sat in a chair and warmed your hands on it." She took a step. "You made a world in which a girl could be dragged from her bed by men in silver masks. You made a god out of my pain. You made him."

"I made a great many things."

"Yes. And I want to talk about one of them."

She looked past him.

She did not look at the priest's smile, or the cold bright voice, or the silver ring. She looked at the face above it. She looked into the gray eyes, which were open, and wide, and lit with a gleam that did not belong to them. She looked, past the gleam, down into the dark behind, the small stubborn pinprick of light at the bottom of the well.

"Kieran," she said.

…

The Emperor's smile slipped.

It was nothing. A flicker, a tightening at the corner of the mouth. But she saw it. She went on speaking, in the same low voice, to the man behind the mask.

"I know you can hear me."

"He cannot," said Valerian.

"I know you're in there. I know you're fighting. I know you can see my face, and our son's, and you're trying with everything you have to open your mouth." She took another step. "You don't have to answer. I'm going to talk. And you're going to listen."

"This is ridiculous."

"Kieran Vael Aldren." She spoke the name as she had spoken it over the fire, in the old tongue. "I have come to collect a debt."

The wind stopped.

It happened all at once. One moment the plain was full of the thin sound of the north, and the next, there was nothing. The ash hung in the air. A pale light lay on the ground like water. She was aware of the Ashborn on the ridge, a long dark line, silent. She was aware of Obsyra, a vast shape like a thundercloud, rising slowly on the horizon with her wings spread. She was aware of the boy, a tiny trembling figure in the Emperor's arm. But all of it was far away. The only two things in the world were the man, and the voice that spoke to him.

"I am owed a kingdom," said Solaia.

The Emperor said nothing.

"A kingdom of the Sky. Seven Thrones. Seven thousand years of the oldest government on earth. I am owed the cities, and the harvests, and the great white towers. I am owed the Aerie. I am owed the one hundred and eighty-one Houses that gave me their oaths on the morning of my coronation." She breathed. "You broke the seats. All but one. I felt them go."

Silence.

"I am owed a million dragons."

A shudder went through the standing figure.

"I am owed every one that the silver cords took. I am owed every egg that never hatched. I am owed the green ones and the gold ones and the little blue ones that nested in the eaves, and the old black one who has just buried her last friend. I am owed their names." Her voice cracked, and she steadied it. "I am owed my mother."

"Majesty—" said Valerian.

"I am talking."

The Emperor's head jerked, as if from a slap.

"I am owed my mother," said Solaia, "who gave her life to hide me, and who was never given a funeral. I am owed her grave. I am owed her book. I am owed a little house, with a green door, on a cape by the sea, and a dog, and a man who burned every pot he touched." Her throat closed. She forced it open. "I am owed nine hundred years. I am owed the first steps of my son. I am owed his first words. I am owed the sound of his laugh when he was two and the nights I held him when he was four. I am owed every one of them, Kieran. And every one of them is yours."

The silence was absolute.

The Emperor stood quite still. The smile had gone from his face. His eyes had gone flat and wide, and under the hard silver gleam, a tremor was passing, deep and slow, like the first stirring of a river under ice. His lips parted. His hand, the one that lay on the boy's hair, began to shake.

"That's the debt," said Solaia. "That's what you owe me. Not a sum. A life. And I am here to take it."

She raised her hand.

She pointed at him. It was a small gesture. Her arm was steady, and her finger did not tremble, and the White Fire ran down it in a thin bright thread and hung at the tip like a drop of water. She saw the Emperor's eyes follow it. She saw the hunted, bewildered, unspeakably tender look come into them.

"Kieran," she said. "Do you hear me?"

A long breath.

Then, in a voice that was not Valerian's, hoarse and cracked and wrung, and so quiet that she had to strain to hear it over the wind:

"Yes."

…

"No," said Valerian.

It was a thin high cry. The ring flashed white. The Emperor's whole frame convulsed, as if a hand had seized him from within and shaken him. He staggered. The boy in his arm gave a gasp, and went stiff, and the cold in the air deepened until the ash around her feet began to creak with frost.

"You do not understand," hissed the priest. "You are not permitted. He has no will. He gave it up. I hold him. I hold him!"

"You hold his hand," said Solaia. "That's all."

"His heart—"

"His heart is mine."

She said it very simply. She did not know whether it was true. She had no right to say it. But she said it, in that bare cold light, with the whole of the Plain of Ash listening, and she felt it go out of her and strike the man in front of her like a stone into still water.

The Emperor's face changed.

It was not Valerian's doing. The smile that crept across it was crooked and shy and heartbreakingly human. It was the lopsided smile of a man who has been sitting in the dark for nine hundred years and has just seen, on the far side of the room, a door open. His lips trembled. His eyes cleared. The gray in them flooded back, clean and deep as a winter pool.

"Sol," he said.

It was entirely his voice.

"Yes."

"I hear you." He was weeping. His arm was shaking, locked round the boy, and the ring at the end of it flared and spat. "I hear all of it. I, I know it's true. I know I owe it. Every, every word."

"Kieran—"

"Take it." He drew a ragged breath. "Please. Take it. All of it. I'll give it to you. I'll give you whatever's left. I've nothing, nothing else to, to give, but it's yours. It's yours, Sol, it was always yours."

"I'm not asking you to die."

"I know."

"I'm asking you to pay."

"I know." He smiled again. "I want to. I want to so much. I want to, to put everything right. But..."

"But?"

His gaze dropped.

It fell, slowly, to the dark head tucked against his chest. The boy was breathing in small, hard gasps. His wings were drawn tight, and the fingers of one hand were clawed in the front of the Emperor's coat. A faint violet glow had begun to seep from his skin, through the tunic, in thin curling threads. Frost was creeping up his arm.

"Sol," said Kieran, very low. "He's listening."

She froze.

"He, he's been taking it in. All of it. The kingdom, the dragons, the years. Every word you said." His voice cracked. "He's ten. He, he doesn't, he hears the, the sum. He hears they took it from her. And he thinks..."

"No."

"He thinks it's his to collect."

The boy lifted his head.

His eyes were no longer violet. They were black from rim to rim, and filled with an ancient, alien light, and in the middle of them was no pupil at all. He looked at his mother. He looked at the man who held him. His mouth moved, and a small cold voice came out of it, flat as a blade, a chord of many tones.

"Then I'll take it," said Veyran.

"Sweetheart—"

"He took it from you." The black eyes were bottomless. "So I'll take it from him."

Kieran caught her eye over the boy's head.

His face was white. It was wet. It was full of such pity, such terror, such naked love, that she felt it in her breastbone like a blow. And, very gently, in the voice of a man who has understood a thing too late, he said:

"Take it from me, Sol. All of it. I'll pay. But don't let the boy do it for you."