The Cracked Throne

It started as a sound, and the sound was a throne breaking.

She heard it before she felt anything else. It came from a very long way off, a low dull crack, as of ice splitting on a deep lake, and it rolled across the Plain of Ash from the south, from the horizon, from the place where the Black Ridge stood small and dark against the sky. It went through the soles of her feet. It went through the ground. It went into the marrow of her spine and rang there, a single clear terrible note.

"The Seat," said Obsyra, from overhead, in a voice of awe. "It has cracked. The Bone Throne. Forty leagues away."

Solaia did not look up.

She could not. Her eyes were fixed on the boy.

He stood in the circle of his father's arm with his head thrown back and his wings flung wide, and the dark fire was pouring out of him. It was not like the fire on the wall. That had been a flood. This was a wound. It rose from his skin in thin curling threads of violet, and black, and a third color she had no name for, a deep bruised gold like the last light at the bottom of a lake. The threads twined and rose. They climbed the air above him in a spiral, wider and wider, and the ash lifted off the ground in a cone, and the light of the pale sun went out of the sky.

"Veyran!" she screamed.

He did not answer.

He was singing.

She heard it under the wind: a high thin steady note, wordless, ancient, shaking with an alien sweetness. It was the sound of the Void. It was the sound of the bell that had rung through the long nights of the Hollow Sky, the grief of a thousand forgotten things. It came out of his throat in a stream, and the air trembled with it, and the frost crept out from his feet in feathered white fans across the dark ground.

He is calling it, said Obsyra. Little one, he is calling the Night.

"Calling it?"

The whole of it. The hunger. The Hollow. All of it, in all of them. The great black head swung down. The golden eyes were wide with horror. He is reaching into the Empire. He is touching every place the Gift of Night has ever lived.

"Stop him!"

I cannot. It is not mine to stop. He is— A shuddering breath. He is the first of his kind, Solaia. Neither of the Sky nor of the Night. He is both, and so he is the door.

…

The Emperor was on his knees.

He had gone down when the singing began, slowly, as a tree goes down. He knelt in the ash with his arm still about his son and the ring on his finger blazing white. His head was bowed. His shoulders shook. She saw the black veins swarm up his throat and over his jaw and into his hair, and she saw him fight them. She saw him dig his gloved fingers into the earth. She saw his lips shape her name.

"Kieran!"

"Hold him," he gasped. "Sol, I, I can't, he's, it's pulling..."

"What's pulling?"

"Everything." He was staring at nothing. "The Night. All of it. It's coming through me. It's, it's coming up out of the, the Empire, out of the Palace, out of the dead, they're, oh God, they're all calling..."

She fell on her knees in front of them and took her son's face in both hands.

It burned. It burned like a coal. The skin under her palms was scalding, and the black eyes looked through her, and the singing went on, high and unbearably sweet. She felt the dark flame lick up her wrists. She felt it eating, patiently, at the White Fire in her veins.

"Veyran. It's Mama. Look at me."

Mama, said the boy, without moving his lips.

"Yes. Yes, my heart."

They took it.

"I know."

They took all of it. The Sky. The dragons. Grandmother. Gron. The voice was perfectly calm. It was the calm of a very deep well. I can hear them. They're all down there, in the dark. They're asking me to let them out.

"They're dead, sweetheart. They're at peace."

They're not. A faint puzzled frown. Mama. They're not. They're in the Throne. The Seat. It's built of them. The bones. The pillars. They never left. They've been waiting, all this time, for someone to...

He stopped.

His eyes cleared a little. For an instant the black ebbed, and she saw the violet, and the gray, and the child behind them, frightened and young.

"I can hear the whole world, Mama," he whispered. "It's so loud."

"I know."

"It's so sad."

"I know, sweetheart. I know."

"I don't want to hear it any more."

"Then stop."

"I can't." A tear ran down his face and hissed on the heat. "I don't know how. You never taught me how. You only taught me how to hold it."

She felt the words go in under her ribs.

…

It was true.

She knelt in the ash, with her son's burning face between her hands, and the whole of it fell into place with a cold small click, like a key in a lock. She had taught him the Seven Words of Welcome. She had taught him the Nine of Restraint. She had taught him to light a candle and put it out, to find the edge of a fire and keep it there, to make himself small. She had taught him a hundred ways to hold.

She had never once taught him how to let go.

Oh, God, she thought. Oh, God, I made a jar, and I filled it, and I never showed him the lid.

All those years. All those long nights in the cave above the lake, when she had told him about the fall, and the Marshal, and the silver masks. All the lessons she had given in cold quiet rage. Be careful. Hold it. Don't let it out. Remember what they did. She had thought she was keeping him safe. She had been teaching him to carry, and carry, and carry, the whole grief of the world in a body that was ten years old.

And now it was too much.

"Veyran," she said, "I'm sorry."

It's not your fault.

"It is."

It's the Throne's. The black eyes slid past her, toward the south. It's all of theirs. The Church. The Empire. The Seven. Every throne there ever was. They kept it all. They locked it away. They made everyone smaller, and sadder, and more afraid, so that they could sit on top.

"No, my heart."

They did. I can see it.

"Some of them were good."

Were they? The voice was quiet. Grandmother was good. She died for you. And the Throne let her.

"Veyran—"

I don't want to take it back from him, Mama. He tilted his head. His black gaze rested on the man at his side, tenderly, with a strange, grave pity. I thought I did. But he's just a man. He's tired. He's only a piece. He's no more guilty than the stone. A tiny, bleak smile. It's the whole thing that's wrong. It's the shape of it. The way the world is built.

She stared at him.

"What are you saying?"

I don't want to punish anyone, said her son. I don't want to win. The black light was growing in his eyes. I want to make it stop. I want to end it. The thrones. The Debt. The Night. All of it. I want it to be over, so nobody ever has to be a queen again.

"Oh, sweetheart."

Do you see?

"I see."

It's the only way.

"It's not."

Mama—

"It's not." Her voice cracked. "There's another way. I swear. There is. We just have to—"

She stopped.

The fire had changed.

It had been rising for some minutes now, in its slow terrible spiral. It reached the sky. It tore a hole in the sun. And from the heart of it, from the very center of the whirling dark, a thing began to take shape that she had seen once before, on a night of snow, on a ridge in the north: a pillar. A column of violet-black flame, a mile high, wider than a tower, wreathed in white sparks and shot through with the pale gold of her own fire. It stood up out of the boy as a mast rises from a ship. It lit the plain from edge to edge. And around the base of it, in a wide shining ring, the ash began to move.

It rose from the ground in great curling sheets. It twisted into shapes. They were vast and pale, and winged, and horned, and she knew them, even as her heart stopped: the ghosts of the dragons, the long-dead, the spirits of the bone. They poured up out of the earth. They filled the sky. They gathered above the boy in a spinning crown, and their eyes were open, and their voices rose in a long deep chord of grief.

Let us go, they sang. Let us go. Let us go.

…

"Sol."

The voice was hoarse. It came from very near, from the ground at her side. She turned. Kieran had lifted his head.

His face was gray. The black lines had reached his eyes. They ran across his cheeks like cracks across a plate, and the skin between them was white as chalk. But he was smiling. It was a shaky, terrified, loving smile, and his eyes were clear.

"He's right," he said.

"What?"

"The boy. He's right." His voice was a thread. "It's not about who owes who. It's the shape. The chain. It always was." He coughed. Blood flecked his lips. "I broke it once. In the Fortress. I paid, and I, I thought it was done."

"It wasn't."

"No. The Gift's still in me." His hand closed round her wrist. "It's in him, now, too. And it's, it's going to eat him, Sol. It's going to eat him alive. Unless..."

"Unless what?"

He looked up at the pillar of fire.

It was beautiful. She saw that, now. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, and the most terrible: a column of violet and gold and black, thrown up out of a ten-year-old boy like a banner. Shadows chased across the plain. The ghosts wheeled. Somewhere very far to the south, the Bone Throne gave a second crack, louder than the first.

"Unless somebody catches it," said Kieran.

She turned her head.

She looked at him: at the white face, the black veins, the silver ring blazing on his finger like a coal. She looked at the bare, thin, trembling hand that held her wrist. She looked, last, at the boy's small figure standing in the heart of the fire, with his arms flung out, and the whole world pouring through him.

And she saw it, at last, the thing she had been too afraid to see.

She saw what she was going to have to choose.