In the middle of the yard she paused, looked up to the sky, closed her eyes and soaked in the sun and the warmth and the dragon's wild hunger. In the years after that day with Azure she'd flown more and more. She'd become a rider, a dragon-princess. The joy had faded, too familiar perhaps, but she never quite forgot, and every time she climbed onto a dragon's back she closed her eyes and thought of that day and of what had come after. She'd looked for it everywhere. With dragons at first. With men, when she'd come to understand what they could do for her. She'd found it for fleeting moments with Jehal, who would die a thousand deaths if she ever found him again. She'd come close over Evenspire in the wild mad fury of that fight; lost herself here and there for little moments until the battle had turned sour. Afterwards, when she was sure she was alone, she'd wept, wept as the little girl who'd found the door to heaven and lost it again.
And here, of all places, she'd found it once more. Joy.
‘Mistress is pleased.’ Myst had found her voice these days.
‘Mistress is,’ murmured Zafir, still with her eyes closed. She held out her arms and stretched.
‘They're looking at you.’ Myst meant the Taiytakei. Zafir opened her eyes and saw that they were, all of them. Watching her, some of them openly, some of them furtively from the towers. Tsen T'Varr and Chrias Kwen and the lord from the mountain city and a dozen others in clothes and feathers that would put rainbows and peacocks to shame were gathered together up on the wall. They were well away from Diamond Eye, but the dragon loomed over everything. And Diamond Eye was looking at her, and so now the Taiytakei were looking at her too. She wondered what it was that drew them in — the power? The hunger? But today they want me. All of them. One way or another they want me for what I have. Even Tsen.
Taiytakei black-cloaks followed as she walked to the castle walls and mounted the steps. She lounged against the stone parapets, dressed in white silk and barefoot. The desert sun beat down and made her skin hot. Her face tingled. She stretched her arms and arched her back, soaking in the heat while Myst and Onyx stood beside her, heads bowed, still as statues. With her long tunic loose around her shoulders and her waist, her arms and ankles bare, the desert was bearable. The soldiers around her with their metal plates stitched into cloth, in their glass and gold and their long florid cloaks, she didn't know how they could bear it. They must be sweating rivers. She looked at them, wondering, and they looked back, desire and envy and disgust mixed together in their gleaming faces while their hands gripped their ashgars and their lightning wands. They couldn't help themselves. They think I'm a whore. She laughed at them and smiled and shook her head. They wouldn't be the first, and whatever they thought it didn't matter. Taiytakei women kept themselves covered from chin to ankle. So what? She wasn't Taiytakei and none of them would ever have her unless she chose it. Another rule of steel forged on Azure's back that day. Never again a slave to any lusts but her own.
The Taiytakei gathered on the wall began to disperse. Tsen paused. He saw her flaunting herself in his path and turned and went a different way. What's wrong with you? What are you afraid of? But it wasn't Tsen she wanted anyway, and the arcane rules they lived by said that none of the others could follow in his wake save the lord who was his guest. Shrin Chrias Kwen — he was the one she wanted. She set her eyes on him and ignored the others. Later. This one first.
Chrias Kwen met her gaze as he approached, and with a venom that made her heart beat a little faster. She let the dragon hunger wash over her, let him feel it burn his skin. As he passed, she kept her eyes on his and brushed a hand across her neck as if to wipe the sweat away. ‘Do murder some more slaves, Kwen, if it troubles you that I'm still here.’
Myst and Onyx flinched. The muscles in the kwen's neck tensed. He'd heard her. She laughed, a tinkling mocking laugh in case her words hadn't been enough. He walked on. The others passed her and she pointedly watched each one as they did. A few turned to look back and then quickly looked away again, embarrassed to be seen to stare at a slave, even one who was a dragon-queen. When they were all gone, Zafir turned and leaned over the parapet into the gentle touch of the breeze. She stretched out her arms and tipped back her head, closed her eyes and flew once more on the dragon's wings.
‘Mistress, why?’ Myst again. Zafir still didn't know her real name and didn't care to, either. Myst was good enough.
‘I'm thirsty.’ They followed her down into the white circle of the dragon yard and into the soft light of the tunnels beneath. Tsen had quartered her among the eyrie slaves at first to remind her of what she was, but he'd moved her before long, away from the others and put her in among the Scales. To keep her safe, he'd told her, but she saw the lie. He'd moved her to shut her defiance away.
She let Myst and Onyx wash and perfume her. They made jasmine tea and chewed Xizic together and Zafir looked at them. They'd been with her for months now, ever since the ship. They were hers, body and soul, and she'd come to take them for granted because they were slaves, her slaves, which made them much the same as the servants she'd once had. But now, today, there was a chance they were about to die and so she saw them afresh. Not as slaves who dutifully loved and groomed and fed her but as people who had once had hopes and hungers of their own, just as she did. She took Myst by the hand. Her skin was so dark it was like staring into the moonless night.
‘Were you born a slave?’
Myst shook her head but Onyx was the one who answered. ‘None of us were, mistress.’
‘I was born in the desert,’ said Myst.
‘We both were. The sword-slaves came out into the Empty Sands and the Desert of Thieves. They bought us from our people and took us back to the slave markets of Cashax and sold us to our first master.’
Zafir listened to them talk as they told her how they'd been taken, each of them, to some Taiytakei lord who made slaves from the desert into bed-slaves fit for a sea lord. How they'd been taught about men and how to pleasure them, how to groom themselves, how to make themselves as perfect and as desirable as possible. They talked of friends made and lost as those who failed to become someone's favourite were thrown aside. The men who were their masters, the kind ones and the cruel, and the women who taught them, who were often far crueller. Zafir half heard their stories and half listened for the crack of the iron-shod boots she knew would come on the stone outside their door, yet while she waited an unexpected sadness crept into her. A kinship for these slaves who should have meant nothing to her — who would have meant nothing to her back in her days as a dragon-queen. Not for their slavery, but for what had come with it. And a sadness, because she ought to send them away now to make them safe but she couldn't quite bring herself to be alone, not in the face of what was coming. She could already feel her resolve weakening.