‘Used to be sergeant of the guard in some place I've never heard of?’
‘Sold into slavery when his town was overrun. Fought with such ferocity that when they finally took him they were too afraid to kill him, right? Whoever they were.’
‘So he says.’
‘He comes from a town you've never heard of because it doesn't exist. He was a dock worker. He was sold to the Taiytakei because he couldn't pay his debts. Found that out from another slave who knew him. Sahan the pirate? Feared throughout the Gulf of Feyr, renowned from Helhex in the south to the mountains in the north, scourge and terror of the seas?’ Tuuran shook his head. ‘Fisherman. He was a pirate but only for one night. Thought he'd row into Deephaven harbour and climb up an anchor chain and rob one of the ships. Caught first time. Sold.’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘But you wouldn't believe it now, either of them. They made up the stories of who they wanted to be. Vhalin the Panther and Bloody Sahan.’ He turned to Berren. ‘So you can be the Bloody Judge of Tethis if you want, or you can be the emperor of Aria or the speaker of the nine realms. No one cares. Just don't act like it makes you any better than the rest of us.’
Berren spat into the sea. ‘Why make up stories if no one cares? They don't change who you are. Pretty pointless, I'd say.’
‘Are they?’ Tuuran slapped Berren on the shoulder and spat a laugh of anger at the night. ‘We have nothing, slave. So when I dream, I am the Tuuran who faced dragons and I fight them and I win. When the time for blood-letting comes, that's who I become and so I live and others die. But when it's not time for blood-letting, these other slaves are what pass for your friends. So if anything happens to Adasi now, you'd better have about a hundred witnesses to say it wasn't you and I'd better be one of them. Otherwise. .’ He mimed a rowing motion.
‘I could throw you over the side right here and now,’ muttered Berren.
‘You really think so?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then why don't you?’
‘I faced him once. The man who stole my life. Let's say, for the sake of things, he was the man who burned my village.’ He stared at the sea, spilling words to the air. ‘I remember the feel of the javelin in my hand. The exultation as I threw it. I looked into his eyes and a chill wrapped itself around me like a long-dead lover. He met me, stare for stare, steady and unflinching as a stone. They weren't the eyes of some doppelganger. They were my own.’ He didn't say anything more after that. Just gazed out across the water.
‘Never mind those other names. I think I'm going to call you Crazy. Crazy Mad,’ said Tuuran.
And that was how things stayed. The days grew to months and the months to years and Tuuran was his friend as much as anyone until the time came when he left, summoned to some voyage to his homeland that filled him with tears and fire and a hunger to be free, and Berren was alone. Crazy Mad. Wondering what to do and waiting for the world to remember him. And remember him it did, after many months more had passed, with a Taiytakei sailing ship and three men in grey robes and one that he knew. The one he wanted most of all.
Vallas. Vallas Kuy. Brother to the dead warlock Saffran who'd cut out a piece of his soul.
16
Not that anyone in the eyrie knew or cared, but in the dragon realms the Adamantine Palace had already burned to ash and glass when the Watcher saw the moon sorcerers for the second and last time. With no warning given they appeared in the desert out of the sky above the eyrie the stolen alchemist had made. Two of them now, not three; and they came with dragons and said nothing, left the monsters behind and vanished into the sky whence they came. The Watcher watched them go and then looked once more at the paper, carefully written in a scribe's hand, that he'd taken from the grey dead under the Vul Storna not many days before.
For the brother who waits in grey.
We have found him
.
Vallas
Vallas. Now he had a name.
The Dragon-queen
17
Six months before it would burn under an onslaught of dragons, the dragon-queen Zafir stood before the altar of the Great Flame in the Glass Cathedral of the Adamantine Palace. Aruch, the cathedral's high priest, was mumbling old words handed down from the first speaker, Narammed. Zafir hardly heard them. Her head was spinning, full of doubts and fears and possibilities and amazement. Out in the Gateyard the Adamantine Men were still clearing up the corpses. The Night of the Knives, they'd soon be calling it. The night that the riders of the north had fought with the Speaker's Guard and left more than a hundred dead strewn across the palace. The night Shezira had pushed Hyram off his balcony to fall to his death and the night Zafir had imprisoned a king and a queen, the first time a speaker had done such a thing in nearly a hundred years. The night she'd started a war.
The Glass Cathedral was half empty. It should have been full, but many of those who had come to see the new speaker chosen were dead or underground. Aruch's mumbling turned into a buzz in her ears. She couldn't concentrate. Her heart was fluttering. War. She'd started a war. Maybe Jehal thought there was a way to turn back but there wasn't.
It took a moment to realise Aruch had stopped. The cathedral had fallen silent. The air was taut with expectation. Aruch was holding something in the palm of his shaking hand.
‘The ring, Holiness,’ he said again.
Zafir stretched out her hand. Her fingers were long and delicate. Musician's fingers, her mother had said a long time ago when they'd still been speaking to each other, before Zafir had bled her first woman's blood and discovered the truth of what was waiting for her.
Today her hands were shaking as much as the daft old priest's.
Aruch slipped the Speaker's Ring onto her finger. He placed the Earthspear in her hand and named her Queen Zafir, speaker of the nine realms. She returned the spear and it was done. As she turned and walked away down the aisle of the gloomy windowless cathedral, she looked for Jehal, but he wasn't there. He'd stayed carefully out of sight. He'd said he would and she understood that he had to, but she wished he hadn't.
Doubts. Doubts had no place in a dragon-rider but it was hard to stand alone with so much uncertainty, not knowing with each hour what would come of Hyram's fall and the battle in the Gateyard, of dragon-kings and dragon-queens imprisoned in her towers, a blood-mage under her feet and a Night Watchman who wasn't as obedient as he seemed. Hard, and Jehal would have made it easier simply by being there to share the burden — but he wasn't, and she'd shambled through this ceremony like a sleepwalker, doing her part but barely aware of what was around her.
And it wasn't good enough. Halfway from the altar to the bright sunlight of the open door, she stopped. She slowly looked from left to right and back again, sweeping her eyes across the riders who'd come to watch her take the ring. They hadn't expected her to stop, and now she had their attention. She looked at them, listened to the racing of her own heart and felt the writhing in her stomach and smiled. Smiled at them, met their eyes one by one and took that fear and doubt and curled a fist around it and squeezed it until it was something else.
Anticipation. Hunger.
It hit her, standing there, halfway along the cathedral. The queen of everything! Speaker! A rush of warmth spread through her and her smile grew wider; and now she strode the rest of the way, strutted, shoulders back, chin high, white cloak swirling behind her. She felt their eyes on her, watching her go. Once outside, she didn't break her stride as she marched to the Tower of Air and climbed its steps to the top. The exertion left her flushed and breathless. She threw open the door to her rooms and pulled off her cloak, sure Jehal would be waiting there ready for her, wanting him to be so she could vent the tension and the anticipation and find a calm again, but he wasn't. She searched back and forth in case he was hiding — it wouldn't be the first time he'd kept her guessing and then crept out on her and she was in no mood for games. When she was sure he really wasn't there, she sighed and flopped onto the pristine silk sheets and started to unlace her boots, and then stopped and threw herself back and closed her eyes because the feeling wouldn't go away. The need for release. She shivered, filled with the memory of desire. When she closed her eyes she could smell him, his sweat, her sex.