Little One!
The words roared in her head. A voice she'd never heard. She staggered and Jeiros was there, right behind her, ready to catch her. She felt him touch her and flinched as if stung, whirled and almost hurled him over the edge.
‘I can stand on my own feet, alchemist!’ she hissed. The fear was a wild thing now, battering itself against the cage she'd made for it. ‘I don't need your hand. Stay away from me!’ As if he would have done such a thing for Hyram or for Jehal. No, just for her, because she was weak. She took a deep breath and quelled the quiver in her throat. She was rattled by that voice, that was all, and her old enemy the dark, but there was nothing to fear here. Steady breaths. Nothing to fear. ‘What is this place? What was that sound?’ Nothing to fear. .
‘Sound, Holiness?’ Jeiros had a smugness to him. She thought she'd probably never stop hating him after this. ‘There was no sound, Holiness.’
Could she have him sent away? There was a thought.
Little one! It came again, a voice that thundered inside her. And the alchemist was right, there was no sound. Only words inside her head.
She reeled. ‘What have you brought me here to see, Jeiros? A dragon? I've seen plenty.’
Jeiros spoke patiently, as if to a child: ‘I've brought you here, Speaker, to see the thing that you cannot be told and must see for yourself, as every speaker before you.’ He drew himself up. ‘This is a dragon untouched by alchemy, Holiness. This is what they would become without us. That is what every alchemist stands against.’
The chained dragon turned its eyes and fixed her with them, alight with fury. It wanted to eat her. It wanted to burn her. It wanted to revel in her fear and dread before she died.
You are nothing, little one.
She made herself stand there, then took two quick steps right to the edge and met its eye. She met its anger and took it inside her and turned it and smashed the fear back where it belonged. Smiled at the monster down below.
Thank you.
19
Months passed from the day Zafir saw the dragon in its cave. The war came. Lovers died and were betrayed but she never forgot. Dragons flew free and cities burned as the schemes of the Taiytakei wrought their havoc, and the dragon's fury rode with her.
She lay sprawled flat, staring up at the sky. The silver man with the white face and the bloody eyes was looking down at her again. Other faces peered down around her. Dark-skins marked with tattoos. Taiytakei. The wooden deck was unforgiving and hard against her skin, bruising her to the bone. She felt crushed by her own weight. One by one a forest of little sounds touched her. Creaking wood. Straining ropes. The wind whistling through the rigging. The shuffle of feet on the deck. Distant voices, orders barked and the calls of seagulls wheeling overhead. The air smelled of salt and of the sea.
The faces didn't speak. They stroked their chins and looked at her. If there was anyone left to write a history of her reign, their words wouldn't be kind. They wouldn't say that Speaker Zafir of the Silver City had been wise or good or just and they certainly wouldn't speak of peace and glory. The miracle would be if there were any voices left to speak at all. But for now none of that mattered, for now she was about to die.
She rose shakily to her feet. Black-skinned Taiytakei sailors in their thin bright silks, yellows and pinks and pale greens and blues, stood around her. Beyond them, past the rocking of the ship, the sea shifted with a lazy swell, the water a deep blue under the summer sun. Around them half a hundred other ships rolled slowly back and forth.
Nausea stabbed at her. She coughed, vomiting up another mouthful of water, then glared at the men around her, ready to fight if she had to, but a cautious thought held her back: of the dragon she had ridden with its vengeful flames, snuffed out in the air like you might snuff out a candle. Crashing dead to the water with her still strapped to its back. Sinking and pulling her under.
No. She was a dragon-queen. She lived and flew and commanded monsters. She had a knife in her boot. She would cut through them like dragon fire or she would fall in the attempt.
She staggered as the pitching of the deck caught her unawares. Her ankle was still weak from her duel with Lystra. She dropped to one knee and found she couldn't rise again, that it was too breathlessly hard. Lystra. Stupid girl.
The silver men dispersed into glittering mist and drifted into the air. She watched them go to the other dragons who had fled from the Pinnacles with her, three of them, motionless, frozen in the sky as though for them time had stopped. The silver mists wrapped around them. They seemed to whisper in the dragons’ ears. Even the Taiytakei stood transfixed, watching the alien sorcerers ascend to the sky.
The oldest of the Taiytakei turned away first and looked at her. He was shaking but it was only his age. Or maybe it was laughter. His face was wrinkled, so dark that his eyes seemed like lamps beneath the tight braids of his ghost-white hair. His fingers were knobbly, all skin and bone. His clothes, though. . He wore bright silk from head to toe and was collared and cuffed with iridescent feathers, red and yellow and orange and gold, shimmering in the sun so that he looked almost aflame. The braids of his hair reached to his feet. A rich man among their kind, then. Very rich indeed.
He told her his name, Quai'Shu, and how he'd traded her for dragons. She let him, taking the time it gave her to find her strength again, to find the fury of the dragon inside. When he was done, another Taiytakei, taller and younger but just as skinny and frail-looking, whispered in the old man's ear. He had his feathers made into a cloak, and when the wind died down and it fell still she saw that the feathers formed a picture. The sea, and mountainous stones rising from the waves that reminded her of her home in the Pinnacles. A golden cloud rose above the scene and two bright bolts of lightning crossed it. His braids too almost touched the deck. She wondered how many times he tripped over them each day.
The old man frowned, shrugged, nodded and turned to walk slowly away. The younger Taiytakei smiled. His eyes felt like unwanted fingers over her skin, all greed and desire. She was cold, the wet soft leather under what was left of her dragon-scale clinging unpleasantly to her, seawater still dripping from her sleeves, trickling down her arms and legs. She knew what was on his mind. What was on the mind of most men when they saw her. She wasn't sure whether it made her want to laugh or cry. Men were so pathetically predictable.
And for one bizarre moment she found herself thinking of Jehal. Missing him. He'd made no pretence of being anything but himself. He'd lived up to his promises, at least until Evenspire.
She rose again, unsteady, slipping her boot knife into her sleeve. Above, her last three dragons snapped into motion again. No bodies fell splashing to the sea but she knew the riders who'd flown with her were gone. Snuffed out. Her last loyal few. These silver men, what were they? Not Taiytakei. The Silver Kings themselves? But a thought like that was too big for this moment, too laden with questions as large as the world. This moment was black and white, life and death.
‘Hold her!’
A sailor reached out and grabbed her and it was almost a relief to have something simple to deal with. She jumped straight at him, knocking him back, and the sailor gave a yelp of surprise and for a moment she was free. She had no doubts about what came next. The whole world narrowed down to the Taiytakei in the cloak, the one who presumed to own a dragon-queen. She sprang and knocked him over. They fell, locked together, and she had the knife in her hand before they hit the deck, sharp and free and already coming down. She'd waged wars, burned cities and called down fire from the skies; she'd stroked the hearts of men and taken lovers as she chose, she'd betrayed her own blood and her desire had betrayed her in its turn. Princess, queen, speaker, she'd been all these and she would not submit to anything, not any more. Never again. Certainly not to a man who'd traded her life and her ambition with King Valmeyan of the Worldspine for his stolen dragons.