Free!
Her three broken birds stopped again. One of them whimpered. Zafir slapped them back to work. What good did it do to explain? Why terrify them even more? There will be a time when I will return. There will be a reckoning. Ruin on them all. Ruin!
Zafir stiffened. Return? Reckoning? Ruin? Those were the dragon's thoughts, not hers. She ought to be afraid. Terrified, as her three little birds were. They'd stopped again, pale and quivering, fingernails half painted, and looked at each other, and then they looked to her, fearful as mice, but they didn't run. Perhaps because she sat still and unmoved among them. Perhaps because she hadn't raised her hand for the third time. They were all hearing the same one voice crashing into them. Did not knowing what it was make it worse, or did it make it better?
‘Mistress. .’
The first word any of them had ever spoken to her. Zafir collected herself. For a moment she closed her eyes. They couldn't have long, after all. Mistress? It made her want to cry for everything she'd lost and at the same time she felt stupidly grateful that, at the very end, someone would be with her. ‘A dragon,’ Zafir said when she'd swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘A dragon has woken nearby.’ That only confused them and so she took their hands and pulled them gently closer, and after all she'd done to them they still came, one by one, to kneel before her as she sat, drawn in because they were terrified and she wasn't. And yes, a part of her wasafraid, the part that knew that death was near, but she'd lived with dragons since she was born and had learned to take that fear and make it into something she could spit right back into any monster's eye, as every dragon-rider did. ‘The silver half-gods will easily see to it,’ she told them, except if it was that easy, how had one woken and why was it still coming? But either way nothing she could do would make a difference, and so for want of anything better she started to tell her broken birds what it meant to be a dragon-queen. All the things that had gone through her mind as she'd killed the Taiytakei on the deck. She told them how she'd been born a princess, heir to the oldest and greatest of the nine realms, to the Silver City, the Pinnacles and the beating heart of the dragon lands. How she'd been made and what it had been like to be a little girl surrounded by monsters. That she had been a queen, a ruler of all and mistress of every dragon in the world even though now she was nothing but a slave. They stared back with wide eyes. She couldn't be sure they were even listening and they certainly couldn't begin to understand. No one could, not unless they'd lived it.
As she talked and stroked their hair and held their hands; and as she did she heard voices through the walls over the wooden creaks of the ship. Tremors touched her feet, of timbers shaken and rent, closer and closer, the splintering of wood as something crashed its way through the ship. Then shouts and screams and the smash smash smash of something that could only be a hatchling dragon battering its way through a wall. Her birds were whimpering, sobbing, huddling ever closer. Zafir kept her head down, eyes among them, talking, doing all she could to keep the quiver out of her voice. A faint smile played at the corner of her mouth even as she flinched and her heart skipped a beat. She would die by dragon after all, and so would these Taiytakei who thought they could make her a slave, and if that was the way it had to be then she would be content.
A noise like a thunderbolt shook the room. For an instant fear got the better of her. Her words faltered, the spoken progress of her life stuttering to a halt as she was crowned mistress of the Adamantine Palace. She heard the roar of flames, more screams; sniffed and caught a whiff of burning, of flesh and wood and cloth and hair.
Know what I am! Her three birds whimpered and cringed and tried to pull away but she held them tight. ‘You can't run,’ she whispered over the din of screams and the crack of tortured wood. ‘Never run. Whatever comes, face it and don't flinch. Can it be any worse than living as a slave in even the prettiest cage?’ She could feel the monster. It was close now.
The roof of her cabin burst apart, a sharp shower of splintered wood cascading to the floor. Her broken birds cried out and clung to her. Jagged claws tore and ripped at the wood above her. A dragon's head smashed through, all fire and horns and glaring fangs. A hatchling fresh from the egg, not that it made a difference. Zafir met it eye for eye. So this was how she would end? And yes, she was afraid, but she was mistress of her fear, quickly crushed to scorn and anger.
‘You're just a newborn,’ she said, and her words oozed with disappointment. ‘I should have better. You should have been a proper dragon. A real monster. Onyx or his like. That’s how a dragon-queen should die. Not you.’ She looked away. Dragon smell filled the cabin, cloying and overpowering. The hatchling glistened. A drop of something dark and sticky fell from it and landed on her skin. She flinched. It was still wet from its egg.
Dragon-rider. It stared, all loathing and glee, then bared its fangs and bored its eyes into her, battering at her, demanding her submission, her obeisance and her awe. It forced one claw through the hole it had made in the timbers and reached for her. She made herself be still, made herself hold its eye, not flinch away even as it touched her face. It drew one talon sharp as a razor down the skin of her neck from ear to collar with careful delicacy. She felt the pain, the warm blood, but she didn't move.
I could burn you. I could rip you to bloody strips.
‘I bow to no one,’ she whispered. ‘So burn me, dragon. Burn me!’
Why? Its eye flickered away as if it was talking to someone else. Abruptly it withdrew. She watched it go then stared out through the hole in the roof of her cabin long after, listening to the screams fade and the pop and crackle of flames until she finally found her voice again.
‘Because I am a dragon-queen,’ she whispered. She wasn't going to burn after all. She hadn't expected that.
Her broken birds were cowering in the shadows under the bed now, under the table, in the corner, whimpering and wailing. They made her laugh. That was how men made themselves into slaves. ‘Get up!’ She touched her hand to where the dragon had opened her skin and then to her tongue, tasting her own blood. A habit that came with every wound, started long ago in her mother's palace.
They wouldn't move. They huddled in their corners, mouths agape, shaking, eyes glazed. Broken. Dragons did that.
‘Get up!’ she said again, sharply this time. ‘Tend to me.’ She hauled them one by one out of their hiding places and wrenched them back from their terror. She touched her bloodied neck once more. Whether it had meant to or not, the dragon had set her free. The silver chain was still wrapped around her wrist but at its other end the bolt that had once gone through the roof of her cabin lay among the splinters on the floor. She picked it up and held it loosely in her hand, wondering. A chain like that could strangle a man. The bolt? It was heavy enough that a good throw, well aimed, hard and fast to the temple, might be deadly. But to what end? How many men were on this one ship? Dozens, unless the dragon had killed them. More than even a dragon-queen could fight, and even if she won, what then?