Authors: Stephen Deas
Tuuran took off his helm and scratched his head. The furrows in his brow deepened. None of this was going in a way that made any sense. Everywhere he went, people refused to believe the simple truths he told them. And you might think, after everything this realm had seen these last couple of years, there would be some sort of pleasure in learning of a sister unexpectedly alive. Didn’t look like it, not from the face glaring in front of him. Come to that he couldn’t remember if Zafir had ever said anything to him about a sister. He’d already known, but she’d never spoken of it.
‘How many of you are here?’
Princess Kiam shook her head. ‘I’ll not give my people away so easily. You still smack of Taiytakei. You may take me to whoever claims my sister’s name so I can explain to them why they should choose another.’
Tuuran tried again. ‘Her Holiness will be pleased to see you.’ He couldn’t quite make himself believe it though. Nothing here was the way it was supposed to be. Be nice, he thought ruefully, if he showed up somewhere and someone was actually pleased to see him.
‘Beginning to wish we’d stayed in Takei’Tarr,’ he muttered, but no one heard.
He crossed back over the bridge with the ragged princess in front, climbed the wall of the fissure and the stairs to the outside, where the eyrie floated over the top of the mountain. He pointed, and then looked for Princess Kiam to be amazed and awed, but she simply shrugged. ‘Bigger than it looked yesterday.’ She tilted her chin and scanned the skies. ‘Where are all the dragons? I haven’t seen any dragons except the ones you brought.’
‘We taught them to keep away.’ Tuuran grinned smugly, but even then Princess Kiam wasn’t impressed. When he thought she wasn’t looking, he glowered at her. He led her to one of the cages that would lift them to the eyrie rim. Glared and frowned at them too. The cages and their winches were getting old and had only been lashed together in the first place. Best do something about fixing them up properly before there was an accident …
Princess Kiam wasn’t looking at the cages. She was peering at his neck. ‘Are you a Scales?’
The marks on his skin. He shook his head. ‘Adamantine born and bred, but I had an unfortunate encounter with a hatchling.’
‘Oh.’ She shrugged it off as though it didn’t matter. ‘Why do you keep staring at me?’
‘Because you look like your sister. It’s … striking. It keeps taking me by surprise.’
‘We don’t look anything like each other.’ Kiam turned away from him. Tuuran sneaked another glance and begged to differ. Her nose was pointed while Zafir’s was rounder. Other than that they were two puppies from the same litter …
He shuddered and glared at the sky. The drizzle was turning back to steady rain.
Two puppies from the same litter?
That wasn’t any way to be thinking about her Holiness and her sister.
When they reached the rim he picked his way through the piled detritus of abandoned crates and ropes and sacks where his men had been offloading the supplies from Merizikat down into the Moonlit Mountain. He led Zara-Kiam up the wall and then tried to take her down to the dragon yard and into the tunnels where it was dry, but she wouldn’t have it. She walked along the top of the wall instead, staring at everything. The lightning cannon fascinated her, and Tuuran almost fired it so she could see what they did, then stopped himself. Showing off, was he? He stomped away to get a proper grip on himself, and sent Snacksize off on a glass sled through the air between the mountain tops to take word back to her Holiness, to ask her kindly to recall the eyrie, since otherwise they were all stuck out here on entirely the wrong mountain.
Zara-Kiam was still up on the wall, standing out in the rain. Drenched. He brought her a cloak, but by then there wasn’t much point.
‘I remember him.’ Kiam pointed to Diamond Eye, circling the ruins of the Silver City far below. ‘He was one of Zafir’s favourites. She took another to ride when Hyrkallan came, but I remember that one. Diamond Eye. So she really didn’t die?’
Tuuran told the story as best he knew it – how the Taiytakei had taken Zafir and Diamond Eye and a clutch of dragon eggs and had tried to start their own eyrie, and how it had all ended badly. ‘I wasn’t there for most of it. You’d best ask Grand Master Bellepheros if you want to know more.’
‘You have a grand master alchemist too?’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘Anyone else?’
‘Not from here.’ Didn’t know where even to start with Crazy Mad and the Black Moon. Too hard to get into all that without sounding stupid. So he didn’t bother, and ended up standing beside her in the rain, looking out at the haze and the dim outline of the Silver City, at the other two mountains of the Pinnacles poking up through the earth like the skeletal fingers of some buried god, wondering what to say and not finding any answers, feeling more and more like a fish flopped up on a muddy shore and not knowing how to get back into the water. ‘You ought to get inside,’ he said after a bit. ‘Too much cold and wet doesn’t do any man any good.’
She didn’t move. Didn’t seem right, but then what was he going to do about it? Pick her up and carry her?
‘You have no idea what it’s like,’ she said after a while, ‘to be able to stand out here in the open and just breathe the air without looking up all the time.’
He laughed at that. ‘I do have
some
idea.’
Took about an hour for Diamond Eye to give up on doing whatever he was doing and come crashing down with Zafir on his back to tow the eyrie from one mountain to the other. Tuuran had Kiam down into the tunnels by then. Pointed her to Baros Tsen’s old bathhouse down in the bowels where the Black Moon used to spend his time, found her some threadbare old towels and a reasonably clean old slave tunic. Couldn’t think of anyone to send to look after her, not with Myst and Onyx in the Moonlit Mountain and him with nothing but a handful of foul-mouthed scurvy men and one bad-tempered alchemist. If she needed any looking after at all, which didn’t look likely.
Zafir’s unexpected sister. Hadn’t been ready for that.
Mad Queen Jaslyn
Eight days after landfall
Zafir sat on her throne, dressed in a queen’s dress she hadn’t worn for more than two years. Servants who had seen half a dozen lords and queens come and go wafted silently around her. They had survived her mother, Meteroa, Valmeyan, Jehal, and never changed. They knew where things were, even after Hyrkallan and his riders had ransacked the place.
She’d loved this dress once. Fresh-blood-red, threaded with gold and silver and made from silk by the seamstresses of Furymouth, but it seemed tawdry now after the dazzling clothes of the Taiytakei. It didn’t quite fit any more either. She wasn’t the same Zafir. The last year had sharpened her, changed her shape, leaned her, but her discomfort went beyond that. They no longer belonged to the same world, her and this silk. She was more at home in her armour these days.
Home. The word was supposed to mean something, wasn’t it? And perhaps it had when she’d first sat on her throne again, commanding the Octagon, when she’d wandered the old halls of the Silver King dredging through two decades of memories. She’d decided almost at once that she would welcome Hyrkallan’s riders into her home, if they would have her, forgive everything that had happened in the dragon war if they would do the same; but they hated her, every last one of them, and it seemed such an implacable thing that couldn’t ever be moved, and so the world would go back to the way it had been before, and she’d hang them because they gave her no choice, and then everyone she didn’t hang would hate her even more, and they’d all fall to fighting again to see who would be the last to stand upright atop the pile of bones and ash that the realms had become. She
would
fight for that too, if she had to. She’d fight for everything because she didn’t know anything else, but it left her so overwhelmingly weary. Weary to the marrow.
Home. Nothing but a great emptiness.
There has to be another way.
It is the dragons’ way, little one.
Diamond Eye’s thoughts were as gentle as a dragon could be as he roamed the once magnificent Silver City. She’d send soldiers into the tunnels, she decided, for the men and women who eked out a living there. And
they’d
hate her too, because she was a dragon-rider and Hyrkallan had been a dragon-rider, and Hyrkallan had had a fondness for sending his riders to hunt and kill them; but she’d do it anyway. Tuuran and his company could deal with it when they were done rooting around the other two mountain summits.
She’d rebuild her city one day. She told herself that every now and then, though she didn’t see how. But right now she needed to decide what to do about Hyrkallan’s riders. The Crowntaker had kept them in line for a while, but the Crowntaker was gone, and who knew when he might come back?
Talk to them.
Myst and Bellepheros had counselled mercy.
Tuuran, off exploring, had left her with Halfteeth running things. Crooked-faced, broken-jawed Halfteeth didn’t bother pretending that he liked her, but after what he’d done over Farakkan, Zafir didn’t much like Halfteeth either, so that was fair at least. She told him to bring Queen Jaslyn to her, up on the summit, warned him to be nice if he wanted to keep his hamstrings, then left her throne and wrapped herself in the old comfort of dragonscale and a cloak against the worst of the weather. She climbed the Great Stair to the summit, to the whip of wind and the slash of rain, and stood in the ruin of the Reflecting Garden.
Talk to them.
But how could that ever work? What could she offer?
Halfteeth brought Jaslyn to her. Jaslyn was dressed in a simple tunic. Halfteeth hadn’t bothered to give her anything against the rain, and by the time they reached Zafir, she was soaked and shivering. Zafir rolled her eyes at Halfteeth. The rain lashed them.
‘Go away.’ She took off her cloak.
Halfteeth sniffed. ‘Tuuran will have my balls if I let you get hurt.’
‘You won’t have any to give him if you don’t do as you’re told.’
He looked at her, looked at Queen Jaslyn, shrugged and withdrew, settling back under the Queen’s Gate out of the downpour. Zafir put her cloak across Jaslyn’s shoulders and stood beside her. For a while she looked at the remains of the Reflecting Garden, then at Jaslyn, then back again. She almost had to shout over the wind. ‘I get angry about the most stupid things,’ she said at last. ‘It makes me angry that the dragons did this. Of all the havoc they wrought, it makes me angry that they destroyed
this
. A pointless, stupid vanity of a thing, but it was beautiful, and nothing we make will ever replace it.’
Jaslyn stood stiff and awkward. The hiss of rain splashing on the pools bubbling from the Silver King’s fountain filled the silence that hung between them, the whistle of the wind through ruined stone. Zafir wiped the rain from her eyes.
‘It used to make me angry that you drove me from my home.’ She took a deep breath and sighed. ‘Actually, it still does. You drove me into the sea.’
‘You brought me here to kill me,’ said Jaslyn coldly. ‘So can’t you just be done with it?’
‘I hear you woke a dragon.’
‘My Silence. They say I’m mad. Even my lord Hyrkallan.’ She spat his name with loathing.
‘Yes. I heard your dragon’s name was Silence.’ Zafir pulled down the collar of her dragonscale coat. Cold rain on her skin. She ran a finger along the scar Silence had given her, then drew back her sleeve and touched the inside of her elbow where the Statue Plague had started to mark her. ‘These are both gifts from your Silence. Now I must bow to my alchemists and beg for their potions or else die a slow lingering death.’ The old anger fluttered through her, capricious in its vengeance. ‘Diamond Eye bit off her head. Though we both know you can’t kill a dragon, not really. I suppose she’s here somewh—’
Jaslyn clamped her hands around Zafir’s throat. She pushed as if trying to lift Zafir right off the ground, throwing them both towards the summit’s edge in the storm. The uneven ground made her stumble. Zafir forced her arms between Jaslyn’s and pulled apart, breaking her grip. They lurched and clashed heads. Zafir reeled, staggered, tripped and fell, splashed into a puddle. Jaslyn picked up a rock to smash Zafir’s skull, but Halfteeth was on her before she could bring it down. He pulled Jaslyn away and then held her while another Adamantine Man offered Zafir a hand.
Zafir howled at them over the wind: ‘Go away! Both of you, or I’ll have you thrown off this mountain!’ Yes,
this
was what she’d been missing. She shoved Halfteeth. ‘Go! Go on! Leave us!’ The anger. Anger was her engine. She picked herself up and pushed at Jaslyn. ‘Is this what you want?’
‘You have no idea.’ Jaslyn grabbed her again, trying to drag her to the edge of the cliffs. A swirl of wind staggered them. Rain lashed across Zafir’s face, left her half-blind. She broke free, danced towards the summit edge overlooking the Silver City. The cliffs here were sheer almost all the way to the ground, but everything was lost in a haze of grey. Zafir turned. Beckoned.
‘Come, then.’ She backed away as Jaslyn advanced. The rain was getting under her armour now, cold and damp and clammy.
‘You have no idea,’ Jaslyn said again, ‘what I did because of you.’ Halfteeth and his men were circling. Zafir screamed at them to go away and leave her alone, and yes, they’d be damned, and Tuuran would feed them their balls, but she was their speaker, their queen, and
let it be just the two of us. Dragon-queens alone!
She stopped with her back to the cliff, wavering in the wind, her feet on the edge. She cocked her head. She was grinning, on the edge of madness. Maybe the two of them had something in common after all. ‘Well? What
did
you do?’
‘They told me you were dead over Evenspire. Lystra was trapped. Prisoner or worse. So I had to get her back. I
had
to.’ Jaslyn lunged and then skipped away, uncertain. She flicked the rain off her face and came again. ‘Nothing else mattered. I gave myself to Hyrkallan.’ She was trembling. Hunger and anger and disgust and loathing. ‘I pitched my dragons with your Viper. I gave myself away like a piece of meat, and it was all for Lystra, and all because of you. Because of you and Jehal. Because
you
couldn’t let him go.’
‘Me?’ Zafir bared her teeth. ‘I’d force-feed Jehal his own manhood if he was still alive.’
‘No, you wouldn’t! You’d kill Lystra so you could have him again. You’d kill anyone who looked at him. But he’s dead now, and my sister is far away under the Spur where you can’t touch her.’ Shaking again. Despite the cloak, Jaslyn was soaked to the skin. ‘And nor can I. And all I want is to fly again, to touch the sky and ride a dragon and be with her. But I can’t, and it will never be, not now. So put an end to me, if that’s what you brought me here to do. Put an end to this droning, dull, sad, suffocating mimicry of life.’ Jaslyn paused, keeping a distance between the two of them. Four or five strides. ‘Jehal’s dead, Zafir. Dead. Your lover. A dragon killed him. He died badly, the way that shit-stain prick deserved, and no one mourned him, not one single tear. But I can tell you this, Zafir: I can tell you that at the end he loved my sister, not you.’
Dead. Zafir already knew, but Jaslyn’s last sting caught her and made it suddenly real. She barked a harsh laugh, threw back her head and let the rain wash over her. ‘So I’m denied the pleasure of killing him myself? But that was half the reason I came back!’
‘And the other half was Lystra, was it?’ Jaslyn was breathing hard, almost ready to charge. Halfteeth’s men were hiding where they thought Zafir wouldn’t notice, but they were too far away to make any difference. Zafir let a sneer cross her face. Slowly, with every ounce of disdain she could muster.
‘I came back because this is my home. So Jehal’s little starling was why you sided with him when you hated his every pore? For sister Lystra? Because you loved her? And then what? She ran away with him and left you here, did she?’ The look in Jaslyn’s eye. Murder and pain. Zafir spread her arms to Jaslyn and to the storm. ‘Come on then! Between them they spurned us both, and I have already stood where you stand, ready to throw myself into the void. In a golden gondola hanging over the great cloud of the storm-dark that lies at the heart of Takei’Tarr, faced by a sorceress who had made me into a slave. I could have charged her down and hurled us both to our end, and yet I didn’t, because I am
not
worthless. So here I am. Come then, Queen Jaslyn of the north, queen of Sand and Stone, queen of Flint. Of all you three sisters you have by far the most of your mother in you, and she would not have flinched. Come, unless you have nothing left, unless
you
truly are worthless. I lost Jehal long before Evenspire. I know that. And you lost your sister Lystra too. I can tell you that at the end she loved Jehal, not you. I look at you and I know.’
Jaslyn screamed. She charged, and Zafir didn’t try to get out of the way, but let Jaslyn crash into her, let herself take one step back and then another and find nothing but air. Let them tip over the edge together and fall.
‘All for her.’ Jaslyn held her tight, screaming in Zafir’s face as the wind howled past them. It tore the cloak off her back and ripped at Zafir’s dragonscale coat. ‘No one else mattered. And my mother gave her to that shit-eater!’
The wind tore Jaslyn away. Zafir spread her arms and closed her eyes. Amid the screaming panic of falling was an odd shred of serenity. Of relief. Was that how it was for Jaslyn too? Probably not.
I shouldn’t be afraid.
No.
Diamond Eye’s claws folded gently around her.
Her as well.
The wind was too strong for her to open her eyes and look into the teeth of it. If anything they fell faster now, raindrops scouring her skin like a thousand tiny daggers; and then she felt Diamond Eye spread his wings and gently slow and level into a glide; and then the rhythmic lurch and rise as he climbed back to the mountain’s summit. Dimly, over the rush of air, she realised that Jaslyn was still screaming. Not the shrieks of unfettered terror that usually came with being caught in a dragon’s claws, but furious howling sobbing wails of despair.
It mattered to her that much did it, to hurt me?
Diamond Eye didn’t answer, but she could see into his thoughts, and through them into Jaslyn. She could see the fractures, the broken pieces that were held together as best Jaslyn could manage, but which would never properly mend.
I suppose I look like that too.
It was hard to really hate someone when you could see into their soul.
Yes.
Diamond Eye reached the top of the mountain and landed. He lowered Zafir and then Jaslyn carefully to the ground. He stretched his wings over them, a moment of shelter from the wind and the rain, not that it made much of a difference. Little rivulets ran against her skin underneath her dragonscale.
Hold her down. But be kind.
Zafir crouched beside Hyrkallan’s reluctant queen, the last echoes of her own fury fading inside her head. ‘I hear you once thought that dragons should be free. You’ve seen what comes of that. Diamond Eye is free. The other dragons who fly with me … not so much. They remember and have woken, but they are beholden to the Black Moon, half-god brother to the Silver King. But you shouldn’t hear it from me. Hear it from my dragon. Hear him thunder.’
Tell her the story of the Black Moon. Answer her questions.
She turned her back, blocked the two of them from her mind and walked away, waiting for it to be done. She scanned the skies for other dragons. Not one, not a single speck. They could be lurking up above the cloud, of course, but if they were anywhere near then Diamond Eye would feel their thoughts and tell her, wouldn’t he?