Authors: Stephen Deas
It is done.
Diamond Eye let Jaslyn go. The dragon cocked his head, that curious and amused look he had, waiting to see what she would do.
Zafir stood by the edge of the cliff. She spread her arms.
‘Well?’ she called. ‘Shall we go again?’ When Jaslyn didn’t move Zafir swept her arm over the vista of the mountain top, its ruined fortress and temple and gardens, the haze of raindrops shattering as they hit stone, mist and spray swirling in the wind. ‘Dragons should be free? You’ll pardon me, I hope, if I’m sceptical. You’ve seen what they do.’
Jaslyn shrank away. She was shaking. Sodden. Freezing cold and almost naked now her cloak was gone. Her thin tunic stuck to her. She got to her feet alone and walked without a word to the edge of the cliff beside Zafir, stood there and looked down.
‘You should have let me fall,’ she said. ‘All is ruin. There is no hope.’
‘And it’s all my fault.’ The words stuck in Zafir’s throat. She’d meant to spit them out with scornful derision, a question mocking the notion, but from the way they hung in the air beside her they sounded more like a confession.
‘I don’t want life in a world like this.’ Jaslyn walked off the edge. Zafir grabbed at her and caught her arm. They almost went over together again. She ended up lying by the edge, holding Jaslyn dangling her by her wrist.
‘Let go of me!’
‘The world is what it is,’ cried Zafir, ‘and we’ve got what we’ve got, and you might hate me to the very core, but what does it make you if you run away? A coward! And that is
not
what you are! Nor was your mother, nor your sister!’ Her voice softened. ‘Lystra fought me, axe and sword. I stacked the odds against her and she did it anyway, and she very nearly won.
She
wasn’t afraid. I would make a different world in so many ways, and so would you, but you have to
want
it.’
‘Let me
go
!’ Jaslyn was struggling now, trying to pull herself loose, slowly dragging Zafir further over the edge.
‘Flame, woman! You know I can just have Diamond Eye catch you again. I see your lust for little Lystra, so much more than the affection of one sister for another. Lost middle sibling, starved of a mother’s love? Is
that
your excuse? Mere neglect? How I wish I’d shared that fate.’ Zafir’s jaw clenched tight. All the venom she held for the world, and suddenly she could see that Jaslyn held the same, and she was slipping inexorably through Zafir’s fingers, and Zafir found she desperately didn’t want Jaslyn to die. ‘You deserve better! You want to hate me? Here, then. See who I am.’
Show her.
‘Take a good long look at the scars I carry inside me.’
Show her everything.
‘See them! If still you want to fall then so be it. But ride with me and you’ll ride on the back of a dragon once more, and I swear I will take you back to Lystra’s side.’ They’d gone to war. Bitterest enemies, and yet underneath so alike that it made Zafir choke. Diamond Eye pulled it out of her, showing it to Jaslyn, the princess locked away in the lightless room, cold and scared, afraid but more fearful still of what would happen when the door opened, more afraid of that than of anything in the world.
Jaslyn stopped struggling. Zafir hauled her up. For a moment they lay side by side, the two of them gasping, rain spattering them both, wiping it from their faces, drenched and bedraggled.
‘I don’t want your loyalty,’ panted Zafir. ‘But will you help me make this world into something different, or do you still just want to die? Because if it’s death you want then go ahead.’
‘Lystra.’ Jaslyn rolled to her feet. Zafir stayed where she was, lying on her back. If Jaslyn decided to pick up a rock and bash her brains out now, Diamond Eye would either stop her or he wouldn’t. ‘Lystra is the Speaker under the Mountain. What will you do with her?’
Zafir rose to her haunches. She held out the Speaker’s Ring on her finger. ‘There’s only one speaker, Queen Jaslyn. Lystra has the spear. She has the last alchemists. I’m afraid I will need them both. But I’ll not hurt her, if that’s what you want. She can have her mountain. Her realm. You can have it together if you want.’ The Black Moon would take the spear anyway, probably from both of them, and after that not much else would matter.
Poor broken princess.
‘When was the last time you flew, Jaslyn?’
Jaslyn shuddered. ‘When we flew to war.’
‘You miss it, don’t you?’ Zafir touched a finger to Jaslyn’s cheek, stood and circled her close, purring softly. ‘It’s a part of what we are, isn’t it? We dragon-queens? Without them we are diminished. Like losing an arm and a leg. Hopping and shuffling where once we could run.’
‘It’s death,’ said Jaslyn flatly.
Will you let her ride you?
She felt for Diamond Eye.
You are never some toy to be passed about, but I win peace here if I win this woman.
Diamond Eye cocked his head. An angry tilt this time.
If you command then I must obey. The cut of the Black Moon’s knife demands it.
I ask, dragon. That is all.
Diamond Eye considered. He bared his fangs and glared at Zafir and then at Jaslyn.
Once only. I promise nothing more.
I do not ask for promises. They are always broken.
The dragon seemed to laugh, some old dark memory welling inside him that he kept to himself. Zafir turned to Jaslyn. ‘I cannot give you a dragon. They are not mine to offer. But Diamond Eye will take you to the sky. I have asked and he accedes. I have earned that, and perhaps one day you will do the same.’ She took Jaslyn’s hand. ‘Give me a bond of peace from you and your riders. You will fly again, and I will not hurt your sister.’
‘And her son?’
For a moment Zafir closed her eyes. She’d forgotten, and remembering was like another knife in the ribs. Lystra had been carrying Jehal’s child. A son, was it? So the bastard betrayer had an heir. ‘And her son,’ she said at last.
‘And I really will fly again?’
Zafir laughed. ‘Ask my dragon, Queen Jaslyn. Do not ask me.’
Jaslyn dropped to one knee. She took Zafir’s hand and kissed the Speaker’s Ring. ‘Then you are the speaker of the nine realms and queen of the Silver City, and no man who rides dragons in my name shall question that it is so.’
Zafir tried not to laugh. So po-faced and serious. When was the last time any of Jaslyn’s riders had taken to the skies?
‘Why me, Zafir? Why not Hyrkallan? My riders will follow his commands before they follow mine.’
‘Because men always imagine themselves to be masters, Queen Jaslyn, and I’ve had enough of that.’ Zafir cocked her head. Maybe she’d been hoping to see a smile, but Jaslyn’s plain face remained a mask of tragedy. ‘Besides, do you honestly think I might win him over?’
Jaslyn shook her head.
‘Neither did I. So there was that too.’
‘I never did like him. Once we were married I learned to loathe him.’
‘What do you want me to do with him?’
‘Whatever you like.’
They walked together to the entrance, to the Queen’s Gate and the High Hall and the Grand Stair beyond, out of the rain at last, dripping a wet trail behind them. Halfteeth and two Adamantine Men followed three steps behind. When they reached the Octagon Zafir threw off her sodden dragonscale and told Halfteeth to find Jaslyn a guardsman, and to mind her body with his life. ‘Find her armour too,’ she said, ‘and some dry clothes.’ She told him to get lost then, but he didn’t, not straight away. Instead he bared his handful of remaining teeth. Maybe it was meant to be a grin. He nodded towards the throne.
The Outsider woman Tuuran liked was waiting there, short and wiry with lethal eyes. Snacksize? Zafir frowned. Stupid demeaning name, but hadn’t she been on the eyrie with Tuuran over on the other mountains? Thick as thieves these days, her and Halfteeth and Tuuran.
Halfteeth’s grin grew wider. He bobbed and trotted away. Zafir glared. The silks she wore underneath her dragonscale were damp from the rain and already uncomfortable. They kept sticking to her.
‘Well? What is it?’
‘Tuuran asks if you wouldn’t mind having the dragons tow the eyrie back over here, your Holiness.’ Snacksize paused.
‘He does, does he?’ Halfteeth hadn’t quite gone, she saw. He was lurking in the shadows by the passages off into the Enchanted Palace.
Snacksize nodded. She beamed. ‘On account of us finding someone he reckons might be your sister.’
Jaslyn was forgotten. ‘What?’
‘He seemed to know her. Reckons she’s Zara-Kiam. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Zafir ran straight back up the Grand Stair, feeling the eyes on her back, and Halfteeth with his silent mocking crooked laughter. She called for Diamond Eye and raced out without waiting to dress in dragonscale and glass and gold, skin stinging in the rain, climbed onto the dragon’s back and flew him straight to the eyrie. She landed hard, rain-drenched, clothes clinging to her, slid off and fell and twisted her ankle in her hurry, the same ankle that had never been quite the same since her duel with Lystra back when the realms weren’t ruled by dragons. Tuuran must have seen her coming. He was waiting for her.
‘Where is she?’ Zafir almost barged him off the wall.
‘The bathhouse, Holiness, but—’
She ran down the steps into the dragon yard and on into the nearest tunnel, down the spiralling passages. The eyrie was a mess, half unpacked, Merizikat crates and sacks piled up in the tunnels and left there, waiting to be unloaded. She hurdled them where she had to, scrambling and jumping until she reached the bottom where the eyrie tunnels all came together at the hard iron doors to Baros Tsen’s bathhouse. She paused then, suddenly wondering what she was doing and whether she had the courage for this. But she had to.
She took two deep breaths and creaked open the door.
‘Zara?’ Little sister. Zara-Kiam. ‘Zara?’
Princess Kiam sat in the bath, head and shoulders out of the water, her golden hair plastered to her skin. She turned and settled a languid gaze on Zafir. For a long time neither of them spoke, until Zafir took another step.
‘You’re alive,’ Zafir said.
‘Yes.’ Zara-Kiam nodded slowly. ‘And so are you, I see. More’s the pity.’
Zafir took another step. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘Don’t pretend you care.’
‘Are. You.
Hurt?
’ Zafir’s foot twitched.
‘So you’re the Speaker again. Does that mean I can have my old rooms back?’
‘Zara—’
Zara-Kiam turned to face her fully. ‘Because I really would
like
them back. Because it hasn’t been the most pleasant time while you were gone, what with the end of the world and dragons and so forth. I’ve been living with the bare few riders who survived your war and a gaggle of lecherous old men. Mind you, I suppose that was better than living with you.’
However she armoured herself, Zara always pierced her. Zafir strode to the bath and almost grabbed her sister by the hair to haul her out of the water. ‘Did they touch you?’ Words through gritted teeth.
Zara grabbed Zafir by the jaw. ‘If you mean did they rape me, then no, no one did that, although I did have a good few rough fucks for the sheer pleasure of it, that and the not having much else to do after you decided it wasn’t enough to wreck our home and went and did it everywhere. If anyone had “touched” me, as you put it, I’d have cut their dicks off and stuffed them down their own throats.’ Zara-Kiam let go. ‘No, big sister. I can look after myself, in case that’s a concern you still pretend to have. Would you like to go away now, or shall we cut each other raw some more?’
‘Can we ever find peace, you and I?’ Zafir backed towards the door. Two years and nothing had changed, not the slightest thing. She could have been away for a day. An hour.
‘Come back and ask me again when you can raise the dead.’
Zafir left. She closed the door and put her back to it, sank to her knees and touched a hand to her eye, wiping it dry. She saw Tuuran then, lurking uncomfortably up the corridor, half watching and half pretending not to pay any attention. Zafir straightened herself.
‘Holiness, there are still men inside the—’
She pushed past him, then stopped for a moment. ‘When you go back to the eyrie, you will take the riders sworn to Queen Jaslyn and return them their weapons and armour. You will bring them to the Octagon with their queen, and they will swear their fealty to their speaker.’
‘Holiness—’
Zafir held up a finger, silencing him. ‘Don’t speak, Tuuran. Just don’t. And listen. Whatever else you do, never tell my sister it was your knife I took on that night when Speaker Hyram came to the Pinnacles. Never. If you do then she’ll kill you. Mostly because she knows it would hurt me to lose you.’
‘Holi—’
‘Stay here and finish your work. Come back when you’re ready.’
She walked away, climbed onto Diamond Eye, and they leapt together into the sky. She barely noticed the rain now, already soaked through. They flew long, high, languid circles, up through the clouds into glorious sun and down again into drear and gloom. When she landed she hid away in her rooms, stripped off her wet clothes and curled up naked on the bed, wrapped under silk sheets, then stretched and tossed and turned and tried to think of useful things; but all she saw was that night, more than a decade ago, panicked, pressed against a wall by too much strength to resist, a hand up her dress, and then Tuuran’s voice beside them both.
Leave her be, you fat prick.
Her hand grabbing the knife from his belt. Stabbing and stabbing and stabbing. Murdering the man who called himself her father, though he wasn’t, not really. And, by the Great Flame, she’d had her reasons for it.
‘I did it for her as much as I did it for me.’
‘Did what, mistress?’ asked Myst. Zafir shook her head. Off in another room, one of the babies started to cry. Myst hurried away. Zafir stretched out and tried to swallow the memories and wrap them in darkness. As she reached a hand under her pillow, her fingers found a piece of cloth almost lost down the top of the bed. She pulled it out and looked at it. A strip of black silk, a blindfold. Once upon a time it had let her see through the eyes of an enchanted golden dragon, one of a pair that the Taiytakei had given to Jehal for his wedding to Lystra. Jehal hadn’t given the second dragon to his bride, he’d given it to his lover. To her. To Zafir, the dragon-queen.