Lightfall, p.22
LightFall, page 22
The prince strode up to her as if she were nothing more than a particularly large, recalcitrant yaxen. He gave the straps and chains of the harness a testing tug. “Let’s go then,” he announced.
I boggled at him. “Go where?”
“The High Keep. Isn’t that what you said?”
“I did, but…” When had anyone ever listened to what I said?
He muttered something under his breath—a curse or prayer? “Come here.” He held out a hand to me, not the courtly gesture like when the others were watching, but an imperious command.
“I am not one of the watch canids for you to order about,” I snapped.
“Clearly not, for they are well fed and obey their handlers.”
While I sputtered, he took me by the scruff of his cloak and hauled me closer to the dragon. “The harness is designed for only one, but it’s not far to the tower.”
I wanted to object, to just keep walking away—since apparently I’d already committed to not running away—but where would that get me? Certainly not back to my friends before the hazards of the mountain night led to my inevitable demise. Whether to my bed in the castle or my death, the prince would get me there quicker.
So I let him strap me to the demon dragon.
Ask the sun if it remembers the night.
~ Proverb of the Xab
CHAPTER 16
LIKE THE PRINCE’S CLOAK, the dragon was surprisingly warmer than she looked. As the prince tightened the straps around me, cinching me closer to her breast, the heat became almost uncomfortable.
But when I wriggled a little, she rumbled what seemed like a warning, and I froze.
“We will fly straight back,” he said. “And she is faster than the earthbone. But don’t struggle, don’t annoy her.”
Her rumble rattled me again—or maybe that was just my fear. “I’m afraid of heights.”
“You should be. Just be more afraid of her.”
I groaned. “Could you just once not make things worse?”
His hands, busy measuring and straightening the straps, stilled. “I…don’t know.”
Oh, now I felt worse. Sagging in the harness, I let out a slow breath. “That was pointlessly unkind of me. I’m sorry.”
“Are you sometimes pointedly unkind?”
“Sadly, yes. No one has ever accused me of auric purity.” I gave him a cautious grin. “Maybe we could both try to be more hopeful?”
“I doubt that.”
“Heyo,” I said. “I clearly said hope, not doubt.”
I more than half expected him to finally feed me to the dragon and fly away by himself, but after a moment, he inclined his head. “It couldn’t hurt. At least no more than it does already.”
As an uplifting mood, that left something to be desired, but we had to start somewhere.
And anyway, it was the dragon who would provide the uplift.
It was my pulse that kicked up though, when the prince stepped closer. “Come toward me.” He unchained one side of the harness.
“Wait.” I clung to the strap, suddenly not wanting to let go. “You’re not going to leave me here!”
“Why would I when I just chained you? But I’m not walking back myself.” He angled between me and the dragon and backed toward her. “Come to me now.”
“What?” I stuttered as I sized up the situation.
“The harness only holds one.” He held out his arms. “So you’ll have to hold me to her.” Snagging my elbow, he reeled me into his embrace.
“This isn’t…” I swallowed hard. “You could still fall.”
“Always.”
He flattened my spine to his chest and reached around me to lash the harness to the yoke around the dragon. She shifted her weight, and all three of us swayed from side to side.
“Is she strong enough to carry us both?” I wheezed out a breath as he notched the straps and chains a little tighter then tucked the dangling ends of leather around us. What had seemed tight on me wasn’t nearly enough space for him and me.
“We’ll find out.” He paused. “On a more hopeful note, if we plummet to our deaths, it’ll be quick.”
I groaned. “You are terrible at this.”
“Yes, I am terrible.” He gave our chains one more tug. “Ready?”
“No.”
When he ducked his head down toward mine, the breath that whispered past my ear sounded almost like a laugh. “Is that the hopefulness you mentioned?”
Steeling myself against an inadvertent shiver, I admitted, “It’s a struggle, sometimes, to be my better self.”
“I’ll remember that.” He looped one arm low around my belly and straightened.
“I’d rather you forgo—” My correction cut off in a garbled shriek as the dragon launched upward. My boots kicked for the ground, but it was much too late.
With mighty beats of her wings, she rose, and the boulders around where we’d stood shrank to pebbles. But the coiled power in her wasn’t muscular, not like a canid or hart, more like the earthbone flow, eerie and unexpected.
And it was cold, so cold. Despite the protection of the borrowed cloak, the chill bit deep, and my face felt frozen in place even as tears ripped from my eyes. The mountains tilted crazily around us as she banked to circle higher. Nothingness pooled beneath my dangling feet, and I wanted to scream.
Yet for all the panic coursing through me, I was even more piercingly aware of the prince behind me.
Maybe I would blame some of my panic on him. The feel of him, hard and still as rock against my spine, was the opposite of hope.
And then he made things worse.
He wrapped both arms around me.
Had I thought it was cold?
No, I was hot, too hot. The wind—an icy union of mountain air, the coming winter night, and the dragon’s flight—should’ve torn away any hint of sensation besides the cold. But somehow the prince’s breath tickled the back of my neck, and the press of his hips behind mine sent a flush of deeper heat through me.
I’d fallen for embarrassingly more than my fair share of bad lovers before—an unfortunate side effect of high debts and low expectations, which I always remembered as soon as I kicked them from my bed—but this was beyond even my wildest, worst nightmares.
And I feared that however long or short my life was from this moment, I’d freely sacrifice some of the darkest hours of the night dreaming of flying with the Dragon Prince.
The winter shadows were racing toward us, but there remained light enough to see the Argonyx around us. The curving path of earthbone broke apart as we rose, leaving us suspended above what seemed an endless wilderness—an emptiness with no people, which meant no sin, no purity, no auric demise to be feared and mourned. We could stay here, no longer unwanted and reviled, flying on forever.
But a golden glow nestled among the crags warned me our journey was coming to an end. The gleam reflecting off the bottoms of the low clouds became the individual torches of the lightkeep. We spiraled up away from them, but only as far as the highest spire.
I was going to see the inside of the obsidian tower.
As we descended, I caught a few dizzying glimpses of the people below going about the business of the palace at night. None of them looked up.
Were we too high? Did the darkness and wind obscure the signs of our passage?
Or did they just not want to know what circled above them?
Then the mountain swallowed us.
I almost screamed again as the rock face loomed up in front of me, but a blacker maw was revealed as the dragon swooped around an outcropping. The chained straps dug into me when she backwinged and alighted on a narrow ledge. When she settled back on her haunches, even with her wings folding down, her body blocked what little light reached this far from the outer and inner wards below so I was left blinking into the void.
The prince reached around me again, his arm harder than the chains across my belly. He fumbled off to the side, and as the bindings released, I was abruptly dumped to the stone floor.
The way the dragon had been standing, my feet had dangled just enough that I landed in an awkward sprawl, but I suspected my shaking knees wouldn’t have held me anyway. I huddled there, all the cold of the recent hours rushing in like a dank tide.
A torchiere ignited, making me blink. The tears in my chilled, tired eyes made icy stars around the glow.
The prince loomed over me, eclipsing that lone light. “Are you hurt? Or just frightened?”
I stared up at him. “Too cold to tell.”
With an annoyed grunt, he bent down and lifted me into his arms.
Oh, this was worse than being chained to a dragon. At least she would not say mocking things about my whimpering and weakness when she killed me.
His hand under my knees was so cold I felt the burn even through my trousers, though the heavy cloak shielded my shoulders from his touch. As vexing as he was, he had given me that protection.
“You must’ve been so cold up there.” Which was as close as I could come to saying thank you for chaining me to a demon.
“I don’t notice it anymore,” he said as he strode down the dark corridor. After a few steps, he added, with what sounded like a touch of reluctance, “And even as small as you are, you blocked some of the wind.”
“I’m not small,” I told him, suddenly remembering his rude comment about looking less fed than the canids. “I’m perfectly sized for my life.”
“Sneaky thieving?”
“Agile, confidential procurement of goods and services on a thoughtful budget,” I corrected. I ignored his snort because I was polite like that. “Anyway, who told you I was a thief?”
“No one had to tell me. I know the look.”
“I don’t have a look.” Then I bit my lip. “But…what does a thief look like? So I’ll recognize such if I ever encounter one.”
He looked down at me, those icy eyes half-lidded. “There’s a grasping of the hands, a cunning in the gaze, a hungry set to the mouth.”
I wrinkled my nose—apparently the nose at least wasn’t a giveaway. “You make me sound like a demon.”
“You said you aren’t a thief,” he reminded me.
“But you said I looked like one.” I lifted my chin. “As if you would even know when you’ve never known grasping or starving, not when you’re a prince.”
“I wasn’t always.”
I stared up at him in surprise. “You weren’t?”
This close, the shadows moving beneath the clouded scars of his eyes were more obvious. “You can warm yourself here.”
The blatant disregard of my question didn’t surprise me. But the place where he’d brought me did.
A red glow revealed a junction in the rocky corridor, and when he turned, the passage opened up into a bathing room such as I’d never seen.
I had sneaked past a few luxurious privacy chambers in some of the nicer homes of Sevaare, in pursuit of the unattended jewelry often left nearby, but none had looked like this.
It was just a cavernous pocket in the mountain, as ugly as a dungeon. The walls were the same stone, dark and rough, veined in obsidian, arching upward into the darkness. But pendant lamps wrapped in delicately wrought iron descended on chains affixed somewhere out of sight above, and the red glow through the metal was warm as the prince carried me past one.
In the center of the chamber was a round cistern, wider than a yaxen trough, the sides built up from the cavern floor to knee height with large chunks of obsidian set in smoothed mortar. Through the blackly translucent glass, the water in the cistern glowed deep crimson with some unquenched fire. The pool looked both perilous and beautiful, like an enormous jewel I shouldn’t even dream of touching.
I swallowed hard as the prince leaned down to set me on the edge. The lip had been finished with black tile etched in runes that seemed vaguely familiar but I didn’t recognize from any of the books in Ormonde’s library. Without my conscious will, my hand drifted to the water. “Oh, it’s hot!”
At the disturbance of my touch, effervescence drifted up, and a faint scent, not unlike the dragon, simmered over the water. Each bubble was rimed in a ghostly blue-white light that vanished when the bubble broke. Soft curls of steam followed.
The prince trailed his fingers through the water, conjuring a constellation of shimmering crystalline stars that burst into the red blackness. “The water pipes through the mountain, heated and frothed in its core, and recirculates to burn off the impurities,” he explained.
“Impurities?” I tried to dredge up a smile. “Will there be anything left of me then?”
He looked at me. “Not auric impurities. Blood. The water soaks through blood and demon gore. It burnishes away the battle, and sometimes floating here is the only time…” He paused, then straightened and stepped away from me, flicking the water off his hand.
Blue-white bubbles caressed my fingertips. “The only time when what?” I asked softly.
“Revive yourself. If you have need, ring that bell there”—he gestured across the cistern—“and Nenzo will answer.”
I pursed my lips, thinking of that dreadful dinner in the great hall. Had it only been only two nights ago? Or was it three? Impossible. “I think your valet doesn’t like me.”
“He doesn’t like me either, but he knows his place.” The prince pointed toward a cluster of braziers. “Dry and clothe yourself there. I need to see to the dragon.”
I stiffened. “Without the whistle, what will she do?”
“I don’t know. But I never know with her, and so this changes nothing, really.”
How I longed for more reassurance. Maybe he did too? I tried to muster some. “She brought us here without anything bad happening.”
He angled his face away from me. “Did she?”
My attempt at hope bursting like a bubble, I looked down into the sparkling water, and when I glanced up again to ask if I should try to do something about the lost bone—what, I had no idea, as if I might just shit it out?—he was gone.
Just as well. He would’ve mocked me again if I’d offered my aid, and rightly so, since it was my fault such a vital link of the dragon’s leash had been severed.
With a disconsolate sigh, I stripped off the heavy cloak and my clothes underneath. Maybe I should’ve been more shy—or at least suspicious—but I’d never had the opportunity for a soaking in hot water. Although I had been thrown in a yaxen trough once or twice.
Once naked, I sat on the tile—cooler against my bare backside—and swung one leg into the pool. Oh, it was so hot. Suddenly I decided I was consolable after all as I slid all of myself into the water. It was also strangely silken, gliding over my body as I eased lower.
The pool was deeper than the sides indicated, and I couldn’t find the bottom with my probing toes so I kept a cautious hold on the rim. Silvery bubbles drifted up from the unseen depths and gathered on my skin. Steam roiled slowly around me like star-gilded clouds.
For a heartbeat, vertigo seized me, like I was flying again, nothing beneath me but night sky and a million tiny, rising moons… I gripped the tiles like they were the dragon’s scales, my breath catching in panicked gasps.
If I drowned here and sank into the abyss, no one would ever know what happened to me, not even the prince.
The forlorn fantasy popped like another bubble. Of course he’d know what happened to me. He’d see my clothes tossed sloppily on the floor and he’d figure out I didn’t know how to swim. And then he’d feel bad about telling me to bathe in a pool with no bottom!
Neh, he’d deserve it too. But I wasn’t inclined to drown right now, so I gulped down my fears and poked around a little farther with my toes.
It seemed there were tiled steps I couldn’t quite make out through the red-shadowed water. At least the way up and down had stabilized in my whirling head so I balanced there and carefully dunked myself a few times. When I relaxed a little deeper into the pool, I was delighted to find that the gentle, endless bubbles seemed to buoy me. Brave enough to take one hand off the tiled lip, I submerged again and scrubbed my fingers through my shortish hair. It felt so good.
While I was under, a memory came to me. Brightly painted wagons were drawn together in a circle, a cheery fire leaping and playing in the middle. A woman—my mother?—was plaiting my long, damp hair and singing.
Pinching my lips tight as my breath went stale, I tried to catch the half-forgotten lyrics before they burst like a bubble.
“The road goes on and far away,
Leaving my beloved far behind.
Though the lonely path turns and twines,
The call of the horizon will not let me stay.”
With a gasp, I surfaced, shaking back my hair. Those middling brown plaits—not as intricate as Lady Dyania’s of course, but pretty enough—had been shorn by the innkeeper when he’d found bugs there. Every time the length had extended toward contemplating braids, I’d lopped it off again.
No bugs for me, and no painful memories either.
Was this what the prince had meant by the waters scouring away the stains of battle? But what if that hardened gore was the only thing holding me together? What if that constant reminder of trouble, to keep my guard up, was the only thing protecting me?
My body definitely warmer and my mind as secretly roiled as the waters beneath the red-mirrored surface of the cistern, I hauled myself out of the pool and stood naked on the tiled edge, the subtle runes like little pebbles beneath my tender, wrinkled toes.
Despite the pendant lamps and braziers warming the space, a faint, cool breeze rustled past me. But it felt good on my overheated skin. Lingering to watch the blue-white bubbles, fewer now that I wasn’t disturbing their quiet, I sleeked my hands over my body, flicking the water idly into the pools to make tiny concentric rings that reflected the red glow. If one of the remaining silver bubbles went through a red ring, I would win a—
“What do you—?” A harsh oath interrupted the question.
I spun around—as if I didn’t know already it was the prince—and my feet slipped out from under me. I windmilled my arms, lest I fall backward into the bottomless pool. A curse gathered at my lips.
