When She Reigns

by Jodi Meadows

  “Hello,” I said, but they didn’t respond.

  “These gentlemen are here for your protection,” Nine said. “Don’t worry about them.”

  Guards.

  I wanted to be angry, but we’d have done no different to her, had our positions been reversed.

  Finally, the others emerged from their cabins, and Nine imparted more rules—mostly ordering us to stay out of the way. Then she showed us how to find the mess hall, the infirmary, a communal washroom, and a small library stuffed with books.

  “Are these novels?” I trailed my fingertips over stories from another world. It hadn’t occurred to me that such a thing would exist, but it made sense: humans were creative creatures, and everyone had some sort of story to tell.

  “I found histories,” Ilina murmured. “This will be useful. We can get to know the empire and its many conquests.” Her tone was pleasant, but I didn’t miss the bite.

  “I think you’ll be impressed.” Nine was leaning in the doorway, one hand on her hip. “The peace our empress has brought to so many warring kingdoms is truly remarkable.”

  Reading about the empire’s steady expansion over the years—its steady destruction of individual nations—wasn’t something that exactly thrilled me, but these histories would be the best place to look for information about the first dragon, her bones, and where I might find them.

  Surely, in all these books, there must be mention of a dragon somewhere.

  On the far side of the library, Aaru stood with a small book in his open palm. “The Book of Silence,” he said when he caught me looking.

  “We have all of your holy books,” Nine said. “The others and I read them before our mission, along with copies of all your important documents and records. We have our own interpretations of your history, of course, but if I wanted to fit in, I needed to know what your people believe.”

  “That’s . . .” I frowned and straightened.

  “You don’t have to like it,” she said. “I do my job.”

  “How long until we leave for the empire?” Zara asked.

  “Half a decan.”

  I exchanged glances with some of the others. The eclipse wasn’t so far away that we had time to just sit here in the middle of the ocean reading books. “Why must we wait? We’re in a hurry.”

  Nine rolled her eyes. “You think we’re going to move a thousand people just to convenience you? Try to remember that you’re guests. If you want to find one of your own ships to sail to the Algotti Empire immediately, feel free. But the skimmer den is faster than any vessel from the Fallen Isles, so even with this half-decan delay, we’ll still be there before you. Try to be patient.”

  I scowled. Our islands were rising out of the sea, and she had the nerve to lecture us about manners. “How long?” I asked. “Once we leave, how long will it take to get there?”

  “Just a few days.”

  “So fast.” Even so, that didn’t leave us much time to find the bones of the first dragon before we needed to return to the Fallen Isles.

  Nine gave a pointed nod. “As I said, we’ll reach Sunder long before any Fallen Isles ship. For now, I suggest you enjoy the library and learn what you can before you meet our empress, and your new friends will help you find your quarters when you’re finished. If there’s anything you need, they will get it for you. And now, I’m going to change into proper attire.” Without another word, she pushed off the wall and left.

  LATER, AFTER OUR “new friends” guided us back from the library to our quarters, Aaru returned to our earlier, aborted conversation.

  “Are you all right with this?” He swept his hand around the room, indicating our situation, I thought, and not the small, confined space.

  “Yes,” I said. “And no. And very much yes.” My whole body felt warm when I thought of the previous day in the rain, the way he’d kissed me and touched me, and the fire he’d sparked that made us both feel like we were flying.

  Aaru offered an awkward little smile. “All right. Me too.”

  “Ilina’s from Darina. Chenda doesn’t take anything slowly. But we don’t— I mean— That doesn’t have to be us. We don’t have to—”

  With any luck, the embarrassment would just set me on fire and put me out of my misery.

  Aaru studied me while I stammered my way through a few simple words. “Is that what happens next?” His voice was soft. Curious. “I’ve been reading The Book of Love, but it doesn’t say what happens when.”

  My heart squeezed around my ribs. “The Book of Love isn’t like that. It’s about emotions. Compassion. Good works.”

  He nodded.

  “I suppose it’s people who decide what they do. When they’re ready.” My voice trembled a little. “But there aren’t rules. We don’t need to do anything we aren’t ready for. It’s up to us to make that choice.”

  Tension slipped out of his shoulders. “All right. Good.”

  That yearning, wanting feeling coiled up inside me, wonderful but too big for me to fully explore. Still, it was tempered by the knowledge of what my friends assumed and expected. I wished they’d asked before moving me into the Fire Rose room with him, but I couldn’t deny that the idea of being so close to Aaru—no walls between us, no hard ground, no gap between hammocks—sent thrills into the deepest parts of me. And now, in here, with the beds bolted to the floor, I was both disappointed and relieved.

  It was a peculiar feeling: the desire for him and the desire to wait, all at once.

  How could I sleep like this?

  Across the room, Aaru sat in a mirror of me. In the low light of a single sigil, his eyes were dilated wide, as soft and black as the spaces between stars.

  “I think,” I ventured, “that on Damina, people sometimes forget about the other things. The in-between things.”

  He tilted his head in curiosity.

  “I think people get into a rush.” When I glanced down, I realized I’d been weaving my fingers around the top of my blanket. I pressed my palms to my knees to stop fidgeting. “They want everything right now, no waiting. But that’s not what I want. Not with you. I’d rather take our time getting there, if we decide we want to.”

  He nodded. Closed his eyes. Nodded again. “Have you ever—”

  “No.” I bit my lip and lowered my voice. “No. I never have. Partly because Mother would have killed me. She thought I needed to be pure—her word—and untouchable.” Although Mother had sent us off to go dance the other night. Maybe she liked him. Or maybe she didn’t see him—a quiet Idrisi boy—as a threat to my virtue. I cleared my throat. “But mostly, there was no one I’d have wanted to be with anyway. Not like that.”

  A question grew in his gaze, but he didn’t ask, and I wasn’t going to answer. Finally, he drew in a heavy breath. “I want to take our time. We decide together. We decide for us.”

  I smiled. “I like that.”

  It was a small thing. A huge thing. All my life, other people had made decisions for me: who could touch me, when, for what purposes. I’d been permitted to kiss a few people—only those Mother deemed acceptable—and later instructed how to break off relationships before they could take root. But even on an island that touted freedom, control over my own body had only ever been an illusion.

  And here, across the room from me, was a boy from Idris—a place where girls and women had historically been stripped of their choices, control over their own lives—and he, better than anyone I’d grown up with, understood the value of those simple words: we decide together; we decide for us.

  Not society. Not expectations. Not friends. Not family.

  Us.

  The knot of nervous energy faded from inside my body. I stood and tapped off the last light sigil, and when I slipped between the cool sheets, I reached across the space between our beds and found him already reaching back for me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, WE MOVED PRIMARILY between our cabins, the mess hall, and the library. We took our meals quickly, ea
ting the strangely spiced food without comment, and tried to ignore the curious stares of the crew. One of Nine’s many rules had been to limit our interaction with the people on board this ship—for our protection, she’d insisted—and for the most part, the guards she’d assigned discouraged confrontation.

  Once, though, a wiry old man stalked toward us wearing a scowl, and carrying a knife taken from his table. “You’re the islanders, aren’t you? You think you’re everything because of those gods of yours. Well, where are they now?”

  I’d barely had time to comprehend his words before Gerel and Hristo—who’d just stopped wearing his sling—were on their feet, standing between the man and the rest of us. The whole mess grew quiet, turning to watch. Hundreds of eyes, like ours, but not, just staring and waiting to see if we’d fight with one of their men. How we’d fight.

  But it didn’t come to that. Our guards stepped in, and the wiry man stepped back. They didn’t even need to say anything. With some sort of gesture with his fist and little finger—probably meant to be rude—he slinked back to his friends.

  Otherwise, we went about our days unhindered.

  On our fifth day aboard the skimmer den, the seven of us sat around the table in the library, surrounded by piles of books, when one of the guards spoke up.

  “We’ve just started to move,” he said from the doorway where the trio always positioned themselves. “We’ll reach Sunder in three days.”

  I glanced at my friends, but if they’d felt the ship begin to move, they said nothing. There’d been no jerk, no strange sway. Even as it was, I could barely feel the motion of the ship—as though we’d been living aboard a small island the last five days, rather than a ship. It was eerie, the way I could barely feel the ocean beneath us.

  “Thank you,” Chenda said, and we all turned back to our books. “Three days. It seems wrong to be able to move anywhere so quickly.”

  “Imagine going back to the Fallen Isles with a fleet of ships like this.” Ilina looked up. “We could save so many people.”

  “And then what? Float on the ocean for a thousand years?” Chenda shook her head. “Sorry. It just seems so impossible to believe there will be anything to go back to.”

  Gerel touched Chenda’s hand, and the Dawn Lady’s shoulders relaxed a little. Then Gerel lowered her voice, addressing everyone around the table. “Anything yet?”

  It was difficult to speak freely with our new “friends” over there, but Aaru had built up a wall of soft silence, so that our voices were muffled but not completely muted. It might have been a little suspicious, but they hadn’t said anything about it. Yet.

  I shook my head. “Their spelling and the shapes of their letters makes it hard to read.”

  Chenda took the library’s copy of The Book of Shadow and flipped through it, sighing wistfully. “At least these are right.”

  “What if we can’t find anything?” Zara propped her elbows on the table and hunched forward. “I mean, all the histories of the Fallen Isles, and all the books we have about dragons, and there’s nothing about the first dragon in any of them, right?”

  Everyone looked at Ilina. “I haven’t read anything about it, but if Mira thinks it exists . . .”

  LaLa and Crystal chittered from their perches atop one of the table lamps—lamps being a generous term for simple arcs of black metal with light sigils carved into them. They made excellent dragon stands, at any rate, and it was nice to have light directly over the books.

  “The dragons think it exists,” I said, mostly teasing, but it was true.

  “Even if we do find something,” Zara said, “who’s to say we’ll be able to get it in time? The empire is immense.”

  “The city we’re visiting is called Sunder,” Hristo rumbled. “It can’t be a coincidence.”

  Gerel shook her head. “The Sundering took place all up and down the coast of the mainland. There are probably half a dozen cities and towns with some variation of sunder in their name. And Little Fancy is right: the empire is immense, and just because the first dragon’s bones might have been here two thousand years ago doesn’t mean they still are. Empires aren’t good about leaving things the way they were. Things get moved around. That’s the whole point of conquering: changing things to suit one group’s preferences.”

  “I know,” I said. “And it’s just as possible that the bones were never discovered, and now they’re buried under a thousand layers of rock.”

  “Even if they do know where the bones are, how do we get them?” Zara scratched her nose. “Assuming the bones are real, and assuming they’re not lost or broken or stolen by bandits, and assuming they’re somewhere we can reach and still get back home in time for the eclipse—”

  “This is far too much assuming to be healthy,” Gerel muttered.

  “Then the empire—or the land they’ve taken over—has had the bones longer than the Fallen Isles did. Why should we expect anyone to give us the bones because we ask nicely?”

  That was a fair question. Zara and Ilina were both very persuasive people, but Damina’s charm wouldn’t change someone’s mind about something they weren’t already willing to do; it only made it easier to say yes. Any other method of obtaining the bones involved violence, theft, or bargaining away something valuable. Like our sovereignty.

  “I suppose,” I said softly, “that’s a conversation to have when we get more information. There’s no point in making a hundred plans for a hundred different scenarios.”

  Aaru pulled The Book of Silence toward him and flipped through the soft papers; they barely made a sound. “‘The greatest calamity,’” he read, “‘comes in the night, when the people are not listening.’”

  Hristo closed his book, marking the page with his thumb. “Is that about the Great Abandonment?”

  Aaru nodded solemnly. “I’ve thought about Idris’s words a lot since the earthquake. I wished I could read them again. To find answers.” His voice was rough with unshed tears. “I read from my family’s copy every day at home. I didn’t think I’d see one again. Least of all here.”

  Under the table, I pressed my foot against his.

  A beat of quiet lingered in the small library before Gerel said, “That’s a good idea. Seven gods know I haven’t been a good follower of Khulan. Maybe I could learn something.”

  Chenda frowned and touched Gerel’s chin. “Khulan saw fit to grant you incredible strength, even away from him. You’re a truer follower than most.”

  Gerel looked dubious, but also like she didn’t want to risk being comforted in public anymore, so she just shrugged. Still, she pulled The Book of Warriors to her and opened it on top of the history she’d been reading.

  On the other side of the table, Ilina and Zara put The Book of Love between them, while the others moved the books of their gods closer, too.

  The Book of Destruction lay at the end of the table, untouched. Feeling bad for it, I dragged the volume to me. I’d read it before—I’d read all of them before—but the lessons on other gods had been cursory, and long ago. My religious studies had focused mainly on Darina and Damyan, although I had asked why, as the Hopebearer, I wasn’t more thoroughly instructed on others’ beliefs. Mother had only said they weren’t as important as our own.

  Still, those lessons had given me just enough to remember that The Book of Destruction had several long passages devoted to the Great Abandonment. Of course. As the goddess of destruction, Anahera would have a lot to say on the subject of our ultimate end.

  As we lost ourselves in the words of our Fallen Gods, a quiet fell over the table: the rustle of paper, the occasional sigh where words twisted with emotion, and then a small gasp.

  Chenda pressed her finger against the page. “Bopha says the rending of her shadow from ours will take place on the darkest day. Could that be—”

  “The eclipse.” Gerel shivered and looked at me. “You were right. The gods confirm it.”

  Chills marched up and down my arms. That was only fifteen days away. If we
didn’t return to the Fallen Isles with the bones of the first dragon, then there would be nothing left.

  No one else said anything. There was no need. We just studied until the day began to wane, and finally my eyes caught on a passage:

  Where there is light, there must also be darkness.

  Where there is hope, there must also be fear.

  Where there is life, there must also be death.

  Every first is paired with a last.

  There can be no beginnings without endings.

  But do not despair. Instead, have hope, because what lives falls to dust, and from dust comes new life. It is sacrifice that enables change.

  The Great Abandonment is an ending, yet it is also a beginning. The shadow soul of the dragon, the fellowship of the Fallen, and the rending of earth: these are the signs of the end and the beginning.

  In the moment when the day and the night are the same, when the first and the last become one, and when hope and despair meet on the field of battle: then the Great Abandonment will be done.

  Remember: fire cannot exist without something to burn.

  I read the passage aloud, forcing my voice steady even as waves of knowing rushed in and out of my heart. The words were like a waking dream.

  “‘The shadow soul of the dragon.’ I just saw that.” Chenda turned a few pages in her book and read aloud. “‘The brightest lights yield the blackest shadows, but even during the darkest day, the shadow soul of the dragon reigns.’”

  “What does that mean?” Ilina asked.

  “I don’t know about the Anaheran passage,” Chenda said, “but the Bophan one has always been thought of as a warning and a blessing. To us, shadows are often interchangeable with souls, but some interpretations believe there is a subtle difference. Shadows are”—she paused to consider—“texture. They add depth. If an object does not cast a shadow, is it really there? Shadows are the shapes of us, the details unseen, and if even our souls have shadows—”