The Dragon of Jin-Sayeng

by K. S. Villoso

  “Is that the letter you found in the dragon-tower?” Khine asked, arriving with an armload of firewood. He frowned. “Can I read it?”

  “You can’t read Jinan.”

  “That’s an unbelievably rude thing to say. I can learn.”

  “You’re not going to learn Jinan by going through my father’s letters, Lamang.” I tried to keep my voice light.

  He placed the firewood on the ground and slumped down next to me. “You look troubled.”

  I turned the letter in my hands. There was nothing else in it. Nothing else that mattered, in any case.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Tali?” Khine asked.

  I stared at the crackling fire. Eventually, I took his hand. I looked at our fingers intertwined so I didn’t have to look at his face. “My father couldn’t close the rift himself, so he decided to ally with Prince Yuebek, who is a known mage. The man could do what he couldn’t.”

  “What—he couldn’t, or wouldn’t?”

  I stared at the letter. “My father was very old.”

  “So he didn’t have much life left in him. Was he afraid? Why didn’t he just end this when he could have? Did he expect to live forever?”

  “He wanted power,” I said. “Just as Yuebek does. The man will be risking his own life, and so you needed to give him a reason to come out here in the first place. And what does he want, beyond anything else?”

  “You?”

  I smiled. “My dear, you’re reaching. It’s not me he really wants.”

  He squeezed my hand and pressed it over his lips. “I’m biased, I suppose.”

  “He wants his own kingdom, which he will never get in the empire, not even if he assassinates his own brothers. Jin-Sayeng is the easier prey. But if he takes the whole nation by force, he’ll be dealing with rebellions until the end of his days. My father arranged all of this knowing I would somehow find myself here, after everything.”

  “Your father is dead, Tali. What he thought shouldn’t matter anymore. Surely another mage can do what Yuebek can. That is what you came out here to find out, isn’t it?”

  I hesitated, glancing at the letter.

  He held his hand out. After a moment’s hesitation, I let him have it. “If only you can see what you look like when you hold on to their words as if you don’t matter. Will you let go, Tali? Can you live without that burden?”

  I continued to stare at the letter until my eyes began to burn. “I don’t think I have a choice,” I said at last.

  “Then…” Without waiting for my reply, he turned to the fire and dropped my father’s letter into it.

  I lunged forward to try to salvage it from the flames, but it was too late. I watched the fire consume the letter, soot curling up around the ink. Listen carefully, Talyien…

  My insides felt numb as I watched my father’s words turn to ash.

  I heard voices in the shadows and reached over to grab my sword. The grass-cutter felt light in my hands, a farming tool not really meant for fighting. I’d been lucky the last few times, but how long until my luck ran out? As I wrapped my fingers around the wooden hilt, I felt my joints creak, remnants from the vision my father had forced into my mind. I wasn’t as old as he was, but somehow, I felt just as exhausted.

  “If they are loyal to Huan, you may not have to fight,” Khine said in a low voice.

  “I don’t think like that, Khine.”

  “I know. But let me talk to them. These people are just trying to survive the night. Not everyone is an enemy, Tali.”

  I was suddenly conscious of how tense I was, and I saw that he could see that, too. Even out of my cage, I was still a wolf. Just like my father, who couldn’t simply accept the collar and chains that would ensure the land’s salvation, who always had to have the upper hand. A wily wolf, until the end. Always a wolf. Always…

  My throat tightened as I watched Khine step out into the open, calling for the soldiers. I stood at the ready, still expecting an attack, expecting to have to hack our way out of there the way I had done too many times before.

  They approached him, lowering their own swords. The familiarity with which they regarded him brought to mind my own lack of diplomacy. My father raised me to be a politician, to always be on guard, to layer my every demand with a promise of what would happen if it wasn’t met. But that sort of thing only worked when you had an army at your back, ready to lend weight to your empty words. Significance could be bought. The kind of queen I wanted to be had to learn to stop fighting.

  Khine gestured to me, and I sheathed the sword and walked towards the soldiers, who bowed before stepping aside, revealing the two mages that had accompanied Warlord Ojika from the city. One was a tall man, the other a short, squat woman, both rendered soft and plump after years of rich Jinsein food. They bowed low, in Zarojo-fashion, eyes on the ground, and named themselves Zuha and Direh, from some province in the empire I’d never heard of.

  “Beloved Queen,” Direh said, her voice quivering. “Lord Huan said you were here. You’ve graced us with your presence at last.”

  “Your father offered us a home when no one would,” Zuha added. “Safety. Security. Everything we could’ve ever asked for, and more besides—he gave us a purpose, something to live for. Do you know what it feels like to be thrown out into the world, knowing people like you can be killed, exploited, without the right channels?” He held his hands out. “May I?”

  I conceded. He took my hands in his, pressing both of them against his cracked lips. I felt ill at the thought of people giving me reverence out of the memory of my father.

  “Is this why you’ve stayed all these years?” I asked.

  “We’ve nowhere else to go,” Direh replied. “Dageis seems such a strange, hostile land… the rules they hold over their mages are not the same as the ones back in Ziri-nar-Orxiaro. Too rigid, too… intrusive. And their customs are strange. Jin-Sayeng is… familiar. Rustic and provincial at times, but we prefer it that way.”

  “You mean to say that you have free rein to practice whatever foul spells you’ve got up your sleeves,” I said mirthlessly.

  Direh flushed. “That’s not—”

  I waved her explanation away. “The skeletons in the tower. You must’ve sold my father on the idea.”

  “Damaged children,” Direh said. “They wouldn’t have lived past their fifth year, if even.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Is that the lie you tell yourselves?”

  “It’s the truth, Queen Talyien,” Zuha broke in. “Not all who have a connection to the agan are as you see us. Many… are born not whole. Deformed, disabled, weak. Broken.”

  “That doesn’t mean they didn’t deserve to live.”

  Direh shook her head. “Some of these children couldn’t even speak. They would have been a burden to their families.”

  “Did their families tell you that? Did you ask the children themselves? How would you have known? You didn’t give them a chance. You killed them instead of showing them mercy!”

  “Your father did,” Direh said. “Insisted on doing it himself.”

  I had an image of my father striking Eikaro against the wall—of Eikaro grappling with those strong arms, thinking there was no escape, trying to pry him off anyway. The same arms that had held me up with such fierceness…

  “Beloved Queen, they couldn’t contain their abilities,” Zuha finished for her. He sounded calmer, as if what they had done was a fact of life, like the turn of the weather. “What Warlord Yeshin did for them was the mercy. And at least their deaths were not in vain.”

  “You do not have systems in place to control the flow of agan in Jin-Sayeng,” Direh added. “You used to, because of your dragons.”

  Almost as if he heard us, we heard Eikaro bellow in the distance.

  Zuha held out his hand. “The children’s blood—provided amplification for the spells we imbued in the dragon-tower. And Oka Shto, as you may know by now. Have you noticed the mirrors?”

  “Hard not to.” I struggled to
contain my rage. If I had my way, I would burn it all down where I stood. But nothing I did could bring those children back.

  “There’s another dragon-tower out in the mountains,” he said. “Right under the sky where Rysaran’s dragon was destroyed years before your father’s war. An older one that remains intact.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “We don’t ride dragons anymore. Why do we need dragon-towers?”

  “They’re connected to the agan, and to each other, or they were in the old days. All the old cities had dragon-towers, each connected to the others, forming a backbone to Jin-Sayeng that was its greatest source of strength.”

  “I know that much,” I said. “They captured excess dragon-fire, for when it built up inside the dragons, which we used for homes in the city.” I paused. “Was this part of my father’s plan? To establish Oren-yaro as the center once he found the secret to taming the dragons?”

  “Once he found it?” Zuha asked, glancing at Direh. He gave a small smile. “No, my queen. You have it all wrong. He knew how to tame the dragons from the beginning. That’s why we needed the dragon-towers.”

  I stared at her. My father said he was leaving it up to Ojika to discover the secret in the first place. No, Tali. Remember how his mind works. He trusted few, and certainly not the ambitious. He knew how, but that wouldn’t have been enough. Warlord Ojika was a test.

  Direh glanced at the fire we’d built and gestured towards it. “If you’ll sit with us, Beloved Queen, we will explain the secret of Jin-Sayeng’s dragonriders and why you’ve lost it all these hundreds of years.”

  Here is one funny thing that should be painfully obvious to most. History books lie.

  History books lie because people lie, and those of us who find ourselves with the power to do so will bend the truth in order to make it fit the trajectory of our lives. The trajectory we believe we are destined for, that we deserve.

  Somewhere along the line, someone—I am not going to say an Ikessar, but it was very likely so—decided that riding dragons had lost all meaning. The Ikessars rose to power because they rode dragons first, but with nearly every warlord and his bannermen in possession of dragons, their influence had grown stale. Little by little, over the years, dragonriding became a thing to vilify. Not directly, of course. This was still a land that worshipped dragons, and changing people’s minds couldn’t happen overnight.

  But suddenly, a warlord with more than his fair share of dragons was too ambitious, too aggressive, and needed to be knocked down. Suddenly the Dragonthrone was demanding tributes from the provinces—their best hatchlings, which were then sacrificed in the waters of Lake Watu. Suddenly the Ikessars had brought in a new religion, a Nameless Maker no one in the nation had heard of before.

  The mages were the next to go.

  “You always had mages,” Zuha said. “You didn’t use the word. But they were members of your community—they maintained the dragon-towers, and the agan flow, and all the little tasks necessary to keep dragons in the first place. And they were needed for the nobles to ride dragons. Because you don’t ride the dragons so much as you become them.”

  I suddenly remembered what Eikaro had done; how effortlessly he had traded his mangled body for the dragon’s. Did these mages train him? Someone who was both mage and dragonrider—no wonder he found a way. I didn’t want to trust these mages, but I had seen firsthand what Eikaro went through, and it all added up. I rubbed my temples for a moment before gazing at the mages through the fire. “So the Ikessars committed sabotage to retain power,” I said. “They caused us to lose this knowledge over time. They made us forget. But they always knew?”

  “The knowledge was hidden in their vaults for centuries. Your father was the first to find them in years.”

  “Tell me the details.”

  They explained. Dragons were large, intelligent, and prone to aggression, snapping their handlers’ necks whenever they chose. But the Ikessars’ ancestors, up in the mountains, somehow stumbled on the secret that certain people could tap into a dragon and share a body with it momentarily. That gave the impression that dragons were being ridden, when in truth the rider became the dragon, or at least was sharing the dragon’s space. More skilled riders could even switch, as Eikaro had done, and gain full autonomy over the dragon’s body; you just had to do it with a more placid dragon that you could trust would stay on the saddle without gnawing your own arms off. In most cases, both rider and dragon were inside of the dragon’s body.

  This left the rider’s body without a soul. To keep it alive, and to offer a clear pathway back for the rider’s soul, the riders were tattooed with spell runes—masked as elaborate tattoos that covered their arms and bodies, the pattern of which many Jinseins still wear today. The dragon-towers were built to further help with the transfers—each was built with spell runes that allowed riders to switch without a mage’s help.

  “So all you need are spell runes, or a mage, to ride a dragon?” I asked.

  “No,” Direh said. “Only Jin-Sayeng royals can ride them.”

  “What makes us so different?” I asked.

  “The Ikessars stumbled onto the secret when they married women mages,” she said. “It seems almost like sheer accident that this particular trait happened, because it’s not exactly the same thing that connects a mage to the agan. Is it a mutation of the agan itself? An attunement made possible by the close proximity of dragons in those days? We know the basics are similar. Skill in the agan is traditionally passed down through the motherline—your mother or your father’s mother. And so even agan -blind royals are capable of dragonriding—or more precisely, controlled soul-switching. Only those who carry the trait are capable—they’ve tried with others, even mages that don’t carry the blood. Somehow, the very act of transferring kills them.”

  “The other clans followed the practice,” Zuha interjected. “Which gave the royals the impression of power over time. It made the land believe the royals are blessed.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Khine exclaimed. I gave him a look, and he closed his mouth.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder why your motherline is more important?” Zuha asked. “Why the council still recognized Lord Rayyel as his mother’s heir, even when his father is a commoner?”

  My own mother had come from Nee, once a royal clan. I stared at the flames, trying to piece together my own thoughts, trying to contrast them against what I had learned of my nation and what I was learning now.

  “When the Ikessars began to dismantle the system they created, anything involving the agan, and mages, became blasphemy,” Direh continued. “Suddenly, it wasn’t such a good thing to have a child with the gift for the agan; suddenly, they were throwing such children to the sea. Suddenly, the dragons were becoming harder to ride, and even harder to capture, and no one seemed to remember why. The towers crumbled in time, and the dragons themselves started to disappear.”

  “Until Rysaran’s dragon,” I broke in.

  Direh nodded. “It wasn’t even a real dragon. That creature was nearly pure agan. An abomination, but it was like bringing water to a parched land. For all the destruction it caused, it also tipped Jin-Sayeng back to balance, calling your dragons back home.”

  The sky flashed. My skin felt as if it was burning, a far cry from the mere prickling it had felt so far. I wondered if it was because we were so near the rift, or because it was getting worse. “Some home,” I said, when we could talk again. “Now it’s breaking at the seams, and despite all this knowledge you’ve yet to tame an actual dragon.”

  “We were hoping it would work with this one,” Zuha said. “It’s taken longer than we had hoped, longer than Warlord Yeshin could’ve ever expected. All our experiments in the past have been failures. Mad dragons were not part of the equation, and the flow of agan in this area has simply become more unstable over the years. But this one doesn’t seem to be mad.”

  “That’s because Lord Eikaro is inside of it,” I said.

  The mages looked con
cerned.

  “He switched successfully months ago, losing his own body in the attempt,” I continued. “Did you teach him how to do that? He’s the reason Warlord Yeshin entrusted you to Warlord Ojika, after all.”

  Direh’s face flickered. “We did—in theory. But that’s impossible. That dragon is too vicious.”

  “All I know is he’s still in there,” I said. “But it’s like he’s losing himself.”

  “The, ah… switch is dangerous in that sense,” Zuha broke in. “You’re not supposed to ride a dragon for very long. If it is as you say, then Lord Eikaro is forgetting what it’s like to be a human. His thoughts are inside a dragon’s brain, after all. If this works, then, it will be good—he may find reprieve in becoming a person once again.”

  “As his father,” I replied.

  “That makes it easier to connect them.”

  “He’ll be wearing his father’s skin.”

  They stared back at me, as if wondering what was so awful about that. I didn’t know how to explain what I’d felt in the few moments Yeshin had thrown me into his memories. It was hard enough trying to shed your father’s shadow all your life. To become him, even briefly…

  “I need you to promise me Lord Eikaro will not come to any harm,” I said.

  They gave each other a wary glance. “Promise? No. We cannot promise anything, my queen,” Zuha said. “The agan is unpredictable. Mastery of it is an art, no matter what the Dageians try to make you believe. We don’t know the details—all we have are theories. We’re blind painters, drawing mountains we’ve never seen.”

  A horn blasted in the distance.

  “That’s the signal,” Direh said. “Please excuse us, Beloved Queen.” They stepped away from the fire and back towards the hill. The soldiers saluted us before turning to follow them.

  I turned to Khine. “Have you still got your sword, Lamang?”