I held back against the thoughts and kept silent as I allowed him to mount the proffered pony, awkwardly placing himself in the saddle—all bones and angles, a mirror image of his father in everything but looks. Subdued, I turned to my own horse. Huan was true to his word—it was the mare who had served me well on the ridge last time, the one Khine’s brother had ridden back to Yu-yan in safety. Recognizing me, she butted my shoulder before turning to my pockets in the hopes of finding a treat. I whispered apologies to her ruddy nose.
We rode up the tower, past the bridge, and into the ridge. I kept as close as possible to my son, straining my ears for the sound of dragons. Huan assured me they would be busy this time of the year; it was mating season, which meant they were preoccupied with each other.
A mage met us at the end of the road, the last remaining of my father’s.
“It’s dangerous from here on out,” Parrtha said. He looked none the worse for wear since Burbatan, though despite his brave words, you could see the fear dancing in his eyes.
“We all know that,” I grumbled.
“We are hoping the Esteemed Prince will help us walk through undetected,” he added. “A shield spell that only he can hold up…”
“Testing me already, are we?” Yuebek snorted. “You people are so pathetic it hurts. I won’t humour you. Let the bastards come if they want.” Without waiting to see what Parrtha had to say, he pushed his horse forward.
“You heard the man,” I said, digging my heels into my mount.
Thanh smiled. “Mages everywhere,” he observed. “It’s like we’re not in Jin-Sayeng.”
“Hush your mouth,” I grumbled.
He laughed. My son really wasn’t the sort of child who took his mother seriously, and I felt myself latch on to that. I would’ve never laughed at my own father. With him, yes. At him? The very thought still shook me to my core. He would’ve taken it as an insult. What was the value in a child who didn’t listen?
Of course, I never once agreed with that diatribe. My son had been free to question me since the day he was born. I watched him ride a little ahead, torn between telling him to stay with me and continuing to marvel how he could be so… carefree. I thought back to the day of his birth, to how the sight of him in my arms made everything I had just endured seem like butterfly kisses.
The living are built for pain.
We continued through the dry riverbank until we passed beyond familiar land, where we found ourselves fully entrenched in the wilderness, layers of mountains on every side. Behind the waning orange light, they looked like shadowed fortresses. Off in the distance, I heard a dragon call, but none appeared in sight. I didn’t know if I was supposed to be relieved or not. A dragon unseen was still a dragon.
“You can see the dragon-tower from here,” Parrtha said, a tremble in his voice.
I squinted. It looked like a needle at first, but it began to take shape as we drew closer—a small tower, three times taller than it was thick.
We dismounted at the base, tying the horses near some trees. I took Thanh by the hand, resisting the urge to talk about the architecture. I wanted to point out how it mimicked the dragon-towers in Sutan—the rings around every window, the stained glass, the dark stone. Yuebek watched us from a corner, eyes unblinking.
“This thing is ancient,” I said, turning to the mage.
Parrtha nodded. “The dragon-tower marks the border where the damage to the agan fabric in the region begins,” he said. “You can see it, too, if you try hard enough.”
I glanced at the sky. There were faint purple streaks in the air, touched with grey, like scabs on a wound. The stars in the background looked distorted. Even if I knew nothing about the agan, I could tell something was very, very wrong.
“And it goes all the way to the north of the Kago region, you say?” I asked.
Parrtha frowned. “It is quite a span. You can see why ordinary mages have their work cut out for them. If Dageis cared to send their best, perhaps we wouldn’t have this problem.”
“They knew about it.”
“When did such a powerful empire ever care for a nation as small as ours? Your father tried to make contact with the Dageian hegemony several times, always to no avail. He was dismissed right at the gate—there was absolutely no chance for his letters to reach the proper channels.”
“Simply because we’re from Jin-Sayeng?”
“What is Jin-Sayeng to the outside world but a nation of ignorant, squabbling monkeys?”
I turned to him, bristling.
He held up his hands. “I am simply saying what the rest of the world thinks.”
“For someone who accepted Jinsein hospitality, you don’t seem to find it very impressive.”
“The land itself is impressive. The people, not so much. Your people are stubborn, Queen Talyien. They refuse progress. Your internal politics take precedence over more serious matters—you would rather bicker, and then indulge yourselves forgetting there was anything to bicker over in the first place. And so things like this happen.” Parrtha glanced at Yuebek, who was stalking towards us now, hands at his side. “Esteemed Prince. Would you like to hear our plans now? I have the spell scroll with me, but first, we will guide you through the process of riding a dragon.”
“I might as well,” Yuebek said, glancing at me. “It’s what my queen wants from me, isn’t it? All she wants from me? I do so much for her, and yet still she looks at me with hate in her eyes.”
I moved away in discomfort. Thanh, I noticed, was watching me carefully, hands on his lap.
“Is there anything I can do for you, Mother?” he asked.
I forced a smile. “What makes you think I need anything at all?”
“You look sad.” He pressed his hands on my cheeks, looking into my eyes the way he used to when he was younger and he wanted to make sure I heard every word he said. “You shouldn’t be. I told you. It’ll be all right. Things will work out. You’ll see.” His voice, I noticed, was deepening. He wouldn’t be a man for a few years yet, but he wasn’t a little boy anymore.
“Thanh,” I whispered. “What if I told you the world is bigger than what we see here?”
“I know it is,” he said.
“There are airships and cities twice the size of Shirrokaru, with towers full of people—towers that aren’t crumbling like ours. There are ships that can go through islands of ice and snow…”
“Icebergs, I think they’re called.”
“You’ve read about them in books.”
He nodded solemnly.
“And they exist outside of those books, too.”
He didn’t understand how much saying that made me sad. How much it gnawed at me to think of the life he’d led, cloistered behind a castle, his every move watched and recorded by a nation that held no compassion for him. He didn’t know. “Did you see an airship?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.
“I did, back in the Zarojo empire.”
“That must’ve been amazing! Did you get to ride it, too?”
“No.”
“It’ll make me dizzy. It would probably make you dizzy. You complain when we ride on river-ships.”
“No worse than riding a dragon.”
His eyes looked like they would pop out of his head. “You rode a dragon? You?”
“I am Dragonlord, you know,” I huffed.
“You are,” he conceded. “You don’t tell people that often enough.”
“Is that what you think?”
He nodded. “In the books, all the Dragonlords just did what they wanted. You never do that. You never just tell people to… to leave you alone.”
“Why do you think that is, Thanh?”
“It’s because you care too much, I think.”
“And do you think that makes me a weak ruler?”
He shook his head. “It’s the others who need to learn that a ruler can’t be everything. Our lives, the future, it’s all… it’s all of us responsible for it, isn’t it, Mother? Not just the Dragon
lord?”
“Perhaps. Who can say? We can only work with what we have, and people are blind.”
“It isn’t fair.”
“The world doesn’t work that way.” I smoothed the hair from his face. “You may think we were dealt a bad hand, but it is far from the truth. There are people dead or dying behind us who have no idea why things are the way they are. Many are born into suffering, and accept it as a fact. Answers don’t fill bellies, Thanh. Principles, theories, politics… don’t really feed people, though we can pretend all day that they will. Rulers need to be able to balance both cares, and those of us with the power to do something at all… must do our part.”
Thanh’s expression told me he was trying to think through what I’d just said.
“But for what it’s worth,” I continued, “you are the best thing that ever happened to me. I love you, my dear. I love you so much.”
He reached over for an embrace. I stared up at the sky as I held him, praying to the gods—all of them, deaf though they might be. Praying they hadn’t given him to me as another cruel joke. Because for a woman like me—after everything that I was and everything I had done—to bear such a child seemed almost like a crime against nature.
I heard Yuebek give a cry and set Thanh aside to return to them. “A spell of that magnitude, and so far away—” Yuebek was saying, gesturing at the rip. “I suppose you expect me to sprout wings next.”
“We do,” I broke in.
His face twisted. “What the hell are you saying?”
“You want to be Dragonlord, don’t you? Well—we are bequeathing to you the lost secret of the Jin-Sayeng dragonriders. We never tamed dragons, Prince Yuebek. Our souls rode their bodies. And the ability to do this effortlessly is stamped on the Jinsein royal bloodline. Did your Esteemed Father know this when he seized your mother as tribute years after Dragonlord Reshiro broke ties with the Empire?”
The words made his face turn red, and he dismissed me with a snarl. “Blood or no, I’ll have it done,” he snapped. “Show me the dragon.”
Parrtha pointed to an outcrop of rocks near the tower. “The Yu-yan soldiers prepared everything before we arrived. The trap is set, Esteemed Prince. With any luck, it won’t be long before—”
An air-splitting roar sounded in the distance.
“I guess we’re doing this tonight,” I said. I turned to Yuebek with a smile. “It’s time to show the land your worth, dear husband.”
I fingered the grass-cutter hidden inside my robe as Yuebek approached the large dragon, which stared back at him in trepidation. Two creatures, sizing each other up. I knew who was the bigger monster.
“There’s a corrupted soul inside that thing,” I said. “It doesn’t like it if you try to get rid of it. It would rather kill its host.” I wondered what Yuebek thought of my honesty, or if he was past caring now.
“I’ve spoken with Lord Eikaro, and he told me these things like the idea of trading,” Parrtha broke in. “They were human once. They’d rather be human again. And so if the Esteemed Prince isn’t opposed…”
“You want this creature to inhabit my body,” Yuebek said.
“My lord, we think that with your power, it isn’t a problem.”
“Of course it won’t be a problem,” Yuebek snapped. “I’m not a child. Get started before I lose my patience.”
“I’ll have to chain you,” Parrtha said. “It will keep the creature contained for when we switch you back.”
Yuebek didn’t seem to hear, or care, and held his hands out without hesitation. Parrtha strapped manacles around Yuebek’s wrists, one for each. He looped the chains through them and began attaching them to the two nearest trees.
“Do you see what I’m doing for you, my queen?” he asked as Parrtha began to work on the runes. “Prove my worth, you say. Look at me when I’m talking to you. Look!”
He was laughing now, the moonlight shining over his form. Black hair streamed down his shoulders, contrasting against his pale skin. I wondered if he would even seem any different with the corrupted soul inside of his body. Yuebek’s very being… was tainted enough as it was. I glanced at the dragon, similarly chained at the far end of the grove.
It was larger than Eikaro, covered from head to toe in black scales, touched with red. I recognized the dragon I had seen from the mirror before, the one overlooking this dragon-tower. The rocks around its feet glowed red, remnants of its struggle mere moments ago. Now it had run out of breath. It stared at us with yellow eyes, teeth gnashing. Only a curdle of flame was left on its lips.
“Do it!” Yuebek cried, all but embracing the dragon.
Parrtha drew on the agan, starting his spell. I felt the ground begin to shake. I pushed Thanh behind me just as the dragon’s chains shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, like sparkling ashes. It filled the air with blue shards.
Yuebek’s body howled, rattling the chains like a wild animal. In that same instant, the dragon lifted its wings, turned to Parrtha, and hopped after him, snapping at his legs. There was nothing human about its movement. Parrtha found his exit blocked by a boulder.
The dragon smashed right into the shield spell, sending blue sparks flying. Once, twice, and then again. The shield spell broke. The dragon grinned, grabbed Parrtha by the legs, and snapped both limbs clean off before he flung him to the sky. In one breath, I lost another mage, and the spell scroll necessary for Yuebek to close the rift in the first place.
But I didn’t have time for grief or surprise. I crashed into the nearest bushes, Thanh’s hand in mine, heading straight for the trees. I could hear the dragon stomping behind me.
“What’s the matter, my queen? Do you not love my new form? Was this not what you wanted?”
His voice was like an echo in the wind. I could hear him, not simply get a glimpse of his thoughts in my head like with Eikaro. The horror on Thanh’s face confirmed it. We reached the first row of trees, a dark wall against a darker night, just as he slammed behind us. The trees creaked, snapping. I barely missed a branch from taking my head off. “Keep running,” I told Thanh. “Don’t look back. Whatever you do, don’t look back!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE CHRONICLES OF THE BITCH QUEEN
Moonlight streamed between the trees.
The ground crumbled under our feet, untouched forest ground, sinking up to our ankles with every step. I could no longer hear the dragon behind us, which did nothing to set my heart at ease.
Thanh began to wheeze.
I slowed down, turning to him. “Are you all right?”
“Just… breathing…” he gasped.
I placed my hand on his back, rubbing it in a circular motion. The wind rushed through the branches above, shaking the leaves. Spring air, a touch of damp instead of frost. But cold, still—cold enough to worry me. I glanced at my son, who eventually straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why is it attacking us?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
“I thought they said he’d be fully in control. We need him to carry a spell, don’t we? They said—”
“It’s too late. The scroll is gone.”
“But—”
“Please, Thanh. Please be quiet.”
I glanced at our surroundings. A shroud of clouds drifted over what little of the sky I could see.
“Mother—”
I reached for his hand, not sure if I was trying to give him comfort or trying to find it for myself. How was I supposed to explain to Thanh that nothing was guaranteed? It was difficult to accept that my son’s future was as uncertain as mine. I was here at the heels of my father’s own guesswork. I couldn’t give my own son more.
I breathed, trying to focus. I could still see between the gaps of the trees. Do we go deeper into the forest, towards whatever other foul things lurk in that wilderness? Or do we risk going back to the field, leaving us open for another attack?
I knew I couldn’t fight a dragon of that size. Ozo meant for there to be an entire contingen
t of guards with me to take care of Yuebek once we were done. The entire affair was a shot in the dark already. If I was going to salvage it, I needed a better plan. And to come up with a better plan, we needed to survive.
I tightened my grip on my son’s hand, feeling my own cold sweat on his skin. “We’ll go deeper into the forest,” I said, gazing at the foreboding darkness. My stomach curdled. It could be a decision that would lead to our deaths. Every step could be death—a ravine, a wild animal’s den, even a stray rock that would make us slip and crack our skulls. But staying meant the same thing. What if the dragon caught up to us? What if it got colder?
We walked slowly. I could hear nothing beyond the pounding of my heart and our steady footsteps. Trying to calm myself while I could hear my son shuffling beside me was the worst feeling in the world. The number of things that could go wrong was limitless. I would die first before I would let any harm befall my son, but then what? How would he get himself out? The last time we were out here, only half of us returned alive, and we didn’t even go this far into the wilderness. Back then, there were soldiers and enough weapons to take down a dragon or two. Now everything we carried from Yu-yan—tents, food, water—was left in the field with the horses. All I had was a sword and a rusty grass-cutter and my son.
As if he could read my thoughts, my son glanced up. “I’m hungry,” he said. It wasn’t a complaint, but the thin sound added to the burden.
I squeezed his hand. “We’ll find something to eat soon.”
“You mean… from the woods?”
“Why not? I’ve done it before.”
“Like an animal?”
“Thanh, sometimes I can’t tell if you’re purposely trying to irritate me when you act like your father.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
I tapped his nose. “There, right there.”
He paused for a moment, taking a deep breath. “Father has really left us, hasn’t he?”
The Dragon of Jin-Sayeng Page 63
