Kingdom of Ashes

by Rhiannon Thomas

  She had thought they needed her. She had thought they were waiting for her support. She had not thought this.

  “Was there a letter, too? An explanation?”

  Finnegan held up two smaller sheets of paper. She took them from him, but the words were all in code. “What does it say?”

  “Things have gotten worse since you left. No one wants to be in the capital. Nettle says that there are rumors that magic will return if you’re killed. She doesn’t say if the king started them, but it’s what they’re all saying now. That that’s what the prophecy meant after all.”

  Aurora closed her eyes. “Of course they’re saying that,” she said. “Of course.” They had believed that Aurora was their savior, woken by a magic kiss. After that, any story would be easy to believe.

  She crumpled the wanted poster into a ball in her fist.

  “Not everyone will believe it,” Finnegan said.

  “But enough do,” she said. “Enough to write those things about me.”

  “Did you expect them all to be on your side?”

  “I don’t know.” She threw the crumpled poster onto the table. Perhaps she had. She had spent so much time worrying about them, planning for them, sacrificing herself for them. Surely they should want her help in return. But no. While she had been worrying, they had been hating her. “They’ll think whatever they want to think.”

  Finnegan rested a hand on her arm. “It’s good that you came here,” he said, so quietly that she almost couldn’t hear him. “They would have torn you apart if you’d stayed.”

  She stared at the ball of paper. She could not even call the accusations lies. She was here with Alyssinia’s enemies, wasn’t she? She was a witch, for whatever that was worth.

  “They’re right,” she said. “They’re right about me.”

  “They’re not.”

  “They are.” She thought of Petrichor, of Tristan, of Iris, of curtsies and smiles and accusations of betrayal, of a little girl choking on a cherry eaten from Aurora’s own hand. Of stiff kisses with promised princes as hundreds looked on. People cheering for her, and then turning against her as soon as they could. And the anger that burned inside her, the way the fire sparked out of her control. She swallowed. “You don’t understand. If I let out everything I felt, I’d burn the whole city to the ground.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Why don’t I? Why don’t I destroy a city, kill the people in it?”

  “Destroy the king,” Finnegan said. “Raze that castle and that curse. Or ignore them all and do what you want to do. Use your magic for whatever you want. Nothing is stopping you, except yourself.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not who I am.”

  “Aurora,” Finnegan said, softly, firmly. He held her by the shoulders, his face inches from hers. He swept the hair away from her face. “I know we’ve been talking about Alyssinia, about how you can help, but you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to ever go back. You’re too good for those people. You’re too good for all of them. Why don’t you let them go?”

  “Because,” she said. “I can’t.”

  But as she lay in bed that night, staring at the canopy, she began to doubt. She could not stop picturing that wanted poster, all its hateful words in different handwriting, how despised she must be. She had spent so long trying to please the people in her kingdom, and this was how they reacted when she failed to meet their expectations. She had worried about her magic, worried about the harm she might do, and they called her a murderer either way.

  She had tried to marry Rodric, for them, for their hope, and they called her a whore.

  They had praised her and loved her, hoping she would bring magic back into the world, and she had recoiled at the idea, so afraid of what magic had done to her, so certain that she could never do what they dreamed. But now she had magic, and they recoiled from her, insulted her, blamed her for all of their ills.

  The story of Alysse came to her again. They did not trust this sorceress who could make so much happen with her thoughts. She would never be enough for them. She clenched her hands, her fingernails digging into her palms.

  She had never been anything to them but a story.

  She slipped out of bed and crept back to the practice room. Defiance filled every breath, a furious, desperate, proud determination to be exactly who she could be, regardless of what anyone else wanted or expected. She balled it in her chest, the power of it, and she teased out strands, bit by bit, until candles and fireplaces burned, until she could cup fire in her hands and make it vanish with a breath, until flames whirled around her without scorching a single hair on her head. The power had a madness to it. It was indestructible. She sent it out and pulled it back in, the anger, the sadness, the magic filling every inch of her, until it felt as much a part of her as breathing, as the blood pounding around her veins.

  And as the magic burned, she realized what she needed to be. How she could use her magic, how she could help them, how she could be free.

  Nothing but a story.

  She marched into Finnegan’s room as the sun began to peek over the horizon. He lay in bed, shirtless, his chest rising and falling in sleep. “Finnegan,” she said, softly, clearly, and he startled awake. “I’m ready.”

  He blinked at her, still half-asleep, his hair tousled around his eyes. “You’re ready?”

  “Let’s go and find some dragons.”

  TWENTY

  FINNEGAN’S HAIR STUCK UP IN FIVE DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS. He ran his hand through the spikes, pushing them back, and continued to stare at her. “What?”

  “You were right,” she said. “About the dragons, about Alyssinia. I need to use them to attack them, attack the king. And they’ll hate me for it. But I have to do it. I have to make them hate me.”

  “Rora,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

  “They hate me,” she said. “They hate me already. They want my power, but they’re afraid of it too. They’re afraid of being unable to control me. And I can’t change that. Not ever.” Not if the story of Alysse was true. “So I’ll get the dragons,” she said. “I’ll rid you of them. And then I’ll take them to Alyssinia, and I’ll stop this violence. I’ll stop the king.”

  “And become a queen they’re all afraid of?”

  “No,” Aurora said. “Then nothing will have changed. Rodric. Rodric is helping already. If he’s king for another time, then I’ll create another time. They can hate me, and he can be the hero.”

  “And what?” Finnegan said. “Let them kill you?” He climbed out of bed and moved to stand in front of her.

  “I can vanish,” Aurora said, and the smile as she said it seemed to fill her whole body. “Like Alysse. Rodric wouldn’t chase me. I’ll stop being their Sleeping Beauty; I’ll stop having this responsibility; I’ll be able to do what I want.”

  Finnegan raked his hand through his hair again. “What about Celestine?” he said. “The plan that she had?”

  “She wanted me to turn on them,” Aurora said. “She wanted some of this. But you were right. Even if she made me, even if she’s the reason I have a connection with the dragons, she can’t control what I do. I’ll use the magic to do good, even if people hate me for it. It’s all that I can do.”

  Finnegan darted forward, clutching her face with his hands. For a giddy moment, Aurora thought he was about to kiss her, but instead he laughed. “You’re amazing, Rora.” And then he picked her up, whirling her around, and she laughed in delight too, gripping his arms to hold herself steady.

  “You’re pretty amazing yourself,” she said, as he placed her back on the ground, and it felt like the moment, the point where everything would change, the time when he would kiss her, or she would kiss him, and they would laugh, and things would hurtle on.

  But then Finnegan stepped away and grabbed a shirt off a chair. “I’ll contact Lucas,” he said. “We’ll go to that mountain, today. Deal with the dragons at the source.” He pulled on the shirt. “Give me
a couple of hours, dragon girl. Then we’ll go see what you can do.”

  They left that afternoon. Preparing for a multiple-day expedition in the waste could not have been easy, especially while concealing it from Orla, but Finnegan had clearly been planning for days. He already had lies prepared, about spending time in a library on the far north of the island to research Aurora’s magic. The excuse would give them a couple of days before they were missed.

  Lucas provided them each with packs, filled with water skins and nonperishable food, kindling for lighting fires in the desolate waste, blankets for the cold nights, maps and compasses for navigation. The packs themselves were waterproof, he told her, coated inside with tar in case they had to swim to safety on the journey. Each one was designed to sustain the carrier if they were separated from the group, but Aurora’s was smaller and lighter than the rest. She had not been given kindling. “Can’t weigh you down too much,” Lucas said with a smile. “You still need to be able to walk.”

  “I’ve had some experience in walking,” she said, “these past few weeks.”

  “Good,” Lucas said. “You’ll need it. But no point in making it harder than it needs to be.”

  Lucas could not have forgotten who Aurora was, but his attitude toward her did not change at all. He spoke to her now as half-girl, half-fascination, an exciting addition to his dragon research. According to Finnegan, it had not taken much to persuade him to travel into the waste with them again. He wanted to see if the dragons could be controlled as much as they did.

  This time, Finnegan had bought his own boat, using Lucas as intermediary to keep the transaction secret. They sailed across the river and hid the boat in a hollowed-out building on the shore.

  “What if someone sees it?” Aurora asked. “What if it gets burned?”

  “Then we’ll need you to send some flares,” Finnegan said. “So try not to die on the way.”

  They soon left the ruined port behind, trudging out into the waste. The baked earth beneath their feet might once have been a road, but any markers had long been lost. No trees, no scrub, no weeds growing between the occasional piles of stones. Nothing but dust, and ash, and death. A few hills and cliffs broke up the landscape, and the corpses of towns were scattered about, their unburned fragments gleaming white in the sun.

  In the distance, a mountain loomed. Aurora saw a flicker of movement around the summit, like a dragon was circling, but perhaps that was her imagination. Soon, she would be there herself.

  The journey would take about two days by Lucas’s reckoning. They planned to walk for most of the afternoon, until they met another wide, slow-moving river. Then they would follow the river north, sticking close to the bank, until they reached the point where it swerved southwest. North of this river, Lucas said, was dragon territory. The dragons lived south of the river now too—they lived everywhere in the waste—but they were concentrated near the mountain where legend said they had slumbered and in the dry land stretching into the west.

  If their group walked directly across the waste, they would reach the dragons in almost half the time. But without the river to guide and protect them, any explorers were unlikely to make it through alive. Despite the dangers of their eventual destination, Lucas insisted that they stick to common sense and take the river path.

  Lucas would get them safely to the mountain, avoiding the dragons as much as they could. Then it would be Aurora’s turn. No one knew precisely what the inside of the mountain was like, but Aurora pictured some kind of cavern, where she could walk to the center, command the dragons’ attention, and then . . . then she did not know. She did not know how many she could control at once.

  Perhaps it would be safer to start at the edge, to control one first, and then two, until she felt herself reaching her limit. She would soothe those dragons back to sleep, and then more, until only the ones she needed for Alyssinia remained.

  It was not a strong plan, but how could she predict what would happen when dealing with dragons? She would trust her instincts, as she had with them before. When she saw them, she would know what to do.

  They reached the river as the sun began to set. It was wider than a city street, and the water rushed past, leaping over rocks and splashing the bank. Reeds grew along the sides, bending inward as though bowing to their river god.

  “There’s an abandoned house a little way up here,” Lucas said. “We’ll rest there tonight, give ourselves time to regroup. It’ll be the last relatively safe spot for a while.”

  House was a generous word for the small pile of rubble that waited ahead of them, but one wall stood right against the bank, sturdy and unburned. The other walls had not fared so well, but it would shelter them from sight, and Aurora doubted they would find anything better so far into the wild.

  They stepped through a space that might once have been a front door. The ground floor was all one room, and although the walls leaned inward and rubble dusted the ground, it looked stable enough. Pots hung above the fireplace, and a table had been knocked over in the middle of the room.

  “We should check upstairs,” Finnegan said. “Make sure it’s safe.”

  “A dragon couldn’t fit in here,” Aurora said.

  “A dragon couldn’t, but an outlaw might. Who knows who else might think this a good place to rest?”

  The stairs led to an attic room that was half-destroyed by fire and time. Rubble and tiles had fallen from the roof, and the remnants of the bed frame were still littered with ash. Something sat by the end of the bed, low to the ground, impossible to make out in the gloom. Heart pounding, Aurora gathered a small ball of fire in her hand, casting a dancing light across the room.

  It was a skeleton. It slumped against the ruined wall. Aurora stared at it. It stared back at her with empty sockets, reproaching her for some unknown crime.

  “The people here didn’t want to leave,” Finnegan said. She jumped, and the fire flickered out. “They thought they’d be safe, so close to the water, and so they stayed. No one was safe.”

  She had never seen a skeleton before. Her life over the past few weeks had been full of death, of family members long gone and friends choking out their lives before her, but she had never seen how it left them, how time had torn everything away.

  “It looks safe up here,” Finnegan said. “Come light a fire downstairs. I think it’s going to be cold tonight.”

  They all huddled around the grate, Aurora’s fire warming their faces and knees as the cold of the night crept steadily across their backs. Lucas prepared them a quick meal of salted meat and bread that they had packed from the city, but Aurora barely tasted it. Her skin prickled, like the skeleton was still watching her from the shadows.

  Finnegan sat close by her side, and his elbow bumped hers every time he moved. Aurora did not move closer, but she did not move away.

  His sleeve grazed her bare arm, and the urge to kiss him rushed through her.

  Lucas leaned close to the fire. The flames lit the hollows of his eyes. He had seen so much, she realized, out here in the waste. He had seen it before the dragons came. He had watched it change.

  “Lucas,” she said. “Could you tell me what happened, when the dragons came back? What you remember of it?”

  Lucas shifted closer to the fire. “They appeared out of nowhere,” he said, “and we had no defenses against them. Most people didn’t think they’d ever existed, and suddenly they were burning everything to ash. No one believed the tales of those who survived the attacks. A dragon burned the city? More likely a fire got out of control, and the survivor has been driven mad by grief. Or guilt. It was a while before people accepted them as real.”

  “When did you accept it?” Aurora asked.

  “I suspected it from the beginning. From the things I had read, the things I heard—I knew they’d existed, and I believed they were back. I must have been one of the first people to see them and live to speak of it. I was young and foolish, so I went out to find them. To prove the rumors true. And I did.
”

  Aurora watched the flames, trying to picture it. Creatures descending out of myth and burning your world away. “What did it feel like,” she said, looking at him again, “when you first saw one?”

  Lucas stared into the fire. The light darted across his face, highlighting the lines there, the whites of his eyes. “It was terrifying,” Lucas said. “Of course it was terrifying.” But the way he spoke, it was almost as though he were convincing himself.

  Had he felt like she felt when she’d first glimpsed one, captivated and alive, like nothing existed in the world beyond this?

  “Are you ever glad?” she asked. “Do you ever think . . . at least I got to see them?”

  “No.” He spoke so sharply that Aurora almost jumped, her hands tightening on her knees. Lucas still stared at the fire, but he was frowning now, the lines deepening around his eyes. “Never. The death, the screaming . . . what would be worth that?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think.”

  “No,” Lucas murmured. “Neither did I.” He let out a deep sigh. “I’m going to rest. Put out the fire before you two sleep.”

  The fire flickered even as he spoke. Lucas stretched out a few feet away, his back to them.

  “That was thoughtless of me,” Aurora said to Finnegan, in a low voice. “I just wondered . . .”

  “Wonder away,” Finnegan said. “I’ve wondered the same.”

  She fidgeted with the corner of her tunic, twisting the material between her fingers.

  “Not regretting coming out here?” Finnegan said.

  She thought of the bones above her head, the bones she would become herself, tomorrow or one hundred years from now or someday. The bones she should have already been, if the world was just.

  Perhaps her curse had given her a gift. She had the chance to live in a time she should never have seen, to become friends with Rodric and flirt with Finnegan and hunt down dragons across a waste that had been full of life before she closed her eyes. She had so much opportunity, here across the sea, even while her kingdom threatened to tear her apart. She wouldn’t give that up now, not for all the security in the world.