THE KING OF DRAGONS

The throne room of Uthrael is a tomb, and I am the thing they forgot to bury.

High atop the Spire, the air never rises above freezing. Ossric wove the enchantments into the obsidian walls himself, layer upon layer of frost-runes that drink every scrap of warmth from the room. Servants who enter without gloves lose fingers. Visitors leave with frost in their eyelashes and ice in their lungs.

For any other man, this cold would be torture.

For me, it is the only mercy left in the world.

I sit upon the Throne of Fused Bone, a chair grown from the ribs of the dragons of the Concord of Saelith. Seven of them. I slew them three hundred years ago, one by one, until the sky belonged to no one but Rynuth and me. Solion's golden scales still glitter on the walls behind me. Aethelgard's prismatic skull hangs above the doors, her empty sockets staring down at every petitioner who enters.

I keep them close.

A man should never be allowed to forget what he has done.

My posture is rigid. It has to be. The curse is aggressive today. I can feel it grinding in my left shoulder, the slow, patient crawl of living stone, inching up toward my neck. Every movement is a negotiation with my own hardening body. Bend too far, and something cracks. Turn too quickly, and I hear it: a dry, sickening sound like a frozen lake splitting under weight.

This morning, I could not close the fingers of my left hand.

Ossric came at dawn with his balms and his needles and his milky, goggled eyes, and spent an hour working his foul-smelling infusions into the black scales of my arm. He is the only living thing permitted to touch me. I despise him for it. I despise him more for the fact that, when he finished, I could move my fingers again.

Three hundred and forty-two years.

I do not age. I do not sleep well. I have not felt the warmth of the sun, or a hearth, or another human hand, since the day the Elder Matriarch breathed her curse into my chest on the summit of Mount Cinder.

You will rule forever, Valora told me, with blood running from her mouth. And you will rule alone. Cold. Until there is nothing left of you but stone.

She was right about all of it.

At the foot of the throne, Gimble crouches in his baby-dragon-skull mask, his finger-bone bells silent for once. He knows my moods better than my generals do. To my left, Lady Elara of the Sunken Vale stands with my goblet, small and pale in her heavy velvet, her auburn hair the only color in the room. She has not looked at me in a week.

Below the great arched window, Uthrael spreads out like a bruise. Black steel rooftops. Gray ash drifting through the streets. A city of a hundred thousand souls, and not one of them makes a sound.

Good.

Silence is the sound of obedience.

"My King."

The voice rasps from the shadows near the iron doors. I don't turn my head. Turning my head is expensive.

"Speak, Vrakos," I say. My voice comes out dry, a crackle like dead leaves under a boot. "And pray your interruption is worth the noise."

General Vrakos steps into the pale light. He is six foot eight, scarred across the face, wrapped in wolf pelts over Szythian plate. I have watched him behead forty rebels in a single morning without once changing his expression.

He is trembling.

"The prisoner from the Eastern Pass, Majesty. Captain Jorah. You ordered him brought before you."

"Bring him in."

The doors groan open, and two Onyx Legionnaires drag the man forward in chains. He is filthy. Mud-caked uniform, burns blistering along his shield arm, eyes so wide with terror that the whites show all the way around. He falls to his knees on the frozen floor and does not get up.

I study him the way Rynuth studies a herd of goats.

"Station Twelve," I say. "The far eastern border. Five hundred miles from this throne. Nothing lives out there but snow-leopards, ghosts, and men too stupid to leave."

My stone fingers tap against the bone armrest.

Clink.

Clink.

Clink.

"Tell me why I should not have you thrown from the Spire for abandoning your post."

"Majesty." Jorah's voice cracks. "Please. I didn't abandon it. I came to warn you."

"Warn me." I let the word sit in the cold. "Of what?"

He swallows. His whole body is shaking.

"Livestock went missing first. Whole herds. No tracks. Then we found burn marks on the northern cliffs, scorched black, like the stone had melted." He takes a ragged breath. "And then, three nights ago, the storm broke over the pass. And I saw it."

The room goes very still.

"Saw what?"

"Wings, Majesty." He is weeping now. "Wings bigger than the watchtower. It roared, and the mortar shook out of the walls. And when the lightning hit, I saw its scales."

My hand stops.

"Rynuth's scales are black," I say quietly. "Were these black?"

Jorah lifts his head and looks me in the eye. It may be the bravest thing he has ever done.

"No, Majesty," he whispers. "They weren't black."

Somewhere to my left, Elara's goblet trembles. One drop of dark wine spills over the rim and freezes before it touches the floor.

I don't look at her. Not yet.

Not black.

For three hundred years, every scale in the sky has been black. I made certain of it.

Three hundred years ago, Fenris the Wild, the last coward of the Concord, refused to fight me. He fled into the Emerald Forest on the back of his verdant drake, Briaren, and tried to hide the hatchlings of the fallen. I did not waste time hunting through the trees. I burned the forest. All of it. Every oak, every nest, every egg, until the ash was knee-deep and the rivers ran black.

I stood in the smoking ruins myself. I crushed the last egg beneath my boot.

I was certain.

I was certain.

A deep, resonant vibration shudders through the floor. The obsidian walls hum. Dust falls from the vaulted ceiling. Jorah screams.

It isn't an earthquake.

A colossal eye slides into view beyond the arched window, pressing so close to the reinforced glass that I can see my own reflection in it. Magma-orange. Ancient. Burning with a hatred older than this city.

Rynuth.

He has been coiled around the top of the Spire, asleep for days. But he heard. Through the stone, through the glass, through the bond that ties his soul to mine, he heard one word.

Wings.

I rise.

My shoulder cracks, sharp and loud, and the pain shoots white-hot down my arm. I ignore it. I cross the throne room slowly, past the kneeling captain, past the shaking general, and press my human hand flat against the freezing glass, directly over Rynuth's enormous pupil.

His fury floods into me through the bond. Red. Jagged. Hungry.

It matches my own perfectly.

"Not black," I murmur to him. "Do you remember, old friend? The forest? The smell of the eggs cooking in the ash?"

His breath fogs the glass in a great plume of smoke.

I remember.

"Then one of them survived." My voice drops. "Or something new has been born."

For three hundred years, the sky has been empty. I scrubbed it clean with fire and blood. I hunted every bloodline to extinction. I salted the nesting grounds. I paid Mistress Vayla to burn every book that so much as mentions another dragon's name.

And now, somewhere out there in the storms of the East, a heartbeat dares to exist.

Kill, Rynuth thinks. The word is a jagged shard of heat in my mind. Kill. Kill. Kill.

"Yes," I whisper. "Soon."

I turn back to the room.

Vrakos is staring at the floor, sweating despite the cold. Jorah has collapsed onto his side, sobbing. Gimble has lifted his head, and behind the eyeholes of his skull mask, I swear he is smiling.

"General." My voice is perfectly calm now. Cold. Efficient. The voice I used at Mount Cinder. "Wake Krov. Every Sky-Piercer on the eastern walls is to be manned and loaded by nightfall. Send Torik's Wyrm-Hounds east along the pass. If this beast has bled, they will find its trail."

"Yes, Majesty."

"Lock the city. No one enters. No one leaves. Sereth will tell me who in this court has been whispering about the East."

My gaze slides, slowly, to Elara.

She doesn't breathe.

"And Captain Jorah." I look down at the weeping man. "You saw a dragon, and you did not die trying to kill it. You have failed in your duty."

He sobs harder.

"But you have also brought me the most important news this throne has heard in three centuries," I say. "So you will live. For now. You will ride with the hounds, and you will show them exactly where you saw it."

I turn back to the window.

"Prepare the saddle."

Rynuth unfurls his wings with a sound like a thunderclap. The whole Spire groans beneath his weight. Somewhere in the depths of the castle, I can hear Arch-Mason Galdor shrieking about the foundations.

I don't care.

We fly within the hour.

Rynuth climbs through the ash clouds until the city vanishes beneath us, until the air is so thin and cold that frost forms on my armor and my breath turns to crystals that never fall. I don't feel the cold. I never do anymore. I only feel the burning stone in my shoulder, and the steady, furious drumbeat of Rynuth's heart beneath my knees.

Five hundred miles.

We fly through the night without rest. Over the frozen wastes where Sylas the Swift died. Over the scar on the earth where the Emerald Forest used to stand. Over the endless dark mountains of my kingdom, silent and obedient beneath the snow.

And then, just before dawn, we reach the East.

The storm is breaking over the borderlands. Lightning forks across the clouds. Rain turns to sleet against my armor.

Rynuth goes perfectly still in the air.

He smells it before I see it.

Then I see it.

Far below us, beneath the thinning storm, something moves through the clouds. A shape I have not seen in three hundred years. Broad wings, beating hard against the wind.

And when the lightning strikes, the light catches its scales.

They are not black.

They are a color the sky has not seen in three hundred years.

There is a rider on its back.

You.

I don't know your name. I don't know your face. I don't know where you came from, or who hid you, or how long you have been out here in the storms, growing stronger while I sat in my frozen tomb believing the sky was mine.

I only know that you exist.

And for the first time in three centuries, something in my cold, calcified chest stirs.

It isn't fear.

It is something far more dangerous.

Rynuth folds his wings and dives.