Dragon Queen (25 page)

‘The alchemist is dealing with them, Hands of the Sea Lord.’ The Watcher touched his brow again to the slick marble of the floor. Tsen's head was drowning him in possibilities now, far more than he could manage all at once. He had to pause, if only for a moment.

‘Are they . . . are they everything Quai'Shu said they were? Wild uncontrollable fire-breathing monsters? Unstoppable, yet tamed by this alchemist? They
are
tamed, yes, LaLa?’

The Elemental Man raised his eyes and met Tsen's gaze. Not something he was supposed to do to a sea lord's t'varr but Tsen decided he'd take it as a compliment this time. ‘They have left one full-grown adult. It is magnificent, Baros Tsen T'Varr. Unlike anything I have ever seen, and I have seen a great deal. I do not fear any man in any realm, nor any beast, but I fear this dragon.’ The Watcher's eyes went back where they were supposed to be. ‘Hands of the Sea Lord, yes, they are tamed but the alchemist urges you to return as swiftly as you can to the eyrie. He—’

Tsen cut him off. ‘No, no. The fleet will be here in a few days. I can't leave until I've seen it for myself. Do they still carry anything interesting or have all the eggs hatched and mysteriously flown to my eyrie by the hand of some mostly mythical wizards?’
My
eyrie?
He raised an inner eyebrow at himself. How easy
that
came. ‘No, I need
him
to come to
me
. I need him to bring one of these dragons. A manageable one.’ Stupid thoughts came at him now as they always did, ones that had no business giving themselves a voice:
This is no way to take a bath
. ‘I'm sorry to treat you as a messenger but a jade raven won't be as quick and so I need you to do this for me. Make these arrangements at the eyrie and then return here and be with me when the fleet arrives and we shall see for ourselves whether Quai'Shu has yet found the mind again that he so carelessly lost.’

The Elemental Man didn't withdraw, which struck Tsen as odd as their conversation was clearly finished. ‘Hands of the Sea Lord, the fleet is not coming here.’

‘What?’

‘They have set course for Khalishtor.’

‘Well, who told them to do
that
?’

‘I suppose our sea lord.’ The Watcher bowed and backed away now, shuffling on his knees until he almost vanished in the steam-haze in the far corner of the bathhouse. There was a pop of wind and a swirl of mist and he was gone. Tsen sank slowly back into the water. The edge had gone from its heat, or maybe he was just getting used to it. His glass was all but empty. Still, he'd enjoy it for as long as he could.
And there I was, complaining away at the burden of my work when it was merely ordinary
.

He sent for Kalaiya again. All the preparations he'd made to receive the eggs would have to change. Stick everything in a ship and sail to Khalishtor, he supposed, and all his people too. That alone would keep half the palace busy. But it wouldn't be quick enough. Glasships. He'd have to use the house glasships. And then if Quai'Shu had lost his mind then the Council of Sea Captains in Khalishtor would have to be told. He'd need to talk to the fleet treasurer before
that
could happen. He'd need to know how truly bad it was. And there were other arrangements to be made. The council's debate on the Ice Witch that Quai'Shu had quietly paid a great deal of money to postpone until the proper time.

Kalaiya, when she returned, eased into the water beside him and wrapped her hands around his face and kissed his brow. People saw her with him and assumed so much.
There he goes. Him and his slave
. They had no idea.

She pushed up beside him, turned and put a finger to his nose. ‘I have a wager for you.’ She smirked. ‘One I think I'm going to win.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes.’

Oh, go on then
. Every man had his vices, after all.

23

The Kwen

Slowly, through their thick accents, Zafir understood what her broken birds were. Bed-slaves, harem girls, except she'd gutted the master of their harem and now they had no one to serve. They should have been pleased then, she thought, but they weren't.

Three days after the dragons broke loose, the Taiytakei sighted land. They sent her down from the decks and bolted the chain still around her wrist to the roof beams and she was a prisoner again. The urge to fight them burned her but she let them do it, played out her act of compliance for now. She watched from her window as the ships of the fleet arrayed themselves in the shelter of a cluster of tiny islands, and when her own vessel turned on its anchor with the shifting of the wind, she saw the line of a distant shore. Caught between the turquoise ripples of the sea and the bright deep blue of the sky, a single cloud-shrouded mountain rose behind the glimmer of a city nestled in the gentle sweep of a bay. That night she saw fires burning across the shore and gleaming lines of light. The next day, up on the headlands at either end of the bay, towers glittered and shone when the sun caught them just so, towers as tall as her own Tower of Air, perhaps greater still. Her stomach fluttered with anticipation. When she was alone she looked long and hard at the chain on her wrist.

‘Where are we?’ Little boats rowed constantly back and forth across the still sea. The Taiytakei were confused. She could feel it in the air. Every sailor knew what to do, every ship, every captain, every soldier, every slave and yet they had no leader. They were a perfect but headless machine.

‘Khalishtor, mistress.’ She still had her three broken birds, though one of them truly
was
broken now from the sight of the dragon and often simply stood, mouth open, eyes blank and looking at nothing. Zafir called her Onyx for want of her real name.
Onyx in memory of the dragon Jehal had stolen over Evenspire. There was Myst, who'd kept her wits and who clearly worshipped her but still didn't speak. And Brightstar. All names she'd given them after favoured dragons from her eyries. They were ignorant and knew almost nothing but they were all she had.

‘And what is Khalishtor?’

‘Their greatest city.’ Brightstar talked, although not much. Her skin was lighter than the others and she spoke with an accent that Zafir had never heard.

‘Their capital?’

‘Their Caladir,’ said Brightstar emphatically. Zafir had no idea what she meant. Their City of Dragons? Let that be good enough.

‘What will they do with me?’ It was hard not to be scared now. Alone at night she lay awake, wondering why they kept her alive at all. Yearning for home and a life she'd never really had, but even if she somehow got away and returned, surely all that waited for her now was to hang in one of her own cages outside the Adamantine Palace, food for the crows. The war had come and she'd lost. Sometimes, in the dead of night, she wept and then hated herself for being so weak. And looked at the chain again and remembered wrapping it around her neck; but to her that way seemed weaker still.

On the second morning at anchor a speck in the sky drew her eyes over the glitter and gleam of the city. A dragon, she thought at first, for what else could it be, but it glistened and shone like a star while dragons were always dark. As she stared, she saw another and then another, drifting over the sea towards the ships, slow like clouds and not like dragons at all. As they drew nearer she saw how they pulsed and flickered, catching the sun's light now and then. They were . . . She had no idea. Shapes in the sky. Discs of gleaming glass tinged and rimmed with gold, great wheels within other wheels all slowly spinning, sky-ships floating with no means of support. The outermost wheel, the largest by far, lay flat, turning slowly around four more inner discs, smaller and smaller, nested one within the other around the innermost sphere and all at different angles, each spinning faster than the last. Lines of gold caught the sun and glittered like a spider's web within the glass and a single orb hung beneath each great disc, golden eggs suspended from delicate silver chains.

Sky-ships the size of dragons. No sails, no masts, no oars, no wings. They came to the fleet and hung above it and Zafir stared at them like a child, as she might once have stared at her first dragon if dragons hadn't been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. The orbs descended on their chains until she couldn't see them any more. She thought, as they came lower, that she saw little round windows in their golden shells.

‘What are those?’

‘Glasships, mistress.’ Brightstar and Myst were staring too, as awed as she was. ‘Beautiful, mistress.’

Beautiful
. The word broke their spell. Zafir looked away. ‘Perhaps. But they are not dragons.’

The sun crept overhead and the glasships floated away. Another frenzy of boats flitted among the fleet and Zafir passed the long hours counting them, seeing where they went. As the sun set fire to the far horizon, Myst brought her a silver bowl of steaming stew and a tall glass of clear liquid with bright crimson leaves floating in it. Brightstar brought fresh clothes. Onyx had a small chest.

‘Tomorrow, mistress. The sea lord wishes to see you tomorrow.’ They bowed to her and put everything down and backed away. ‘Do you wish us to dress you, mistress?’

‘In the morning. Now go away.’

They left and she glimpsed Taiytakei soldiers outside her door as they did, frightening forms armoured in great clattering plated layers of glass and gold that made them look a little like giant insects, but tall and broad-shouldered like her Adamantine Men. Their faces were like coal and their eyes like lamps beneath their helms and their gold-glass visors. They carried swords, short narrow stabbing things, and great spiked clubs, and golden-glowing wands at their belts where their hands rested. Over each glittering carapace of armour were draped streamers of colourful cloth and great black cloaks made of feathers. But she saw their faces too, looking back in at her, saw how nervous and uneasy they were. She smiled to herself and took strength from that. So they should be, for they had a dragon-queen in their cage.

She ignored the tray and the clothes and the chest, staying at the window as the sun set, looking out at the distant city far across the waves. Lights filled one part of it, the highest part, raised on a little
hill and overlooking the sea at one end of the bay. Not a castle. Something else. It was the place where the flying ships of glass had gone.

The food had turned cold by the time she looked away but she ate it anyway. The meats and vegetables were things she didn't recognise but they were spiced with flavours she knew from the Taiytakei traders who'd once come to her mother's kitchens in the Pinnacles. She pulled the leaves out of the glass of water and threw them away. They had a flavour to them that she remembered from long ago but couldn't quite place. A visit to King Tyan in Furymouth, perhaps. Perhaps the first time she'd met the young Prince Jehal.

She paused for a moment, caught in that memory. The first day they'd seen each other they'd both known what would happen. She'd had a fire in her for him from the moment she'd seen him, and she'd lit one in him as well. He wasn't her first conquest but he was certainly her quickest. There hadn't been anything in the world more important than finding a way to get away from her family, to drag him to a place where they could be alone. They'd understood each other in the merging of sweat in a way that no one else ever had. They were perfect.

The glass shattered in her hand.

One day, be it tomorrow or ten years from now, she'd find a way home to watch him burn. To flay him and scatter his body with salt and listen to him scream. She'd do it herself.

She was bleeding. The glass had cut her. Not deeply. She ripped a piece from the silk sheets – another reminder of Jehal, since all the sheets they'd stained between them had come from the silk farms that Jehal and King Tyan guarded as though they were dragon eggs. There'd been trouble with the Taiytakei about the silk farms once. Long before she was born and she didn't know much about it and didn't care either, but someone had tried to teach her some history once and Tyan's silk farms and the Taiytakei had been a part of it. Tyan's dragons had burned their ships. She didn't remember why.

She wrapped her hand and squeezed it tight, watching the blood ooze, savouring the pain. Sometimes any feeling at all was better than nothing, and when she let her head sink into the soft Taiytakei
pillow and closed her eyes, she dreamed of Jehal. Not of the revenge she yearned for but of more pleasant things. Of the times before Evenspire when they'd been lovers. Of what they used to do and how it had felt and how she knew it had felt to him, how it should still have been. She yearned for the comfort he used to bring and how he'd made her be not alone any more. When she woke in the small hours of the morning her pillows were damp with tears, and she clenched her fists and raged at herself and flapped the silk until it was dry so that no one would see and then lay there in the dark, staring up at the faceless wood over her head.

Her broken birds came back at sunrise. Hers? Yes, she was beginning to think of them that way. They looked at the blood on the sheets and on her hand and gasped when they saw the broken glass. Perhaps they thought she'd opened a vein rather than be taken by whoever this sea lord was. Zafir, as she rubbed her eyes, laughed at their horror.

‘I am not some pampered harem lady,’ she spat. ‘I am a dragon-queen. I've burned cities and I've killed men, and women too. I've gone into battle armoured in a dragon's skin. I've stood and fought with sword and axe. Look at you, staring at blood as if it's some terror.’ She tore the silk bandage off her hand, opening the wound again so that a line of crimson ran down her arm and dripped onto the bed. She clenched her fist. ‘Blood is life. What are you, if you don't understand this?’

They paled and Zafir laughed again. She thought of taking a shard of the broken glass, of hiding it somewhere in her clothes as a weapon, but whom would she cut with it? One of these poor pathetic slaves? To what end? Out of spite? No. A fearsome slave she would be, proud and unbroken until some man came with the desire and the strength to tame her, and she would let him, at least until the moment came to cut out his heart and be free.