Page 10 of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame

CHAPTER TEN

OVER THE NEXT weeks, Yeva settles into an unease that masquerades as stillness, that uninformed observers might even think is peace. The moment her falcon returns, she writes that promised, sober letter to Emory telling him to disregard everything she previously said—“all will be explained when I return to Mithrandon,” she says in parting. She thinks, if I return to Mithrandon, but that thought no longer fills her with excitement as it once did. She has, in the past months, started to imagine a different future for herself, one where she left the guild and came to live in Daqiao permanently. One where she remained lover and confidante to the girl-king for the rest of her days. But these thoughts now seem inappropriate. Yeva returns to her place by Lady Sookhee’s side, an awkward addition to the court, a cherished intimate to the girl-king yet a stranger from a hostile empire. But their relationship is irrevocably changed. The connection between them has been tainted by complex matters, contaminated by thoughts of duty and kinghood and Imperial greed spreading like mold. Within Yeva a pendulum swings between complex emotions she can’t quite name—some days she thinks she feels despair, and other days it’s rage, but one thing she knows is that she isn’t happy. She misses, with an unwarranted ferocity, the earlier days of her time in Daqiao, when she had grown drunk on new language and custom, intoxicated by freedom, nostalgia, the apricot flush of intimacy. She hopes her letter to Emory will be enough. She hopes the damage can be undone.

For her part, Lady Sookhee behaves as if Yeva’s transgressions had never happened, as if she had never broken into sacred spaces or threatened those closest to her, as if she herself hadn’t hid the truth of the beast living in the mountains from Yeva. She acts as if the knot of deception and mistrust between them can be sunk to the bottom of a river and forgotten. For which Yeva is grateful. She, too, pretends nothing has happened. She greets Captain Lu in the mornings as she always has. She takes lunches with his lieutenants, even if the easy flow of conversation notably dips when she is around. She remains genial with Sookhee’s handpicked council. One evening, in response to something Yeva said about flowers for an upcoming prayer day, Sujin snorts and says, “Trust you, Soup Ladle, to always pick the most roundabout method.” She speaks with utmost derision, but the nickname comforts Yeva anyway. She still remembers. She still hasn’t given up on Yeva’s place in the palace.

Still, the unease remains. After speaking so openly about the kingdom’s secrets in the dragon mausoleum, Lady Sookhee closes up like an iron door which Yeva can’t prize back open. Her stack of questions have only multiplied since that morning, and there are no answers to be found. She fears that asking them will shatter the precarious peace she’s been allowed. She tries her own investigation, but her sources are few: she can’t very well go poking around the already wary royal household. She tries the libraries, but her comprehension of the written language is still too poor to make much of it. It was easier for her to pick up speaking and listening, to deal with immediacies and intimacies, than it is with the dry academia of court records and official histories.

At Aunty Anuya’s that week, she asks: “What do you know of Lady Sookhee’s royal father? She’s mentioned him in passing to me, but I can’t find anything written about him.”

“A royal father?” Aunty Anuya looks confused. “I’m not sure about that. The late king never married, and she never had any lovers—not that I knew of, anyway. She didn’t seem like the kind who was like that. There’s a rumor that she conceived her daughter with a passing merchant, some traveler from another country. But, aiya—” She gets up to fetch a fresh pot of water, which she thumps down upon on the table. “Such things you should be asking your lady, not me.”

“I see.” But of course Yeva can’t ask Lady Sookhee these questions. She’ll get a non-answer, or silence, or a lie. All three would be worse than not knowing. So she remains suspended in ignorance. In this uncertainty her mind starts stitching together story after speculative story. She imagines Lady Sookhee’s royal father—a pale and narrow man in her imagination, no thicker than a pane of glass—running from the royal palace to become a recluse in the misty mountains, digging himself into the damp earth, never to be seen again. She invents origins for each of the tasseled lanterns hung over Sookhee’s bed, imagining them gifts from loyal subjects or foreign dignitaries. And while in bed she stares at the long pink scar running down the left side of Sookhee’s ribs, which she fashions into a long-forgotten assassination attempt. A knife in the dark, plunging into the side of a child’s body, stopped at the last crucial moment by the guards outside. Yeva runs her fingers down the whorled knots of flesh, and Sookhee deliberately pushes her hand away, frowning. Neither speak, but Yeva senses the emotional fragility of the moment and withdraws her hand. Lady Sookhee looks away, but something in her blink reminds Yeva of a snake, membrane sliding over a glassy eye.

Day after day, she goes about feeling like a soap bubble carried upon the wind, liable to burst at the lightest touch. In the center of her being lies an absence where home and family should be. Her years in Mithrandon had hollowed her out, and she had filled that void with duty and obedience; now that those things have been stripped from her like limestone leached out of bedrock, she fears she might crumble under the weight of nothingness.

When she sleeps, Yeva has dreams of every dragon she’s ever slain. Over the years, she has killed a hundred of their kind in every shape and size, from lowly worms the length of her foot to elders big as a mountain. Each one she remembers with great exactness: every fight is a life extinguished at the edge of her blue blade, something taken out of the universe. She makes endings and she mustn’t forget. As she lies with her eyes closed, they appear in a rippling swarm, a hundred flashes of scale and sinew, a thousand shining teeth and tongues. Their breath is hot upon her skin. The yearling with silver horns, whom she slew upon becoming a guildknight, dances once again, its fire blossoming against obsidian night. The ice queen, who trapped her on a snowy mountain and very nearly escaped its fate, slides glacial fingers along the knots of her spine. Her first stumbling and uncertain kill, the lithe wyrm from her childhood, curls around her ankle. Floating weightless through a black void, Yeva welcomes them all into her arms, into her body. They form a vortex, pressing their thick, sinuous bellies against hers until she can no longer pick out the border where she ends and the dragons begin. She moves and they, too, move in concert. As the dream proceeds, Yeva becomes certain that their limbs are her limbs, their clever jaws her clever jaws. She runs across the curve of the planet on clawed feet, a flame beneath her ribs and golden blood in her chest. She becomes so enormous she blots out the sun. She finds herself on the banks of the Yalo, being pursued by a party of guildknights from the Sun Empire. She drowns them all in the frigid curtains of the river, all save one. On those mornings, Yeva wakes coated with sweat and trembling like a leaf, fighting to separate the dream from reality.

The awkwardness between her and the girl-king grows. Yeva accumulates anxieties and wild theories like rocks in her head, while Lady Sookhee seems more and more preoccupied by unspoken problems, drawing deeper into herself, shrouded with worries. Every now and then she catches the girl-king staring at her like Yeva is a puzzle that needs to be solved, but these glances are fleeting, and the girl-king looks away the moment she notices Yeva staring back, as if ashamed. The situation is becoming unbearable.

Almost a month after Lady Sookhee’s revelation, she calls Yeva to her chambers at night. Yeva finds her standing in the garden, back turned to her, hands clasped to her chest. She is paler than usual and her breaths are quick and fevered. “Your illness,” Yeva says, in alarm. It’s about that time. “You should be resting, or it’ll get worse.”

The girl-king cannot meet her eyes. “I have something to tell you,” she begins.

“It can wait until after your illness passes.”

“No. No, it can’t wait.” Lady Sookhee pulls herself up and finally looks directly at Yeva. “It has to do with my illness, Yeva. And it has to do with the questions I am sure you have begun to ask yourself. There are things I have been keeping from you that I no longer want to hold secret. Yeva, there are things that you need to know about me.”

Around Yeva the world has started to warp, the air closing in, the ground tilting. “What things?”

Sookhee draws a deep breath, her body visibly shaking—whether from impending illness or from fear, Yeva cannot tell. She waits for the girl-king to speak, for her lover to spill forth her burden that will fix every doubt Yeva has, that will knit every wound back into flesh. She opens her mouth. She begins: “The truth is, I—”

“Lady!” It’s Kima, rushing in, her face white except for two spots of exertion on her cheeks. It’s clear she has run a long way: her chest heaves with frantic breath. “Knights, at the city gates!”

“Have they reached us already?” Lady Sookhee presses a hand to her throat, and Yeva thinks she looks like she might faint. “It’s sooner than I expected.…”

Yeva takes her by the elbow. “What do you mean?” Knights—guildknights—this must be her doing. The Emperor has decided to send a garrison after all. “Did you know they were coming?”

“They crossed the border earlier today,” Lady Sookhee says. Tremors continue to run through her slender frame. “I thought we would have more time.…”

“Guildknights travel fast,” Yeva says. “Our gryphons are quicker than ordinary horses.”

“What shall we do?” Kima asks.

“We must welcome them.” Even through her weakness Lady Sookhee remains ever the monarch, resolute and determined. “Kima, make preparations. I will give them an audience before I go into seclusion. Hurry.”

“Yes,” Kima says, and she goes, almost running, robes hitched up.

Yeva asks: “Is this what you were going to tell me?”

“No.” Lady Sookhee sags sideways in exhaustion. Her hands go to her hips, as if it’s the only thing keeping her upright. “It was something else. Now’s not the time. Yeva, we might not get to speak again before I go into seclusion. I have only one thing to beg of you: do not let those soldiers into the cavern. I know that’s what they’re here for. Find some way to stall them. Until—”

“Until the danger has passed?”

She nods. “Until then. Now go—surely you’ll want to meet them at the gate.”

Yeva does, but she can’t meet them like this. They would not recognize her. She cannot reveal this much of herself to them. Her first stop is to her room, to change into her knight’s garb: the mail, the helm, the heraldry. Piece by piece it goes on, aided by her much-neglected contraptions. She fumbles. A gauntlet slips as she struggles to put it on. She’s out of practice; her hands have already started to forget the motions she performed daily for a good part of her life. The weight upon her feels unnatural now, clogging her movements with their bulk. She can’t imagine how she spent so much of her life with this burden upon her shoulders. Her hands shake as she puts the helmet back over her head. Yeva has forgotten how dark it was within its metal confines, how echoey and distorted. She feels a stranger in her own body.

Yeva meets the Empire’s party as they come up the Main Street to the royal palace. His Radiance has not sent a full garrison, thank the goddess, but a hunting party of four guildknights, each with their attendants, and a wagon for provisions following in the back. Together they form a clot of noise moving up the cobbled street as people hover warily in the shelter of storefronts, watching this parade with an air of suspicion. How out of place the Empire’s guildknights look, bright and uncouth, armor clanking and clashing, obnoxious banners held aloft.

At the head of the group, perched on a dappled mare with dove-gray wings, is Emory. Not wrapped in the soft linings of velvet and silk she’s used to, but in shining breastplate with his family’s heraldry laid over it. She’s never seen him look so martial, so formidable. “Emory,” she says, running beside her cousin’s mount, reaching up to tug on the reins, feeling like nothing more than a small child. “Emory!”

He glances downward with his expression pinched and severe. “Yeva.”

“Why are you here? Why did you come?”

“Why else?” Now he looks annoyed. “You wrote that the King of Quentona is harboring a dragon, Yeva. I’m here because of you.”

THE NEXT HOURS tumble onward, in their horrible way. The guildknights are taken to their lodgings, while Emory, as their leader, is led to the Great Phoenix Hall for an audience with the girl-king. Yeva accompanies her guildmaster, a silent observer tailing in his shadow as he bends the knee, just as she did so many months ago. Unlike Yeva, he has come with a speech prepared, florid and flattering, seeking the grace of Her Majesty to—

Lady Sookhee raises her hand. “Enough,” she says, through wheezing lungs. “We know why your guildknights have come, we know what they seek. These are matters that should be discussed later. As you can see, I am not well. Your knight—Yeva—can explain these matters to you. I greet you, as a courtesy, but any further talk must wait. We shall speak again in a few days, when I have recovered.”

Emory looks up. “I understand the nature of Your Majesty’s health, but—”

“That is all that needs to be said. You may go.”

With that summary dismissal, Lady Sookhee stands without waiting for Emory’s reply. She sways as she does so, the grasping fingers of her illness draining the strength from her body. Kima leaps forward to catch her, to support her as she totters toward the exit. Sujin, who has glowered watchfully from the sidelines, comes forward to wedge her body between Emory and the royal dais, blocking the view of her king’s weakness from these foreigners.

Emory is too much of a diplomat to openly contest the will of the girl-king. But Yeva sees sullenness in him as he stands. He gestures. “Come.”

At this moment she feels like she might split in two. Half her instincts scream out their desire to run after Lady Sookhee, to make sure she’s all right, to help Kima settle her in her sickbed. The other half, the more sensible half, wants to cleave to the habits she’s cultivated all her life. Her captain calls for her. She is a soldier of the Sun Empire, she must follow.

Within her helm, Yeva shuts her eyes. The old weight of her armor, the syllables of the language that Emory barks at her: it’s all coming back, wrapping her in a cold shroud of reality. It drags her downward into an older version of Kunlin Yeva, one who is the famed masked guildknight of Mithrandon, who knows duty and knows duty only. Has she forgotten? She’s acting as though she has never been allowed to tend to Lady Sookhee when her blood-sickness is in full swing. If she had gone after Kima, Sujin would have stopped her anyway. Know your place.

Emory has been given a room neighboring Yeva’s, directly across the courtyard they both share. Within it, his boy Telken is running to-and-fro, unpacking, getting his master’s affairs in order. “Telken,” he says heavily, “let us have some privacy.”

The boy scuttles out of the room, dipping his head to Yeva in greeting as he goes. Leaving Yeva and Emory alone in a room for the first time since she left Mithrandon, which seems a different lifetime, lived by somebody else. Yeva hesitates before pulling her helm off her head, inhaling air spiced with ripening summer fruit.

Emory looks exhausted, as if he has walked all the way from Mithrandon on foot. “What mess have you gotten us into, Yeva?”

“It isn’t my mess,” she says. “I told you not to come. There’s nothing to see; I told you I was mistaken. Why did you come anyway?”

“Why did I—” Emory stamps a small, petulant circle, pulling his fingers through his hair. “Goddess above, Yeva. You wrote a panicked missive declaring you’d found a dragon living in the massive caverns underneath the city, then followed it with a ridiculous letter saying never mind, I was wrong, don’t come here, it was nothing. What was I to think?” He grows still, serious. His voice drops. “You’re not under duress, are you? Please, Yeva. You can tell me.”

“I am not.” Her heart is tumbling sideways; she never considered that Emory would draw that conclusion. Certainly her letters have glossed over the private aspects of her relationship with the girl-king, but she’d only ever written good things about her time here. “I must have represented Quanbao poorly in my writings for you to think so little of Lady Sookhee. She has been nothing but kind to me.”

“I see.”

“You shouldn’t be here, Emory. Everything’s fine. Go home.”

“Go home?” Emory looks like he’s swallowed a lemon slice, and he turns away. He picks up an oddly shaped trunk, an oblong thing the right size and shape to hold a rolled-up rug. But it contains no carpeting: as he places it on the low desk that obstructs the middle of the room, it thumps as if filled with metal. “Go home, you say. Yeva, His Radiance has gotten involved. He wants results, he wants trophies.”

“Trophies.” Her mouth is dry, her lips feel like cracking. “A man who hunts on His Radiance’s lands is liable to lose his head. Why does he think he can do the same under some other monarch’s rule?”

Emory’s fingers grip the edges of the table hard. “You speak as if we hunt some fleet four-footed creature, not a monster that could destroy a village with a single breath.”

“The dragons in Quanbao are spiritual beasts. They don’t hunt. They don’t destroy villages.”

“Is that what they’ve told you?” Emory flips the lid of his trunk. “Is that what you believe?”

Within an interior of red velvet padding is the device he was working on when she saw him last. He hefts it in his arms, and for the first time Yeva recognizes it for what it is: a weapon. A musket of some sort. He points the muzzle away from her, and she catches a glimpse of his completed handiwork along the length of the tube. A fist of everstone sits within the musket’s core, and thin lines of blue run along the weapon’s machinery. Emory thumbs a switch and the weapon hums, coming alive the way Varuhelt does. Even though Emory doesn’t have the holy gift that Yeva does. Even though he shouldn’t be able to activate it.

Yeva’s blood thrums in her neck, twinging along her shoulders. He’s created a sacred weapon that anyone can use. She’s not sure how he’s done it, but she thinks of all the time he’s spent holed up in his tower in experimentation and research, sometimes to the detriment of his duty as guildmaster. And the Emperor’s largesse toward this dereliction. Now she understands why. With this musket, any ordinary soldier in the Imperial army will be able to wield the power of the everstone.

She thinks: I told them of the garden of everstone I found under the city. I’ve whetted His Radiance’s appetite for conquest.

Emory says: “You saw the report on the attack years ago, didn’t you? I read my father’s notes on this and discovered details that were not reflected in the official record. There were two dragons sighted that day. A younger one, not yet full-grown, which was wounded, and an adult that swept in to protect it. Both fled toward the border after killing a half dozen of our men.” His face tightens, as if to say this would not have happened on my watch. I would have made sure that things were recorded properly. She cannot recognize this version of her cousin who stands before her. Emory’s face is unreadable as he says, “The girl-king has not been forthright with you, Yeva. Those caves must harbor a population of dragons that she’s concealing. Breeding pairs and family groups. We have to take a look, at least.”

Yeva says, “The girl-king has forbidden entrance to the caverns while she is in seclusion. To defy her orders is to contest her will. Is His Radiance prepared to go to that extent?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

“And are you?”

Emory doesn’t reply. He runs his fingers along the surface of his musket as though stroking the head of a dog. “The entrance to the caverns. You know where it is, don’t you?”

“We can’t go in. It’s impossible. I’ve lost the key.”

He glances sideways at her and sighs. “Yeva. You’re a terrible liar.”

“Don’t make me do this,” she pleads. She knows that if he insists, if he says that’s an order, she’ll do what he says. Because that’s what she’s been trained to do. And Emory knows this too. It’s a weapon in his arsenal that he’s never used. He knows that doing so will reshape their relationship forever.

Her cousin sighs. Her captain closes the lid of his trunk and calls loudly for Telken. The servant boy stumbles in through the screen door as Yeva hastily pushes her helm back on her head.

“Summon the others,” Emory tells him. “We must make plans.”