Page 12 of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame
CHAPTER TWELVE
AT ITS FAR end, the cavern splits off into several smaller hollows through which groundwater rushes, reflecting the light of the everstone, twinkling like fireflies, like a fairy grotto. In this dreamlike diorama the storm dragon has come to rest, taking refuge in the largest of the hollows. Its ropelike body coils in loops upon the rocks, sides heaving with exertion. Yeva cautiously draws near, one slow step after another, and it allows her approach. The tempestuous air has quieted; small sparks of lightning still travel down the dragon’s yellow horns, but Yeva no longer feels like she’s about to be blown off a mountainside. She finally has free rein to study this otherworldly creature up close.
The dragon’s body is covered in the same sort of iridescent scale that Yeva has carried about in a silken knot for several months. The first four of its six limbs are taloned like a gryphon’s, but the last two are enormous paddles like a leviathan’s. Diaphanous membranes flare from its spine and tail and clawed limbs, a creamy magnolia shade. And there’s its great, finned head, tapering to a fine snout, crowned by its lightning horns. Along its side is the scar that Yeva knows so well. In the presiding calm, Yeva is allowed to gaze at it all she wants, and any doubt about the crazy notion she’s developed is dispelled. She knows this scar. She knows who it belongs to.
The beast watches Yeva intently, its great yellow eyes never flickering. There’s nothing of Lady Sookhee in its canny face, no trace of humanity in its shape or expression. Yeva wonders what it feels like. To lose yourself so completely, to become something else entirely. To be so changed. What does it think? What does she feel? It makes sense that these transformations take so much out of the girl-king, that she is sick for days before and after.
Yeva is close enough to touch the dragon. Its breath washes over her, a great warm tide that raises the hairs on the back of her neck. Yeva slowly removes her helm, places it upon the damp slate at her feet. She pulls free the gauntlet on her scarred hand, thrusting that gnarled skin into the open air. Tentatively, as though she expects to be jolted, she reaches her hand forward until carefully, gently, it brushes against the bright scales of the dragon’s snout. A jolt does run up her arm then, but not one of electricity; she shudders with a sense of recognition, of relief, of elation. A potent mix of the three. The dragon makes a sound like the cry of the wind through castle walls on a winter’s night.
“I know who you are,” Yeva says. “You don’t have to hide from me.”
Their eyes meet and a shiver runs through the great beast lying before her. Understanding and trust pass between them, fragile wordless things like a leaf on a lake, like snow on a windowpane.
A seismic tremble runs through the dragon’s bones and light fills the hollow. Its luminance brings neither heat nor cold but a gentle whisper like a murmuration of spring petals through the air. Even within her armor Yeva feels bathed. Before her, the wounded dragon transforms. Its scales shed from its skin, showering the ground with radiance. Its limbs shrink and its body collapses upon itself, curling into a comma, a tiny human figure. When the light fades, Lady Sookhee crouches unclothed, clutching a burned arm, gaze fixed upon the ground, trembling with exertion.
Yeva finds it in her body to move. She kneels beside her lover, stiff in the armor she cannot take off without aid. She lays her bare hand on the girl-king’s forehead. Cold, as it always is when her blood-sickness takes hold. Or what she called her blood-sickness, although Yeva knows its true nature now. “You’re all right,” she manages, the words clumsy and surreal against their backdrop.
Sookhee’s voice is hoarse, as if clawing its way out of a long, dark tunnel. “When did you realize?”
“Only just now.” She hesitates, thinking. “Although I suppose, deep down, I have always suspected something like this.”
“Did you, now?”
“I’m not as shocked as I ought to be.”
Water drips in the cavern. The stillness and silence stand in stark contrast to the apocalyptic furor of their confrontation when Sookhee had been a dragon. “So now you know. The true nature of my periodic illness. Why we have to seal off the caverns every month. I must transform to balance the energy of this, my other form. This is a secret that few outside the walls of the palace know. The people only know the myths and stories, they have no idea how close to the truth it is.”
“Is this the secret you were trying to tell me?”
“It was.” Sookhee shifts her weight, kneeling fully upon the ground. “Forgive me. I know it was wrong to withhold this information, especially after I showed you the mausoleum. But—”
“But I am a guildknight of Mithrandon, a dragon-hunter of great renown. There was no reason to think I wouldn’t see you as an abomination.”
“Indeed.”
Yeva closes her scarred hand into a fist; she feels the blue fire in her blood, that glowing ember of supernatural power that hangs in the shadows of her life, quiet and waiting until she calls upon it, waking it into cleansing inferno. She unhooks Varuhelt from her waist and activates its fiery blade, casting azure light into the darkest corners of the caverns.
She thinks: this strange gift of mine, which they say is holy, which they say comes from sources beyond the veil of the mortal world—if I learned to wield it correctly, might I also turn into a dragon?
She says: “No more of an abomination than I am.”
Sookhee gets to her feet, stumbling in exhaustion. Yeva darts forward to catch her, hold her steady. It feels like a routine they’ve had forever, as though they were born to do this. “Let me show you something,” she says.
She totters toward the back of the hollow; it’s a long way to walk for someone so fragile. Yeva holds her steady.
The thing she wants to show Yeva is a dragon skull hoisted on an altar of stone, surrounded by teeth of everstone. A reasonably sized thing, belonging to a beast of similar size to Sookhee when she transforms. Like the relics in the royal mausoleum, ribbons have been wrapped around the altar, and knotted rope hangs between two everstone tips, from which bronze bells dangle. Other bones have been carefully placed around the altar: a handful of vertebrae and talons in radial patterns, and pairs of curving ribs form a protective frame over them.
Sookhee comes to stop before this diorama, leaning heavily on Yeva for balance. “These are the bones of my royal father.” There’s no sadness in her tone, just a solemnity, a quiet acceptance.
“You said he died years ago.”
“Yes.” A pause, a gathering of thoughts, which Yeva patiently waits out. When Sookhee begins speaking again, it is with a distant voice and gaze, as if she were standing on a high perch looking down at herself. “My family, the royal bloodline, has always had dragon blood. They said we are the descendants of Chuan-pu, and perhaps that’s true. But who can really say of a past so distant it’s shrouded in fog? My mother had no interest in the touch of men, but with my royal father, when they were both in dragon form—it did not matter, then.”
“Your royal father—was he like you? A shape-changer?”
“The opposite, actually. A dragon who sometimes took on human form. He was the last of his kind. Perhaps there are more like him in the remote wilds of this country, or somewhere else entirely—we don’t know. There are none that we know of.” She grows more pensive. “Like my mother, I have no interest in taking a husband. Since I was little, I’d come to terms with the idea that my family bloodline would end with me.”
“So you’ve said.”
She looks sideways at her lover. “Do you want to know how my father died?”
Nothing but the sound of water within the hollow caverns. Yeva nods.
Sookhee’s smile grows sad. “I had just turned twelve. I’d come of age and form-changing was new to me, both scary and exciting. I ran wild; I was ungovernable. Against the explicit instructions of my mother I crossed the border of the kingdom. I thought, I am a dragon—why should I care about the laws of mankind? All the folly of youth. I instantly found out that there would always be consequences to breaking such laws. Your guildknights found me, and I was too young, too new to know how to escape their barbs. It was my royal father who saved me, providing another target for their blades while I fled. I survived with nothing more than a few scars”—she gestures to the tangled line seaming her side—“but my royal father was grievously wounded.”
Yeva thinks, so what Emory told me was true.
“Your mother came to help us, but his wounds were too great, and he perished. I remember very little from that time, except the grief. The sorrow. My mother never said that she blamed me, but—how could she not? She quarreled with your mother, you know. It was not long after my father died. They were such great friends, and then your mother stopped coming to Quanbao. I’m sure the heartbreak from that period in time sent her to an early grave.”
“So all this time my mother knew of your family’s secret?”
Sookhee nods.
And Yeva thinks again, if I hadn’t left for Mithrandon—if Sookhee’s father hadn’t died—we might have become friends, naturally introduced. I might have been invited to her court the way my mother was invited. The tragedies of their lives entwine in her mind.
“Yeva, beloved,” she says, “when you came I was not sure if the gods were mocking me or sending me a sign. I thought perhaps you were meant to finish the job your compatriots began all those years ago. Or perhaps you were a reminder of the terrible things I had wrought.”
“Or perhaps,” Yeva says, “I am neither.” She’s stacking the memories of all her years, one on top of the other: the trauma of her dislocation to Mithrandon, hard metallic days spent training and avoiding the other recruits. Dissolving all the fondness and tenderness she felt for home and family so that it would no longer pain her. Her path to this place, to this moment, has been long and difficult; her trials her own. That she has found comfort in Daqiao is a kindness from the goddess.
Sookhee says: “I had considered letting you take my life, cutting me down with that sacred blade of yours. It seemed suitably poetic to me. Let the girls run the kingdom in my stead. It’s what I’ve trained them for. And they’ll have one less secret to hide from the prying eyes of the Empire.”
Yeva’s shoulders slump. The thought of Varuhelt cutting through the girl-king’s flesh sickens her; she can’t bear it. She could never do it. “The Emperor’s greed cannot be so easily satisfied,” she says. “Your death would be for nothing.”
Sookhee leans her head against the edge of Yeva’s arm, and she can feel the girl-king’s exhaustion in the motion. “But it’s too late,” she says. “Your captain and his men have already sighted me. They won’t leave without a trophy, will they?”
“They will have to.” Resolve hardens in her stomach, a protectiveness that she didn’t know she was capable of. This crystallization of will brings her clarity, dispelling all doubt, all anxiety. She knows what she can, will, and must do, even in the face of impossible odds.
Sookhee glances at her, eyes shaded with disbelief. She switches to Thrandish, as if to make a point, forcing Yeva to speak in the language that had become second nature to her, against her will. “You’ll stand against them, for my sake? If your captain gave you an order to kill me, you would defy him?”
“I would.”
Her disbelief remains. “Even if the price was their lives, or mine?”
Vindictiveness swamps her. Maybe if the other guildknights hadn’t been so odious, maybe if they hadn’t made her imagine killing them a dozen times on their way to the cavern, maybe then her answer might be different. “I’d do it,” she says.
“You’d do what?”
They both turn, startled by this newcomer to their conversation.
Emory stands at the mouth of the hollow, battered but unbowed. Blood pours down half his face, but the musket in his hands glows blue with deadly intent still. He’s staring at Yeva, breath ragged. “You’d commit treason, Yeva? You’d do that?”