Page 13 of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame
“EMORY.” YEVA MOVES toward him, placing her body between him and Lady Sookhee. “Put the weapon away.”
His grip on the musket tightens. His gaze yaws wildly between her and the girl-king, and she senses the wheels of his canny mind spinning, dizzy, trying to make the connection between what he’s seeing and what he’s just experienced. He sees that the massive dragon they were chasing down has vanished, and here is the girl-king, unclothed and trembling, standing upon ground showered with dragonscale. The rational mind, raised in Mithrandon by books and tools and walls of stone, might come to easier conclusions: that terrible storm dragon somehow swallowed the monarch, and Yeva slayed the beast and cut her out of its belly. But Emory is smarter than that, and Yeva watches him put together the same thing she did.
It’s not an answer he can accept. He looks like he’s about to tip into madness, about to start foaming at the mouth. He hasn’t spent months in Quanbao, slowly being inured to the idea; he hasn’t seen the reverence with which Sookhee treated the dragon relics in the mausoleum; he hasn’t gone to sleep with Daqiao imprinted behind his eyes and woken up with the taste of the city lingering on his tongue. Emory is a man who lives in a shining white tower and barely ever leaves it. He’s never hunted and he’s never wielded a weapon with intent to kill. He shakes with nerves as the gun’s muzzle wavers between Yeva and the girl-king.
“Put that away,” Yeva repeats.
“You’d do it,” Emory rasps. He seems so much younger than his age, as if his layers have been peeled back and there stands the boy that Yeva first met in Mithrandon all those years ago. “You’d kill them to protect a beast.”
She draws Varuhelt and wakes its blue blade, partly as a threat, but only partly. “I’d do anything to protect her.”
“Is your duty so easily cast aside?”
“My duty?” Yeva’s grip on her sacred blade tightens. As a guildknight, her path forward should be clear. Her vows to the Sun Emperor are unambiguous: all dragons are a threat. All dragons must be slain. Her maimed right hand is a testimony to the terrible power these creatures hold. She should show no mercy, and hold no regret. If her actions lead to war, to the fall of the kingdom and its sublimation into the Empire, so be it. Such things are beyond her ken and scope of care. She is a tool, doing things that tools must.
Yet, still: Yeva is her mother’s daughter. Over the years that connection has frayed to mere threads, but persists, running through her body as strongly as her father’s bloodline does, threading through the chambers of her heart. In those newly turned soils are slow-growing saplings of regret, longing, loneliness, love. Emotions she has stopped allowing herself to feel. If she were in Mithrandon, she could easily cut down those tender moods, as has long been her habit. But in the openness of Daqiao, with her armor stripped away and no stone walls to protect her, in this foreign land where she only had herself to hold on to—in this place both alien and familiar, Yeva found herself tending to that garden instead.
She’s spent half her life cutting herself into pieces and burying the shards that others considered unsightly. She’s walked around as a hollow husk of herself. She’s tired of it. She doesn’t want to return to Mithrandon and resume her life as usual.
“Yes,” she says. “I cast my duty aside. I will not follow the Emperor’s orders. I don’t care what he wants. I won’t do it.”
Emory’s face twists, and he raises the muzzle of his gun, pointing it at her. It glows, everstone gathering charge.
Yeva’s life has always pivoted around the blue fire in her blood, her ability to speak with everstone. It was why she was sent to Mithrandon. It is what she spent years honing. It is what she wields in her course of duty. And the everstone in Emory’s musket is everstone like any other, no different from the everstone within Varuhelt. She feels the pulse of its power in the line of her jaw. With casual, practiced ease, she shuts it off.
Emory stares at her in disbelief as his weapon goes dead in his hands. Yeva moves then, striking him in the chest with Varuhelt’s hilt, knocking him over. The musket goes clattering to the floor and Yeva kicks it away with one steel-toed boot.
The betrayal that shows in his expression is complete and overwhelming. “How could you?” It comes out sounding childlike. “You’d choose her who you’ve known for mere months, over those you’ve known your whole life? Over me, who’s been your friend since childhood?”
She stands over him, chest heaving not with exertion but with emotion. What she feels for him is not hatred, but sadness and almost overwhelming pity. Pity, because he seems to be trapped and doesn’t know it. “I choose to do the right thing, Emory. I thought you’d understand that too. Why else would you send me here? Why else would you choose the least fit men in the guild to accompany you into Quanbao? Were you not stymying the Emperor’s will with your choices?”
Uncertainty flickers on his face. Regret. An understanding that the choices he’s made are irreversible. No matter what happens, they can’t go back to how they used to be as children. Yeva presses on: “All this time you’ve said you wanted to be better than your father, to make a kinder, gentler Empire. Is this your idea of what that is?” As Emory takes a sharp breath she continues, relentless. “Is the will of the Emperor more important than I, who’ve been your friend since childhood?”
Emory turns his face from her, sprawled out on the ground as he is. Tremors shake him. He covers his face. Yeva thinks: he’s really not cut out for this sort of work. He should never see battle in a field. But she does not release her grip on Varuhelt. Doesn’t let her guard down.
Eventually, he pulls himself back to sitting. “What do you want me to do?” He sounds in despair. “His Radiance expects results, he wants the head of a dragon. You know what his temper is like… if we return empty-handed, it’s not just our heads that will roll. He’ll bring his wrath down upon the kingdom… just as he’s always wanted to. He stands in the shadow of his late, great father, the conqueror… I think he hates that man more than he loves him, you know. His father swept up the neighboring lands and left him with nothing for conquest, nothing to write into the books of legend.…”
He’s rambling again. “I don’t care about that,” Yeva says. “What’s in His Radiance’s heart can stay there. It won’t help me, or this situation.”
“Enough.” Lady Sookhee strides forward, naked yet unafraid. The skin on her arm is bubbled with damage caused by Emory’s weapon, but she seems unaffected by the pain. She points. “If it’s a dragon’s head you want, then a dragon’s head you shall have.”
Her finger thrusts toward the skull at the back of the hollow. “Take those bones,” she says, “and tell your Emperor you got the job done.”
Yeva’s eyes widen. “But those bones belonged to your royal father!”
“Yes. And he has no need of them anymore. My father gave up his life for me, many years ago. He would be honored if his remains could once again save me, and the kingdom, even years after his death.”
“But your prayers…” Yeva thinks of the altar to her own ancestors in her childhood home, the rituals and celebrations that were tied around them. “Are you sure?”
“Prayers are for the living. Not the dead. I am sure, Yeva.” She looks down at Emory. “You’re a man of letters, a master diplomat. You’ll figure out some way to appease the Emperor’s appetites with these. Your men—are they alive or dead?”
Emory gets to his feet, slowly. “Mostly alive, I think. We were lucky.” He hesitates, steeling himself before he’s finally able to face Yeva. “And you, Yeva? Will you return with us?”
He asks, even though it appears he already knows what the answer will be. And as Yeva puts her thoughts into words and her words into breath, all of a sudden her feelings spring into reality, shaping the path of her future. “I will not. I disavow the guild. I put aside my duty. I will not return to Mithrandon.”
“And what am I supposed to tell His Radiance, upon my return?”
“Tell him she died,” Sookhee says. “Tell him she perished in the hunt for the dragon.”
Emory glances between them. “And you—Yeva—you plan to remain here?”
“I’m sure I can find work in the palace,” Yeva says. If they’ll have me. “Barring that, I could still be useful pouring tea.”
Sookhee slips a hand into hers. “You’ll always have a place by my side.”
Emory looks at them both, and you can see understanding crystallize on his face. He looks defeated, wounded. “I tried my best, you know. Yeva, I really tried.”
“I know.” And she doesn’t blame him for what he did. He is the product of his upbringing and circumstance. Born to Empire and tied to it until the day he dies. “But sometimes our best efforts just aren’t enough. You’ll take care of them for me, won’t you? My gryphons. And Sage. They’re creatures of the guild. Take them back with you.”