Page 2 of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame

TO BEGIN WITH, we must travel to the past.

Kunlin Yeva was thirteen when she slew her first dragon.

The hero’s feat comes to her unexpectedly: her mother is months away on business, and her father left that morning to hunt.

The dragon comes into the kitchen where her little sister, Beyar, sits alone, and Yeva, drawing water from the well, hears her scream.

On instinct she runs for her father’s sword in the shed.

In the kitchen she finds disaster: jars smashed, stools upended, milk spilled over stone.

On the counter, the dragonling hisses with smoke and fury.

A scrawny creature, freshly hatched, all nerve and plate and bone.

Blue scales with a faint rainbow sheen, and a pale belly not yet armored.

Yeva puts herself between the dragon and Beyar, fear-frozen in a corner, shouting, “Begone!” in hopes that it might bolt out the door.

The dragon instead lunges at her.

As Beyar howls, Yeva fights it off, swinging her weapon with wild abandon.

Her father has been teaching her the sword since last summer, but everything she knows has fled her, and she slaps it atop the head as though using a broom, striking it with the flat side of the blade.

The dragon swipes and the sword goes clattering to the ground.

Yeva staggers and falls as the dragon leaps upon her and fastens its teeth in the flesh of her wrist, grinding her bones and setting a fire.

It will not let go and she cannot pull it off.

Blood runs over her hands and arm, a startling color, like jam.

Her vision goes prickly and a buzz swells in her head, and she realizes this might be the moment of her death.

But that thought is distant, as if behind a pane of glass.

The dragon has small yellow eyes and horns that are still budding, covered in velvet.

The muscles in its neck twitch as it adjusts its grip.

Yeva watches her blood seep between the treads of its teeth.

What does it think as it takes the life from her? It, too, is in a struggle for survival.

The burning in her flesh grows weighty as it spreads to her chest, as if she could wield it, pick it up, and swing it around like a hammer.

Blue fire coats her arm.

At first Yeva thinks it came from the dragon, but the creature shrinks in fear from the tongues of flame.

It lets go and scuttles away.

Impossible strength fills Yeva’s limbs, and she stands, thinking she has to kill the dragon now or she will never get the chance.

Covered in strange fire, she picks up the dragonling as it tries to run, and snaps its neck with one quick twist. Its bones crackle like a broken twig. Yeva thinks nothing of it, as though she’d just crushed a tick or killed a hen for supper. She is still quite dizzy, and as she steps forward, arm dripping blood, the ground tilts under her and she faints.

Her father, Paul, returns home to disaster: one daughter out of her mind with fear in a ruined kitchen, the other on the floor with a maimed arm and a dragon whelp dead beside her.

Yeva still lives, breathing shallowly, but Paul sees the marks of blue fire on her and around her.

He knows what it means: the thing that he had prayed to never happen has indeed come to pass.

When Yeva wakes, tearing through a veil of darkness heavy and close as an ocean, she finds her father sitting by her sickbed, his face long and grave.

“I have sent for the guildknights,” he said.

“You must go north with them, to Mithrandon.”

“Have I done something wrong?” she asks.

He sighs, and looks sadder than she’s ever seen him.

“No.

You did everything exactly right.

But you have my family’s blood, and my family’s gift with it, or so it seems.

Some call it a curse.

The guild will take you and train you.

It is your destiny to become a wyrmslayer after all.

I dearly wish it weren’t so.”

“Your family’s gift?” Her wounded hand throbs under the coverlet, and Yeva is afraid to look.

“You never speak of your family.”

“And with good reason.”

Yeva hesitates, thinking of Beyar.

Trying to form a counterargument, not realizing that her father’s mind is already made and she has as much chance at convincing the sun not to set.

“Mithrandon’s so far away.” Mithrandon is where the Emperor lives, where her father comes from.

Their village lies on the edge of the His Radiance’s influence, which the long shadow of the Imperial capital barely touches.

Yeva has only heard stories of the city; when she tries to picture it, there’s nothing.

Emptiness, fuzzy as wool.

“You won’t be alone,” her father says.

“My brother lives in Mithrandon.

The Baron Deerland.

He’s a guildmaster, he’ll be your patron.”

“Your brother? By blood?” In her father’s stories, he was a simple wanderer from the north who found love and settled here, the humblest of tales.

Yeva never knew he was of noble birth.

“Does he know who I am?”

Paul sighs.

“You’re blood.

He’ll take you in.” He does not sound convinced.

“You’ve always said blood doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t,” he says.

“Until it does.”

This is not a decision her father should be making alone; it is not his choice to make.

Later, in her letters, Yeva’s mother will lament that, had she been present, she would not have allowed her daughter to go to the north.

She understands more of magic than Paul did.

She could have taught Yeva herself.

But if she hadn’t been away, she would have handled the dragon, and Yeva’s gifts might never have been discovered.

Paul is simply a mortal man who, fragile in his fear, reached first for that which was comforting to him.

Despite it all, he is still a son of the Empire’s capital city.

The pair of guildknights who come for her are gruff but kind, and speak little to her except to give direction.

They have her father’s pale complexion and eyes the color of leaves or jewels, and wear identical livery in red and white.

Beyar fills a small sack with biscuits and dry breads for the long journey ahead.

Yeva says, “I will write often, when the doctors in the city have healed my hand.

Father can read them to you.” Her sister nods, face pinched as she tries not to cry.

During their monthlong journey to Mithrandon, Yeva and her chaperones remain cordial strangers to one another.

Yeva learns to eat with her left hand as her right one stiffens into a hook she can barely bend at the wrist.

At night, when they think she is asleep, the guildknights whisper to one another in her father’s language, which she understands, although not well.

Yeva drinks in their gossip, despite not knowing who or what they are talking about.

The inscrutability of their lives and concerns troubles her.

Mithrandon accosts her with its clamor and filth.

The cobbled streets are flanked by stone-gray buildings inlaid with colored glass, and everywhere she looks there are people, constellations of busy lives intertwined.

She feels dizzy imagining how each shuffling figure she passes has a name that she does not know and probably never will.

The walls of the guild fortress enclose the only silence in the city.

Yeva feels her anxiety subside as they ride past stone courtyards speckled with guildknights in the red-and-white that has, by this point, become a source of comfort, of dependability.

At the stables, she sees her first-ever gryphon, a gray-green stallion that pins her with its unblinking gaze, perceiving her—muddy tunic and all—as an intruder.

Her uncle’s office requires a climb of innumerable steps.

The room has impossibly high ceilings and more books than she’s ever seen, and ever expected to see, in her life.

Yeva stands before a man who wears a copy of her father’s face.

His lip curls as he stares her up and down.

“So he did it, after all.”

She guesses that “he” means her father, Paul.

The man continues: “Pity you take after that woman, despite carrying our exalted blood.”

Heat rushes to her cheeks and up her neck.

Yeva has never thought of her mother with anything but pride; her father often remarks admiringly how much they look alike, with their dark hair and golden skin.

Immediately after, he would add that blood doesn’t mean anything, that family is more than blood.

She always thought it was for Beyar’s sake, but now she’s not so sure.

Her uncle says, “My disgrace of a brother claims you’ve slain a dragon.

Have you proof of that?”

Yeva has brought the dragon’s bones in a bag.

They clatter in a meager pile as she upends the bag over a table in the attached study.

Her uncle sifts through them with a pale, thin finger, lips thinning as the curved yellow ribs knock into one another.

“You call this a dragon? ’Tis barely a worm.

If we accepted every lowly farmer who cut one apart with a spade, we’d be overrun.”

Yeva thinks that any farmer who killed a beast like the one that maimed her should be allowed to be a guildknight if they so wish.

She recalls the nighttime whisperings of her chaperones, their pointed barbs.

“And you, sir? How many dragons have you slain?”

Her uncle’s face darkens.

In the shadows, someone giggles.

A boy, not much older than her, has been hiding between two bookshelves.

He covers his mouth instantly, but the damage has been done.

“You,” says her uncle, pointing.

“If you’ve time enough to lounge about eavesdropping, you’ve time enough to be useful.

Take this one to the quartermaster and get her sorted.”

Yeva follows the thin boy down labyrinthine passageways, their footsteps swallowed up by the curved shoulders of the fortress.

“My name’s Emory,” he says.

“Did I hear correctly what my father said? Are you Sepaul’s daughter? If so, that makes us cousins.”

Yeva nods, overwhelmed by the sudden, casual appearance of a new relative.

Emory says, “Sorry about my father.

He’s very set in his ways and can be quite blunt.

Far too blunt, in fact.

Some would say cruel.

Do you have siblings, by the by?”

“I have a sister,” she says.

“Beyar.

She’s not of my father’s blood, though.

My mother found her abandoned and took her in.

But she’s my sister, all the same.”

Emory nods thoughtfully.

“You know, my father once considered adopting a boy with gifts like yours—a distant relative, but one of common birth—so that at least one of his heirs would have the sacred blood.

But nothing came of it.

He’s got me, and nothing else.

Is it nice, having a sibling?”

Yeva nods. “It is.”

“I see.

You should tell me stories of your home, if you have the time.

I like to hear about faraway places.”

He hops from topic to topic like a bird, bursting with curiosity.

She has already decided that she likes Emory, who seems unbearably soft in this world of stone and hard angles.

Mithrandon will be endurable, she thinks, if they can become friends.

Later that day, when he brings her new clothes to wear, she notices that his cheek is reddened, as if recently struck.

He sees her staring and smiles, sheepish.

“Father gets mean when he’s had too much to drink,” he says, as if that is a reasonable explanation.

Yeva feels—and knows—that this has something to do with what she said earlier, her insolence rippling outward invisibly, in ways she had not predicted.

It is the first lesson she’s learned in Mithrandon, and in many ways it is the most important one.

They send her to the infirmary first.

In the cold light of the stone room, Yeva sits nervously as the guild doctor examines her.

He takes the stiff claw of her hand, river-bright with scar tissue, and turns it this way and that, making chicken noises with his tongue.

The doctor’s age is marked by his silver hair and the white talons of battle-wounds across his face.

In his youth, he was a wyrmslayer of great renown, and he has seen it all, every injury, every form of death.

“This should have been looked at months ago,” he says, “when it was still tender.

Now the bones and sinew have set.

It is healed.”

“Can’t you undo it?” Yeva asks.

Yeva gets irritation in response.

The doctor vanishes into the next room, leaving Yeva alone under the domed roof of the infirmary, heart pounding, half-filled with hope and half-filled with dread.

He returns with a gilt box, and inside is something which catches Yeva by surprise: a silver dagger with a sword’s pommel too long for something so small.

The blade itself is unusual, shaped like a splash of water, frozen.

A thin stripe of blue crystal runs down the middle of the handle.

“Can you hold this?”

Yeva works her broken hand around the pommel, the crystal digging into the thickened skin of her palm.

As she lifts the dagger she feels her chest tighten, and she is back in her mother’s house again, in the ruined kitchen, dizzy with unknown power.

The blade comes to life, completing itself in a flash of blue, and Yeva sees that it is a sword after all, and the metal is only a scaffolding for the fire her father said is their family’s birthright.

“Very good,” says the doctor.

“If you can wield a sword, then the hand’s not useless.

There’s nothing to change.”

“But what about letters?” Yeva asks, putting the sword down.

He looks irritated again.

“What about them?”

“How will I write letters home? I promised—”

“If you have letters to write, you may employ a scribe,” he says dismissively.

“Home… what need of letters have they, anyway? What would they understand of the affairs of knights?”

Yeva’s stomach roils at the thought of all the tender words she wants to send to Beyar, to her parents, being passed through the hard end of a scribe’s nib.

The doctor sees the look on her face and says, “Better for you to forget them back home.

Your life is given to the Sun Emperor, to serve at his pleasure.

The guild is your family now.”

In this way Yeva comes to understand the way her new family sees her: as a blade, an object whose value lies in serving His Radiance.

When she is introduced to the other knights-in-training, she also comes to understand that her gift is exceedingly rare, that most guildknights work in pairs or teams, and are just as likely to perish against a full-grown dragon as they are to survive.

The blade the doctor had her hold is a relic, a sacred weapon, and the blue crystals it bears are everstone, a catalyst that draws directly from the gift in Yeva’s blood.

The others can’t wield it.

From the beginning, she is already set apart from them.

Then there are the other things: her foreignness, her maimed hand, the way her face looks like none of theirs.

The lot are boys, mostly, and have a tower all to themselves, while Yeva’s room is in the scullery with the maids.

None of the trainees are openly cruel to her, but Yeva feels the cruelty in them nonetheless, in their glances and their whispers behind her back.

If she leaves her gauntlets unattended during training, they go missing and turn up in a ditch later.

The first few weeks, Yeva cries herself to sleep at night. She dreams of her mother coming to bring her home, of her fearless mother kicking down the mortared flint of the fortress, picking her up by the neck, and swooping up into the sky. But Yeva knows her mother would be disappointed if she were broken by simple hardship. “You have the strength of the earth in you,” she used to tell her daughters. “The rains can come and the ploughs can carve through you and still you will remain.”

So Yeva persists.

She takes to her studies with a fervor that surprises even her teachers.

She learns to tame gryphons, reading the movements of their glossy feathered torsos between her heels until she can control their arcs in the air with the barest nudge.

Her skill with the sword grows beyond reproach.

She learns to wield the flames that are her family’s birthright, practicing with the doctor’s relic until she is good enough to warrant her own.

Yeva eats the soft, mealy food of the kingdom until she forgets that there are other textures, other flavors.

Little by little, her mouth gets used to speaking her father’s language until it becomes second nature, until those syllables dominate even her thoughts and the language she spoke in her mother’s home fades and becomes brittle in her mind.

In the evenings, when Emory’s personal tutoring is over, she dictates letters home in her new native tongue, and he dutifully writes them down.

She knows she will never again be able to send word in her home language.

As the days pass, Yeva spends increasing stretches of time in the garb of the guildknights, finding comfort in the regularity of its appearance, an assurance that she belongs.

The golden masks they wear while training make a secret of her face, while the reinforced leather conceals the markers of her sex.

She looks no different from the other knights-to-be, except she is swifter and fiercer.

She learns quicker and works harder.

Yeva practices drills alone until dusk, until she is forced to retire to bed, where she sleeps restless hours until she can wake and put on her training garb again.

Routine grows into habit, until Yeva can no longer imagine appearing beyond the walls of her room without her armor.

Sooner than expected, the day arrives where the swordmasters declare Yeva ready to join the ranks of the full guildknights.

She has worked hard and her diligence has borne fruit.

There is nothing more they can teach her; very soon, she should expect to be sent out on her first mission.

Her father, now living alone in a southern city, sends her a wyrmhound pup in congratulations.

Emory commissions the forging of a new everstone weapon, Varuhelt, its blade longer than Yeva is tall.

He presents it to her in the room where they first met, under the narrow scrutiny of his father.

Yeva hefts the silver hilt, engraved with the serpentine body of a southern dragon whose open mouth gives the impression that it spits the blue flame that makes up the sacred blade.

It is beautiful, perfectly balanced, perfectly smithed to fit in Yeva’s clawlike hand.

As Yeva raises it over her head and wakes it, a bolt of azure fire fills the room with harsh light as though touched by the goddess herself.

The guild tailors fit Yeva for the full garb of a guildknight in a vast room rimmed with mirrors of glass.

A dozen apprentices bustle around her like fish in a river, robing her in mail and leather and dragonplate, taking measurements and pinning excess fabric, while their master grunts and gestures for adjustments.

As they tug the red-and-white livery into place, Yeva looks out of the slits of her visor and sees, in the looking-glass, the perfect image of a guildknight being dressed by their attendants, no different from the knights who stride through the courtyards of the fortress, who stand in lines when His Radiance comes to visit.

She could be anyone; no one can tell that she is the strange broken yellow girl intruding upon the ranks of the kingdom’s finest.

That realization bursts in her chest like a warm sun.

Within the shell of armor she feels, for the first time since leaving home, that she belongs where she is, that there is nothing wrong with her.

Taken from the soil and cradle of her home and placed in this hard land, full of stone and bright metal, she has fashioned a womb for herself from which she can safely navigate her new world.

It is at this moment that Yeva makes her vow—a pledge not to the goddess or the Emperor but to herself.

She will remain within this shell of leather and metal forevermore.

No more shall she suffer the judgment of others who will look into her face and find it lacking.

No more shall she seem like an interloper, an unworthy stranger squatting within the holiest walls of the Sun Empire.

From this day on, people should look at her and see nothing but a faithful servant of Mithrandon, pure in ability and beyond reproach.

She knows the road ahead will be difficult, and its many impracticalities will test her will.

But she is determined to triumph over such banalities, obstacles of mortar and flesh. In the days to come, the immense bulk of the armor will cease to feel like an oppressive hand pressing down upon her head, and more like the arms of the goddess, holding her in a protective embrace. Keeping her dear and close to the bosom of the Empire so that she may not stray. Yeva falls into this fate with her eyes shut and her arms wide open. Never looking back at what she has left behind.