Page 4 of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame
CHAPTER FOUR
QUANBAO—QUENTONA—IS a half-year’s journey by foot and a month away on horseback. Soaring through blue skies in a gryphon carriage, Yeva closes the gap in two days.
A range of craggy mountains stands on the border between the kingdom of Quentona and the Sun Empire, split by the Zochar Pass, a fissure through which a single stony road winds into the heart of the kingdom. On her way to the pass, Yeva sails over the pastures and paddies of her old home and a seam of longing opens between her ribs. How many years has it been? A memory breaks through like the first buds of spring, all smells and tastes: the smoke of her mother’s kitchen, the piquant caramel of a stuffed pork bun melting in her mouth. But the picture in her mind is incongruous: she’s thinking of a child with limbs like brown twigs, a smile as wide as her face. Yeva hasn’t looked or acted like that for years.
A wall of wooden palisades outlines Quentona’s borders. The guard at the gate scowls suspiciously at the Imperial scroll Yeva presents him, but it is not for him to refuse an envoy of the Thrandic Emperor. To do so would be to oppose the will of the Emperor, and His Radiance has historically not taken kindly to such matters. Before Yeva, massive wooden doors with hand-whittled lotus-flower reliefs creak inward, heavy and oaken, and she follows the path up into the mist and gray of Quentona.
Despite her proximity to it, Yeva has never been across the border. In her childhood Quentona was simply the neighboring kingdom, shrouded and mysterious, a place her mother went to on trips with other elders. She has never met anyone from there; the impression Quentona gives is of a small and fiercely reclusive nation, protected by unforgiving terrain and bristling with strange customs. Even her mother, so generous with her tales of the sun and the sea and the sky, hardly spoke of her trips up the mountains—it was grown-up business and Yeva was not yet grown. “But when you’re older,” she used to promise, “I will take you with me. One day you will learn everything I know.” In the years since Yeva went to Mithrandon, the image of Quentona has faded into a haze of ambiguity, something which was once important to her childish, hopeful heart, brushed away by the hard practicalities of the world.
This is all she knows about the kingdom in the present: half as many people dwell in the entire country as do live in any small town in the Empire; its rule is matrilineal, unlike the way it is in Mithrandon; the current monarch is young, a girl-king, someone who inherited the position when her mother died a year ago. Fat tongues of ore crisscross the mountains that make up the land; fine steel and silver are among the country’s biggest exports, sold in exchange for dark wines and cotton and ripe, plump fruit. Yeva understands why His Radiance, with all his childlike greed, wants this prize for his own.
The stony road leads her to Daqiao, the country’s capital, resting upon the flank of a mountain just inside the border. An imposing wall of gray brick stands around it, and its entrance is a pair of bloodred doors with golden studs, tall and wide enough for a dragon to fly through. An official in indigo robes allows her passage into the city. His scowl is even deeper than his border guard counterpart’s.
The streets beyond the city gates are almost too narrow for Yeva’s gold-and-white carriage. She drives slowly and cautiously through these winding paths that look nothing like the ones she’s familiar with. Wooden buildings with sloping roofs line either side. She causes disruption as she goes, her passage a wound that closes up behind her. Glimpses of color and delight are snatched out of her sight as soon as she gets close.
Her golden scroll grants her passage to the outskirts of the royal palace, circled by walls covered in glittering mosaic. Mythical creatures dance among swirls of azure cloud. The palace is split in two: a lower half at street level where the stables and civil servants are, and an upper half where the girl-king and the palace servants live. Yeva is swept into the no-nonsense care of the palace guard, who want to assign her attendants, sleeping quarters, a stable hand to take care of her gryphons. She rejects all this. “I sleep in my carriage,” she says. “And my gryphons will not tolerate the touch of those who are not their master. I will tend to them myself.”
The captain of the guard is a man named Lu, whose face holds a map’s worth of frown lines. “You cannot be serious,” he says. His Mithrandish is heavily accented. “We cannot allow an esteemed guest of Lady Sookhee’s to sleep in the stables. A preposterous idea! Anyone would think that we were meaning to cause offense to the Sun Emperor’s envoy.”
“There will be no offense taken.”
“We must insist.”
“This is not a test,” Yeva says, more snappily than intended. She has been in Quanbao for less than an hour and already things are difficult. “I wish to sleep in my carriage. It’s what I find comfortable.”
The look on Captain Lu’s face tells her that there was offense taken, and it was on his end. She realizes too late that it sounds like an insult on the quality of the accommodations in the royal palace. It’s too late to take it back. An hour in and already she has fallen short of what Emory expects.
So Yeva sets up in a corner of the royal stables, taking it over with the bulk of her carriage. She turns the gryphons loose and lets her wyrmhound, Sage, out of the carriage to stretch her legs. The pup kicks up dirt as she inscribes loops around the courtyard, fueled by pent-up energy. A pair of stablehands—one an old man with flyaway cotton hair and one a skinny kid no older than twelve—stare at the enormous winged beasts with a mixture of curiosity and terror.
“They won’t harm you,” Yeva says. “If you don’t bother them, they won’t harm you.”
Neither of them speak or acknowledge what she said. She realizes they might not speak her language. This is going to be difficult.
Captain Lu returns near sundown. “You must be famished from your long journey. Is this venerable knight of Mithrandon too proud to eat dinner with the peons of the royal guard?”
Yeva hesitates, suddenly trapped. To refuse would be to offer further insult, and yet Yeva hasn’t shared a meal with others since she was a child. “I cannot remove this helm in public. It is forbidden. I must therefore dine alone.”
The captain scoffs, his patience with her worn thin. “Very well. If you wish to eat in the stables like a dog, who am I to argue?”
Soon after, a woman in seafoam-green silk with peach accents arrives bearing several woven baskets with lids. The baskets contain an array of food so dizzying it might feed an army: fried and boiled dishes, baskets of steamed confections, oily bowls of soup. Crystal-skin dumplings, whole fried snakehead, double-boiled soup with lotus root and groundnut, stewed winter melon, crispy whitebait, pastry shells filled with shrimp and radish salad. On and on.
Yeva, overwhelmed, takes the baskets into her carriage and shuts herself in. Each of the dishes comprises a small serving, almost too small—two mouthfuls and they’re gone. The flavors punch her in the throat, heavy on her tongue and bright on the roof of her mouth. Yeva forces herself to eat slowly, to savor every note, from the sweetness of the dumplings to the rich salt-and-bitter of lotus root soup. Familiar ropes of aroma drag her back in time until she stands within the walls of her mother’s house, stirring a pot of fish stock, breathing in the thick and pungent steam. Yeva closes her eyes and steeps herself in these feelings, while at her feet Sage whines for leftovers.
Her time here will be fraught and she might not survive it. She’s barely set foot in the nation and already she feels unstable and anxious, as if she might tilt and fall unexpectedly into the earth with every step. Tombs long sealed will be broken open, and Yeva is afraid of what she will find buried within.
LADY SOOKHEE, THE girl-king of Quentona, is ill. She has been for a long time, with a blood-sickness that flares up and subsides with alarming regularity. Yeva has arrived during one of those resurgences, while she is too frail to receive visitors. Words could not express her deep regret at such impropriety, but she is afraid that the esteemed knight of Mithrandon must wait before she can formally welcome her.
All this Yeva finds out from a silk scroll brought to her in the morning by a different woman in peach and seafoam green. The Thrandish in the missive is flawless and formal, written in a neat but strange hand. The blotty shape of the letters indicates use of an ink-dipped brush instead of a sharp nib; peculiar, but beautiful. Dismay grows within Yeva as she reads the scroll over and over. Lady Sookhee does not say how long Yeva is expected to wait in this unsettled, suspended state before she can be formally assigned to court—or whatever the girl-king wishes to do with her. She only asks Yeva to trouble Captain Lu or Sujin—the handmaiden who has brought her the scroll—if she has any needs.
There’s one more thing. Tied to the end of the scroll is a thin sliver of iridescent material braided within an elaborate decorative knot. A royal seal. Taken anywhere, this should allow Yeva patronage of any of the shops in the city, whether she should desire to try some of Daqiao’s delicacies or stay at one of their famous hot-spring inns. If she is so inclined.
But Yeva is not. She looks to Sujin, a plump woman perhaps in her thirties, with an air of severity that suffers no fools. “What should I do, then?”
“How would I know? Do whatever you like, it’s none of my business.” She seems irked to be talking to a guest in the stables, this loud and unruly place. She pointedly keeps her distance from Yeva’s carriage. When Yeva doesn’t respond to what she said, she simply turns and leaves without a further word.
Yeva finds herself left alone and unattended. Time stretches before her like a desert, taunting her with its emptiness. In Mithrandon, she had routines to fill the spaces between hunts, but she is no longer in Mithrandon, and the idea of leisure seems offensive to her.
She examines the braided seal more closely. Its iridescent center, which has the appearance of hammered metal, shimmers and flexes irregularly. Yeva realizes she knows what it is: dragonscale. A sibling material to the sheets that make up her golden armor, though more like insect shell and less like steel. Dragonscale comes in varieties as diverse as the beasts they are carved from, and this scale is novel to her, from a type of dragon she’s never seen before.
A shiver passes through Yeva. She’s certain she isn’t wrong; nothing else in the natural world carries the aura this scale has. The blood in her hand fizzes as she brushes her fingertip against it: her sacred gift reacting, responding to the traces of divinity left in the material. The more attention she pays to it, the sharper the sensation becomes. Why is dragon shed being used as a royal seal, and what does that mean? Might His Radiance be right about the threat of dragons living in Quanbao after all?
Yeva turns these questions over and over in her mind until a froth of suspicion builds around her thoughts. If there is some danger here, however slight, she must uncover it.
Within her carriage, in a finely tooled silver box that was a gift from Emory, she has stowed what information she could find about Quanbao. She unrolls the tight sheets of vellum and peruses their contents. There’s not much to go on; what is available to her is sketchy and comprises a handful of patrol reports and dry summaries of the neighboring nation’s military might. Emory could have found more by asking certain friends deep in the Imperial court with their fingers in the secret archives, but that would have taken time, and they did not have enough. So she makes do.
Most interesting is the account of a failed hunt on the edge of Quentona—Quanbao—more than a decade ago. Emory spoke of this. A guild party of six, pursuing a small southern dragon spotted near a village not twenty miles from where Yeva grew up. A winter sighting which went wrong, all but one of the party slipping in mud and falling into the river that borders the Empire and Quanbao along that point. The sole survivor was found by villagers days later, half-frozen and delirious, barely able to speak of what had happened. Yeva’s attention is snared by the transcript of what he told Mithrandon’s interlocutors weeks later, after he had been brought back to the capital:
After a day and a night’s hunt we cornered our foe on the banks of the river they call the Yalo. Its length was not greater than a six-boat, and its girth paltry besides; by its pale coloring and timid behavior our captain determined it to be a juvenile of its species (although it was of a sort that the guild has not yet fully recorded). Our champion, Aestafar, had grievously wounded it in its side with his greatsword. We felt assured of our victory and moved quickly. But in our certainty we failed to anticipate the true strength of our quarry. As it neared dusk, upon the riverbank, the infernal beast called up a great fog from the ground, through which we lost sight of it, and each other. A terrible chill descended upon us all, and a foul wind blew, but so thick lay the fog that it did not disperse even within the gale. The firmament turned to mud under us. Here my recollection falls prey to uncertainty: in the howling wind and stinging fog I cannot be sure of what I saw. I moved through the gloam, seeking out the rest of my party. I heard them cry out—I slipped in the mud—and then above me, a shadow so large it seemed like it might blot out the sun—the coil of some kind of creature, too large to have been the dragon we were pursuing. Terror gripped me and I thought I was to meet my end. In my madness and desperation I thrust blindly upward with my lance, and the Sun Goddess must have been guiding my hand, for in the tempest I felt it strike something, almost like flesh. Blood rained upon me, a blue so dark it was almost black. The beast made a cry so awful I felt the ground might split and the world end. Strength fled me then, and as I lay in the cold mud I saw a dark, enormous shape fleeing toward the border of the neighboring nation. To what end, I do not know. I remember nothing more. That creature—it was no juvenile, but surely a demon dragged from the depths of the world, luring us in with its weakness before assuming its true form. Six of us there were, fine men all, and only I returned from that fateful encounter. I cannot fathom why Lady Eymthra protected me while my brothers-in-arms perished.…
The description of the hunt sends a chill through Yeva. It reads less like a knight’s report than a tale of fantastical horror. Attached to the report is a note from the then-guildmaster—Baron Deerland, Emory’s father—dismissing the man’s report as a mere flight of fancy, touched in the head as he was after the death of his comrades.
Yeva does not know what to think. Clearly the Sun Emperor believes there is more to this story than the delirious ramblings of a madman. Or he doesn’t. Possibilities and theories dance in Yeva’s mind and gnaw at her sanity. There’s little she can do to calm herself, but at the same time she feels too unsettled to remain alone in her carriage. And the thought of wandering the palace with its labyrinthine passages and dour servants sets her stomach roiling.
So she does the only thing she can think of: she leaves the palace to traverse the cobbled streets of Daqiao, in search of something she cannot name. Does she seek clues to a dragon’s whereabouts? Is she looking for something more? She does not know and she cannot guess. Perhaps she simply seeks the simplicity that comes from walking, occupying herself with the simple effort of putting one foot in front of the other and deciding which way to turn. To silence her troubled mind, she carefully places her helm back over her head, retreating into a comfortable cocoon of safety. With the royal seal gripped in the gauntlet of her good hand, she steps out into an unfamiliar world, hoping to make it legible.