Page 8 of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame

CHAPTER EIGHT

WEEKS AFTER THE spring festival, Lady Sookhee’s blood-illness returns for its usual rounds. Yeva is again left alone to her own devices. Now that they have become lovers, she feels the absence of the girl-king even more than usual, like the empty socket of a tooth, like a limb cut off. At the same time, a wave of stomach ailments sweeps the ranks of the palace guards, leaving her even less to distract herself with.

On the third day of Lady Sookhee’s seclusion, Captain Lu summons her. “Look. You know my men are down for the count. We’re short-staffed. I want you to guard the door in the library—you know the one.”

The door, the secret door that leads to the caverns that are once again barred to the world. Yeva agrees, even though the request is ludicrous and they both know it—she is an Imperial guest, and not someone to be ordered around like a pantry maid. And yet she likes the tacit acknowledgment that she’s become almost like household staff. Yeva takes the wyrmhound Sage with her and stands guard in the stillness of the library with the knowledge of the secret entrance that waits behind her. She’s dressed herself in her guildknight’s armor again, old habit—if she is to do a soldier’s duty, then a soldier’s garb she must don. Varuhelt, her sacred weapon, idle since she came here, sits at her waist, waiting to be useful. It feels only proper.

No one comes to the library, of course. These books serve as an archive and are rarely read; even the palace scholars haunt these shelves fleetingly, just visiting to look up a specific volume before vanishing again. None would come to try the secret entrance to the caverns. It was only ever Yeva who bothered the guards, asking, “Still closed today, is it? I’ll come again tomorrow, then.”

Now she’s the one watching over that forbidden entrance. Sage sits beside her to keep her company, infinitely patient in a way Yeva is not. The unoccupied hours yawn before her, a guildknight trained for battle and not for standing guard. The idle wheels of her mind spin in place. She thinks, and she’s been thinking, that there’s a pattern to the regularity of these two phenomena, the unrest in the caverns and Lady Sookhee’s illness. Don’t they always overlap? Doesn’t the girl-king always fall ill when some unknown calamity is striking the heart of the caverns, making it too dangerous for human passage? What if the threat that lurks within these deep hells is the same thing that plagues Lady Sookhee, the fumes of its miasma coming through the stone and creeping into the royal bedchambers as her lover sleeps? The thought, once kindled in her head, continues to burn and burn until it is a wall of flame that blots out any other rational thought. The thought of those deep caverns with their immense size and unexplained dangers gains form and mass until she can feel it pressing down on the back of her neck. She cannot turn away from these feelings; she’s trapped by them. That sense of suffocation sharpens Yeva’s instincts for danger, raising the temperature of her blood until she knows she must act. She is a guildknight of Mithrandon; she cannot simply stand idle.

So it is that Yeva turns and activates the secret doorway she is meant to be safeguarding. So it is that she descends the stairway she was supposed to protect from access.

She’s not sure what she’s expecting to find. Her weeks of exploration have made familiar ground of the hostile subterranean landscape, but the purported dangers that cause it to be sealed away have never been explained to her. Neither has she found clues in the before and after. But she’s only been at this for a handful of months; there’s things she could have missed. Yeva’s heart races at the thought of what she might find, but she is used to living this way. Used to feeling alive this way.

The cool dark of the caverns seems the same as she left it. Nothing gives way under her feet. Nothing leaps out at her from the shadows. No fumes clog the air; nothing burns her lungs as she breathes. Yeva holds her torch aloft and walks through unchanged terrain, wondering what she might be missing. And yet her blood, her sacred blood, squirms in her veins as anxieties skitter over her skin. That particular sense of hers has been quiet since she came to Quanbao, lulling her into a false sense of calm. Now, her instincts are on full alert. The bones of her arm ache, as though responding to a threat.

Something lurks within these chambers that wasn’t here before.

Sage sniffs the air and grumbles, ears laid back. The wyrmhound falls in step with her master as they press onward. Yeva tracks her growing sense of unease, letting its volume guide her through the caverns as though following Sage’s keen nose. Whatever they’re following leaves neither physical scent nor trail; it might be of supernatural nature. A demon that curses these lands.

Much as Yeva dreads, she is led toward lava. In the crimson furnace of a hollow groaning and popping with magma she comes to a stop, unable to proceed further. The source of her unease lies beyond these walls, and she cannot reach it. She sweats in her helm, suddenly and keenly aware of its discomfort. It seems she will have to turn back, with nothing to show for her transgressions.

Sage goes stiff in alert, ears pricked as she points to something Yeva has missed. Following the sulfurous curve of the lava leads her to the edge of the cavern. A fracture in its hard glossy walls, almost invisible in the hellish light. Has it always been here, has she simply missed its existence in all her exploring, or was it opened up by whatever she’s hunting? Not that it matters. The gap is large enough for someone to walk through it, and walk through she does, into a darkness that grows colder and quieter as she leaves the magma fissure behind.

The crack in the rock widens the further she goes until it’s almost a decent passageway, and the movement of air around her hints at a larger volume waiting ahead. What is there? This is uncharted territory; in her months of exploring she has never made it past the lava barrier. Whatever secrets the caverns have been hiding, she is about to find out.

At last the passageway ends and before her is a cavern that dwarfs any other she’s mapped in her expeditions underground. She stands on a ledge that overlooks a new world enclosed within the belly of the earth. It’s so large she cannot see the other end; it’s so large that she can hear a river rushing in the distance, the muffled roar of a waterfall. It’s so large she can imagine a city planted here and growing, hidden from the eyes of goddess and emperor. Her feeble torch throws a meager circle of light that barely illuminates a fraction of what she’s discovered. A sky-blue glow runs like lightning across the ground and collects in outcroppings of rock that thrust upward like stalagmites. Firefly freckles of holy phosphorescence, not unlike the glow of her sacred weapon when she activates it. Exactly like that glow, in fact.

Yeva can barely breathe and she feels dizzy. She gestures for Sage to reconnoiter and the eager wyrmhound leaps off the ledge with brindled wings spread, soaring through the yawning cavern in search of lurking danger. She watches Sage tilt into the shadows until she is a pinprick, too faint to distinguish in the gloom. A whistle recalls her faithful companion, who lands in a flurry of fur and feathers and bumps her nose into Yeva’s waiting hand.

Sage has found nothing, but it doesn’t mean it’s safe. Carefully, Yeva climbs down from the ledge, torch held aloft in her maimed hand. There’s something she must investigate. Gingerly, she approaches the closest glowing outcrop. As its light pulses, the blood in her veins throbs in concert. She presses the palm of her broken hand upon the rock and shivers as the blue fire within her, the ability she spent her youth carefully cultivating, bursts into instant recognition. This is the same material that forms the core of her holy weapon, Varuhelt—it forms the core of all sacred weapons in the Empire, in fact. This, the rarest of rare materials, thought to be found only in the most blessed of locations touched by the sun, yet it languishes here in such vast quantities underground. All this time while Yeva explored the bright colors and sweet gardens of Daqiao above, a whole second world has lurked under her feet. Yeva walks from bright stone to bright stone, eyes awash with wonder, mind reeling with the implications of her discovery.

And then she sees it: a wide swathe of scale glittering upon the floor, appearing like a scatter of cherry blossoms at first, iridescent in the crosshatch of her torch and the holy blue light. Her heart leaps into her mouth as she realizes what she’s looking at. She picks a single specimen off the floor and flexes it: still soft, not yet stiffened into the indomitable material that makes the prized armor she wears. Fresh dragon shed, no more than a day or two old.

A dragon has been here, in this cavern, not too long ago—a living creature, one still growing and breathing. There can be no other explanation.

A constellation of fears explodes within Yeva. A hundred different thoughts and a thousand different questions all at once. She has been lied to. She has been told the wrong version of the truth. She’s discovered something everyone knew. She’s discovered something nobody knew.

A dragon lives in Quanbao, making its nest somewhere deep in the mountains protecting its capital city. The Emperor was right. She was not sent to this kingdom on an idle whim.

Yeva wants to chase after this beast. She wants a hundred questions answered. She wants to begin the hunt. She wants to return to the palace to shake Lady Sookhee and ask—did you know? Is this why the caverns are sealed off? Have you been lying to me, even as we shared a bed, shared our hearts?

Her fingers close around the still-living scale, blotting out its soft iridescence. She knows what her next steps are. Her need for answers wins. To plunge deeper into alien territory in pursuit of unknown quarry would be foolishness. Her hunt is only beginning.

As Yeva retraces her footsteps a great heat builds in her chest and continues swelling as she approaches the surface. By the time she emerges into the bright, cold light of the royal palace she feels ready to burst into flame. Without speaking to anyone else, she heads directly to Lady Sookhee’s bedchambers, one broad step after another, walking so quick even Sage has to trot to keep up.

Her way is barred—the grumpy handmaiden Sujin stands guard before a palisade of embroidered screens that stretches across the walkway. Over the months Sujin has softened toward her, but among Lady Sookhee’s personal staff she has softened the least, keeping one watchful eye upon this intrusion in her mistress’s inner circle. Yeva is denied access in the most tight-lipped, uninterested way: you can’t go further. Those are the rules.

“This is important,” she insists. “A matter of Daqiao’s safety. The city is in danger.”

Unimpressed, Sujin flicks her gaze toward the sky in the central courtyard. “Is the city on fire? Is it burning down? Are the Emperor’s troops at the gates, about to break through it?”

“No, but—”

“Then it can wait two days.”

“This is—”

“I said, it can wait two days.”

Yeva has gotten so comfortable that she’s forgotten her place in this country: a guest who has no say in what the girl-king must do. She is an outsider who cannot choose to do as she pleases. Foolishly, she had thought differently. Fuming, full of resentment, she retreats to the room she was so generously provided and writes a singular letter to Emory—a battering ram of a missive, dragged along by emotion, detailing where she went and what she found, scrawled in the awful, inexact script she has learned to manage with her left hand, that she knows Emory can read but few others can.

After she sets the falcon on its path, she is once again faced with her own powerlessness. Frustration boils over at the thought of inaction. How could she simply remain in her room, obediently waiting for Lady Sookhee to recover from her bout of illness, while under her feet an existential threat to humanity lurks? Unthinkable. Yeva gears up, and even as she does, she makes battle plans. Carys and Meteor, her gryphons, cannot access the dragon’s abode unless she finds the opening through which the beast enters and exits its nest. She cannot count on that possibility; she must be prepared to face it with just Sage and herself alone. It’s likely to stay airborne. She should bring a bow. Does it respond to the elements? Legends name Chuan-pu as a storm dragon—if this creature is one of its descendants, should she take the flourish and fancy of mythos into account?

By the time she is thinking this, she is already striding, heavy-booted, down the wooden corridors of the palace, halfway toward the ground-floor library. The atmosphere has changed around her: a gloom seems to have descended upon the fragrant gardens, and a sense of unease charges the cold air. Where are all the servants, usually so busy and bustling? The glimpse of a wan face she catches hurrying around a corner looks mired in fear and anxiety. The peace in the royal palace has been broken by an unknown hand. It might be her own. It might be someone else’s.

The entrance to the caverns is no longer unguarded. Captain Lu himself stands glowering before the offending bookshelf, an impassable bastion of wrath. His gaze narrows upon Yeva as she approaches. “You. I asked you to watch this entrance, to guard it with your life. And what did you do? Turned and went in like a little snake. You couldn’t wait, could you? The very moment I trusted you with something important…”

How he knows what Yeva’s been up to, she has no idea. But his fury is implacable, and Yeva has no excuses for herself. She’s breached his trust. And yet—no, he never deserved it in the first place. “I found traces of a dragon living in those caverns.” She flashes an iridescent scale at him, her proof of his duplicity. “As a knight of Mithrandon, I must—”

“As a knight of Mithrandon, you will do nothing. Your Emperor has no jurisdiction here. By order of our king, these caverns are not to be entered. Unless…” This time his fists tighten, as if ready to draw a weapon. “Do you wish to contest her sovereignty?”

This is not a fight Yeva knows how to have. She turns around, leaving Captain Lu to stew in his anger. But she does not return to her room. Instead, she goes up. She climbs all the way to the apex of the palace, following pathways she has come to know as well as her heart. If it is the girl-king’s will that determines who goes where, then it is the girl-king’s will that she must bend to her use, and damn the consequences.

Sujin snaps when she sees Yeva again. “I thought I told you—”

“I’m not waiting another day.” Brusquely she shoves past the woman.

Sujin grabs her by the shoulders and blocks her with her body. But the woman is only a king’s handmaiden, while Yeva is a trained knight. Yeva pushes her off easily, and when Sujin lurches to grab hold of her again, Sage comes between them, teeth bared and wings snapped out, a threat rasping in her throat. Sujin backs away from the wyrmhound with real fear in her eyes, distancing herself from Yeva until the dog’s snarling ebbs into a low growl. She glances at Yeva, and Yeva has never seen such honesty in the woman’s expression before this. “Don’t do this. If you care for her at all… if she even means anything to you… leave it alone. Go back to your room. Forget this.”

“You know I can’t.” With that, Yeva pushes the embroidered screens aside and strides toward the girl-king’s chambers.

One fateful step, then the next. Yeva is at the threshold of Lady Sookhee’s private chambers, then she crosses over.

Someone must have warned the girl-king that Yeva was coming, because Lady Sookhee waits in the middle of the room, swaying like a willow in a storm. “Yeva,” she says, when she catches sight of her, and that is as far as she gets before she collapses.

Yeva lunges forward and catches her a foot off the floor. Whatever rage that filled her dissolves in a sweeping flood of alarm as Lady Sookhee slumps into her grasp. The girl-king is so bloodless, and smells so strongly of death and copper, that Yeva momentarily fears she’s been assassinated, struck by a dagger to the back as she stood. But she notices the sheen of sweat on her brow and the labored breathing as though her lungs have folded in on themselves. She is ill, of course she is ill. What was Yeva thinking, barging in here when she is so unwell, rousing her and causing her upset when she is so fragile. An awful sensation sweeps Yeva, so strikingly similar to the sensation she gets when her sacred fire activates that it leaves her dizzy. In her moment of terror she wonders if this is what it means to be in love.

Guilt-stricken, Yeva carries Lady Sookhee unconscious to her bed and lays her in it. She removes her helm, her gauntlets, and places her left palm against Sookhee’s forehead. The skin is cold, but she can sense the fever raging beneath it. Her mother was a healer, and as a child Yeva had begun to learn some of her craft before she left home. What she wouldn’t give, in that moment, to remember any of it. To help.

Yet Lady Sookhee stirs under her touch, returning slightly to her senses. “Medicine,” she whispers, through cracked lips. With a weak finger she directs Yeva to the bedside cabinet filled with little jars and unguents.

Yeva retrieves a tiny, fragile bottle filled with white powder and mixes it in a small bowl of water under her direction. “Should I call for someone—?” she asks, but Lady Sookhee demurs. She lets Yeva prepare the medicine and bring it to her, bring it to her lips. She swallows and leans back against the pillows; by the time Yeva has put away the glassware a touch of color is already returning to her face.

The sliding door flings violently aside, and standing in its frame are Sujin, red-faced, accompanied by a furious Captain Lu. “Your Highness!”

Lady Sookhee raises a hand in gesture: everything is all right.

Sujin’s eyes are cold, fixed upon Yeva like fishhooks. “Shall I have her arrested?”

“No.” The girl-king forces her voice out of a hazy whisper, trembling with the effort. “Let her tend to me. We can speak later.”

Sujin and Captain Lu’s faces are twin studies in disbelief. “Your Highness—” Captain Lu begins.

“I understand your worries. But—” She stops to cough, spasms wracking her body. Sujin steps forward as Yeva tightens her grip on Lady Sookhee’s shoulder, trying to soothe her. The girl-king shrugs them all off. “It’s all right. I would like her to tend to me.”

Sujin’s expression tautens. She flicks a sideways glance at Yeva, heavy with distrust. They’ve been speaking in their native language, but now Yeva understands it, too, and Sujin can no longer conceal the meaning of her words. That knowledge shadows her face with resentment.

“Sujin,” Lady Sookhee says, wearily, “I do not wish to argue about this.”

Sujin and Captain Lu exchange a glance. To resist would be to go against their monarch’s wishes, to lodge further complaint would only exhaust her with more quibbling. Yeva watches this understanding crystallize between them, before they bow in obeisance and, reluctantly, withdraw.

Now Yeva and the girl-king are once again alone. The uneasy sensation that bubbled in Yeva’s blood is already beginning to fade, replaced with ever more guilt. She settles next to Lady Sookhee’s bedside.

“You startled me, barging in like that.” Lady Sookhee turns her face halfway toward Yeva’s and gives her a weak smile. In that gesture is comfort and forgiveness in equal measure. “What did you want so urgently?”

“It’s nothing.” All of Yeva’s concerns seem small and unsightly in the face of Lady Sookhee’s illness. Sujin was right—the city is not burning, what could possibly be so important? What she found might not be what she thought she found. She could be mistaken. There could be some other explanation. But it can wait. It can wait two days. She runs a bare thumb over the gentle arch of Sookhee’s brow. “Don’t trouble yourself. We can speak when you’re better.”