Page 9 of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame
CHAPTER NINE
OVER THE NEXT two days, Yeva tends to Lady Sookhee, intensely so, focusing every fiber of being on her care. She soaks linens in warm water and wipes the sweat from Sookhee’s face. She brews healing teas and broths, drawing on wells of old knowledge long disused but not entirely dry. She eats little and sleeps at the foot of her bed. She spends the blank hours watching her lover breathe, keeping her mind free of thought by counting each inhale and exhale, measuring the distance between them, scrying meaning from every minor toss and turn. That tempest of emotion that tore through her dissipated and did not return. In its absence, in the harsh light of practicality that beats upon her like the desert sun, she finds herself doubting what she had seen in the caverns. Finds herself doubting her conclusion. Sujin comes and goes, tidying after them both, taking away spent bowls of water and fetching fresh ones. All this she does without speaking a word or meeting Yeva’s eye. The other members of Sookhee’s inner circle hover in the periphery, whispering amongst themselves, being quiet until out of earshot, knowing that Yeva understands their language now. The awkwardness collects around Yeva and thickens so much it feels like a clot lodged in her chest. It brings upon her a deep and sour feeling that collects in the bones of her neck, the line of her jaw. She’s done this, she knows. She shouldn’t have broken in. She should have known her place.
It’s too many hours to herself. It lets her mind wander places it shouldn’t. In the cold, cricket-filled deeps of the night, she conjures a vision of her mother, who has been absent from her mind for years as if Yeva couldn’t bear to think of her. Tall and brown, with wide cheekbones and black, slicked-back hair. The haze of decades clears away, revealing sharp fragments of her childhood like glittering stones. Mother is teaching her to braid Beyar’s hair, each of them taking half. Her sister hums, lost in her own worlds, happy. This was, she recalls, perhaps a year before Yeva was taken to Mithrandon. Her mother is saying, “Beloved, you will be grown soon, and you’ll have to decide what kind of person you want to be.” Or something along those lines. “Beloved, you don’t have to answer right now, but you must think about your answer.”
In this recollection Yeva doesn’t hesitate. She blurts out, tugging on her sister’s hair: “Of course I want to be like you, Mama!” And her mother laughs, but looks sad somehow.
More memories: her parents arguing in whispers when the girls have been put to bed. But Yeva only pretends to sleep, eavesdropping, anxious. Even before she was sent away against her mother’s will, the fissures of her parents’ eventual split were already present. Her mother disapproves of Yeva learning the Empire’s swordplay. “But the girl loves it so,” her father says. Her mother’s retort emerges as a sarcastic question: “I thought you’d left all that behind?”
But her father is right—Yeva loves the time spent in the yellow fields with the practice sword he’s made for her, dodging Paul’s strikes and parrying his blows, gleaming with exertion and pride as her father exclaims at how fast she learns. “You have a natural gift!” he says, a smile extending across the wide planes of his face. Yeva imagines herself heroic, defending her home and little sister from unknown threats, invaders creeping up from the tall grass and slithering through their doorways. The thought brings her joy like no other.
She thinks: Did I summon the blue fire in my blood? Did my desire bring that dragon into our house when I was a child? Could it be a choice that I made, without even realizing—a secret choice in my heart? Yeva always felt she’d had no control over the course of her life, dragged by the tides of destiny into the Empire and bound to duty before she could catch a breath. But what if she did? What if she’d turned her back on her mother and her mother’s people to follow her father’s path?
She aches. She can’t think of her father that way, as a corrupting influence that led her away from her true self. It wasn’t like that and he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t wrong for sending her to Mithrandon. He was doing only what he knew, what he thought best. The tragedy that is Yeva’s life was sown long before that happened. It started the day when her father, lost and wounded, wandered into a village where he knew no one and barely spoke the language, and was taken in by a daughter of the village elder. Two disparate, opposing threads of destiny twined into one.
Sookhee’s fever breaks on the third evening. By the fourth day she is awake, well enough to sit up. Yeva attends to her in near silence, too ashamed to speak of what happened. The girl-king whispers her thanks, wraps her hands around Yeva’s when offered a cup of white peony tea. Yeva brings her bowls of congee, warm and gently seasoned with scallion oil.
“Have you eaten?” Lady Sookhee asks. “You look as awful as I feel.”
Yeva does eat a little, despite the resistance from her appetite.
“What happened?” the girl-king asks. “Why did you want to see me so urgently?”
Yeva bites down on her words, unsure of how to broach the topic. She has never been a diplomat; it was Emory who was the cleverer between them, the one who knew all the right words to say at the right time. “You can’t just speak your mind,” he used to tell her. And right now her mind harbors more doubts than certainties; every answer seems like it could be the wrong one.
She dips into the sleeve of the generously given robes she’s put back on. Her fingers close around the cool, sharp edges of the object she’s looking for, which she brings into the light. A single scale which has since hardened into its final form, stiff as iron and shimmering with the same colors as the royal seal.
“I found this,” she says, “in the depths of the caverns underneath the palace.”
A shadow skims across the girl-king’s face; quietly she puts her teacup down. “I see.” And then: “I have something I must show you. But it’s a place we must go to. Perhaps tomorrow, when I am feeling a little better.”
Yeva nods. The opacity of the girl-king’s expression reveals nothing, and the anxiety of imagining what she might mean consumes Yeva through the hours that follow. She tries to eat more, to rest well, but sleep eludes her. She finds herself lying awake in her own chambers, closing her maimed hand around the dragonscale she found. The skin on that hand is so heavily scarred it’s nearly dead to sensation, but she keenly feels the presence of the precious artifact against her palm, as if there was more to it than a physical object. More to it than sharpness and inflexibility. An ache grows in her hand and creeps upward until her arm feels sore from wrist to elbow, throbbing with phantom pain.
She spends the night sleepless. In the gray slash of morning she rouses and goes to see Lady Sookhee, forcing herself past her exhaustion. As a matter of trust, she wears the fragile civilian robes that afford her no defense and leaves Varuhelt in her room, guarded by Sage. She puts on the sandalwood tiger mask that was gifted to her.
This morning Lady Sookhee is being attended by sulkpot Sujin and Kima with her long braid, the two handmaidens closest to the girl-king. Lady Sookhee is up and about, dressed again in her elaborate robes with her hair put up in a fine bun. She is paler than usual still, but her gait is steady and her back held straight. Relief surges through Yeva at seeing her recovered.
“You look like you haven’t slept well,” Sookhee observes, and Yeva gestures vaguely, neither confirming nor denying it. The girl-king takes her by the elbow, gently. “I promised to show you something, didn’t I? Let’s go.”
They are meant to go unaccompanied. Sujin scowls as Yeva passes her by, but her attitude has clearly softened since their confrontation days earlier. Yeva understands that this tempered rage is the girl-king’s doing, a plea to be nicer to their foreign guest despite her many transgressions. She’s not sure if she’ll ever be in the woman’s good graces. She’s not sure why she wants to be.
In the back of Lady Sookhee’s private garden, hedge and bush wrap around stone steps that lead through the heart of the palace. Sookhee and Yeva follow its lightless spiral downward until they reach the ground floor, where the stairway opens directly into the royal treasury. The treasury is locked and closely guarded; Yeva has never been in it. Here are kept the kingdom’s most precious artifacts and records of the royal family’s history. Like a loyal dog she tails after Lady Sookhee, crossing room after room filled with precious minerals, framed calligraphy that spans a wall, painted vases taller than she is. Throughout this journey across the collected wonders of the kingdom, Sookhee says not a word, and Yeva follows her lead, staring wide-eyed and silent at the glut of history and artistry that passes her by.
Finally, they come to a wall that appears to be spanned by a single massive tapestry, a marvel of silk and ink which depicts Chuan-pu’s legend, his sacrifice from which rose the kingdom of Quanbao. As Yeva takes in its towering magnificence, Lady Sookhee finally speaks. “What I’m about to show you is something that very few outside my family have been allowed to see.” She glances over her shoulder. “I don’t say this to scare you, or to put you in your place. Just so you know the gravity of what’s before you.”
She activates a hidden mechanism, pulling on a golden knob that appears to be a decorative element in the tapestry’s frame. Gears turn and grind out of sight, and Lady Sookhee steps backward as the entire wall of the archive begins to move, pivoting to reveal rock-hewn stairs that extend into dimness. The block of air that washes over them is cool and damp in a way deeply familiar to Yeva.
“Come,” Lady Sookhee says, beginning the climb down those broad steps. Yeva follows, half-keen and half-weary. Already the secret door is closing behind them, grinding back into place on an automated timer. Up ahead, the way is blocked off by a slate-gray wall, upon which is carved an elaborate diorama, nine dragons converging upon a circle inscribed in the middle. Lady Sookhee draws a royal seal from her sleeve and presses it into the perfectly shaped indent within that circle. Blue light flashes in filamentous patterns, running up the shapes of the carved dragons, and the wall shudders as it withdraws into the roof like a mouth opening.
Behind them, the door to the treasury shuts completely, cutting off all light from the outside. Yeva has a sudden vision of an intruder stumbling into this secret passage, only to find it sealed and impassable at both ends, and dying a terrible and unseen death in a lightless trap. But the tunnel before them is lined with everstone emitting its cold blue light, and Yeva knows there is further to go.
They follow the pathway as it slopes gently downward. The air grows colder and their footsteps seem to drag out greater echoes. In this wordless silence, the minutes seem to stretch into hours, as if they are journeying to the center of the earth. Yeva has an inkling she is being led to a dragon’s lair; she realizes it was a mistake not bringing a weapon.
“Here we are,” Lady Sookhee says.
Ahead of them, the stone walls open into a vault so high it should brush the heavens. Sconces of everstone are studded along its length, illuminating a collection of wonders arrayed on stabs of stone that seem pulled up from the very ground itself. A collection of bones, scales, teeth and claws, parts of dragons long dead. Yeva draws a chilled breath, struck by a similarity—the guildknight’s museum has a room like this, full of the spoils and trophies taken by hunting parties over the centuries. But while the museum back home bristled with a sense of curiosity and scientific inquiry, a greater gravity surrounds these relics, wrapped in red ribbon or raised on golden altars. On the plinth nearest to her a collection of iridescent scale—very much like that of the royal seal’s—have been sewn together to make a pouch, and painted on those pearlescent leaves are words Yeva approximately recognizes as a prayer for the dead, an invocation of the veil between worlds. This is a mausoleum, a columbarium. Yeva treads carefully between each display, being very still with her breath, feeling like her very presence disturbs the sanctity of the place.
At the end of the room is a skull so large that its shape loses meaning as bone and becomes abstract, part of the terrain. Yeva doesn’t even know what she’s looking at until several moments in, when its lines pull together into form she recognizes. The dragon’s skull is larger than a house, larger than a palace, and the beast it must have belonged to could have shaped the sky and the earth.
Sookhee sees her staring, frozen, awed, and says: “In the royal records that skull is said to be that of Chuan-pu, our ancestor dragon.”
“The myth? It really happened?”
“Who’s to say? In all honesty, we weren’t there and we didn’t see it happen, so we can never be fully certain. All we have are the records and the stories, and stories don’t always have to be true. I heard a lot of stories about you before you came here. That you were cruel and deadly, an inflexible fist that crushed everything that stood in your path. But that isn’t true, is it?”
The girl-king strides between the rows of dragon reliquaries. “What I can say is true, is this: dragons have always been at the center of our society and culture since time immemorial. And yes, they used to roost here in the mountains, in great numbers. Numbers that would frighten your Sun Emperor, cause him to send armies over the border. But not anymore.” She looks sad. “Over the years they’ve been hunted as they ventured beyond our kingdom until nearly none are left. The scales you found belonged to a creature who is probably the last of her kind.”
Yeva deliberately paces her words. “You’ve seen this creature?”
“I’ve not met it in these caverns myself. But I know it exists.”
Yeva turns away from Sookhee. The wheels of her mind spin wildly, while her body feels cold, too heavy to move. The rage and determination she felt when she first found traces of the dragon have long fled her. It is her instinct—it is her duty —to hunt this creature down. But the thought of the dragon haunts her mind: this one beast, last of her kind, sliding alone through an endless dark. No one speaks to her. No one sees her. When she dies, the last of her family will go with her.
“It’s a secret,” she says, mostly to herself. A secret of the neighboring kingdom, well contained and well concealed. Why should it be the business of the Sun Emperor? Why should it be within Yeva’s purview to get rid of it? What gives her the right?
Separate from Yeva, Lady Sookhee seems caught in her own reverie. She brushes fingers along the line of a small jawbone, almost ruefully. “It’s weighed heavy on my mind for a long while now,” she says. “It is during my time that this kingdom will see the end of the dragons. It’s been hard to accept. Ever since the death of my royal father I haven’t stopped thinking about it. In many ways it was a relief… and yet I never expected to lose my mother so soon, when I was but a young woman. Now the fate of the kingdom rests in my hands.”
Something she said catches Yeva’s attention. “Your royal father?” Lady Sookhee has rarely spoken of her father, much less that he was of royal status. No one in the palace has mentioned existence of a past prince-consort.
“Yes. He died a long time ago, when I was a child. It’s no matter.” She brushes past the topic as though ashamed of it. “When I was a young girl, I determined that I should be the last of my bloodline. I won’t saddle more children with the burden of my family’s curse.”
“Your blood-sickness.”
“Indeed. Already I planned to have a council of wise maidens rule in my stead, but I thought I had years left—I imagined I would be in my fifties when the throne fell to me. Alas, such things can never be predicted.…” Briefly her gaze grows distant before she snaps back to the present. “I’m sorry for lying to you. I didn’t trust you then, when you were still a stranger to our city. But I know better now. Forgive me.”
You still shouldn’t trust me, Yeva thinks. Guilt crashes through her, not as an avalanche but a slow glacial advance, making her bones heavy. If she had to choose between her duty and the tender shoots of affection that have grown in her over the past few months, which would she pick? She has no answer to that. “It is me who needs to ask forgiveness,” she says. “I behaved rudely, especially to Sujin. And Captain Lu.”
“Understanding will come in time,” she says. “But now you know this secret which we have been keeping from you. Far be it from me to tell you what to do, but I do dearly hope that you will keep this secret a little while longer.”
Yeva thinks of the falcon she sent to Emory, and the guilt advances deeper into her bones. “Of course,” she says. She will write to Emory again, in cold and clear terms, telling him it was all a misunderstanding, telling him she now understands the situation through a lens of logic and there is nothing to worry about. He will read her letter and concede to her deductions, canceling whatever preparations he has been making since her prior, barely coherent missive. It will all blow over. It has to.