Page 23 of Shadow Throne King
“They did notonlybirth the Northern Kingdom.” The dragon paused, her eyes searching my face. I frowned, my mind searching the old stories I knew, the ones told by the eldest in our clan and others. Even the elders told their stories the same as my mother.
“No,” I said. “We would have known if there was another nation in our territory. The north is large, larger even than the Southern Imperium, but much of it is too cold to be inhabitable. The further north you go, the less anyone could survive.”
“So you believe. One of their children went on to found your people and the Northern Kingdom. But one was born like his mother—made of ice, with blood that froze in his veins before he could even draw his first breath.” The dragon grinned, her sharp teeth showing again. “Do you understand now?”
“Ice dragons,” I said. “You’re saying that the son of a bear and an iceberg had children. One became a person, and the other became a dragon.”
“Is it so impossible?” She tilted her head, her eyes shifting, looking lit from within the way deep ice in the north did, as though some inner light source illuminated it.
“It’s not … I always believed Yorîmu when she said that it was more story than truth. It was a history we told to children to explain why we lived as we did, but it wasn’t… I…” I struggled to put into words the way I’d always assumed truth and legend diverged somewhere in the story, and yet I couldn’t tell where.
Silence stretched, and I shook my head. “So, the child dragon plans to teach me—the man whose brain has more holes than a groundhog nest—how to do ice magic. Something which my people have never known how to do, thoughour cousinsare born knowing.” I watched her and was rewarded with the sweet smile of a child, all of her teeth showing, and her eyes crinkling in amusement.
“Yes!” She nodded, then put out both hands, palms up. “Long ago, before food grew scarce and people forgot the way of it, your kind and my kind used animal speak to live together.”
“How do you remember this?”
On her palm, a single snowflake circled, a castle growing as the snowflake spun, a trail of ice creating a miniature carving on her hand. It had high steeples and large, round windows. It reminded me of one of the oldest tapestries in the Silver City.
It hung behind my mother’s throne. No one who had ever been to Tallu’s palace would call the chair my mother sat in a throne. But it was all we had in the north.
Either way, behind her was a massive tapestry, with a palace just like this in the center. Around the edges, it told the history of our people, the uniting of the clans and the founding of the Silver City.
“I’m not sure how I remember. But I hold memories of all the dragons who came before me in my line. All of my mother’s lived experience rests in my head, along with all of her mother’s. It fades a bit after that.” Despite her small, youthful face, the dragon seemed very old. “I am glad of it. I do not know that I would want to remember the fall of the city where our kind once lived in peace together.”
She frowned, closing her hand, and the ice palace turned to water between her fingers, splashing onto the tree stump.
“What should I call you?” I asked.
She opened her mouth, and I saw her lips move, but the sound that emerged was a dragon roar. “That is the name my mother intended to give me.”
I blinked at her. “I don’t suppose there’s a convenient word in Northern I could use. That sounded a bit like the translation wasI’m ready to eat you for dinner.”
The dragon shook her head. “Call me what you want.”
“Well, I’ll have to give you an appropriate name, then.” I considered her. She looked nothing like my sister. Eonaî had golden hair and blue eyes, while the ice dragon was all pale moonlight and eyes like opals.
But Eonaî had given me the egg with hope. And despite everything, the dragon reminded me of what my twin might have been like if she had not had her youth stolen by the knowledge that she had been engaged to our greatest enemy before either of us had been born.
“Naî.” I reached out, and despite the fact that she could probably eat my entire arm whole, I patted her head. Because I was a fool, and I fell in love with dangerous people like Tallu.
“Naî,” she repeated and nodded once. “We run out of time. Whatever was done to your head when you were injured by the general left room for this magic.”
“Losing my animal speak means I can wield ice magic?” I asked.
“It left room tolearnmagic. Hold out your hand.” When I hesitated, she grabbed my palm and stretched out my fingers, facing upward. “Think of the cold not as the enemy, not as a danger, but as a person. One you call on when you need help. One whose call you answer when they need the same.”
“A friend.” I frowned down at my hand, trying to imagine something so constant as cold as anything more than an inevitability.
“A friend like any of those you’ve made here in the Imperium. A friend who you cannot trust and do not know the true motives of, but upon whom you must rely,” she said, annoyed at my disbelief. “You know cold, Prince of the Northern Kingdom. Call to it.”
And how often, in the balmy southern springtime, had I wished for the cold of the north? I let that yearning take hold,wishing desperately for cold. I called to it, the way my heart called to Eonaî.
A single snowflake formed in the center of my palm, then more, a spiral of them appearing, curling up to my fingers.
“What is this?” I lifted my other hand, pressing into the gathered snow, and it melted under my touch.
Naî smiled. “It is a start. Now, we must return.”