8. FIRE IN MY VEINS
Chapter eight
FIRE IN MY VEINS
PORTIA
The blade is in the air and then it is in my hand, and the part of me that has spent a lifetime hiding what I am does not get a vote.
There is no decision in it. That is the thing about reflex, it lives below decision, in the old wiring, and the old wiring in me is not human.
My hand comes up and closes around the falling thing and a thread of cold fire goes with it, instinct spending itself before thought can stop it, and the blade screams. Not metaphorically.
The metal makes a high thin shriek as my flame touches it, and where I would expect it to soften and run like any honest steel, it does the opposite.
It resists. It drinks the fire and turns it black and gives off a stink I know in my marrow before I know it in my mind.
Scorched silver. The particular reek of metal forged for one purpose, which is to kill things like me.
I drop it. It hits the marble and lies there smoking, and the smoke is the wrong color, and the whole sunlit room has gone silent around the small ugly fact of it.
"Anti-dragon," I say, and my voice does not shake, which is its own small triumph.
"That blade was made to kill a dragon. Not a wolf.
Not a man." I lift my eyes from the smoking metal to the faces ringed around us, courtiers and guards frozen mid-flinch, and I watch the meaning of it travel through them.
They knew what she was. Whoever sent this knew, before the mark, before the hall. They came for the dragon.
Leon is already on his feet and already in front of me, which I will have words about later, because the next thing I see is the line of red opening along his forearm where the assassin's second strike caught him.
A strike I did not even see. A strike he took because his body put itself between mine and a blade meant for my heart.
"You're bleeding," I say, stupidly, and the bond does something I have no defense against. It floods me with his pain as if it were my own, a bright wire of it laid straight into my chest, and I understand all at once and far too late why the law forbids this.
Why you do not bind two creatures together before they are ready.
Because now his hurt is mine and I would burn the world to stop it.
"It's nothing," Leon says, which is what people say when it is something.
His eyes are gold at the edges. The wolf is up and it is furious and it is, I notice with a part of me that is always noticing, holding itself in check, choosing the room over the rage, deciding as the man and not the animal.
Ferb's words must have landed somewhere.
The guards have the assassin down. He is not large.
That is the first wrong thing. He is not a soldier, not a trained killer.
He is thin and young and there is something glassy and burnt-out in his eyes that I have seen before and hoped never to see again.
They haul him up and he does not struggle.
He looks at me, only at me, past the prince and the guards and the king, and he smiles, and the smile is the worst part, because it is not cruel.
It is exalted. It is the smile of someone who believes.
"What are you," Leon says to him, low and dangerous.
The young man does not answer the prince.
He answers me. "The Cup is thirsty," he says, in the singsong of a thing recited many times.
"The Cup remembers the old blood. You ran from it, princess.
You can't run from it." His glassy eyes roll up.
"The Ember Cup drinks, and the Havoc rises, and the false thrones fall. "
The room does not understand. I do.
"Get him out," King Ferb says sharply, and his voice has lost all its silk.
"Out, and somewhere deep, and let no one near him alone.
" The guards drag the young man away still smiling, still murmuring his liturgy, and the king turns to me and the look on his old face is not surprise.
It is confirmation. Whatever he suspected, the boy just proved it.
"You know that name," Ferb says to me. Not a question.
"Everyone in Dragonia knows that name," I say.
"Most of them think it's a story for frightening children.
" The scorched-silver smell is still in the air and I cannot stop tasting it.
"The Ember Cup. An old relic. A cult, if you want the unkind word, and you should, because the kind words are how they recruit.
They believe power is destiny. That suffering is proof of worth.
That a dragon who has been made to bleed and burn enough becomes something higher than a dragon.
" My hands have gone cold. "They believe Havoc, the magic-storms, the corrupted heats, the violence that comes off the Cup like heat off a stove, is not a sickness.
They believe it is the truth, finally let out.
And they have been quiet for years. Quiet enough that we let ourselves believe they were finished. "
Leon is watching me with his bleeding arm forgotten. "And they want you."
"They want my blood," I say, and there it is, plain in the sunlit room.
"Old blood. Royal dragon blood. The Cup is thirsty, he said, and he was not being poetic.
The relic does something with the blood of the old lines.
Amplifies. Feeds." I make myself say the rest, because he has bled for me and he has earned the truth even if I cannot give him all of it.
"If they have been bold enough to send a marked blade into the heart of the Polish court, then they are not quiet anymore.
Something has changed. Someone has given them a reason to move. "
I already know what the someone is. I have known since a sigil burned itself onto my mirror in my brothers' hand. But I do not say it here, in front of witnesses, with the bond still raw, because there are truths you do not set loose in a room you cannot control.
It is then that the letter comes.
A page brings it on a silver tray, white-faced, holding it at arm's length as though it might bite.
It might. It is sealed with the coiled mark of Dragonia in wax that is not red but a deep oxidized brown, and I know what that is too, and the knowing turns my stomach to stone.
Blood-wax. Itis then that letter sealed in blood is a letter that means its threat.
I break it. I read it. The hand is the same hand that burned across my mirror, patient, terrible.
Return to Dragonia, sister. The court requires its daughter. Father grows frail in our care, and frailty is such a fragile state. Do not make us prove how fragile. Come home, and he keeps breathing. Stay in your wolf's bed, and we will send you what's left of him, one piece at a time.
The fire in my veins, the cold blue fire that has never in my life felt warm, goes molten. The page at the tray takes a step back. I feel the heat coming off my own skin and I do not, for once, fight it down, because there is a use for it. There is finally a use for it.
"Portia." Leon's hand closes over mine, careful of the heat, not flinching from it, and the bond pours his steadiness into me the way it poured his pain a moment ago, and the molten thing in me banks down just enough to think. "What does it say."
I look up at him. My fated mate. My cage and my shelter. The man who took a blade meant for my heart an hour after the law finally let him.
"It says I have to go home," I say. "And it says my brothers are going to kill my father if I don't."
Dearest Readers,
Scorched silver. Metal forged for one purpose, and that purpose has a name and the name is Portia.
Think very carefully about what that means, my darlings. That blade was not made in an afternoon. Somebody commissioned it. Somebody knew what she was long before a mark ever appeared on her throat, before the moonstone, before the garden.
And a thin, glassy-eyed boy who was not a soldier smiled at her like a man in church and told her the Cup was thirsty.
So here is my question. Who told them she was coming?
And who in that beautiful sunlit room was not surprised?
Turn the page.
Your author.