14. THE EGG AND THE OATH
Chapter fourteen
THE EGG AND THE OATH
PORTIA
Iam almost certain I am pregnant, and I have told no one, not even the man it belongs to.
It is too soon to know the way a doctor knows.
But a dragon knows her own fire, and there has been a second warmth banked low under mine since the night in the croft, small and new and separate, a coal I did not light.
I have carried it through a breach and a catacomb without letting it slow my hand or soften my voice, because the moment Kael learns there is a child is the moment the child becomes another cup.
So I hold it the way I hold the mark on my throat, hidden under a high collar.
Mine. Secret. Terrifying. Precious past saying.
Which is why, when Leon lifts that fragment of eggshell out of the catacomb grit, the cold that goes through me is not only grief for the vault. It is fear for the thing I am keeping.
"There will be more," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I am. "Shell doesn't travel alone. If they carried the eggs through here, they dropped a trail, and a trail runs in two directions."
"Then we follow it toward whatever they were carrying them away from," Leon says, and he is already moving, and I do not stop him, and I should stop him, because a part of me older than my discipline already knows exactly where this passage climbs to and does not want to see it.
The fragments come more thickly the higher we go.
At first they are scattered, a piece here and there in the grit, easy to mistake for stone.
Then they are underfoot in drifts, pale and curved and catching the fire-glow off my hands, and the sound they make under our boots is the worst sound I have heard in this country, a dry small crunching that I feel in my back teeth.
Somewhere behind me one of Keith's people makes a noise and stops making it.
The old-bone smell of the catacombs gives way to something else.
Warm stone. Cinnamon. A scent I know better than my own name, because it was the first thing I ever smelled, because every dragon of my line is hatched into it and warded and watched in it until we are strong enough to wear a human shape.
"Portia." Leon has slowed. He is reading my face by fire-glow. "What is this passage."
"The royal nursery," I say. "It's the most protected room in the world.
That's not a boast, it's the oldest law we have.
There are wards on that door that have held for a thousand years, layered by every queen of the line, one on top of the next, so that even if the palace fell and the country burned, the cradle would keep.
" My throat closes. "I used to be taken there as a girl to lay my hands on the shells and feel them hum.
It's how we're taught what we are. Fire to fire. "
We come up into the light of it, and the door is open.
That is the first wrong thing, and it is the one that tells me everything before I have seen a single broken shell.
The door is open. Not forced, not shattered.
Open, the way a cupboard is open, the way you leave a room you intend to come back to.
And the wards that should sing against my skin from twenty paces are dead.
Cold. Scratched through, deliberately, with something that left a scorched-silver residue in the grooves, and the sight of that residue in that place is an obscenity I have no word for.
The chamber beyond is not a nursery anymore. It is a robbed tomb.
The cradle-vault stands empty. The sealed niches where the eggs of the line slept, sometimes for a generation, waiting for the bloodline to need them, are cracked open one after another down the curved wall, forty of them, fifty, I stop counting because counting is a thing you do to hold yourself together and it has stopped working.
The floor is a ruin of pale curved fragments.
And the warmth that should fill this room, the low constant heartbeat-warmth of sleeping dragon-fire, is simply gone, and the cold that has replaced it is not the cold of stone.
It is the cold of a hearth that has been out so long the house has forgotten it was ever lit.
My dragon, who wanted to come home, who wanted the sky and the blue and the den, lets out a sound inside me that has no human equivalent. A grief that predates language. I have to put my hand flat on the cold wall to stay standing.
"They took them," I say. My voice does not sound like mine.
"The eggs of my whole line. To feed the Cup, or to break for the shell, or for something I have not thought of yet because I cannot make my mind go where they went.
" I make myself look at the empty niches, one after another, because looking away feels like a second theft.
"There has not been an empty cradle in this room in a thousand years, Leon.
Not through wars. Not through the plagues. Kings have died defending this door."
He does not say anything useless. That is one of the things I am learning to love in him, that he can stand in the middle of a horror and not reach for a bandage made of words.
He comes and stands close, his shoulder against mine, the bond pushing steadiness across the link, and he lets the room be as terrible as it is instead of trying to make it smaller.
"Tell me what an egg is," he says quietly, after a while. "To you. Not the politics, not the strategy. The real thing. Because the wolf reacted to that shell down there like it was kin, and I need to understand why my own body knew to grieve before I did."
So I tell him, here, in the wreck of the nursery, the thing I have never had reason to say to anyone.
"A royal dragon egg isn't only a child waiting," I say.
"In the old lines it's tied to a mother's life-force.
When a queen is carrying, an egg of the blood can be gifted to her, and it syncs.
The egg and the pregnancy braid together, fire to fire, and they share what they have.
The egg lends the child the line's old strength.
It shields it from things a human pregnancy could never survive.
" I touch a fragment with the toe of my boot, gently, the way you touch something dead.
"Havoc among them. That's the point of it.
That's what it was for. A dragon child carried through a poisoned age has an egg wrapped around it like a hand around a candle. "
Leon has gone very still beside me. I do not look at him. I cannot, yet.
"It's the oldest blessing my family has," I say.
"Mother to child. It only works if the egg is whole, and alive, and freely given.
" I lift my eyes to the broken shells scattered from wall to wall.
"These were alive. Every one of them. Someone stood in this room and broke a thousand years of blessings to make a weapon. "
And the second warmth under my sternum, the secret coal, flares once, as if it heard me, and a thread of ice goes through me that has nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
Leon feels it. Of course he feels it. The bond does not let me have private weather anymore. His head comes up, and his eyes narrow, and he reads me the way I have learned to dread and to need in equal measure.
"There's something you're not telling me," he says. "It just moved. In you. I felt it."
I could lie. I am very good at lying, it is the first instrument they put in a diplomat's hands. But I have asked this man for honesty twice now and gotten it both times without conditions, and I am too tired and too frightened and too far from anything safe to be a hypocrite in a robbed tomb.
"Not yet," I say, which is the truest answer I have. And then, because his face is doing something terrible, "Soon. I promise you. When we are somewhere the walls don't carry it to my brother. Just, not here. Please."
He holds my eyes a long moment. I watch him want to push, watch the wolf want it, watch him decide.
"All right," he says, and nothing else, and the trust of that, the sheer unearned grace of a man setting down a question because I asked him to, undoes me more thoroughly than any answer could have.
"Then promise me something instead," I say, before I lose the nerve, because the nursery has shown me exactly how this can end and I will not walk into the rest of it without this nailed down.
"If it comes to a choice. If you are standing in a room and you can save me, or you can save what the Cup is reaching for, the line, the future, the thing worth more than either of us, you choose the future. Not me. Swear it."
"No," he says, instantly, flatly, the wolf right at the surface.
"Leon."
"I'm not swearing that." He turns to face me full on.
"I will not stand in a room and choose to lose you.
There isn't a version of me that survives it, so it isn't a real choice, it's just two ways of ending.
" He takes my face in his hands. "Ask me anything else.
Ask me to walk into fire, I'll go, I'll go tonight.
But don't ask me to weigh you on a scale, because the wolf and the man agree on exactly one thing and it is that, and you will not move either of us off it. "
And the awful, selfish, human truth is that I am glad. I wanted him to refuse. I am ashamed of how much I wanted him to refuse, and I will never tell him, and the bond has probably already told him anyway.
It is then that my body chooses to make a liar of all my plans.
It comes as a deep low cramp, a wrongness, a pulling, and a heat that is not the good heat.
And I feel the secret coal under my sternum gutter, flicker, struggle, the way a flame struggles in a draft it cannot find the source of.
I make a sound. I do not mean to. My hand goes to my middle and comes away and there is blood on my palm, dark in the dead nursery light.
I am standing in the room where my line is supposed to be safest in all the world. And it is the room where I understand, with a horror that empties me out from the inside, that the Havoc has already reached the thing I was trying to hide from it.
"Portia." Leon has me before I fold, his arms the only solid thing left in the world. "Portia, what's happening, talk to me, what's happening."
And I cannot answer him, because to name it is to make it real, and I am not ready. I am not ready. I will never be ready for this.
Dearest Readers,
An empty cradle. A thousand years and not one empty niche, and kings have died at that door, and Portia walked into it and found the wards scratched through with the same metal they forged to kill her.
She asked him to swear he would choose the future over her. To weigh her on a scale and let her lose.
He said no. Flatly. Instantly. No.
And she was glad, loves, and she is ashamed of how glad she was, and if you have ever asked someone to promise you something you desperately hoped they would refuse, then you already understand this chapter better than I can explain it.
But her body has just betrayed her in the one room where her line was supposed to be safest in all the world.
There is blood on her palm.
Turn the page, my darlings. Hold my hand.
Your author.