5. Fen
CHAPTER FIVE
FEN
At dawn, I arrived at the council chamber.
My mother’s voice cut through the room before I’d fully entered. “The Scorching will be held in one week.” Her posture was so still she could’ve been carved from the same pale stone as the castle walls.
I stopped mid-step, one hand still on the door.
Not three weeks. One.
“I see.” I closed the door and started across the room.
The council chamber had been built to make a person feel insignificant, with high ceilings that swallowed sound and windows facing the mountain range instead of Shaleside below, as if the kingdom’s business couldn’t be troubled with what actually lived there.
Light slanted across the broad wooden table, cold and white.
I took my seat at Mother’s right hand. The chair had been constructed of the best wood and positioned outside the council’s half-circle.
That was me: audience dressed as participant.
I’d sat here for fifteen years, but the wood still gouged like it expected someone else.
The three council members had already taken their places.
Lord Holmen sat across from us, his bulk filling his chair.
He’d dressed in dark, formal robes despite the early hour.
Lady Chambers sat on his left, wearing an ornate tunic and pants, as always.
Mother’s scowl landed on her for half a breath before she looked away.
Lord Andra lounged to Holmen’s right, his goatee freshly trimmed, his posture too casual for a council called at dawn.
Dorresk stood near his desk. He’d been the council’s scribe for as long as I could remember. His quill waited beside paper. He’d risen when I entered and bowed, not taking his seat until I’d settled in mine.
He was the only person in this room who behaved as if I was already king.
“Why move up the Scorching?” Lord Andra asked.
“The Oracle makes these decisions, not me,” my mother said, waving for Dorresk to record everything said in the room.
Lord Holmen’s gaze narrowed, while the other two leaned back in their chairs, watching my mother.
The last race had been held twenty-three years ago, and we all knew who had died without even making it through the second trial.
I’d studied the records. Every royal did.
It was part of our preparation, understanding what you were entering, what had killed previous riders, and what had created heroes.
Our library held years of detailed accounts.
Trial descriptions, though they magically changed with each race.
Dragon performance metrics. Rider casualties with causes noted.
Forty-one riders had entered the last Scorching. Only twelve were still alive after the third leg of the race.
I’d memorized most of my father’s entry. Died in the second trial. Interred with honors.
He’d been called singular.
I’d found that word in a separate archive, a collection of pre-Scorching assessments written by the trial observers who evaluated each rider’s potential before the race began. Most entries ran half a page. Competent. Strong dragon bond. Good instincts under pressure.
My father’s entry took up four pages, and the observer had run out of language twice, crossing out words and starting again. “Unprecedented” had appeared three times. “Dangerous” appeared once, though the observer hadn’t clarified how.
I’d read those pages until the paper softened along the fold.
I traced a knot on the table, the movement small enough no one would notice. My restlessness wanted out. It was vital I keep it contained.
Lord Holmen leaned forward, his voice filling the chamber before anyone else could speak. “The Oracle’s will be done. This is not merely tradition, Your Majesty. This is divine mandate.”
His attention fell on me and held for a beat too long.
I couldn’t read his expression, but he was old enough to have learned every trick to mask it.
He’d been at my bonding ceremony. He’d watched them place Aristus’s Unity Band around his throat and called it sacred. He’d patted me on the back after and told me how proud he was of me. I’d shrugged him off then and every time since.
I traced the table’s wood grain and let him wonder what I was thinking before meeting his gaze head-on and holding it, daring him to declare the outcome of the upcoming Scorching as mandate as well.
He flinched. Only the skin around his eyes tightening, but I saw it.
I looked away first, letting him think he’d won.
I was told he’d stood beside Mother at my father’s funeral pyre, which I had not been allowed to attend. They said seven was too young, that it would be too much for my childish heart.
I’d found his signature at the bottom of my father’s assessment, plus a single line in his tight script: Monitor closely. This one doesn’t know what he is yet.
I’d assumed it referred to my father’s potential as a rider.
Sitting across from Holmen now, I wasn’t so sure.
I’d read Holmen gave my father’s eulogy himself. An extraordinary man. Taken from us before he could show the full measure of his worth.
I’d read and reread those words, turning them over like a smooth stone I’d found along the side of a stream.
If he’d been an extraordinary man, why did Holmen never talk about my father?
Through years of council meetings and ceremonial occasions and quiet dinners where old men grew sentimental, he’d never once shared a story about my father.
Never said your father used to… or I remember when he…
Men who’d genuinely mourned someone shared those stories eventually.
Lady Chambers pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the pile lying on the smooth surface in front of her and flicked her finger toward her pen.
“We’ll need to manage public expectations.
Entrant processing will require additional personnel.
I suggest security for the initial commons trial—assuming any dare enter—and healers for the aftermath of the Scorching itself. ”
Aftermath. Was that what we were calling it now?
My jaw tightened. I rolled my shoulders once, trying to shake off the weight that had settled there since the meeting started.
Lord Holmen’s gaze tracked the movement before sliding away.
The lady took some quick notes before looking up at us all. “We need to ensure the winner transition arrangements are made well in advance. Relocation protocols, if needed. Documentation. The standard procedures.”
“See to it yourself,” Mother said.
They spoke some more, their words sliding over me. Administrative noise. Twenty-three years ago, I’d heard the servants whispering about the upcoming Scorching in the castle halls. Then my father was dead, and I’d stopped paying attention to anything.
“Orla, the commons rider who made it to the third trial last time, caused significant complications,” Lady Chambers said. “We should anticipate similar determination this year.”
Complications. That was one word for it.
My mother scowled but didn’t comment.
I’d read Orla’s file. She’d lost three fingers in the first trial and kept flying. She’d made it further than twelve elite riders who’d had significant training and rode bonded dragons. And she’d left a daughter behind.
The commons woman from the bonding ceremony had that same quality, a look that said she’d already decided what she was willing to lose in order to win.
Lord Andra’s fingers drummed on the table. “What parameters exist around the Oracle’s wish-granting process?”
“The Oracle is sacred,” Lord Holmen said, his voice sharp. “She does not follow protocol. She isn’t a tool for our convenience.”
Andra’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I only meant we should anticipate… anything. As Lady Chambers noted, the last commons rider made it quite far. That caused a disruption.”
What he meant was that a commons making it that far had shown that anyone had a chance of winning. Why wouldn’t we want to send that message every time?
If Eradin, as I’d discovered she was called, entered the Scorching, would she last longer than we wanted her to?
“As always, the trials will take care of that for us,” Lady Chambers said, staring down her nose at the younger man. “We don’t need to assure ourselves of anything.”
“How is the wish dispensed?” Lord Andra asked.
“Do you truly care about the mechanics?” I asked. “The Oracle grants what she grants. That’s how it always had been and how it always will be.”
His face flushed, and he directed his attention to the table.
I felt my mother’s attention sharpen on me.
“Commons have as much right to the Oracle wish as we do,” I said. “The trials are sacred. Let them be fair. If you’re so certain they’ll fail, why are you afraid?”
Mother sucked in a breath and gave me a look that shouted, Don’t.
I met her gaze without faltering.
“The Scorching will proceed as it always has, for the good of the realm,” she said while everyone else stared at me. “I will not speculate about commons when related to this illustrious event.”
Lord Holmen cleared his throat. “The realm is served by your wisdom, Your Majesty.”
“I’ll see to the preparations we’ve discussed immediately,” Lady Chambers said.
Lord Andra nodded. “I look forward to watching the event.”
The hierarchy showed itself in who spoke when, each of them slotting into their place.
“You’re dismissed,” my mother said.
They rose and filed out. The door closed behind them with a sound too soft for the size of the room.
My mother turned to face me. Her expression didn’t change, but I’d learned to read the stillness. She was waiting for me to flounder. To apologize for “speaking out of turn”.
I said nothing.
Her mouth thinned, though not by much. She’d trained that response out of herself decades ago.
My stomach twisted. I ignored the feeling.
She rose, but before leaving through the private entrance, she stopped beside Dorresk’s desk.
“Strike everything Prince Fenian said from the record. The council’s minutes are no place for…digressions.”
Her voice held no inflection at all, and that was the point. For this moment, I did not exist. My words never had, and they would not in the record.
Dorresk’s quill stilled. His eyes flicked to me, a scribe’s apology, gone as fast as it came, and then the ink lifted off the parchment in thin gray threads and unraveled, taking my words with it, one at a time.
My mother left through the private entrance.
My voice, gone.
What else in this fortress had been erased?
After Dorresk left, I sat in the quiet, my hands tracing the wood grain on the table.
I got up and walked over to the only window in the room facing the valley.
Shaleside spread below, too far down to see details other than smoke rising from chimneys.
Laundry lines crisscrossing the lanes. Passing lives I’d been taught to see as necessary but distant, the way you saw the foundation of a building.
Important, but not something you thought much about.
From here, the smoke looked clean. Decorative, almost. Like the faelights in the castle corridors. Contained. Purposeful. Harmless.
It smelled different down there. Up here, the air tasted like stone and protocol.
The Scorching served the realm.
The Oracle granted wishes.
And I had one wish I’d kill to see fulfilled.
The healers kept using words like degenerative and irreversible and time, and I kept nodding and dismissing them, then lying awake at night listening through the bond for the hitch on Aristus’s exhale.
If the Oracle could fix what I’d done to him over the past twenty-three years, I would burn every other thing I’d ever wanted to the ground.
I pressed my hand against the cold glass, my fingers splayed.
Somewhere down in the smoke-hazed lanes, Eradin was probably waking up. Pulling on boots. Heading to the aerie to tend creatures I was beginning to believe she understood better than their own riders.
If she was foolish enough to enter the Scorching, she’d die in the first trial.
I should hope for that. It would be cleaner.
Instead, I kept seeing the way she’d looked at the hatchling after the Unity Band closed, as if she’d watched something sacred get murdered. Grief and anger had cracked through her mask before she’d shoved it down.
I couldn’t stop wondering what else she was hiding.
My reflection stared back at me from the window.
I didn’t recognize the expression on my face.