10. THE DRAGON GATE
Chapter ten
THE DRAGON GATE
PORTIA
There is a door under the Polish palace that only opens for blood, and tonight it opens for mine.
We go down past the wine cellars, past the cold rooms where the old kings kept their ice in summer, past the level where the stone stops being cut and starts being only stone, raw and weeping and older than the idea of Poland.
Leon walks at my shoulder with a sword he does not need and will not put down, and behind us comes the small advance party we agreed on, Keith's quietest people dressed as roadies, the tour's first trucks already rolling east above our heads as cover.
The plan is sound. I keep telling myself the plan is sound.
But the deeper we go the more the air changes, takes on a mineral sweetness I have not smelled since I was a girl, and my dragon, who has been a coiled ache since the moonstone, lifts her head and says one word that has nothing to do with planning. Home.
The gate is a seam in the rock you would never find if you did not carry the key in your veins.
I press my burned palm flat to it. The cut I open across the heel of my hand is small, deliberate, a tithe the old pact still demands, and where my blood touches the seam the stone remembers what it is for.
A line of light cracks open. Not the cold blue of my fire, not the gold of his wolf, but a deep furnace red that throws our shadows huge against the cellar wall.
"That," Leon says, very quietly, "is not the color it was supposed to be. Is it."
"No," I say. "It is not."
Because a healthy gate burns pale, the silver-white of moonlight on a calm sea.
Red is the color of a gate forced, a gate run too hot, a gate with Havoc pushing through from the far side like a fever pushing through skin.
I have read about it. I have never seen it.
I am seeing it now in the place I was born, and the dragon in me, who wanted to go home a moment ago, goes still and wary, the way a creature goes still when it walks into its own den and smells something else living there.
"Stay close," I tell him, which is his line, and he hears me steal it and does not smile, because there is nothing here to smile about. "Whatever is on the other side, you let me speak first. Promise me."
"I promise you a great deal," he says, "but I promise you that."
We step through.
Dragonia takes the breath out of me before my eyes adjust, because the first thing is the smell, and the smell is wrong.
Sulfur where there should be the clean cold scent of high stone.
Char where there should be cedar. And under it, faint and sick and unmistakable, the scorched-silver reek of the blade that came down out of the rafters at me a continent away.
The smell of metal made to kill my kind, here, ambient, in the very air of my homeland, as if they have been forging it by the ton.
Then my eyes clear and I see the sky.
I grew up under that sky. It was the bluest in any kingdom I have visited since, a blue so deep it went indigo at the edges of the day, the kind of sky that makes a child believe she lives somewhere chosen.
It is gone. What hangs over Dragonia now is a low boiling ceiling the color of a bruise, green-black and shot through with veins of that furnace red, and it does not move the way weather moves.
It churns. It reaches. Far off over the spires of the capital a column of it has touched down to the earth and is turning slowly, a Havoc-storm, a wound in the world where the Cup's magic has bled through, and even from here I can feel the wrongness coming off it in waves, a pressure that makes my own fire twist uneasily in my chest like a compass needle near a lodestone.
"Gods," Leon breathes beside me. "You grew up here."
"I grew up somewhere that looked like here," I say. "This is its corpse, wearing its clothes."
We have come through into the lee of a ruined watchtower, exactly where the old maps in my head said we would, and that small mercy, that the geography at least still tells the truth, steadies me enough to move.
I lead us along the broken wall, keeping low, the advance party melting into the rocks behind.
And that is when I see the first poster.
It is nailed to the tower door, weather-curled at the corners, but the face on it is unmistakable because the face on it is mine.
Younger. A formal portrait from before I left, before the ice queen, when I still let them paint me smiling.
And beneath the smiling girl, in the heavy black letterpress the crown reserves for its worst enemies, a single word.
TRAITOR.
And beneath that, smaller, the explanation they have given my own people for why the king's daughter must be hunted.
Fled in the realm's hour of need. Consorts with wolves.
Sells Dragonia's blood to foreign thrones.
Every word of it a knife turned exactly backward, my flight from my brothers rewritten as flight from my country, my survival recast as betrayal.
There are more of them. As we move I see them everywhere, on doors, on the boarded windows of shops I remember, my smiling girl-face repeated down the ruined street like a fever dream, TRAITOR, TRAITOR, TRAITOR, until the word stops meaning anything and starts meaning only they got here first, they wrote the story before you could.
"Portia." Leon's hand finds the small of my back, and the bond pushes his steadiness into me, deliberate now, he has learned he can do that. "Those are paper. You are the fact. Paper loses to fact eventually."
"Not always," I say. "Not even usually. But thank you for the lie."
I should have known the gate burning red meant they were waiting.
I should have known the smell of forged silver in the open air meant they had stopped hiding.
But knowing a thing and being ready for the look of it are different animals, and I am not ready, none of my discipline readies me, for the moment the churning dark at the end of the ruined street parts and a figure walks out of the smoke as though the smoke is his to command.
He has gotten older. That is the small human heartbreak underneath the large political one.
The brother I last saw nine years ago was a young man with too much ambition and too handsome a face, and the man walking toward me now has spent those nine years feeding the ambition until it ate the handsomeness from the inside, and what is left is sharp and bright and burning, his eyes lit with the same ember-red that veins the sky.
The Cup already in him. Already changing him.
Leon goes rigid at my side. The wolf has scented kin-of-mine and threat in the same breath and does not know what to do with the contradiction. I put two fingers against his wrist. Wait. Let me speak first. You promised.
Kael stops a dozen paces off, close enough that I can see he is smiling, and his smile is our father's smile worn by something that is no longer entirely my brother.
"Welcome home, sister," he says, and spreads his arms wide over the ruin of everything we were born to, generous, delighted, a host receiving a guest he has waited nine long years to seat. "We kept it just as you left it." The smile sharpens. "Now. Kneel."
The word lands in the poisoned air between us.
Behind me I feel Leon's whole body make the decision not to, feel the gold start to rise, feel the storm front of us crackle.
And I stand very straight under my brother's burning eyes in the corpse of my country and I do not kneel, and the not-kneeling is the first true blow struck in a war that has been waiting nine years for me to come home and start it.
Dearest Readers,
They got there first. That is the thing that guts me about this chapter, and I hope it gutted you.
She came home to save her father and her own face was already on every wall, smiling, nineteen years old, under one black word. Traitor. They wrote the story before she could open her mouth, and by the time she arrived, her people already knew who she was.
Tell me honestly, loves. Have you ever walked into a room where someone had already explained you?
Did the truth save you?
Or did you find, as Portia is about to find, that paper does not always lose to fact?
And now her brother has stepped out of the smoke and told her to kneel.
Turn the page. She does not kneel.
Your author.