13. CAGED PRINCE
Chapter thirteen
CAGED PRINCE
LEON
The door comes off its hinges and the night comes in wearing armor.
I am between Portia and the breach before the first man clears the frame, and the wolf rises into me clean and fast and without the panic of that first time, because I have done this once now and my body remembers the shape of it.
The croft is small, which is the only mercy, because it means they have to come at us a few at a time, funneled through the broken door like water through a crack, and a few at a time is a number I can answer.
I answer it. The wolf does not need a sword and neither do I, not anymore, and the speed of him is a thing I am only now learning to trust, the way a man learns to trust a current he has been fighting his whole life and has finally stopped swimming against.
The men are not soldiers. That is the second thing I learn, after the noise.
They move like believers, like the glassy-eyed boy in the sunlit room, and they fight the way believers fight, without fear of dying, which makes them more dangerous than soldiers in every way except skill.
The wolf handles the skill. The man handles the count.
Three down in the door. Two more through the window Portia warded, their hands still smoking where the dragon-work bit them on the way in.
A sixth who gets past me and makes it two steps toward her before the bond spikes with her cold fire and he goes down screaming with frost on his face and his hands.
Then the chains come, and they are not chains.
That is the thing no one warned me about.
A man at the back of the press lifts his hands and the ember-light in his eyes pours down his arms and out, and what reaches me is not metal.
It is the Havoc itself given a shape, a lash of red-black light that wraps my chest, my arms, my throat, and where it touches the wolf it does not bind the body.
It binds the self. I have spent my whole life with the wolf as a fist held closed and two days learning to open the hand, and this thing reaches into the open hand and starts, patiently, horribly, to fold the fingers back down.
The strength goes out of me by degrees. The fight in me does not fade, the fight rages, but it is being walled off from the body that could spend it, and there is no worse feeling I have ever known, not the sea, not the funeral, than willing a limb to move and feeling the will arrive at a door that has been bricked shut.
I go down. The room tilts. Somewhere very far away I hear Kael laughing, the easy laugh of a man watching a plan run exactly to schedule, and I hear the words through the wall of it, you see, sister, you see what your pet is worth against the Cup, and the worst part is that he is right.
The wolf is worth nothing against this. The wolf is a fist and they have learned how to open it from the outside.
And then Portia stops hiding.
I feel it before I see it, the way you feel a furnace door swing wide across a room.
Nine years of discipline, the ice queen, the diplomat's still water, all of it comes off her at once like a coat dropped on the floor, and what is underneath is not a woman with a temper.
It is a dragon, old and enormous and entirely done being careful.
The cold blue fire I have only seen in licks and threads floods out of her in a wave, and it is not warm and it is not gentle and it goes through the ember-chains like winter through a cobweb.
The thing folding my fingers back down simply stops existing.
The wall over my will comes apart. Strength slams back into me so hard I nearly black out from the return of it.
But I see her face in the blue light as the power leaves her, and I understand the price even as it saves me.
She has shown them. Every man in that room, and through them every faction in Dragonia, now knows past any deniability what the king's daughter is.
The secret she has spent her whole life clamping a hand over her own throat to keep, and she spent it, all of it, in one breath, to take a leash off me.
"Up," she says, and her voice has fire in it now, literal, the words coming out edged with smoke. "Catacombs. The cellar floor, the stone with the old mark. I'll open it. Go."
We go. I carry the last of the fight on my way out, the wolf back in my hands and furious about the minutes it spent in a cage, and Portia burns a path behind us that no one is brave enough to walk into.
The cellar floor opens under her blood the way the gate did, a black mouth in the stone, and we drop into a cold that swallows the ember-light whole.
Then we are running in the dark through a throat of rock older than the palace above it, her hand a hot point in mine, the sounds of pursuit thinning behind us as the passages branch and branch again.
When we finally stop, it is because she has run herself empty.
She folds against the wall and I get an arm around her and the bond tells me what she will not, that showing herself like that cost her something past the fire, some long-kept piece of who she let herself be.
I am bleeding. I do not tell her where, because she will feel it through the bond soon enough and I would rather she rest the half second before she does.
"You should not have done that," I say into her hair, and I mean it, and I do not mean it, and she hears both.
"They had you in a box," she says. "I don't leave you in a box."
It is, I think, the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me, and it has fire-smoke in it, and I am going to remember it for the rest of my life.
It is then, in the dark, getting my breath back with my mate burning low and spent against my chest, that I catch the scent.
It is faint. Under the cold and the mineral and the old-bone smell of the catacombs, and at first I cannot place it, only that the wolf has gone alert in a new way.
Not threat-alert. Something stranger, something that pulls at a part of me I did not know the wolf had.
Mineral, but not stone. Calcified. Old, but with a thread of something living woven down inside the old, the way a dead coal can still hold one red eye.
I follow it a few steps without meaning to. Portia lifts her head.
"What," she says. "What is it."
"I don't know." I crouch and run my fingers through the grit on the catacomb floor, and it is not all grit.
Some of it is curved. Fragments, pale and faintly iridescent even in the dark, catching the last of the fire-glow off her skin the way her scales catch light.
I lift a piece. It is thin as a fingernail and it hums, very faintly, against my hand, a sympathetic note to the bond in my chest, like calling to like.
Portia goes absolutely still.
I have learned her stillnesses by now. This is not the diplomat's stillness, the controlled one. This is the other kind, the kind a person goes when a thing they buried comes up out of the ground in front of them.
"Portia," I say carefully. "What is this."
She does not answer right away. When she does her voice has gone very small, smaller than the fire, smaller than the fear of her brother, small in a way I have not heard from her and will not spend the rest of the night wishing I had not heard at all.
"Eggshell," she says. "Dragon eggshell." Her hand closes over mine around the fragment.
"Royal line. They were never supposed to be down here.
They were never supposed to be anywhere but the nursery vault, sealed, alive, waiting.
" She lifts her eyes to mine in the dark, and the fire in them has gone to something colder than fear.
"Leon. If these are down here, broken, then they have been into the vault.
They have been taking more than my father's blood. "
The catacomb holds its breath around us, the pale fragments scattered down the dark like a trail of teeth, and somewhere far above the Havoc turns and turns over a poisoned city, and I understand that whatever we came here to save, the cost of it has just gotten larger than either of us knew.
Dearest Readers,
Nine years she hid what she was. Nine years of a hand clamped over her own throat, of scales pressed back under skin, of a secret she was told would start a war.
And she spent all of it, every last drop, in one breath, in front of every witness in that room.
To take a leash off him.
She will never get that secret back. Not ever. And she did not hesitate for one second, and when he told her she should not have done it she said: they had you in a box. I don't leave you in a box.
Tell me, loves. Who would spend their whole life's protection on you in a single breath?
Have you told them lately?
And now there is eggshell in the dark under a palace, where no eggshell has any right to be.
Turn the page. It gets worse.
Your author.