18. ASHES AND CLAIMING
Chapter eighteen
ASHES AND CLAIMING
PORTIA
They get me out of the chamber and into a bolt-hole in the old servants' warren, and for a long time I am not anyone at all.
The room is small and it smells of cold ash and mice and the particular staleness of a place nobody has needed in fifty years.
There is a cot. There is a basin with a skin of dust on the water.
Somebody, Keith I think, has put a blanket over me and built a fire that is more smoke than heat, and somewhere beyond the door two of the crew who were never crew are speaking in the low flat voices men use when they are guarding something they are afraid is already lost.
I know all this. I catalogue it the way I catalogue everything, out of habit, the way a hand keeps its grip after the arm has died. But knowing is not the same as being present, and I am not present. I am underwater.
I have been underwater before. Once, in a freezing dark, with a small drowning boy's hand in mine and a choice in front of me that I was too young to understand I was making.
The part of me that swims is very old and very good and it has decided, for now, not to.
So I lie on a cot in a dead room and let the water close over.
The white has receded into gray. The gray is worse.
The white at least had the mercy of being empty.
The gray is full, and what it is full of is one image, played and replayed with the patience of a thing that has all night.
A man's hand opening. Ash sifting between his fingers.
The soft, gentle, obscene register of my brother's voice telling me it was quick.
And under it, the singsong of a believer, the Cup is thirsty, and under that, the worst thing, the thing I keep reaching for and cannot find.
A small warmth under my ribs that does not answer.
Leon does not leave. That is the only fact in the room.
He does not fill the silence. He does not tell me it will be all right, or that it was not my fault, or any of the other sentences people build to protect themselves from a grieving person.
He sits with his back against the cot and his shoulder just touching my arm, close enough that the bond can reach, not close enough to demand anything of it, and every so often he says my name, and nothing else, and lets it go.
"Portia."
An hour. Maybe two.
"Portia. You don't have to come up. I'll sit here as long as it takes. I just need you to know the water has a bottom. Your feet will find it. You don't have to look for it yet."
And it is that, the permission to not be all right, that finally lets a single clear thought surface through the gray.
The thought is not grief. Grief has been running the room all night and has nothing new to say. The thought is the oldest reflex I own, the one my tutors drilled into a child too young to ask why she needed it, the strategist waking up because the strategist never fully sleeps.
Kael lies. Look at the evidence, Portia. Not the wound. The evidence.
I make myself do it. It is the hardest work I have ever done, harder than the fire, harder than nine years of silence, dragging the cold instrument of my own mind back up through the water and pointing it at the thing that is killing me.
The ash. He never let me touch it. I turn that over and over, and it does not wear out.
He held it at arm's length and he opened his fingers and he let me see it, and a man who is telling the truth does not care whether you touch the truth.
A man who is telling the truth hands it to you.
Kael performed it. He produced it the way a conjurer produces a card, at the exact moment it would do the most damage, in that exact register of false gentleness he has used on me my whole life when he wanted me to stop fighting.
I'm sorry. It didn't hold. I'm told it was quick.
Told by whom? He was standing in the chamber.
He was standing over me. There was no one to tell him anything.
And the coal.
He could not have seen it. That is the second thing.
He read the pregnancy off my body the way I read a face across a negotiating table, from the way I held my hands, from a softness in a place I used to be hard.
He guessed. And then he weaponized the guess before I had finished denying it, which is not the behavior of a man who knows.
It is the behavior of a man who has found a wound and is pressing it to see how deep it goes.
I put my hand flat on my own middle. I make myself reach, all the way down, past the fear, past the gray, into the place where the second warmth lived.
It is there.
Faint. Guttering. Buried so far under the Havoc and the exhaustion and the scorched-silver ache in my wrists that I could not find it in that chamber, and I have been mistaking that failure of reach for a failure of the thing itself.
But I am a dragon. I have carried fire in my body since before I could speak.
And I know, I know, the difference between a banked hearth and a cold one, and what is under my sternum is banked.
Not cold. And a banked fire is a fire that can still be fed.
I surface.
Not all the way. But enough that when I open my eyes the gray has a crack of light in it, and the light is the worst and most dangerous and most necessary thing of all, because it is hope.
And hope handed to the grieving too early breaks them.
But hope that the grieving reach for themselves, by their own reasoning, in their own time, holds.
"He showed me ash," I say, and my voice is a ruin, but it is mine. "He never let me touch it. He never let me close."
Leon goes very still against the cot. "No," he agrees, carefully, not pushing. "He didn't."
"He read the pregnancy off my face. Not from a test, not from a sight, he guessed it from how I was holding myself and then he armed the guess.
" The cold instrument turns over, examining, and the more it examines the steadier my voice gets, because this is the one country where I have never been lost. "It's what he does.
He takes the true thing and files it down until it fits the story he needs.
He did it to my leaving. He did it to those posters on every wall in this city.
And he did it to me on that floor." My hand is still flat on my middle, and this time it is not resting there in despair.
It is asking a question. "I felt the coal in that chamber, Leon.
Faint. Failing. But there. I would know if it had gone out.
The bond tells me everything I don't want to hear, every single time, it has never once spared me.
It didn't tell me gone. It told me faint. "
He turns then, and takes my face in his hands, and there are tears on it, mine, falling now that the gray has thinned enough to let them through. And they are not the same tears as before. Before they were grief. These are fury, and fury is a thing I can stand on.
"Then we don't grieve a thing we haven't lost," he says, fierce and low. "We get it back."
And something in me that has been drowning since the chamber gets its feet under it at last, finds the bottom he promised was there, and pushes off.
I kiss him.
It is not the fever. It is not the bond screaming.
It is not grief looking for somewhere to put itself.
It is a choice, the clearest I have made since the garden, and I make it with my whole ruined chest. Because the Cup is a thing that takes and takes and calls the taking holy, and I am so tired of being taken from, and the oldest and truest answer to a thing that only knows how to take is to give.
Freely. On purpose. To the one person in this poisoned country who has only ever asked.
He understands. Of course he understands. He always asks, even now, even with my mouth on his, his hands framing my face like a question. Are you sure. Are you here. Is this you. And I answer all of it the same way. Yes. Me. Here. Choose me back. And he does.
The intimacy that follows is not an escape from the grief.
It is the defiance of it. Two people who have been told the future is ash, insisting with their bodies, in the dark, that it is not.
That the line does not end here. That the fire is banked and not cold and that we intend to feed it.
The scales come, faint, shimmering up my arms, and he traces them like a man reading something precious in a language only he was ever taught.
The bond, frayed as it is, sings one low note all the way through, and the note is not want and it is not even comfort.
It is alive. We are alive. The Cup did not get this.
Afterward, in the dark, with his heartbeat under my ear and the gray finally, fully gone, I tell him the thing I have been keeping even from myself.
"My father hid a failsafe," I say. "Before any of this.
He didn't trust the line not to produce a Kael eventually.
He told me once, half-drunk on a feast night, when I was too young to understand it was a will and not a story.
" I lift my head so I can see his face. "There's an old dragon crown.
Older than the Cup. Older than the pact.
It was made to cancel Havoc, to put the storm back in the bottle, and he hid it somewhere only blood of the line could reach. "
"Why haven't you said this before."
"Because saying it makes it real. And if it's real, then it's worth dying for.
" My throat tightens. "And I have watched every person I love decide that something was worth dying for.
My mother did. My father did. "You did, in a sunlit room, when you put your body between mine and a blade meant for my heart.
" I hold his eyes. "But you should know it exists.
Because we are going to need it, and because you asked me for all of it and I have been giving you halves. "
He opens his mouth to answer, and the door opens first.
Rhun. Bleeding from a shallow line across his temple, ember-light spilling in at his back, one hand still on the frame like he does not entirely trust his legs.
He has the look of a man who has finally jumped off the fence and felt the ground come up hard.
Leon is on his feet with the gold rising and I get a hand out, flat, wait, because I have spent my life reading faces and this one is not lying.
Rhun does not waste breath on greeting.
"Kael moved the timeline," he says. "He knows you'll come for Father.
So he isn't waiting for the Havoc-tide." He swallows.
"He's going to execute him at dawn. On the high balcony, in front of the whole city, and use the death to wake the Cup all the way.
The blood of the old line, given in fear, with a kingdom watching.
" His eyes find mine, and there is the loyalty again, terrible and unearned and offered anyway.
"You have until sunrise, sister. After that there is no father to save, and no kingdom left to save him for. "
Dearest Readers,
She reasoned her own way back. Did you catch that? Nobody handed her hope. He sat on the floor of a dead room for hours and gave her nothing but company and permission, and she found the bottom herself, and she pushed off.
That is why it holds, my darlings. Hope you are given can be dropped. Hope you reason your way to is yours.
And what she reasoned was this: a banked fire is not a cold hearth. She would know. She is a dragon.
But there is a crown hidden somewhere only her blood can reach, and a brother bleeding in a doorway, and a sun that is coming up whether we are ready or not.
Dawn, loves. They have until dawn.
Turn the page. Do not stop now.
Your author.