11. Chapter 11
Kalli
Two days after I arrive, I fly. Nobody says the word, but I get the sense I’m being encouraged. Mrs. Nell puts a heavy coat on the chair, tells me the morning is clear, and leaves the door open. I walk out onto the frozen lawn behind the house, and for a long moment I just stand there.
Then I shift for the first time in over a year.
It hurts. My wings come out slow and wrong, stiff along every joint. The muscles across my back cramp and release and cramp again. I stretch each wing to its full reach and hold it there while the ache burns through and fades. The wind comes across the lawn and gets under them.
I run four steps, and I’m up.
Yes!
The cold pours over me. The house drops away, then the wall around the yard, then the whole valley opens out below—white fields, black pines, the frozen line of a river.
My body remembers everything. Every correction, every shift of weight, every small movement of the tail.
A year in cells and boxes, and my wings still know their work.
Oh, my God. This is amazing!
I climb until the air goes thin and my eyes stream, and I level out, and for a little while I just fly. Big slow circles over the valley, with the sun on my scales and nothing touching me.
This is the first hour in over a year that has belonged to me.
Then I go looking for the boundary.
I aim at the ridge on the north side and climb.
The pressure starts behind my teeth when I’m still far from the rock—the same bitter taste, stretched across the whole sky in front of me.
I slow down and feel my way forward, and it thickens, and thickens, and then it stops me.
There’s nothing to see. My wings work but I don’t move forward.
When I push harder, my head fills with pressure, and I fall back.
I try again further along, above the river gap. Same.
Dammit!
I try going straight up, higher than any wall could reasonably reach, until the cold cuts through even me.
It’s there too. The valley isn’t fenced. It’s sealed. A bowl with a lid on it, and I’ve just flown along all of it.
I glide back down to the lawn, land badly and stand there in the snow, breathing hard, human again.
So that’s how big my cage is.
Mrs. Nell is waiting in my room when I come up, the coat pulled around me. There’s a fire going and towels laid out, and she looks me over—wind-burned, wet to the knees, half pleased with myself in spite of everything.
“Good flight?”
“Long year.”
“I imagine.” She folds a towel over her arm. “We need to prepare you.”
“Prepare me for what?”
“A bath first. You’re frozen through.”
A bath is a bath. I’ve earned one, and my back is one long cramp. Whatever’s coming will come whether I’m clean or dirty.
The bathroom is warm and full of steam. The water smells strong—oils in it, sweet and heavy, roses and something under the roses that I don’t know. I get in, and the heat sinks into my sore back, and the cramps let go one at a time. For a few minutes it’s simply good.
Then my skin starts to tingle.
Heat after cold prickles on the surface and fades. This is different. It sits under my skin, low and constant, everywhere the water touches, and it doesn’t fade. I lift my arm out of the water and look at it. Nothing to see. The tingle keeps on.
“What’s in the water?”
“Oils.” Mrs. Nell pours a pitcher slowly over my shoulders. “For your skin. You’ve been living in concrete for a year.”
She’s calm. She’s kind. She has been kind since the moment I stepped out of that truck. She’s kind now, with her sleeves rolled up and sweet oil on her hands, while my body prickles in water she prepared.
I get out of the bath. She doesn’t stop me. She wraps me in a towel, sits me by the fire, and combs my hair out in long, even strokes. My skin goes on humming under the towel. My nipples tighten, and my thighs press together.
What the fuck?
Then she takes a small bottle out of her apron pocket and holds it out to me.
Glass, with a stopper. The liquid inside is pale gold.
“What is it?”
“It will make things easier for you.”
“Easier how?”
“It’s better if you take it yourself, Kalli. In your own time. I promise you that.”
“What is it?”
She doesn’t answer that. She holds the bottle out, steady, kind, and waits.
“No.”
“Kalli—”
“No!”
My dragon comes up with the word.
She’s fed, rested, and stretched, and she is not the starved, flattened creature they shipped up this mountain.
She rises fast and close to the surface, and the room changes around me.
The steam rolls back off my skin. Heat pours off my shoulders.
Scales lift along my forearms, gold and hard, and the towel starts to smoke where it touches me.
Mrs. Nell doesn’t move. She watches, expressionless, as the scales come up my arms, and her hands stay folded around the bottle.
Now, my dragon says. Now, while we’re strong.
And I want to. My whole body wants to.
But I’ve flown around the boundaries of this valley. There is nowhere to go. If I burn this room, they’ll cuff me, dose me anyway, and I’ll have shown them how fast they have to chain me. There’ll be a better time to use that than tonight.
I push her back down. My teeth grind, and sweat runs down my spine. The scales sink back under my skin one row at a time, slow, and she fights me the whole way.
The towel has a scorched brown line across it where it lay against my arms.
“I’m not drinking that shit.” There’s a rasp to my voice that’s pure dragon.
Mrs. Nell looks at the scorch mark. Then she sighs—a small, real sigh, the first crack I’ve ever seen in her—and she puts the bottle back in her apron. She goes to the door and opens it.
The men from the yard come in. Four of them.
The first one is carrying my cuffs.
I know them the moment I see them. Not new ones. Mine. The same runed steel they removed when I arrived here. They kept them.
Of course they kept them.
“Screw you!” I go for the window because it’s the only direction that feels like a way out, but I don’t get there.
“Legs,” the first one says, and somebody takes my legs.
They’ve done this before. One man on each arm, one across my back, all their weight, nothing wasted. I get a hand free and put my nails through somebody’s cheek.
“Fuck! She’s got my— Hold the arm. Hold the arm!”
They hold my arm. None of them hits me. They were told not to damage me, and they don’t need to, because there are enough of them to keep me pinned for as long as it takes to get the cuffs on my burned wrists.
The runes wake up. My dragon surges and the runes press her flat. My whole body arches once and drops.
Then they hold my head, and Mrs. Nell kneels in front of me with the bottle unstopped.
“Don’t,” I say, twisting my face away. “Don’t do this.”
“I asked you to take it yourself,” she says. “I meant that kindly.”
Fingers force my jaw open. The liquid goes in, sweet and thick. A hand closes my mouth, and another strokes down my throat until I swallow. Then it’s done. Four trained men, one kneeling woman, one small bottle. It took them less than a minute.
Fucking bastards!
Mrs. Nell doesn’t leave the room. She doesn’t look away, and she doesn’t stop being kind. She wipes my chin with a cloth, gently, while the men hold me down on the floor.
The drug comes on fast.
Heat first, rolling up from my stomach through my chest and into my face. Then weight. My arms go heavy. My thoughts stay clear, but my body doesn’t feel like my own anymore.
Kalli. My dragon, far away. Kalli. Get up.
She’s still there. Still furious. But the drug has packed itself between us. Her voice reaches me small, from a long way down. Her fire reaches me as barely any warmth at all.
Mrs. Nell goes to the door. Renwick is standing in it. I don’t know how long he’s been standing in it.
“She’s taken it,” Mrs. Nell says.
“Willingly?”
“No.”
“A pity. The willing ones settle faster.” He looks past her at me, on the floor, in a towel, with my hands cuffed in front of me. “How long?”
“It’s already working. It brings the heat on within the hour. The sedative will keep her manageable through the evening.”
Manageable? We’ll see about that!
I try to fight it, but it’s no use. I’m lying on the floor, and I can hear every word, and I cannot do one thing about any of it.
They dress me. I can’t even make that hard for them. Then two of the men carry me down a hallway I haven’t seen before, into the other wing, and through double doors into a large room.
The room is beautiful. Carpets, carved wood, a fire in a stone hearth, candles already burning. And in the middle of the room, a wide bed made up in white.
They put me in a chair near the fire because I can’t stand. My head keeps sagging, and I keep dragging it back up.
Now what?
It doesn’t take long to find out. Renwick comes in with another man.
Dragon. I know it through the drug, through everything—the dry heat off both of them fills the room.
This one is old. Older than Renwick, and it shows in ways Renwick doesn’t let show: thin all over, dry-skinned, careful on his feet.
His eyes are pale yellow. They run over me, assessing.
It makes my skin crawl, even though it’s burning from the drug.
“Ilmar Vex,” Renwick says, “Kallista Ondrathe. Heir of the Aldrake seat.”
“She’s not what I expected,” Vex says.
“She’s within the range your people specified. Hip measurements are on file. She’s young; she’s proven fertile stock on the maternal line, and her bloodwork has been consistent for over a year. You’ve seen all of it.”
“Records are records. I wanted to see her.” Vex walks around my chair, not close. “The Aldrake line breeds true, and shares multiple ancestors with the Vex line. That’s the value. Two of my grandsires came off that mountain range.” He stops in front of me. “How soon can we expect results?”
“The first attempt can be confirmed within weeks. My physician will monitor her from the first mating.”
“And she’s fit? After a year in that pipeline?”