29. Max
Max
The whole base couldn’t stop talking about the Twelve Fires.
Slaves in Crimson Ridge got no festivals. No feast days, no lanterns, nothing on the calendar but our quota. Missy went wide-eyed at the Stormglass lamps strung all over the fortress, and giddier still when she found out the bakeries below ran their ovens through the night.
Our first holiday. Missy’s and mine.
“Most important Covenant tradition there is,” Frost told us. “Twelve beacons in a ring around the capital. The dragon flies the ring and lights every one of them in a single night. Been done that way since the founding.”
“Why?” my sister asked, eyes round and bright.
Over in the corner Ross worked his claws against the toy tree trunk.
“For our people,” Frost said. “It’s a rite and a message both. We’re still here. The lights hold.”
Drakken’s dragon had to fly it. The other heirs flew with him, by tradition. No threat of war would stop that.
This year, I’d be up there too.
“Wear layers,” Aelindor had said. “It’s cold at altitude.”
When I carried my pack down at twilight, Drakken had shifted and settled into the courtyard of Elenmoor. Gold and black and vast, wings folding down against his flanks, scales throwing back the last of the daylight.
The heirs went up his back with their packs. Caspian came last, hauling a full-size suitcase, and a growl rolled up through the flagstones that translated as do you think I’m your fucking mule?
“It’s the picnic blanket. And some other things for Max.”
The growl stopped. The tail flicked once. The luggage was permitted.
We settled along his spine. Below us, Missy stood between Josette and Desta with her whole face tipped up, waving both hands so hard her feet came off the ground.
The dragon had promised her a ride at noon tomorrow.
Not tonight, though. Tonight belonged to the rite.
Desta and the elite guards would keep my sister with their lives, and Corporal Dane would plant himself outside her door until we came back.
Even so, something like dread went across the back of my neck.
Light as a moth. This was the first night I wouldn’t be with her since I got her back from the Haven.
I looked down at her waving, and at the ring of armed warriors standing around her, and called it paranoia and shoved it down.
Five of us now, from six Zodiac Houses.
The wheel was closing.
We flew.
I rode near the base of the dragon’s neck, Caspian and Nikolai behind me, Aelindor at the tail, and the wind of our climbing pulled tears out of my eyes that had nothing to do with crying.
Aelindor had told me to wear layers. He hadn’t mentioned that at thousands of feet the cold got into the seams and stayed there. And every time the dragon banked, the whole line of us swayed together and apart, together and apart, and my body kept getting ready for the contact that never came.
None of the heirs could lay a hand on me. The geas burned any touch that carried desire in it. But scales weren’t hands, and a dragon wasn’t a suitor, so the beast of the one heir who had never claimed me was the only thing among them that could carry me.
I pressed my palm to the hot scale under me, the closest thing to a touch I was allowed. The dragon rumbled, heat pulsing up through my hand. He liked it.
I left my hand there. It was warm, and I was so cold. And then I thought about who was inside that dragon.
Drakken was in there. Somewhere under the scales and the smoke and fire, and I had my bare hand flat on him, stroking slow circles like an idiot, and he could feel every bit of it.
I took my hand off.
The rumble stopped. The great head of the dragon tilted, and I understood I was being asked a question.
I put my hand back.
Below us the kingdom was celebrating. The fortress opened its gates to the towns by custom, and soldiers streamed down into the streets to join the crowds. I’d read the duty rosters, though. The watch on the walls stood double tonight.
Denver base sprawled beneath us in rivers of Stormglass light. The towns beyond glowed like coals shaken out of the same fire, lantern processions winding through them slow and bright.
From that height, you could believe the world had never broken.
Then the rite began.
At the first mountain, the heirs rose to their feet on the dragon’s back, and I rose with them. Drakken banked in low over the great iron basket of the beacon, drew breath, and lit it with a river of red-gold.
We stood witness above the fire as the light caught and climbed.
Then the next peak. Then the next, the dragon carving the ring of the kingdom while flame after flame answered him, a crown of fire assembling itself around everything the Covenant held.
At the seventh beacon a gust shoved me sideways, and I stumbled.
Two hands shot toward me on pure reflex, Caspian’s and Nikolai’s both.
“No!” It ripped out of me over the wind. “The geas!”
Both hands stopped inches short, shaking with the effort of it. I got my own balance and planted my boots on the scales.
“I’m okay.”
I kept my feet the rest of the ring, and neither prince tried to reach for me again. They just held their hands there, close and useless and ready, all the way to the last mountain.
That was worse than falling.
Because a curse like that couldn’t stop the wanting.
The twelfth beacon roared alight, and from far below, the cheering came up at us. The base and every town in the ring throwing its voice at the mountains.
The lights held. We were still here.
“Best Twelve Fires there’s ever been!” Caspian shouted over the wind. “We found Max, and she came with us!”
We landed on the peak of the highest mountain beside the newborn bonfire, on a shelf of stone no army could ever climb. Drakken shifted back and rolled his shoulders as though the whole sky had been a coat he was shrugging off.
Then the heirs made camp together, easy as breathing. Aelindor spread the blanket and Drakken squared the corner. Caspian hauled out food. Nikolai produced wine, and glasses that had somehow survived a dragon flight.
This was their ritual. Four brothers and a fire on top of the world.
And now me.
They built me a plate without touching my hands. Nikolai poured my wine and set the glass down on the stone for me to lift. Caspian pushed the warmest corner of the blanket toward me with his boot. Aelindor sat across the fire, where looking was safe.
They’d gotten frighteningly good at it. That was the thing that got under my skin. Already, it had turned into choreography.
Nikolai set things down instead of handing them. Aelindor picked his seat by geometry. They had built an entire language for loving me at a distance. They were fluent in it, and watching them be fluent in it made me want to put my fist through something.
The food was good and the wine was better.
The fire was warm and the kingdom glittered below us rim to rim.
I sat in the middle of the family I had chosen, and not one of them could brush my sleeve.
A dream with a single rule in it, and the rule was Xander’s.
My rage at him burned like the beacon behind us, and the longing kept moving underneath.
So I did what miners do with unbearable things.
I put them to work.
“All right.” I dug into my pack. “Sit in a circle. I’m going to rob you gentlemen blind.”
Deadman’s Lantern. Every miner in Crimson Ridge played it on stolen rest shifts, and I’d assumed it had been buried down there with our dead.
Then, my second week in the barracks, I walked past an open window and heard one cadet accuse another of going down the shaft.
I stopped short. They called it Ten Air.
None of them had ever been underground in their lives.
Somebody’s grandfather had carried it up out of some other pit a lifetime ago, and it had been walking ever since, changing its name at every border like a fugitive.
Same two dice, same pebbles, same deck, same rule about the last one breathing taking the pot.
I found my own kit on a stall in the lower market lanes. A canvas pouch, a deck, two dice, and a handful of river pebbles already worn smooth by thumbs I would never know. The trader asked ten coins for it. I emptied my pocket.
I carried that pouch up a mountain on the back of a dragon.
The rules took two minutes. The slang took the rest of the night.
“Your pebbles are your air.” I counted them out around the blanket. “Ten each. The pot in the middle is the seam.”
I rolled the dice into the firelight. Five and three.
“Eight’s the depth. Beat it with your hand, or make the table believe you did.”
“And if I want to raise?” Nikolai asked.
“Then you’re going down the shaft.”
Caspian shoved four pebbles in with the back of his hand. “Down the shaft.”
“You’ve got nothing,” Nikolai said.
“Then call it.”
“That’s a cave-in.” I dealt him his next card. “Calling a bluff. And when a man’s got no pebbles left—”
“He’s out of air.” Aelindor was listening the way he listened to treaties.
“Black damp. Out of air, out of the game.”
By the third hand, four princes of the realm were muttering seam and shaft like twenty-year mining veterans.
“One more rule.” I shuffled. “We’re not playing for coin. We play for answers. Every hand you lose, you owe me one honest piece of the Fourfold prophecy. Full transparency.”
Nobody answered right away.
Caspian found something fascinating in the pebbles he was stacking. Nikolai’s eyes went to Aelindor. Drakken didn’t move at all, which from Drakken was the loudest answer in the circle.
I didn’t blame them. I’d kept a demon in my head from all of them. Secrets were how every one of us had survived.
Aelindor had spoken of the prophecy once, the first time we had our hands on each other, and neither of us had been in the mood for scripture.
The memory came up warm and merciless, and across the fire those winter-blue eyes were standing in it with me, and there wasn’t a thing either of us could do about it but look.
He didn’t look away. He simply held my eyes and let me see his love for me.
“Full transparency,” Drakken agreed.