26. Nerina
NERINA
The Black Spire is larger inside than its exterior suggests, which I did not expect and which I file without comment because commenting on it would mean admitting I had expectations about the interior of a dragon lord’s fortress, and I am trying to focus.
The council chamber is at the Spire’s heart, carved from the same black volcanic rock as everything else but older-feeling, the ceiling lost in shadow forty feet up, torches in iron brackets throwing orange light across the walls and the faces of the assembled clan.
I walk in behind Maelor and I do not look at the ceiling because looking at the ceiling is what you do when you are overwhelmed and I am not going to be overwhelmed in this room.
I look at the room instead.
Twenty-two dragons in human form. Most of them watching me with the focused interest of creatures encountering the unfamiliar.
A few with the careful neutrality of the politically cautious.
Drazik at his wall, the broken left horn catching the torchlight, his orange eyes moving over me with the assessing attention of a predator who has just been handed an unexpected variable and is already working out what to do with it.
I find Ysara near the eastern arch. She gives me the smallest nod. I take it and look forward.
Maelor presents the context. I listen to him do it with the even authority of six centuries, the strategic framing clean and precise, and then he says “She will speak to the corridor approach directly” and the room’s attention shifts and I am standing in it.
I speak.
I tell them what the crossing was. The specific heading I used and how I held it in the storm.
The barrier weather from the inside, not as a human terrified of it but as someone working a problem.
What it was. What everything has always been.
The hull breach and the repair. The approach corridor in the dark, the quality of the pull through the inner fog, the specific angle of the western landing.
I am precise and I do not perform and I do not look at Drazik.
I tell them what I came for. Not the stone — Bren.
My brother’s name in this chamber, in this air, said simply: his name, his age, his lungs, the number Sevraine gave me, the arithmetic that produced a fishing brig and a fog bank and whatever happened after.
No dressing up. Dressed up it would be smaller than it is.
The room is very quiet.
Drazik speaks from his wall. “And you expect this council to find the security of this island well served by a lord who allowed personal sentiment to—”
“I expect nothing from this council,” I say.
He stops.
“I came here to steal from you. I want to be clear about that. I had a plan and the plan was theft and I would have executed it if the arrangement hadn’t been offered.
What I’m telling you is what the approach corridor looks like from the outside, in a storm, in a damaged brig, which is information you did not have before I arrived and which you now have because your lord made a decision that the information was worth more than the removal.
” I look at Drazik directly. “Personal sentiment didn’t survive my crossing.
Sentimentality sinks ships. What got me here was that the arrangement was sound. ”
The room receives this.
I do not wait for the vote. I walk back through the Spire’s lower corridors and out into the volcanic air and down through the forest to the beach, and I sit beside the cold fire pit and I wait, and my hands are steady, and the stone is warm in my pocket, and the bound arm aches less than it did yesterday.