Chapter Eight Frejara
The gates of Irongate rose before us like the teeth of some ancient beast, gilded at their peaks but dark at the roots, where shadow still clung despite the morning sun.
The city was awake – more than awake, alive in a way that felt fevered.
The drums began before we saw the gates – low and deep, like the sound of a heartbeat.
They rolled down from the ridge like a second sunrise, echoing against the stone-flanked road that led to the citadel.
Not that long ago, I had heard these same drums at the front lines, used not to welcome but to break men apart from the inside out.
Then, they had been a weapon. Today, they were dressed in silk and a joyous rhythm.
Celebration made of thunder. Banners in black and gold fluttered from every window, every arch, every pole and spire.
They snapped in the breeze like they were restless for blood.
They were welcoming their General home.
As we descended into the city, the crowd thickened.
They lined the streets in layers, children perched on ledges, elders watching from behind veils and latticework.
When they saw me, they began to cheer. Not loud at first – just a ripple, a murmur of recognition – but it built, and soon their voices filled the air like smoke in a dry field.
Someone threw the first flowers. Pale petals arced through the sunlight and landed on the cobbles ahead of my mount, and then others followed.
Marigolds, lilies, rose-heads snapped from their stems. It became a torrent.
Their raised voices called for their General. Not for the woman. Not for the Heir Apparent. But for the Unbroken Blade of Irongate – the sword that had never shattered, even if stripped of its flame. It rang through the streets like a swift gust of wind, sweeping over stone and iron and flesh.
The procession behind me moved like the measured swing of a blade mid-arc – precise, gleaming, inevitable.
Astrid and Daen flanked the cart, eyes scanning every window, every shadowed doorway with the kind of tension that doesn’t loosen until long after the danger is passed.
The soldiers rode with backs like iron rods, their armour polished to a mirror shine, reflecting the sun in blinding shards.
Like Astrid had said a mere few nights before – we were dressing up a pyre and calling it theatre. And now here we were: the theatre. The pageant. The promise.
We were not simply an escort. We were a message to the entire city and all the others we had conquered. The Sorcerer Queen’s will would not be undone, and all those who opposed her would perish in the Black Flame.
But even still, all I could think about was the quiet song of our prisoner and the next victim to fall upon the fire.
“No roads lead to Dragna’toch, but all roads bring you home, sister.”
Alaric’s voice had been soft when he sang it – gentle, almost reverent. Like something remembered from another life. Like a lullaby sung to a child he’d never held.
I had not heard that song since I was very young – since the lessons behind shuttered doors, where I was made to recite every line, every fragment of myth that traced its way back to the First Fire.
My Mother watched me with that familiar, pinched expression – equal parts scrutiny and disappointment – as I failed to summon even a flicker of flame.
At first, there had been a quiet certainty that the fire would come. I was her daughter. I bore the bloodline. And for a time, that had been enough. Until it became painfully obvious that the birthright of our line had passed me by.
But even when the flame refused to come, the lessons did not stop.
They only deepened—sharper, more exact—as though, by learning what I would never become, I might better understand what I lacked.
Each word a brand. Each history, a mirror.
She carved the Sisterhood into my bones – not to honour it, but to remind me of what I had failed to inherit.
“No gates will greet you at Dragna’toch, but they all open to you, sister.”
Dragna’toch. The true stronghold of the Sisterhood – veiled from the world, unreachable by any road, unmapped, and unspoken.
It did not rise from mountains or settle in valleys known to cartographers.
No traveler has stumbled upon it. It could not be found by those who searched.
Dragna’toch existed elsewhere and nowhere – hidden and shielded by centuries-old magic.
It called only to those born of the blood that built it or those they chose to summon.
But no man had ever set foot beyond its wards – not even those who had fathered the daughters born there. To the world beyond, Dragna’toch remained nothing more than a myth veiled in ash and silence.
And so, for a man to know those words…
From the cart behind me, I heard the faint creak of wood – the wheels of the cage holding the Queen’s prize catching on the slope, just for a moment.
It was the first time I heard a sound from his direction since last night.
Alaric had not said a word since he had quietly sung something he had no place knowing.
Instead, he had kept his eyes on me ever since.
I didn’t look back, but I could feel his gaze like a weight on my spine, heavy and yet calm.
It was not the stare of a man awaiting death.
It was the steady gaze of someone who had made his peace with the inevitable.
The ache in my shoulder flared again, twisting through muscle and bone with a sudden, familiar sting. The crowd roared around me, but I couldn’t hear it clearly anymore. Behind my ribs, a tremor began – a subtle pull, like a thread being drawn.
I tightened my jaw and focused instead on the rise of the road, the way it coiled like a serpent toward the keep.
We passed beneath carved arches, each more elaborate than the last. Sunlight spilt between the eaves, catching in the petals at the hooves of my horse.
Someone reached out to touch my boot, and a guard shoved them back. There was no malice in it. Just order.
“There are no windows in Dragna’toch, but you will see inside, sister.”
Magic in Eryndia had never belonged to men. In truth, it had not belonged to anyone until it was stolen.
The Old Gods had shaped the world with divine hands – raising mountains, guiding rivers, and setting the stars in their places.
But they grew tired. Not all at once, and not with malevolence, but with the slow erosion that comes from the quiet disinterest of beings who had grown too vast to hear the voices that once praised them.
And so, as their gaze turned elsewhere, they left stewards in their place: the dragons.
Born from divine fire, the dragons were meant to shepherd the world, to preserve the balance left behind.
But power without love curdles quickly. The dragons grew arrogant, then cruel.
They saw mortals not as wards to guide but as offerings to consume.
Where once the gods had tended, the dragons now ruled – and not with wisdom, but with hunger.
So began the Age of Ash, when the skies were scorched, and the ground shook with the weight of wings too vast to oppose.
And it was during the Age of Ash that the dragons began to demand a tribute from us mortal beings.
Firstborn daughters, born beneath the blood moon – taken to the mountains, dressed in red, veiled with lace and given over to flame.
The dragons feasted on their souls, drinking in their essence like a fine wine.
And it had been thus for hundreds of years.
The people forgot the Old Gods and only knew their new rulers, the tyrants on wings, who consumed their beloved daughters.
Somewhere in the crowd, a child called out – her voice high-pitched and joyous.
A moment later, I saw her perched on her father’s shoulders, waving a black banner emblazoned with golden flames with both hands.
For a heartbeat, I saw another child: a boy with limbs too thin for the armour that covered him, his eyes wide with pain as he bled out beneath Haedor’s corpses.
His voice, like torn silk, had begged for help.
This girl, however, held silk in her hands, her eyes gleaming with an excitement that had never witnessed death.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Astrid. As our gazes locked for just a moment, I knew she felt it too: the smile the child wore did not belong in this grotesque theatre. The dragons had consumed their daughters. Now we taught ours to cheer as if the flames had never come.
It had been Drizzna the Deceiver who turned that tide. Not by strength. Not by flame. But by theft and cunning.
She had walked the path as so many had before her – barefoot, bound in red, eyes lifted to a sky that had not answered for centuries.
The dragon came for her, vast and glimmering, its breath turning stone to ash.
But Drizzna did not weep. She did not kneel.
She offered a bargain: her hands, her service to nurse the unhatched egg in exchange for her life.
The dragon, amused by her audacity and perhaps weary of its own solitude, agreed.
A gust of wind funnelled down the narrow stone corridor ahead, tossing flower petals beneath my horse’s hooves. Some stuck to the wet iron of a soldier’s greaves. They looked like blood. For a moment, I wondered how long the scent of burning would linger in these streets after the Feast.
But Drizzna had not burned. She lived. She waited.
She watched. And as the days and months passed, she began to hear them – the voices of the sacrificed.
The daughters who had come before her. Their souls, devoured but not destroyed, still clung to the dragon’s fire, bound in torment.
They whispered to her. Not with grief, but with fury.
They told her what the dragon would never reveal – its nature, its arrogance, and most importantly, its weakness.
They whispered of the weapons that might wound it, of scales shed in slumber, of eggshell fragments buried deep in the soot.
They taught her how to bind those relics together—bones from the devoured, shells from the unborn, and scales from the still-proud beast—and how to shape them into a blade not forged by fire but by revenge and rage.
They guided her hands, each movement a litany of vengeance passed down by voices too long silenced.
When the egg cracked and the beast bent low to meet its young, Drizzna moved.
A blade, fashioned from bone and scale and sorrow, struck true.
The dragon’s heart split open. But its magic, ancient and unbound, did not die with it.
It chose her. Or perhaps the souls did. They flooded her veins with fire and fury and retribution.
Not a gift. A wound. A pact.
She rose from the carnage changed. Not just alive, but aflame, magic made flesh.
And she shared her fire with no king, nor priest. Only her sisters – seven women in all.
This was Drizzna’s legacy: her blood, her line.
The fire would burn only through them. It lived only in the blood passed from mother to daughter – never to sons, never to strangers, and never to those who sought it.
It could not be learned or stolen or tricked.
It burned only in the ones born to it and no others.
And I had inherited none of it.
“Let us know you, sister, and we will welcome you home.”
I adjusted my grip on the reins as we passed through the outer court. The keep loomed ahead, draped in silks and smoke. Somewhere beyond those walls, she was waiting. My mother. My Queen.
The people called out for joy, for triumph, for glory.
I rode through them like a stone dropped into water.