Chapter 22: The Dragon's Breath
ULF
Three hours past midnight, and the Keep slept.
I went down through the servants' passages counting turns. I'd walked them twice by candle and once in full dark. Kitchen stair. Laundry corridor. A warped door that had to be lifted on its hinges to swing quietly.
Ratcatcher paths. Blood and Cheese would have used these same stairs.
Would have. Past tense. They were dead, and these passages were mine now.
Rhaenys's hill stood black against a sky not yet decided on morning, the Dragonpit on top of it, older than the Keep, built to house creatures that could burn cities.
I took the feeding entrance, a wide tunnel where carts of sheep and cattle went in for the dragons' meals, sour with old blood, unguarded at that hour. The dragonkeepers slept in quarters above. I'd watched their lamps go out four nights running.
The tunnel branched. Left to the chambers where the dragons slept. Right to storage and the butchering floor.
I went left.
Heat came up through my boots, then found my face. Dragons burn from the inside their whole lives and the stone holds it. The air went thick enough that breathing felt like drinking.
First chamber. Syrax.
Rhaenyra's golden she-dragon lay curled with her tail across her own snout, scales catching what little light fell through the shafts. Beautiful. Terrifying. Her ribs moved and the whole chamber seemed to move with them.
I dropped my weight to fifty kilograms and made myself small. Slow steps. No blade in my hand, no hand near my belt.
I'm not a threat. Just curious. Just here to learn.
Syrax's eye opened.
Vertical pupil narrowing on me. Gold, and old, and nothing like an animal's.
We looked at each other. Then she snorted, lifted her head off the stone, and breathed.
Not a full blast. A gout, almost lazy, the sort a horse gives a stranger's palm.
I hardened. Tekkai locked my muscles to iron and I planted and let it come.
Fire isn't heat. Fire is a thing that shoves. It went over me and my clothes caught at the edges and blackened, and my face and the backs of my hands went from hot to wet to something worse, blisters rising while the flame was still on them.
I didn't scream. Didn't run. Screaming would have told her something I didn't want her knowing.
Three seconds. Then nothing.
Syrax rumbled, low, asking a question I had no language for.
I stayed where I was. She lost interest, laid her jaw back on her tail, and closed the eye.
I retreated without turning my back on her.
In the tunnel my skin throbbed hard enough to blur my sight. The burns were closing already, slower than the forge burns I'd trained on down the Street of Steel. Dragonfire ran hotter. My body had much to learn about it.
Again tomorrow, then. And the night after. Until it stops being new.
Five nights.
Night two was Sunfyre. Aegon's dragon slept on his side with one wing thrown out like a drunk in a doorway, all that gold gone grey in the dark. He opened an eye, looked at me, and shut it. Nothing worth burning had come into his chamber.
Night three, back to Syrax, close enough that the flame arrived before the sound of it. Five seconds. My sleeves went to ash and my forearms cooked, but the blisters came up smaller, and by next evening the skin had gone pink instead of splitting.
Progress.
Night four, one of the young ones in the far chambers, a brown-green thing no longer than a warhorse. I never learned its name. It flamed me out of pure fright the moment I came through the arch, seven seconds of it, panicked and unbroken, and I stood with my arms over my face until it ran dry.
My clothes were ash. My skin was red and rising. By dawn it had closed.
Night five: Dreamfyre.
Helaena's dragon.
She was bigger than Syrax and far older, her scales throwing the shaft-light back in blue and silver, and she was awake before I cleared the arch. Head up. Eyes on the entrance. Waiting, like someone had told her I was coming.
I stopped. Waited with her.
She brought her head down, joint by joint, until that skull hung level with my chest and her breath stirred my hair. Sulfur and hot iron and something older than both.
"I'm keeping her safe," I said. Quiet. "Your rider. Helaena. You understand, don't you?"
She didn't blink. Dragons don't, much.
"I'm not here to claim you. You have a rider. I'd rather you knew my smell before the day comes when it matters. She dreams of you. She says you answer."
Then she breathed.
Not at me. Past me — a steady column poured out along my left side, near enough that the air scalded and my sleeve went in an instant.
Thirty seconds she held it. Not an attack. An attack would have been aimed.
I stood in it. Every heartbeat my skin learned something the one before it hadn't known.
When she stopped, the chamber ticked and cooled around us. My skin was pink and raw and tender.
Not charred. Not blistered.
Dreamfyre rumbled. Whatever that sound is in a dragon, it wasn't a warning.
She lowered her head further, close enough to touch.
I put my hand flat on her snout. Warm, near hot, the scale rough as a whetstone under my palm.
"Thank you."
She rumbled once more and settled back, done with me.
I walked out carrying something I hadn't gone in expecting.
Dawn found me in my room peeling off what was left of my shirt. Pink. Tender. Already knitting. By nightfall it would pass for a bad afternoon in the sun.
Fire resistance: building. Not finished. Functional.
I put on the guard's uniform and took my post outside Helaena's door as the light came grey through the windows.
She came out an hour later, dressed for the day, and stopped two steps past the threshold.
She lifted her chin and sniffed.
"You smell like Dreamfyre."
No lie survived that.
"I wanted to meet her properly. Make sure she knew I was... trustworthy."
Helaena looked at me. Not at my face — at my hands, at the raw shine over my knuckles, at the burnt edge of my collar. She took her time.
Then her expression softened.
"She likes you. She told me in a dream."
"Dragons dream?"
"Everything dreams. Most just don't remember." She paused with one hand on the door frame. "Did she hurt you?"
"No. She tested me. I passed."
"Good." Her fingers stayed on the wood. "You could have died down there. Alone, in the dark, and nobody would have known where to look for you."
"I didn't die."
"That isn't an answer. You could have asked me. I would have walked you in. She'd have been gentler."
"I didn't want her gentle."
She considered that longer than I expected. "No. I suppose you wouldn't."
She started toward the godswood and I fell in beside her, half a pace back, where a guard belongs.
"She doesn't like most people," Helaena said. "The keepers bring her meat and she suffers them. That isn't liking. She likes you. That means something."
"What does it mean?"
She glanced sideways at me. "That you're meant to stand beside fire. Not burn in it."
"Is that yours, or hers?"
"Your collar's burnt."
"It'll mend."
"Not by you." We turned down the gallery, past windows going gold.
"Does she tell you anything else? In the dreams?"
"The moths were on my glass last night. All of them facing the same way." She said it to the corridor ahead, not to me. "Nobody ever asks why they do that."
I didn't have an answer, so I didn't invent one.
We came out into the morning and she slowed to let the sun find her face. Ahead lay the godswood, the same bench, the same hour.
Stand beside fire. Not burn in it.
Somewhere beyond this city Silverwing was sleeping, and she would be mine before the year turned. But it was Dreamfyre's leave that had to hold when the Dance came, and I had it.
Helaena's hand brushed my sleeve as we walked, right across the burn, and she didn't take it back.