Chapter 59: The Whip
ULF
Five days after I barred the pit gates myself, I stood in a saddler's shop on the hill road with my arms out from my sides while a man with pins in his mouth decided which parts of me were worth leather.
"Thighs and chest," he said. "That's where the scale takes the skin off. Everyone forgets the chest."
"I didn't."
"You did. They all do." He drew a chalk line under my ribs and stepped back to look at it. "You're heavier than you stand like."
"I eat well now."
He grunted and went back to the tape. His shop smelled of neat's-foot oil and wet hide, and it was the first room in a month that hadn't smelled of burnt hair.
The saddle sat half-built on the trestle behind him. High cantle, deep seat, thigh rolls stuffed and stitched shut. He'd cut the straps wider than any horse would ever need.
"How do you sit her?"
"Forward. Low, when she climbs."
"Do you stand?"
"Sometimes."
He took the pins out of his mouth and dropped them in a dish. "Then you want the stirrup leathers doubled and the buckles set inboard, or you'll open your own calf on a hard turn. And you want to tell me the truth about your weight. The man who lies about that comes back with a broken spine and blames my stitching."
"Cut everything for a man three times my size."
He looked at me a while. Then he wrote a number on the wall in chalk, beside a column of other men's numbers, and never mentioned it again.
I paid him double and told him a fortnight was too long. He said a fortnight was what it was.
Aemond's order had come up from the Keep the morning before, in eleven words. The two dragons fly as a pair inside a fortnight. He hadn't said how it was to be done. He never did, and that was the whole of the arrangement between us.
At the pit, the outer galleries still had straw down where nineteen men had slept. Nobody had swept it. Wick lay in a cot in the undercroft with wet linen over the ruined half of his face, and no one from Flea Bottom had come up the hill to sit with him, and no one had answered when I sent.
Silverwing was in the yard with her wing already dropped for me before I'd crossed the threshold. She was most of what still came when I called.
Hugh Hammer came out of the tunnel at midday with a whip in his hand.
Not a drover's whip, though he'd bought it off a drover at the Gate. He'd carried it back to his old forge on the Street of Steel and re-cored the handle in iron, and he turned it in the light a moment longer than he needed to, so I would see the work.
"Saddler done you?"
"Measuring."
"I don't need one." The burns up his forearms had scabbed into long ropes, and he flexed them at me like a purse of coin. "Rode him bare the first day. Rode him bare yesterday."
"Prince Aemond wants us in the air together in a fortnight."
"Then he'll have us in the air together in a fortnight."
"He'll have it if Vermithor agrees to it."
Hugh laughed, one short sound with nothing in it. "You talk about them like they're deciding things."
"They are."
"Mine isn't." He wound the lash twice around his forearm. "How old were you when you first ate meat you hadn't stolen?"
I didn't answer. He hadn't waited for one. He was already walking down the yard toward the bronze shape at the end of it.
HUGH
Getting up was the worst part of the day, and Hugh Hammer had decided nobody would watch him do it.
He went up the foreleg with his back to the galleries, hand over hand, and felt two of the scabs on his arms split somewhere under the wrapping. By the time he swung his leg across the ridges his shirt was wet through and his jaw ached from being clenched.
Worth every hour of it. Worth the fire.
A moon ago he had been a smith with a dead wife's name still chalked on his tally-slate and lords riding past his door without turning their heads. Now the whole city knew there was a blacksmith on the Bronze Fury. The men who had come to the pit to watch beggars burn had gone home talking about him, not about the White and his silver bitch.
Vermithor took the air without being asked, which Hugh liked, and then went where he pleased, which Hugh didn't.
The dragon wanted west, toward open water. Hugh wanted the tight circles above the yard where the keepers and the guards and the White could all stand with their necks bent back.
"Left," he said, and drove his heel in behind the shoulder. "Left. Left, damn you."
The great head came round a finger's width and kept going west.
Twenty years he had fought a forge. Iron did not want to be a hinge. Iron wanted to stay iron, and it became a hinge anyway, because a man stood over it and hurt it in the right place at the right time until it stopped arguing. His father had taught him that with a strap across the back of the legs and it was the only true thing the man ever gave him.
Hugh let the lash out.
He did not put his shoulder into it. There was no need. He laid it once across the soft hide behind the jaw, and the crack came back off the pit wall a full heartbeat later, and every bird on the roof went up at once.
Vermithor turned left.
ULF
They came down hard enough to send grit skating across the yard.
Vermithor's flanks worked like a bellows. His head hung low and his wing stayed half-open, shivering, until Hugh struck the joint of it with the iron butt of the handle and it folded.
The welt behind the jaw was as long as my arm and already wet.
I had crossed eleven paces of yard without deciding to.
"Hugh."
He turned with the lash still hanging from his fist, cheerful, wanting to be congratulated.
"You'll make him hate you," I said.
He laughed. Not a sneer. He honestly found it funny, and that was worse.
"Good," he said. "Let him. A beast that loves you throws you anyway. A beast that's afraid of you gets you home."
"He's three hundred years old. He carried a king who died before your grandfather was whelped. He'll be here when you're a name nobody says."
"Then he'll remember who was master while I was here." Hugh spat into the grit and wiped his mouth on his wrist. "You want him gentled, White. I want him useful. In a fortnight the prince wants two dragons over the Kingswood in step. Yours does tricks. Mine will do as it's told. Tell me which of us is lying to His Grace."
He walked off toward the undercroft, still coiling the whip, calling for wine before he'd reached the arch.
Marston came up on my left with his hands behind his back and stood there, not looking at me, watching the bronze.
"Three of my keepers won't go in that end of the yard now," he said.
"I know."
"He'll do it again tomorrow. Harder, because today it worked."
"I know."
"Then you'll be putting it in your word to the prince."
The answer took less time than it should have. A fortnight. Two dragons or none, and a war that had already eaten the river, the bread, and the boy in the undercroft with wet linen on his face. A bad rider on a great dragon was worth more to the Crown than a great dragon with nobody on it, and Aemond wouldn't strike Hugh off for cruelty. He would only learn that I wanted Hugh struck off, and set that beside everything else he had begun collecting about me.
"No," I said.
Marston nodded once, as though I had confirmed a price he had already been quoted, and went back to his keepers.
Silverwing had not moved. She had watched all of it from her place by the water trough with her head turned, one amber eye on me the whole time, and when I came to her and put my palm out for the wing she didn't drop it.
I stood there with my hand up like a beggar.
She lifted her head clear above my reach and looked over the top of me at the far wall, and she held that until I stopped asking. She would take water from the keepers that afternoon. She would take meat. She wouldn't take me, and every man on the wall saw it.
At the low end of the yard, Vermithor's eye had found me and stayed.
It did not blink. It didn't follow Hugh, or the keepers, or the shivering wing he still wouldn't fully close. It rested on the man who had stood eleven paces away with the whole of the pit in earshot and said four words and then nothing at all.
I turned away first.