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We, who are kin to the dragons, surely know the names of our own grandmothers and of the lives they led. Listen now to this tale, written the way it was told to us by our foremothers, who in turn learned it from their own foremothers. Hear now the tale of Kunlin Yeva. Hear now the truth of the guildknight of Mithrandon.
“You’ve always said blood doesn’t matter.” “It doesn’t,” he says. “Until it does.”
“Pity you take after that woman, despite carrying our exalted blood.”
He hops from topic to topic like a bird, bursting with curiosity. She has already decided that she likes Emory, who seems unbearably soft in this world of stone and hard angles.
Later that day, when he brings her new clothes to wear, she notices that his cheek is reddened, as if recently struck.
Yeva feels—and knows—that this has something to do with what she said earlier, her insolence rippling outward invisibly, in ways she had not predicted. It is the first lesson she’s learned in Mithrandon, and in many ways it is the most important one.
“You have the strength of the earth in you,” she used to tell her daughters. “The rains can come and the ploughs can carve through you and still you will remain.”
Little by little, her mouth gets used to speaking her father’s language until it becomes second nature, until those syllables dominate even her thoughts and the language she spoke in her mother’s home fades and becomes brittle in her mind.
She looks no different from the other knights-to-be, except she is swifter and fiercer. She learns quicker and works harder.
Taken from the soil and cradle of her home and placed in this hard land, full of stone and bright metal, she has fashioned a womb for herself from which she can safely navigate her new world.
Emory, with his smarts, with all the books and knowledge he has swallowed, surely sees that the Emperor is looking for a toehold into the next region over. It’s been a while since they’ve had a war. His armies are idle and His Radiance is bored.
A hard-won belonging she is now expected to abandon for a strange land, under strange circumstances. To be alone and nobody again. And Emory can’t see how much his request is asking of her. He even thinks this will be better for her.
To hear these ugly secrets so casually dredged up by someone she doesn’t know brings a wave of sourness to her mouth.
Dragons are sacred to us, they form the basis of our culture. But if you’re asking about the sort of beasts you hunt, then—no. They do not live here. Not anymore.” For a brief moment sadness envelops her like a flash of ice. But before Yeva can latch on to it, Lady Sookhee puts it aside and returns a small smile to her face. But this gesture of reticence only endears her to Yeva, who has spent a lifetime putting her own emotions into neat boxes where they won’t bother others.
“Caves? No one’s mentioned any,” Yeva says, intrigued. “Tell me more.” “Oh,” Chuwan says quickly, “it’s nothing at all. Just some old caves. You shouldn’t go anyway, it’s off-limits. There’s lava and whatnot in there.”
“I would not normally grant permission, and there are times when the caves are closed to everyone, even members of the royal family.
But it isn’t right now, and if you’re so curious…”
Bit by bit she stops looking for clues of a dragon infestation. Bit by bit she forgets why she was sent here.
She’s not always allowed: for stretches of weeks at a time the caves are too dangerous to enter and guards are posted in front of its secret entrance. In those days, Yeva waits impatiently to be allowed passage again.
And when she falls ill—as she does with alarming regularity, every month, like clockwork—Yeva finds herself pacing the walkways of the palace as she is denied access to its monarch.
Upon the indigo folds of one sits another painted dragon half-mask, this one in shades of green and black.
She buys a sandalwood fan with legends of dragons carved through the thin slats, each panel no bigger than a thumbnail, and slips it into Yeva’s sleeve pocket.
It’s time for the dragon dance.
The dragon, propped on metal rods, made of yards of shimmering fabric lined with the black fur of goats, undulates over the heads of twenty dancers in bright red outfits.
Lady Sookhee watches the dance with a soft joy that almost looks like melancholy. “Has anyone told you the meaning behind this dance? Behind the Festival of Return?”
“The Spring Festival celebrates the return of the children of Chuan-pu, the ancestral dragon.
The eldest daughter of their leader was a girl of twenty named Suma, and she was tougher than the mountains and prettier than the meadows in spring. As Chuan-pu circled the heavens, he saw her hunting in the river to feed her family, and his heart was instantly captured by her beauty, her resilience. He came down to the mortal world in the shape of a man to court her, to woo her.
He married Suma, and she bore him many children, half-human and half-dragon.
the pale shape of Lady Sookhee’s body is so long and narrow she appears to be half-serpent,
She thinks, and she’s been thinking, that there’s a pattern to the regularity of these two phenomena, the unrest in the caverns and Lady Sookhee’s illness. Don’t they always overlap? Doesn’t the girl-king always fall ill when some unknown calamity is striking the heart of the caverns, making it too dangerous for human passage?
Yeva has an inkling she is being led to a dragon’s lair; she realizes it was a mistake not bringing a weapon.
The scales you found belonged to a creature who is probably the last of her kind.” Yeva deliberately paces her words. “You’ve seen this creature?” “I’ve not met it in these caverns myself. But I know it exists.”
Lady Sookhee looks away, but something in her blink reminds Yeva of a snake, membrane sliding over a glassy eye.
He’s created a sacred weapon that anyone can use.
There were two dragons sighted that day. A younger one, not yet full-grown, which was wounded, and an adult that swept in to protect it.
And then she sees it. Curving along the dragon’s side: a long, slashing scar. Distinct even in the unstable light of the cavern. Yeva recognizes its shape. She knows this particular knot of flesh.
“You’ll stand against them, for my sake? If your captain gave you an order to kill me, you would defy him?” “I would.”
“Even if the price was their lives, or mine?”
“I’d do it,”
“You’d kill them to protect a beast.”
“I’d do anything to protect her.”
