Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame

by Neon Yang

Whether or not such a place exists is not important. The guildknight’s triumph: that is the real story.

After all, these tales are really about good versus evil, about the triumph of the will, about the indomitable strength of the servants of the Sun Empire. What does it matter who is at the center of them?

“You’ve always said blood doesn’t matter.” “It doesn’t,” he says. “Until it does.”

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.

The blade comes to life, completing itself in a flash of blue, and Yeva sees that it is a sword after all, and the metal is only a scaffolding for the fire her father said is their family’s birthright.

She looks no different from the other knights-to-be, except she is swifter and fiercer. She learns quicker and works harder.

It is beautiful, perfectly balanced, perfectly smithed to fit in Yeva’s clawlike hand. As Yeva raises it over her head and wakes it, a bolt of azure fire fills the room with harsh light as though touched by the goddess herself.

In place of help, Yeva has learned self-reliance, so that tasks which require a coterie of maids and attendants can be done alone with one maimed hand that can hold little but a sword.

While the other guildknights are arranged in companies that report to a captain, and those captains report to the guildmaster, Yeva takes no orders except from Emory, answers to no one except for him.

Another time he’d built an elaborate clockwork opera that played tinny music and had twirling dancers in enameled dresses, a gift for a young nobleman he fancied.

Some even say that dragons might take on human form to give birth to live young.

The further she goes, the deeper into despair Yeva sinks. Inns and shops in the buildings wave her away or simply ignore her. Brandishing the girl-king’s seal elicits silence, or questions in the local language she cannot answer. The solution, to her, seems obvious. Take off the helm, let them see that she isn’t some marauding stranger who has come to threaten their country with Imperial power, let them see that she is a neighbor and a daughter to a woman who loved this city.

The woman beckons her inside. Chest rushing with equal parts hope and fear, Yeva follows her instructions. She does not know what awaits her, but she cannot not know.

Yeva feels two sizes too large in the building’s cramped interior, stiff and bulky amongst these carefree civilians. Heads turn to stare at her, as though a guardian gargoyle has detached from its pedestal of stone to walk among them.

Anuya tuts. “You don’t like tea? Your mother always ordered this.” Reluctant, she takes a sip. The tea is deep and smoky, with a woody fragrance that reminds her of incense burning. “It’s a good brew.” She thinks: my mother has good taste.

“Eat, eat,” Anuya says, waving generously at the dishes. Yeva almost can’t bear to. But she must. She’d be rude not to. She spoons in a taste of the ember-hot congee and shuts her eyes. The emotions that flood her pull her in a thousand different directions; she has no words in any language to describe the heavy, golden feeling that settles in her chest. How can she explain what it’s like, what it means, or where it comes from?

She watches Yeva’s approach with a hunter’s intensity, a lupine intellect lurking within her fragility.

Yeva is deeply glad of her conversation with Anuya days before. Through it, the revelations of her family’s past and her mother’s history in Quanbao have had time to settle and become architecture in her mind.

Now all that’s missing is a head covering, and of course, one is not provided. Yeva may concede a lot to the girl-king’s wishes, but this is the only thing she cannot be persuaded from. The thought of walking about with her face open to the elements is unbearable; the one incident in the congee restaurant has taught her never to do it again. Yeva completes her outfit by donning her plumed helm of shining metal—and feels an instant wave of shame. The incongruity of the Empire’s heavyweight handiwork made even more obtrusive. Is she to spend all her days in Daqiao looking like this, feeling like this?

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.

How can Yeva refuse? Each step into Quanbao has seen the breaking of one taboo after another. She removed her helm for Anuya. She has shed the vestments of the guild for a stranger’s robes. What does it matter, swapping her cumbersome metal helm for this sleek, fearless mask? She turns her body away from Lady Sookhee to make the switch, but part of her wants to do it without decorum, to expose the lines of her face to the girl-king and absorb all the consequences.

All of a sudden the wall of understanding between them seems not so insurmountable. All of a sudden the woman in front of her is not the monarch of an unfriendly nation, but someone she could be friends with. Someone she could let into the chambers of her heart.

The world looks, feels, tastes different in her new light garb.

The girl-king giggles and gently corrects: “You mean around the castle. Or underneath.” She’s been teaching Yeva her language, at Yeva’s request. Every evening they spend curled up in her lantern-draped chambers, speaking of infinitives and gerunds. Vocabulary comes easy to Yeva but grammar is hard. Prepositions the worst of all. Lady Sookhee asks: “Why are you interested in the caves?”

An entire world seems to languish in this unknown dark. Yeva’s mind plays tricks on her, conjuring images of massive otherworldly shapes moving through the caves alongside her watching her passage with glittering red eyes. Still her sacred blood remains quiet under her skin, telling her that nothing draconic lives in these caves. If something dangerous were hiding in these passages, she would know.

Down in the dark, with nothing but air between her and the raging firmament, she feels shockingly small and blessedly mortal, both awed by the scale and enervated by a sense of discovery.

She is not used to attaching emotion to people she knows, and this novel experience is as uncomfortable as it is pleasurable.

“It’s the Festival of Return tonight. And as is tradition, as my mother did before me, I will don a mask and walk among the people, and they will be none the wiser. There’s a market, music, performances. Yeva, will you accompany me? So that I need not walk alone.” “Do you always go alone?” “No. I’ll usually have one of my girls with me, of course. Or a few. But this year, since you’re here—I’d like it to be you.” “People already recognize me by my mask,” Yeva says. “They’ll know it’s me, and then they’ll realize it’s you.” Lady Sookhee smiles, brilliant and pale as a pearl. “That’s fine. Will you?”

girl-king seems entirely at ease in her masked anonymity, much like Yeva herself. This fact brings Yeva an unusual happiness, a kind of relief. Warmth spreads from her chest into her limbs, and she feels so light that gravity might lose its grip on her and allow her to fly into the endless winds of the night.

How little these spiritual beasts of legend resemble the reptilian creatures of blood and bone Yeva has hunted all her life. The Sun Emperor is a fool to think that they are anything alike.

“Come,” Lady Sookhee says, a gentle entreaty, and she takes Yeva’s scarred hand with such tenderness that whatever objections she had collapse, folding under the weight of Yeva’s desires.

The girl-king has finally broken through the last of the barriers she had built around herself. At this moment, at this twilight, she is allowed to take on new form—not just the valiant guildknight of the Sun Empire, not the faithful servant whose only purpose is to wield a blade, not the faceless, nameless creature who exists only as terror and whispered legend. She never lets herself be so exposed, yet she does not feel vulnerable. She leans into the girl-king as the young woman pulls around her. She sheds her reservations. Later, when they retire to her bedchambers, she allows herself to sigh, to linger in sensations, to wrap her fingers in the damp ribbons of Lady Sookhee’s hair. Her lover licks the salt from her navel, travels with her fingers between Yeva’s legs, and when she moans yes, please, yes, the words that slide from her lips emerge in the language of home, sounds and syllables she has been divorced from for so long.

Yeva agrees, even though the request is ludicrous and they both know it—she is an Imperial guest, and not someone to be ordered around like a pantry maid. And yet she likes the tacit acknowledgment that she’s become almost like household staff.

And yet her blood, her sacred blood, squirms in her veins as anxieties skitter over her skin. That particular sense of hers has been quiet since she came to Quanbao, lulling her into a false sense of calm. Now, her instincts are on full alert. The bones of her arm ache, as though responding to a threat. Something lurks within these chambers that wasn’t here before.

This is uncharted territory; in her months of exploring she has never made it past the lava barrier. Whatever secrets the caverns have been hiding, she is about to find out.

There’s something she must investigate. Gingerly, she approaches the closest glowing outcrop. As its light pulses, the blood in her veins throbs in concert. She presses the palm of her broken hand upon the rock and shivers as the blue fire within her, the ability she spent her youth carefully cultivating, bursts into instant recognition.

A dragon has been here, in this cavern, not too long ago—a living creature, one still growing and breathing. There can be no other explanation. A constellation of fears explodes within Yeva. A hundred different thoughts and a thousand different questions all at once. She has been lied to. She has been told the wrong version of the truth. She’s discovered something everyone knew. She’s discovered something nobody knew. A dragon lives in Quanbao, making its nest somewhere deep in the mountains protecting its capital city. The Emperor was right. She was not sent to this kingdom on an idle whim. Yeva wants to chase after this beast. She wants a hundred questions answered. She wants to begin the hunt. She wants to return to the palace to shake Lady Sookhee and ask—did you know? Is this why the caverns are sealed off? Have you been lying to me, even as we shared a bed, shared our hearts?

The atmosphere has changed around her: a gloom seems to have descended upon the fragrant gardens, and a sense of unease charges the cold air. Where are all the servants, usually so busy and bustling? The glimpse of a wan face she catches hurrying around a corner looks mired in fear and anxiety. The peace in the royal palace has been broken by an unknown hand. It might be her own. It might be someone else’s.

If it is the girl-king’s will that determines who goes where, then it is the girl-king’s will that she must bend to her use, and damn the consequences.

She glances at Yeva, and Yeva has never seen such honesty in the woman’s expression before this. “Don’t do this. If you care for her at all … if she even means anything to you … leave it alone. Go back to your room. Forget this.”

Someone must have warned the girl-king that Yeva was coming, because Lady Sookhee waits in the middle of the room, swaying like a willow in a storm. “Yeva,” she says, when she catches sight of her, and that is as far as she gets before she collapses.

An awful sensation sweeps Yeva, so strikingly similar to the sensation she gets when her sacred fire activates that it leaves her dizzy. In her moment of terror she wonders if this is what it means to be in love.

Sujin’s eyes are cold, fixed upon Yeva like fishhooks. “Shall I have her arrested?” “No.” The girl-king forces her voice out of a hazy whisper, trembling with the effort. “Let her tend to me. We can speak later.”

She thinks: Did I summon the blue fire in my blood? Did my desire bring that dragon into our house when I was a child? Could it be a choice that I made, without even realizing—a secret choice in my heart? Yeva always felt she’d had no control over the course of her life, dragged by the tides of destiny into the Empire and bound to duty before she could catch a breath. But what if she did? What if she’d turned her back on her mother and her mother’s people to follow her father’s path?

She finds herself lying awake in her own chambers, closing her maimed hand around the dragonscale she found. The skin on that hand is so heavily scarred it’s nearly dead to sensation, but she keenly feels the presence of the precious artifact against her palm, as if there was more to it than a physical object. More to it than sharpness and inflexibility. An ache grows in her hand and creeps upward until her arm feels sore from wrist to elbow, throbbing with phantom pain.

“Come,” Lady Sookhee says, beginning the climb down those broad steps. Yeva follows, half-keen and half-weary.

Yeva has an inkling she is being led to a dragon’s lair; she realizes it was a mistake not bringing a weapon.

This is a mausoleum, a columbarium. Yeva treads carefully between each display, being very still with her breath, feeling like her very presence disturbs the sanctity of the place.

At the end of the room is a skull so large that its shape loses meaning as bone and becomes abstract, part of the terrain. Yeva doesn’t even know what she’s looking at until several moments in, when its lines pull together into form she recognizes. The dragon’s skull is larger than a house, larger than a palace, and the beast it must have belonged to could have shaped the sky and the earth.

The rage and determination she felt when she first found traces of the dragon have long fled her. It is her instinct—it is her duty—to hunt this creature down. But the thought of the dragon haunts her mind: this one beast, last of her kind, sliding alone through an endless dark. No one speaks to her. No one sees her. When she dies, the last of her family will go with her.