Blood of Dragons

‘It’s dark in here,’ she complained and felt his assent.

‘They did not use the Silver everywhere. Even then, it was a precious commodity. Where many might gather they used it for light and for warmth. For art that all shared. But in the small personal spaces, they used far less of it.’ He reached into his pouch and drew forth light. He held something out to her, shaking it free. A necklace with a moon-face charm on it. It brightened as he shook it, filling the room with a thin silvery light. It looked oddly familiar.

‘Put it on,’ he urged her, and when she did not, he stepped closer to push back her hood and loop it around her neck. The gleaming moon rested on her bosom and she looked around the shop. Little remained of the humble wooden furnishings, but there were things among the rubble that she recognized. An anvil of a kind she had never seen, yet she knew it for what it was. A stone table with grooves and drains in the surface: for working Silver. Reflexively, she lifted her eyes to where tools had once hung on a rack. The rack was gone, the tools a jumble on the floor near where they had hung. A battered ladle tangled with a pair of shears. A sudden urge to pick them up, to tidy her workspace came to her.

‘Let’s go outside,’ she said abruptly.

‘We could,’ he agreed. ‘But it wouldn’t help. You can’t run away from it. I don’t want to force you, but time is running out. For all of us.’

Cold filled her. She turned to look at Rapskal and the reflected light from the moon-charm made his eyes silver. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know,’ he coaxed her gently. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to admit it. You do know.’ He paused and looked at her accusingly. ‘Amarinda knew. And so you know.’

You know, Sintara echoed his words. And it is time for you to stop being stubborn.

‘I don’t know,’ she insisted to both of them. It hurt her feelings that they would join forces against her, and force her to this. Whatever ‘this’ was. She spoke frankly to the man with the gleaming silver eyes. ‘You are scaring me. Tellator, go away. I want my friend Rapskal back.’

He sighed and spoke reluctantly. ‘The need is great. I love you. Then, and now, I love you. You know that. I have waited as long as I can, as long as any of us can. But we are Elderlings, and ultimately, we serve the dragons. Will you let Tintaglia die? Will you let Malta and Reyn and their baby die because you want to cling so strongly to who you were born? Thymara, I know you are frightened by this. I have tried to let you go as slowly as ever you wished. But tonight is our last chance. Please. Choose this. Choose this for me, for Rapskal. Because I would not force you. But Tellator would.’

She was shaking, fighting a battle inside herself as well as withstanding the crushing fear he woke in her. Memories were stirring, ones she did not want to acknowledge. She looked around her. ‘This was her little shop. She made things here.’

He nodded. ‘Not a shop, really. She sold the things she made, but she gave as many away. This was where she created her art. This was where you worked Silver with your hands.’

‘I don’t remember it.’ She spoke flatly.

‘Not easily, no. Silver was too precious. The memories of working it were not saved in stone. Some secrets are too precious to be entrusted to anyone except the heir to your trade. Those secrets were only passed from master to apprentice. The locations of the wells could not be kept completely secret, not when the dragons came to drink from them. How the wells were managed, season to season, that was a guild secret.’

He took her arm suddenly and she almost pulled away from him. But he was walking her to the door and she was too grateful to be leaving the building. Amarinda had worked there. She knew it now, recalled the busy little street of artisans as it had been. Not from memory-stone; it had not been used in this part of the city, but from the residue of memories that her time as Amarinda had left in her mind.

‘Ramose had his studio there. The sculptor. Remember?’ His voice had gone colder.

She glanced at the empty sockets of windows in the wall. ‘I remember,’ she admitted grudgingly. Something else popped into her mind. ‘You were jealous of him.’

Rapskal nodded. ‘He had been your lover before I was. We had a fight once. Foolish of me, not to know that a man who wields a hammer and chisel all day builds up an arm.’

She shied away from those memories. Too close, she thought, too close to something. And then they turned a corner and she was in a familiar place. There was the well plaza, just as they had left it, beams stacked to one side, broken mechanisms to another, tools in a third. The ship’s crew had put some hours in on the chain. There was a mended length of it by the well’s lip, the end fastened to the stub of one ancient post that had once supported the well’s cover. Heeby was there, too, standing quietly in the darkness. A sense of dread rose in Thymara.