Chapter 4 One Night to Live

"I don't stay anywhere," I said. "Not with you. Not with anyone who thinks the word for a person is property."

Kael had his back against the bolted door like he could hold the whole palace out with his shoulders. The silver light was gone from both our wrists now, but I could still feel where it had been, a warmth under the skin that had not been there an hour ago and would not leave.

"You'd rather take your chances in the hall?" he said. "There are forty dragons out there who felt that stone burn. Half of them are already deciding whether killing the Moonfire heir themselves would earn them a place at my father's table. Go on. Open the door. See how far you get with no shift and no claws."

He was right and I hated it. I had spent two days finding the gaps in six guards and I had not found one yet that did not end with me dead.

"Then explain it to me," I said. "All of it. You don't get to lock me in here and decide what I'm worth without telling me why. What is Moonfire. Why does it scare a kingdom full of things that breathe fire. And why" -- I lifted my wrist between us -- "did this happen when you touched me."

He pushed off the door and crossed to the hearth. For a moment he just stood looking into the low flames, and the firelight moved over the old burn scar on the back of his hand.

"Moonfire was the bloodline that ruled before the Dravens," he said. "Dragons, but not like us. Their fire ran silver instead of gold and it did things ours can't. It could heal. It could break a binding spell. It could burn a lie out of a man until he told the truth in front of a whole court whether he wanted to or not." He said the last part with something close to bitterness. "You can see why a king who wants to keep his secrets would find that bloodline inconvenient."

"So your father killed them to keep his secrets."

"My father killed them because they were a threat to the throne." The words came out flat and rehearsed, a thing he had been taught to say. Then, quieter, like the rehearsal had failed him. "That's what I was told. Twenty years ago. I was three. I don't remember it. I only remember being raised on why it had to happen."

A log shifted and threw sparks up the flue. I thought about the portrait my father kept covered in the back of our den, the one I was never allowed to uncover, the one I had uncovered exactly once when I was nine and been struck so hard I saw white for it.

"And the bond," I said. "You called it a mate bond. Tell me what that costs you."

He turned and looked at me, and for the first time the cold heir was not in the room at all.

"It costs me everything," he said simply. "A dragon prince is allowed to take a mate his father approves. A political match. A strong line. What he is not allowed to do is bond, truly bond, fire to fire, to the one bloodline his family wiped out. If anyone learns of this, I am not a prince protecting a prisoner anymore. I am a traitor who has tied his soul to the enemy. They won't just execute you, Lyra. They'll execute me beside you and call it mercy."

The use of my name landed somewhere it had no business landing. I made myself ignore it.

"Then we both want the same thing," I said. "For no one to find out."

"For tonight."

"For as long as it keeps us breathing."

Something almost like respect moved across his face, and he opened his mouth to answer.

The knock came.

Three raps, unhurried, the knock of someone who is not used to being kept waiting. Kael went still in a way I was learning to read. This was worse than the guard in the chamber. This was someone he feared.

"Kael." A woman's voice, smooth as poured glass, came through the heavy door. "Open for your mother."

I felt the blood go out of my face. Kael crossed the room in three strides and gripped my arm, steering me toward the only door other than the main one, a narrow servant's passage half hidden behind a hanging of dark cloth.

"Not a sound," he breathed against my ear. "She can smell fear better than any of them. Think of something cold. Snow. Stone. Empty."

He pushed me behind the hanging and pulled it closed. Through a finger's width of gap I watched him cross back, school his face into nothing, and draw the bolt.

The Queen of the dragons did not enter so much as arrive. She was tall and pale and dressed in grey that caught the firelight like ash, and she moved through the room with her hands folded and her eyes everywhere at once. On the bed. On the cold hearth. On the two melted halves of iron cuff still lying on the floor that Kael had not had time to hide.

She looked at them for a long moment.

"They tell me the trial stone burned silver tonight," she said.

"A defect in the stone," Kael said. "It's old. It threw sparks and frightened the first years. I sent them to their rooms."

"Mm." She drifted toward the hearth, and toward the cuffs, and I dug my nails into my own palm and thought of snow, of cold, of the empty pass between the mountains. "And the debt wolf? The unshifted one your guard logged at the gate?"

"In a cell. I'll deal with her in the morning."

The Queen smiled. I could see it in profile, and it did not touch her eyes at all.

"Such a small thing to bother yourself with personally," she said. "A worthless wolf. I'd have thought you had better uses for an evening." She turned for the door, then paused, one hand on the frame, and said it lightly, the way you drop a stone down a well to hear how deep it goes. "It's only that I find it strange. The girl arrived two days ago. But I gave the order to watch this particular debt three weeks ago, before her father had even offered her." She looked back at her son. "Almost as if someone knew she was coming. Sleep well, Kael."

The door closed behind her.

I stood frozen behind the cloth, my heart slamming, one thought louder than all the cold I had tried to fill my head with.

She had been waiting for me. Before my father sold me. Before I was ever a debt to be paid.

The Queen of the dragons had known I existed long before tonight, and she had not sent a single rider to kill me.

She had sent them to make sure I arrived.