The stairs went up a few more turns before opening out into a wide hallway, one side illuminated by the silvery-gray moonlight of the large arched windows, while the other held wooden doors. Both Montfre and I had slowed our steps, and I had a chance to look out of the windows to see that we were quite high up now – the black mountain side swept down across our vision, and there – in the distance, I could see the telltale lights and bonfire of the mines of Masaka.
I dropped the box with a heavy clang.
“Ach!” Montfre continued walking a step, to an awful scraping noise.
“Narissea?” Abioye turned and looked at me, still wearing the worry on his face that I had seen in the throne room.
“You sleep up here,” I said. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement.
“Yes,” Abioye said, at first in confusion before he followed my gaze out of the windows to the clear view of the mines below. I knew that Abioye wasn’t an evil man. Not in the same way that his sister was so twisted up that there was barely any bit of soul left inside of her anymore. But the fact that for the last however many years, he was still able to walk out of his ‘apartments’ every morning, set my teeth on edge. He had seen us slaves down there, toiling and working hard and getting picked on and beaten by his sister’s guards, and he had done nothing to stop it. It awoke all my old feelings of rage once again.
“Ah.” Abioye clearly saw what was on my mind. “Please, not here,” he said, gesturing to the largest set of double doors, and looking back down the corridor to the stairwell. “We can’t talk out here – Inyene has her servants and spies everywhere.”
I didn’t budge. “When,” I said, remembering the words that I had overheard Montfre say to him just a few nights ago. “When are you going to step out of your sister’s shadow, Abioye?”
The young man cast a look once again back to the stairwell, and then to me – and finally to Montfre, who appeared stony-faced.
“Now,” he hissed desperately. “Tonight. I have a plan.” If I hadn’t just seen how he was with his sister, and if he had said these exact same words back at Montfre’s tower when I had cornered him, I might not have believed him. But I could see in his eyes all the shame, all the guilt and the embarrassment his sister had made him feel. He appeared desperate – angry. “This cannot go on. I cannot let her go on doing this!” he hissed.
Good, I thought. Anger wasn’t for everyone, and neither was it a particularly useful tool – but sometimes it was necessary. If you are cornered by a Plains lion, it doesn’t matter how peaceful you want to be. Sometimes you need to be able to spit and snarl and to fight.
But my long years of incarceration had taught me that there were limitations to that need to strike back.
Like Rebec, I thought. She had always been angry, just as I had for the entire first year. Constantly furious. Constantly glaring at the overseers – and with good reason, too! But anger had a way of eating you up just as much as it empowered you. It was the memories of my people, and of the wind on my cheeks, that had kept me going. Kept me alive.
But for some – I nodded to myself as I looked at Abioye – some people needed a touch more fire in their belly, and it looked as though Abioye had just discovered his. The young lordling had already hurried to the larger set of double doors, using a key from his belt to unlock it, before turning around to look at us.
He still didn’t offer to carry the bleeding box, though, I thought a little wryly as I grabbed one end and Montfre picked up the other, and we went inside.
My feelings of resentment didn’t exactly subside as I saw the sheer opulence that Abioye lived in. Even though he had called this place his ‘apartments’ – for some reason I had expected it to be ‘rooms.’
It wasn’t. I had walked into what can only be described as a large reception hall, with high-backed, gold-inlaid chairs around low stained-wood tables, and with further large, leather-backed seats comfortable and large enough to sleep on. The room was deep enough to extend to the far side of the keep walls, where three bay windows stood, currently half-shuttered with wooden frames. There were huge earthenware pots filled with tall, large-leafed plants the like of which that I had never seen before.
And the wonders still did not stop there. On one side table (with the most ridiculously thin, curving legs that I had ever seen in my life – how was that any use as a worktable!?) sat a diorama made out of painted clay – a double-mountain with one side totally dominated by cream-white walls of a citadel.
“Torvald,” Montfre said with a trace of awe to his voice, as we set the box down in the center of the room and moved across to it.
“Seems like a silly place to live,” I muttered, even though my heart quickened a little at the sight of it. I knew that I was being a little childish – finally seeing the place that had always been talked about and mentioned through my life made me feel awkward. Out of place.
But there was something to it, I had to admit secretly as I examined the sculpture. One of the mountains wasn’t really a mountain at all – but was instead a vast crater, and inside it I could see terraces of carefully sculpted rocks – and even dried grasses and sprigs of bushes that had been carefully pruned to look like trees!
There was a ridgeway that connected the crater to its sister mountain, and, nestled just under the peak of painted purples and browns, there was another grand old building. A little like this keep in fact, but much wider.
“What are these?” I pointed at the strange half-moon shapes in the walls. They dotted this top keep as well as the rows of terraced walls of the citadel itself.
“Dragon platforms,” Montfre said, his eyes shining at first, before he blinked and looked sad. “My mentors and masters at the Academy said that each platform would be filled with dragons, all through the sunny days when they stood guard over the city.”
“Guard over the mountain!” I heard Ymmen breath into my mind. “Dragon mountain,” he breathed – but my mind translated it as sacred mountain.
“Dragons and mountain are one. Were one,” he said mysteriously in my mind.
“Then why aren’t they there now?” I said, part in question to Ymmen, but it was Montfre who answered me, thinking that I was talking to him.
“The dragon numbers started declining a generation ago, I think,” Montfre said, looking sadly at the diorama. “There are still dragons and Dragon Riders, but only a fraction of what there used to be. No one knows for sure why they went – or where to.” Montfre sounded wistful, and I could only agree. I got a sudden appreciation of the model in front of me as only half of what it could be. The citadel itself with its curving streets and high walls, weirs and guard towers and small plazas, looked very fine indeed, but the other half of the model looked empty and barren – the crater and the mountain tops.
“It’s meant to have dragons,” I breathed, and felt Ymmen’s assent. Once again, I sent the question up to him that I had asked before: Why did the dragons leave?? Where did they go? But once again I was met with only a scaly silence in my mind. It was either something that Ymmen wouldn’t – or couldn’t – talk about. Maybe he didn’t even know, I considered. It was a hard thing to imagine a creature that powerful and that large experiencing any type of pain, but I dreaded to think of the scale of the trauma that he and his dragon kind must have gone through, secretly, if they had abandoned such a sacred place.