Marcus scratched his chest. His arms and legs felt like they were sinking down into the earth, limp as overcooked chicken. In his memory, Cithrin looked out over the city and said, The violence we do with a contract is the sort I understand. The thought left him caught between pride and melancholy. She spent so much time and effort seeming older, it was easy to forget that she was only just past her girlhood.
She’ll be fine, Alys said, walking through the thin spread of trees outside their little house. He couldn’t see the details of her face, but he knew it was her with the false certainty that came in dreams. Some part of him was already screaming in anticipation of what was coming. The violence, the smell of burning skin, the feeling of his daughter in his arms, her blackened skin against his own. She’ll be fine.
He tried to speak, to warn Alys that it wasn’t true. Merian was in danger. They were both in danger. All of them. All he could manage was a whisper, and she couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t tell that he was trying to scream. Behind him, Merian laughed. He tried to turn around, but his body wouldn’t move. Something was wrong with him. He felt like he was stuck in thick, invisible mud. Merian’s laughter turned to a scream and he tried to run. It wasn’t too late. If he could only get there in time. Her scream was constant now, like a storm wind that didn’t have to pause for breath. The air stank of smoke and his skin was beginning to peel back from his hands, exposing the meat of his fingers. The bone. The thickened air was ripping him apart rather than letting him through. He gritted his teeth and tried to scream his daughter’s name, his heart thudding against his ribs even as the wise, watching part of him turned away, knowing what would come next.
“Sir?” Yardem said.
Alys and Merian were in flames, the child curled in her mother’s lap. Their screams reached over the crackle of the flames.
“You should wake up now, sir,” Yardem said. “Something’s happening.”
Marcus opened his eyes and took a deep, gasping breath. The little room was thick with buttery yellow light. Kit knelt on his cot and peeked out the window into the black night. Dream and reality mixed, the screaming and the smell of fire still in his ears and nose as Marcus swung his feet to the floor. He tried to say What is it? and managed some part of the syllables.
“Not sure yet,” Yardem said. His sword was in his hand.
The death screams of his family moved out from their intimate place in Marcus’s ear, out to the window and the dark streets beyond. That wasn’t his nightmare, then. People were screaming. He yawned, the force of it cracking his jaw, as he rose.
“Palliako’s army?” he asked.
“Could be,” Yardem said.
“I can’t believe that they could travel so far or so quickly,” Kit said. “Do you think it’s possible?”
Marcus reached under his own cot, hauling out the vile green sword and scabbard. He slung it across his back. “I know a way to find out. You stay here.”
In the night-black city, lanterns flared and people filled the squares. Marcus moved among them, his senses stretched for the peculiar signs of violence. Yardem, at his side, shifted his ears one direction and then the next. The city guard stood at the corners and choke points where the rush of a mob could be controlled, but so far as Marcus could make out, there was no riot, no invasion, no burning buildings or boiling pitch or flights of killing arrows.
He was in the middle of a wide square, perhaps three hundred men and women in it looking around in confusion that echoed his own, when the screaming came again, and from all around him. Yardem tapped his shoulder and pointed up toward the distant stars.
A deeper darkness moved against the sky, blotting out stars. The movement gave it shape—wide, tattered wings, a great tail and serpentine neck. The dragon glided silently against the night, swooping over the city like a hawk looking for a rabbit. A gout of flame poured forth from the mouth in a great gold-and-smoke cloud brighter than the moon. Women shouted, pointed. Men screamed and tried to push themselves back into the buildings against the flow of other people coming out. Others stood in openmouthed wonder. All round the city, lanterns and torches flickered to life, the citizens of Northcoast flooding the streets or fleeing them in terror and elation.
Kit was pacing when they came back in, his expression a mask of distress. He stopped, his gaze shifting from one to the other in anticipation of the worst.
“Ships are here,” Marcus said.
The late morning found the square outside the Grave of Dragons packed almost too tightly to walk through. Marcus and Yardem had to lead with their shoulders and push to make any progress at all. For the most part, they got no worse back than angry looks and some mild profanity. One man so thick across the shoulders he could have passed for Yemmu from behind pushed back and lifted his chin, but Yardem met his gaze and shook his head. The man backed down.
King Tracian’s private guard held the entrance, blades drawn. Even they kept looking back over their shoulders to catch a glimpse of Inys as he moved along the long, pale rows. When he reached the soldiers, Marcus looked for the one in charge. A Kurtadam woman in plate armor so bright and gilded, he was fairly sure he could have poked through it with a dinner fork. Not all armor was for fighting, though, and hers did the work of showing who mattered. Yardem at his back, Marcus pushed through to her.
“I’m here to see the dragon,” he said.
“You and everyone else,” she said, looking past him into the crowd.
“I know him. We travel together,” Marcus said. The guard captain ignored him. Yardem flicked an ear. His empty expression wouldn’t have read as amusement to anyone else. “I’m Marcus Wester.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
“No offense, ma’am,” Yardem said, his voice deep as thunder. “He is.”
For the first time, the Kurtadam woman really looked at Marcus, and her eyes went wide. “Oh shit.”
“It’s all right,” Marcus said. “No one ever believes me right off. But I have come to see the dragon.”
“Sorry, I can’t do that,” the woman said. “King gave orders. No one’s to bother the… God. The dragon. Marcus Wester and a dragon. What next? Orcus the Demon King?”
“He’s back at the compound,” Marcus said. “Tracian didn’t mean me. You should let me through.”
“Not an option. I’m really very sorry.”
Marcus shrugged and cupped his hands around his mouth like a speaker’s horn. “Inys!”
The dragon’s head shifted toward the crowd. The vast, warm eyes found him at once. “Marcus Stormcrow. You have come.”
Marcus looked a question at the guard captain. She stood aside. The path down to the graveyard proper was pale and empty. Marcus and Yardem stepped down toward the huge beast. The scars of the battle in Porte Oliva were healed, for the most part. Wide scars striped Inys’s flank, roughening the scales and making a range of small shadows when the sun came at a sharp enough angle. The dragon’s wings were ripped where the huge Antean spears had pierced the webbing. Inys was still magnificent; there was no question about that. But also ragged and tired. Marcus wondered whether the injuries it had suffered would heal further than they already had, or if this was as whole as the dragon would ever be again.
Inys shifted forward and put a taloned paw into the imprint of some long dead dragon. The expression of grief on the dragon’s face was unmistakable. “Arach. This was Arach. She used to sing the most beautiful pieces. I can hear them in my mind if I try to. Her voice was so pure.”