A Wild and Unremarkable Thing

Prologue The Fire Scale flies low over Ithil. Its body is the breadth of a circus tent. Its breast is striped by veins as broad as the boughs of a mighty oak. Its roar is like the howl of an angry wind. It gleams in the starlight. Its scales are ruby-red. No wonder just one of them is worth its weight in gold, and there must be thousands. They sparkle, catching the glow of lamps and torches below - flat, fluttering discs that ripple against its skin like a scarlet coat of suns. Its leathery wings beat, once, twice, like a tribal drum, like a thunderclap, and out of its yawning mouth, a blaze erupts, engulfing everything. One breath, and Ithil is black as ash. Ithil, gloating Ithil, built of white sandstone. Built by the hands and backs of scholars. One breath. Libraries and the proud, columned summer homes of wealthy merchants are set alight. Every inch of lush, green earth in the airy market square is grit and gravel in an instant. Screams rise up like a symphony, sobs and the worst swears men can muster. Just outside of the town gates, in a field not far enough away for anyone’s liking, crystal champagne glasses fall into the grass. Girls in their finest gowns faint or flee, and some are trampled underfoot. In the heart of Ithil, beneath a brightly embroidered tarp, drunks and costumed children lie dead or dying. They make groaning prayers as they bleed and burn, mouths flush with the rose-cobbled street. One, two. The Fire Scale is high above the burning town. It gapes, and smacks its lips. Embers teeter over its tongue and tip out between its wide-gapped fangs. One, two. The Fire Scale breaks through the clouds and inky phantoms swirl in its wake. Some Ithites watch its yellow talons shove aside the stars. So quick, it came, it left. A breath. A fast-ascend, and it is gone. And Ithil…Ithil is on fire. Cody doesn’t start. She does not fly upright as the dream recedes. She lies perfectly still, except for her unbound chest, which heaves, and her throat, which lobs as it swallows a sob. She might have tossed, or screamed out in her sleep, or even mumbled and woken her father. Now she doesn’t make a sound. She listens for his footsteps, heavy and quick, but the house is as quiet as death. She’s had this dream before. Once, she called it a memory, but now…now she wonders if the scales were really so red, if the beast’s one eye was as bright and sharp as the sun. If its other eye was really missing, gouged out by a Lair Town Champion, the way legend says it was. Maybe the beast had two eyes, after all. Maybe it saw her, tripping over her lace-hemmed skirt. Maybe it knew how she cowered, black with soot, in the butcher’s fireplace. She hasn’t seen a Fire Scale in fifteen years, and she’s heard so many tales since the scorching of Ithil—fantastic tales. She doesn’t know what is really memory anymore, except that the Fire Scale came. It came and ruined Ithil. It made the whole town burn. It made her a boy. Cody doesn’t remember anything before the last Emerging, when the Fire Scale scorched Ithil. But after - she remembers everything, everything, that came after. She closes her eyes now, and thinks she’ll have another hour of sleep. Dawn isn’t so near. But when she tries to dream, she remembers instead: A pair of feet. Her feet. Pudgy, cinnamon toes. A fan of faint, burnt umber hair, like a feathery bangle, over each one of her ankles. Her father, tipping her head forward, his hand like shaved ice, cold and callous on the back of her neck. Her father, sheering off her shining, raven curls with a switchblade. She remembers: Watching her hair fall away, each lock a tightly coiled ribbon of black. She remembers: Whimpering. Her father scolding her. Gods, she remembers every tight-lipped swear. Every promise: “A lash for every tear.” She remembers: A swallow. A blink. A wobbling room. And fast, a puddle between her feet. A shorn, boyish reflection gazing out of her tears. And a scream. Her next memory is of the cane. Cody opens her eyes – nineteen-year-old Cody. Not Cayda, the little girl her father cuddled and coddled and loved. “You’ll slay a Fire Scale one day,” her father said before he sliced away her onyx mane. “A girl shouldn’t do it. A girl would never get to keep her prize.” His words were apt. His instruction indisputable. He cut her hair close to the scalp. He dressed her in trousers and called her Cody. And when she was sixteen, her mother bound her breast and warned her not to linger long in front of mirrors after a bath. Cody is a boy, on the outside at least, though she is slender and soft of cheek. She didn’t fill out the way her father hoped she would, no matter how much he made her run and climb and swing a sword. Sometimes, when her father is gone to the neighboring towns for wares, Cody does stand in front of the mirror too long. She strips n***d and admires herself in the dingy glass. She wishes, wishes, she could be Cayda again. A selfish wish. She can’t say it out loud, else she will have the cane. And she shouldn’t wish it at all. Her younger sisters have both brought home coin from the brothel. Her mother’s chest – how it boasted and bulged once! – is concave. The house is always black with filth. The cupboards are always bare. A Fire Scale will set everything right, if Cody can kill it. Cody, not Cayda. The town keeps Cody’s secret. Most have forgotten it by now, she thinks. Most call her a boy and believe that she is one. If anyone doubts…well, no one picks a fight with her father. He says his eldest child is a boy. So she is.