The Last Flame of Veyra

Chapter 4: The Man at the Table

She woke to grey light and the smell of woodsmoke, and for one merciful moment she did not remember where she was.

Then it came back, all of it, the way it always did. The square. The drum. Her sister's reaching hands. Sera lay still and let it arrive and did not flinch from it, because flinching cost more than facing, and she had learned long ago to spend her strength carefully. The fire had burned to embers. The bolt was still home on the door. No one had tried it in the night.

She was alive. That was more than the road had promised her.

Maerion came not long after, with warm water and a clean dress, grey again, always grey. He did not comment on the fact that she had slept on top of the blankets in her clothes. He told her only that the master wished to share the morning meal with her, that it was not a command, that she might refuse and eat alone in her room if she chose, and that he would carry no judgment either way.

"And if I refuse every morning?" Sera asked. "For a year?"

"Then you will eat alone for a year," the old steward said, "and no one will make you do otherwise. But you struck me last night as a woman who would rather see the thing she's afraid of than imagine it. I may be wrong. I often am, about everything but him."

So she went. Not because she was brave. Because Maerion was right, and because a closed door you cannot see behind is a worse enemy than any face.

He led her through the dim half-lit corridors to a smaller hall, warmer than the rest, where a long table had been set for two at one end and left bare down all its great length. A fire burned high in the hearth. The shutters here stood open, and the cold morning light fell across the stone.

A man sat at the table.

He rose when she entered, and Sera stopped in the doorway and looked at the Dragon King of Veyra, and every story she had ever been told fell quietly apart.

He was not old. That was the first lie undone. The stories said he was ancient, mountain-old, a withered thing that did not age because death itself had passed him by. The man before her looked to be in his late twenties, no more, tall and dark-haired, with a still and serious face and eyes the strange dark gold of banked coals. There was something old in the eyes, she would grant the stories that. But it was not the age of a body. It was the age of someone who had been tired for a very long time.

He was not monstrous. There were no horns, no scales, no fire at his fingertips. Just a man in dark clothes standing at the head of a too-long table in a too-empty hall.

And he was not, she saw at once, enjoying this. Whatever else he was, the King did not look at her the way Castorin had looked at her, with that pleasant buffed-smooth cruelty. He looked at her the way a man looks at a debt he never asked to be owed.

"Seraphine Aldwin," he said. His voice was low and even. "Sit, if you'll sit. The food is not poisoned. I imagine you'll check it anyway. You should."

She had been reaching, without quite deciding to, to break the bread open before she ate it. She stopped with her hand half-raised, caught.

"You should check everything you're given here," he went on, sitting again himself. "Not because it's poisoned. Because you've survived this long by checking, and I'd rather you stayed alive than stayed polite. Sit, Seraphine. We have a year. We may as well begin it honestly."

She sat. She did not eat. She watched him.

"You know the stories about me," he said. It was not a question.

"That you kill your brides. That none of the three before me came back." She kept her voice flat, an inventory read aloud. "That you're ancient, and don't age, and that Aldwin sends you a daughter every autumn so you won't burn the lowlands. That's what they say about you."

"And what do you think?"

"I think a man who wanted girls to kill wouldn't dress it up as a wedding. I think rituals have reasons. And I think the Regent who sent me here wasn't surprised when I offered myself in my sister's place, which means I was always meant to be the one in this chair." She held his strange gold gaze and did not look away. "So I think there's a great deal no one's telling me. And I think you're about to tell me at least one true thing, because you've decided that's how you'll handle me. Honesty. To knock me off balance, since cruelty wouldn't."

Something moved across the King's still face. Not anger. Closer to grief, or to a tired and reluctant respect.

"You're cleverer than the others," he said quietly. "That will make this harder for you. The clever ones suffer more here, in my experience. I'm sorry for it. I can't make you stupid and I wouldn't if I could."

"Then give me the true thing," Sera said. "You promised honesty. Start."

The King was silent a moment. The fire snapped in the hearth. When he spoke again his voice had dropped, and the evenness had gone out of it, and underneath was something raw he had clearly carried a long time.

"The three brides before you are not dead," he said. "I did not kill them. I have never killed a bride, or anyone sent to me from your kingdom. That is the first true thing." He met her eyes. "The second is worse, and I'll give it to you now, because you'll find it out anyway and I would rather you heard it from me. What happens to my brides is not death. It is something the women of your kingdom have been chosen, for twelve years, to carry in death's place. And there is no part of it that is kind."

The fire cracked. Outside, the pale smoke of Veyra went up against the morning.

Sera sat very still, the unbroken bread forgotten in her hand, and felt the floor of everything she'd assumed tilt quietly beneath her.

Not dead. Not killed. Something worse, dressed as a wedding, chosen on purpose, twelve years running, and the Regent who picked her had known exactly what he was sending her into.

"What is it," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "The thing they carry. What is it."

"Not this morning." The King stood. The tiredness was heavy on him now, as though the honesty had cost him something he could not easily spare. "You've had one true thing and a half. Any more on an empty night's sleep and a year of dread, and you'll do something brave and foolish before you understand what you're being brave about. Eat. Rest. Learn the house. Maerion will give you the run of it." He paused at the door, and looked back at her, and for a moment the banked-coal eyes were almost gentle. "All of it but one wing. The east. The doors are locked, and they are locked for your sake, whatever you decide to believe about me. Stay out of the east wing, Seraphine."

He left her there, alone at the long bare table, with the food she hadn't touched and the fire she hadn't asked for and more questions than she'd carried in.

Sera looked down at the bread in her hand. After a moment she broke it open, checked it from old habit, and found it was only bread.

She ate. She would need her strength.

And she thought, with the cold clear part of her that never stopped working: The east wing. Of course. Tell a woman who's survived on knowing where every door is that there's one door she can never open.

She already knew she would.