A QUEEN RAISED BY DRAGONS

THE NIGHTMARE THAT ANSWERS

For a moment nobody in the archive moved.

The shudder passed through the floorboards and up through the soles of my feet and into my chest, and then it was gone, the way a held breath goes when you finally let it out, and the ledgers on the shelves settled back into their neat crooked rows as if nothing had happened at all.

Caspian's hand was still on the drawer. He hadn't opened it. He was looking at me.

"You heard that," I said, before I could decide whether saying it out loud was a mistake.

"I felt it." His voice had changed — not softer, just more careful, the way you get careful around something you don't yet understand the size of. "The whole village felt it. That's not the same as hearing your name."

I went very still.

"I didn't say anything about a name."

"No," he agreed, and something in his face closed like a door being eased shut so quietly you'd almost believe it had never been open. "You didn't."

Outside, I could hear the village doing what villages do after something strange happens and everyone pretends it didn't — voices low and quick, someone's dog barking itself hoarse three houses down, a child crying and being hushed. Ordinary panic. The kind that forgets itself by supper.

I did not feel like I was going to forget this by supper.

"I have to check the grain stores," I said, which was not true, or at least not urgently true, but it was the fastest sentence I could find that got me out of that room and away from a man who had just heard the ground move and immediately looked at me like I was the reason.

He didn't stop me. He didn't say anything at all, actually, which was somehow worse than if he had.

I didn't check the grain stores.

I walked the length of the village instead, past the well, past Ronan's forge where the fire was banked low for the evening and he was leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed, watching the same direction everyone else was watching — not at the sky, not at each other. At the treeline.

"You felt that," I said, coming to stand beside him.

"Whole forge shook." He didn't look at me. There was something in his face I didn't have a name for yet, something too still for a man built out of noise and warmth the way Ronan was. "Never felt anything like it."

"Neither have I."

That got his attention. He looked down at me, and for just a second — less than a second, gone before I could be sure I hadn't imagined it — there was something like fear behind his eyes. Not fear of the tremor.

Fear for me.

"You should get home," he said, and his voice had gone gentle in the specific way people get gentle right before they're about to lie to you, or right before they're about to tell you something true that they wish they didn't have to. "Long day. Crown's Blade poking around your archive, ground shaking like the world's got a fever. Go home, Ember."

"You know something."

"I know it's getting dark and you've got a full day tomorrow." He said it lightly. Too lightly. Ronan has never in his life said anything to me lightly that he actually meant lightly, and I have known him since we were children pulling frogs out of the same stream, and something about that — about him lying to me in the gentlest voice I'd ever heard him use — frightened me more than the tremor had.

I went home. I didn't sleep.

The dream came anyway, the way it always does, except tonight it didn't wait for sleep to actually take hold. It came in that thin grey space between waking and dreaming, the place where you can still feel your own bed and still hear your own house settling and still, somehow, be somewhere else entirely.

I am standing at the edge of something vast and burning.

Not burning like a house fire, panicked and consuming. Burning like a forge, deliberate, ancient, patient — heat that has been building toward something for longer than I have been alive. And out of that heat, out of that patient enormous fire, a voice.

Ember.

It has always said my name like this. Since I was small enough that my mother — no. Since I was small. That correction happens every time and it never stops hurting, small and sharp, like biting the inside of your cheek.

Ember.

Tonight the voice doesn't sound like a haunting. It doesn't sound like something reaching for me across a distance too vast to close. Tonight it sounds like something on the other side of a door, close enough that I could reach out and put my hand flat against the wood and feel it breathing on the other side.

Tonight it sounds like it's almost here.

Ember. Come to the edge.

I woke standing at my window.

Not in my bed, not sitting up gasping the way I always have before, every single time, for sixteen years. Standing. My hand pressed flat against the cold glass. My scar burning warm against my collarbone the way it had earlier that day, in the archive, when the ground shook and a voice called my name from somewhere past the treeline.

Outside my window, past the fence, past the last lit lantern of Caldenmere, the Ashenwild stood black and endless in the dark. And for the first time in my entire life, looking at it didn't feel like looking at something forbidden.

It felt like looking at something waiting.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough that my feet had gone numb against the floorboards, long enough that the candle on my desk had burned down to nothing, and it was only when I heard footsteps on the road outside — slow, careful, deliberately quiet — that I came back into myself enough to look away from the treeline.

Caspian was standing at my gate.

Not moving. Not knocking. Just standing there in the dark, looking up at my window the same way I had just been looking at the Ashenwild — like he already knew exactly what he'd find if he looked long enough, and he was afraid of it, and he couldn't make himself stop looking anyway.

Our eyes met through the glass.

Neither of us moved for a long, long moment.

Then he turned and walked back into the dark toward the elder hall, and I stood at my window until the sky started to grey, trying to work out which frightened me more — that the Ashenwild had called my name twice in one day, or that the King's Blade had stood outside my house at midnight instead of sleeping like a man with nothing to hide.