A QUEEN RAISED BY DRAGONS

DRAGONBLOOD

For a long moment neither of us said anything. Wren stood with her back to me, facing the treeline, and I stood a few paces behind her with my heart going hard enough that I could feel it in my throat, and the Ashenwild stretched dark and enormous in front of both of us, patient the way it always was, the way I was beginning to understand it had always been.

"How did you know I'd follow," I said finally.

"Because you're exactly the kind of person who follows things she isn't supposed to follow." She turned then, and in the thin moonlight her face looked younger and more frightened than it had in the village square, all the fierce bravado stripped back to something rawer. "I read that in you the second I saw you. You don't let things go. It's probably going to get you killed one day, and it's probably also the only reason you've survived this long without knowing what you are."

"Everyone keeps saying that. What I am. What I'm about to find out. Nobody will actually say the words."

"I will." She said it simply, without flourish, the way you'd finally set down something heavy you'd been carrying too long. "Do you want me to?"

I thought about lying. I thought about turning around and walking back to my ordinary house and my ordinary bed and pretending, for one more night, that I could still choose not to know. But I was so tired of choosing that, of filing things away instead of opening them, of being the only person in my own life who didn't understand the shape of the thing everyone else had already decided to protect me from.

"Yes," I said. "Tell me."

Wren took a breath like she was about to step off something high.

"Dragonblood," she said.

The word landed strangely, the way important words sometimes do — too small for what they're meant to carry, and somehow, in the same instant, enormous, the whole shape of my life rearranging itself around two plain syllables.

"I don't know what that means," I said, though something in me, some old buried instinct, some part of me that had spent every day of my life leaning toward a forbidden treeline without ever asking why, felt the word settle into place like a key finding its lock.

"It's old," Wren said. "Older than the kingdom, older than the wars the histories tell you about. Three hundred years ago dragons and humans lived side by side — not myths, not stories for frightened children, real, the way the crown is real, the way this village is real. Some human bloodlines bonded to them so deeply the magic crossed over. Passed down. Bred into the blood itself, generation after generation, sleeping most of the time, waiting for something to wake it."

"Wake it how."

"Extreme fear. Extreme feeling." She looked at me carefully. "Or contact with a living dragon."

My hand went, without my deciding it should, to the scar below my collarbone.

"You carry it," Wren said, watching my hand find the mark. "I don't know exactly what shape yours takes yet — it's different in everyone who carries it, fire, or sight, or something the old texts call voice, where dragons answer you the way they answer nothing else living. But you carry it. I'd bet my life on it. I think I already have, riding here."

"That's not possible," I said, though even as the words left me they sounded thin, unconvincing, the last weak argument of someone who already suspected she'd lost. "I'm a record keeper. I've lived in this village my entire life. I would know if I—"

"Would you?" Wren's voice was gentle now, gentler than anything else she'd said, and somehow that gentleness hurt worse than bluntness would have. "You've heard something calling your name your whole life, haven't you. In dreams, at first. And then closer. And then not a dream at all — you've woken up outside, near the treeline, with no memory of walking there. Haven't you."

I didn't answer. I didn't need to. My silence was answer enough, the same way Ronan's had been in the square that afternoon.

"That mark on your collarbone isn't a birthmark," Wren said quietly. "It's a seal. Someone placed it on you when you were an infant to keep the blood asleep — to buy you time to grow up ordinary, unnoticed, safe, before it woke and made you a target. I don't know everyone who's still alive who could have done that for you. But I know it was done with love, whoever did it. Sealing that kind of blood isn't easy, and it isn't free, and nobody does it unless they're trying desperately to save the person underneath it."

The ground seemed to tilt under me the way it had the day the tremor passed through the whole valley, except this time the shaking was entirely inside my own chest.

"Why would anyone need saving from it," I managed. "If it's just — magic. Old magic. Why would that make me a target."

Wren's face went hard again, the fierce bravado sliding back over the fear like a visor closing.

"Because the crown doesn't call it magic," she said. "The crown calls it contamination. A disease. Something to be found and ended before it wakes, quietly, generation after generation, for longer than either of us have been alive. They've been hunting carriers for two generations, Ember. Finding them before the blood wakes, and making sure it never does."

Somewhere behind us, back toward the village, I heard the faint, unmistakable sound of a door opening, footsteps moving fast along the road toward the treeline — someone coming to find us, someone who'd noticed we were both missing and gone looking, and I didn't yet know if it would be Ronan or Caspian or Maeve herself, only that whichever of them it was, they were about to find me standing at the edge of the Ashenwild having just been told, in plain words at last, exactly what I was.

And underneath the fear, underneath the vertigo of an entire ordinary life cracking down the middle in a single conversation, some small, quiet, terrible part of me felt something I hadn't expected to feel at all.

Recognition.