A QUEEN RAISED BY DRAGONS

THE PULL BECOMES PHYSICAL

I woke standing at the treeline.

Not at my window this time. Outside. Barefoot, in my nightclothes, the grass wet and cold under my feet and the last fence post of Caldenmere a good hundred paces behind me, and no memory at all — none, not a fragment — of how I'd gotten there.

For a long moment I couldn't move. Not out of fear, though the fear came quickly enough once my mind caught up with my body. Out of something closer to disorientation, the specific vertigo of realizing that a version of you has been operating your own limbs without your permission and you have no way of knowing what she did with the time.

The Ashenwild stood in front of me, close enough now that I could have reached out and touched the nearest trunk, and it was different up close than it had ever looked from my window. Not menacing, exactly. Attentive. As if the whole dark mass of it had turned very slightly, the way a person turns when someone they've been waiting for finally walks into the room.

Something was breathing beyond the treeline.

I want to be precise about this, because precision is the entire skill of my life and I refuse to abandon it now, when it matters most: it was not the wind. Wind does not have a rhythm that slow, that deep, that deliberate. What I heard, standing barefoot in the wet grass at the edge of the forbidden world, was breath — long, enormous, patient breath, the kind that belongs to something the size of a hillside, and it was not threatening.

It was waiting.

I stood there long enough to understand that if I took one more step forward, something on the other side of that treeline would meet me halfway. I felt it the way you feel a held door about to open — not seen, not heard, just known, in the part of the body that understands things before the mind agrees to.

I did not take the step.

I turned and ran instead, back across the wet grass, back past the fence post, back to my own door, and I sat down against it from the inside with my knees drawn up to my chest and stayed there until the sky started to grey, the way I had two nights before at my window, except this time there was no glass between me and whatever had called me, and that difference terrified me more than I had words for.

I told no one. Not Ronan, not Maeve, and certainly not Caspian, though when I arrived at the archive that morning with grass stains still faintly visible on the hem of my nightdress where I hadn't managed to fully scrub them out, he looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn't read.

"You look like you didn't sleep," he said.

"Everyone keeps telling me that."

"Because it keeps being true." He set down the ledger he'd been holding and studied me the way he studied everything, missing nothing, cataloguing without mercy. "Something happened last night."

"Nothing happened."

"Ember." That careful weight on my name again, the one that made me answer honestly before I'd decided to. "I am trained to notice when someone is lying to me, and you are lying to me right now, and badly, which tells me you're frightened enough that you've stopped being careful about it. What happened."

I could have lied again. I'd done it successfully enough two days before, in the square, about the names in the ledger. But something in his face — some crack in the careful winter-grey control of it, something that looked almost like worry, though I didn't yet trust myself to name it that plainly — made me want, for the first time since he'd arrived, to simply tell the truth to another person and see what happened.

"I woke up outside," I said. "At the treeline. I don't remember walking there."

Whatever color had been in his face left it entirely.

"How close to the treeline."

"Close enough to touch it."

"Did you hear anything? Feel anything?"

"Breathing," I said, and even saying the word out loud in the daylight of the archive it sounded impossible, sounded like the kind of thing that belonged in the nightmare I'd never told anyone about and not in an ordinary Tuesday morning. "Something enormous, breathing, on the other side of the trees. It didn't feel like it wanted to hurt me."

"What did it feel like it wanted?"

I looked at him, and understood, watching his face go very still and very focused in a way I hadn't seen from him yet, that whatever I said next was going to matter more than anything I'd said to him so far.

"It felt like it wanted me to come closer," I said. "Like it's been waiting for me. Specifically me. Not — not the village. Not anyone. Me."

Caspian didn't say anything for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped into something quieter than I'd heard from him yet, careful in an entirely different way than his usual carefulness — not guarded, but gentle, the voice of a man handling something he'd just realized was far more fragile, and far more important, than he'd let himself believe.

"I need you to not go near that treeline again," he said. "Not at night. Not alone. Not for any reason, until I understand what's happening to you."

"You said you'd tell me when you were certain."

"I am becoming considerably more certain by the hour," he said, "and I am liking what I'm becoming certain of less and less."

He wouldn't say anything else. But he watched me for the rest of that day with an attentiveness that hadn't been there before — not suspicion anymore, not the assessing weigh-and-price look he'd given me the morning he arrived. Something closer to a man standing guard over something he was starting to understand was worth far more than he'd been told, and far more fragile than the crown that sent him seemed to believe.