The Dragon king's captive bride

Chapter 5: The Book And The Burn

I read until my eyes hurt.

The book Ronan had given me was old, older than I'd first thought, the pages thin and slightly brittle at the edges, the ink faded in places where someone had pressed too hard or the years had been unkind. The cover had no title, no author name, nothing on the spine to tell you what it contained or who had written it. Just old leather, worn smooth in the middle where hands had held it over the years, and the faint smell of something like woodsmoke that clung to the pages when I turned them.

I'd carried it back to my room the evening Ronan gave it to me, intending to read just a few pages before sleep.

That had been hours ago.

The fire in my hearth had burned down to low embers, and the candle on my bedside table had melted nearly to the holder, and I was still sitting cross legged on top of my blankets fully dressed, the book open in my lap, reading the same paragraph for the third time because my mind kept refusing to accept what my eyes were telling it.

The war hadn't started the way my father told it.

I set the book face down on the blanket and pressed my palms against my eyes for a moment, not because I was tired, though I was, but because I needed a second to separate what I'd believed my whole life from what I was reading now. They felt like two different rooms and I was standing in the doorway between them, not sure which one I was allowed to go back to.

According to everything I'd learned growing up in Valdris, the sequence of events was simple and had never been in question. The dragons had struck first. Three border villages burned to the ground in a single night, families killed, fields destroyed, the kind of attack that left nothing behind except ash and grief and the particular fury that comes from being hit without warning. My grandfather, King Aldric the Second, had retaliated in defense of his people. Everything that followed, the decades of conflict, the border skirmishes, the lives spent on both sides like coins that kept running out, had been a consequence of that first night.

It was the version I'd heard at dinner tables and in schoolrooms, repeated by soldiers and servants and tutors and my father himself. Told so many times by so many people that I'd long since stopped thinking of it as a version. It had simply become the truth, the same way the sky being grey in winter or the river being cold in spring was the truth. Unchallengeable. Self evident. Just the way things were.

But the book in my hands was telling me something else entirely.

The author was careful about it. Cautious in the way that people are when they know what they're writing could get them killed. He didn't come out and say it plainly, not at first. He built toward it slowly, the way you might approach something dangerous, circling around the edges before committing to the center. He cited sources I'd never heard of, referenced letters and testimonies and documents from people whose names meant nothing to me but whose accounts, taken together, assembled themselves into a picture that made my stomach turn the more clearly it came into focus.

The attack on the border villages had not been carried out by dragons.

I read it again. Then again, slower, making sure I hadn't misunderstood the phrasing or missed some qualifier that would soften what the words were saying.

There was no qualifier. The author was as certain as a man writing in careful, cautious circles could be. Men had done it. Men wearing symbols designed to look like dragon fire, carrying weapons capable of producing burns that would be misidentified in the chaos and grief of the aftermath. Paid, the author suggested, by a council he referred to only by a set of initials I didn't recognize, acting on orders that had come from somewhere very close to the throne of Valdris.

I put the book down on the blanket again and looked at the ceiling.

My grandfather had been king at the time. My grandfather, who I had grown up hearing described as the man who defended his kingdom when no one else would, the king who held the line, whose portrait still hung in the great hall back home with a small golden plaque underneath it that read Protector of Valdris.

I thought about that portrait for a long time. The serious eyes, the formal posture, the way he'd been painted to look like exactly what they'd needed him to be.

Then I picked the book back up and kept reading.

The author went on for another several pages, carefully, methodically, each paragraph adding another piece to the picture. Witness accounts from dragon realm settlements that had been nowhere near the border that night. A timeline that didn't match the official record. A letter, reproduced in full, from someone the author identified only as a border official, raising questions about the nature of the burns that had never been answered publicly.

I read it all. Every word. And when I reached the end of the chapter and turned the page, expecting more, I found nothing.

Not a blank page. Not a clean ending. Ragged edges, four or five of them, torn close enough to the spine that you'd never notice unless you were specifically looking for them. The paper around the tears was darkened the same age as everything else in the book. Not a recent removal. This had been done a long time ago, carefully, by someone who understood that the most effective way to bury a truth wasn't to destroy the whole document but to remove just enough of it that the reader was left with questions and no way to answer them.

I ran my finger slowly along the edge of the first missing page.

Whoever had done this hadn't been careless about it. They'd left enough of the book intact to seem like a complete document to anyone flipping through it casually. You'd have to be reading closely, the way I'd been reading, to notice that the chapter simply stopped mid argument and the next one began on a subject entirely different, with a tonal shift that didn't make sense unless you understood that something had been removed from between them.

Someone had decided, deliberately and with some forethought, that whoever read this book didn't need to know what came next.

I closed it carefully, the way you close something that might fall apart if you're not gentle with it, and sat with it in my lap for a long time.

The candle had burned out. The room was lit only by the last of the embers in the hearth, everything orange and dim and shifting, and outside my window the silver garden was dark, the flowers catching no moonlight because there was no moonlight tonight, just clouds pressing low over the mountain the same way they had since I'd arrived.

I thought about my father's voice on the morning I'd left. This is bigger than you, Seraphina. This is about the kingdom.

I'd been angry when he'd said it, angry at being reduced to a diplomatic tool, at being handed over like something to be signed and sealed. But sitting here now with this book in my hands and these missing pages and this version of events that nobody in Valdris had ever mentioned to me, I found myself wondering something different.

Had he known?

Not just known that the war existed, not just known that peace was necessary. Had he known what I was now holding in my hands? Had he known what this war was actually built on, what it had actually started from, and sent me here anyway with a carriage and a maid and six words of goodbye that were supposed to stand in for everything he couldn't bring himself to say?

I didn't have an answer. I wasn't sure I wanted one yet.

What I did know, sitting in the dark with the ember light dying around me, was that I had come to this mountain expecting to find a monster and had instead found a man who'd handed me a book full of his family's secrets and told me to start there.

That didn't make Ronan good. It didn't make any of this simple. But it meant that whatever this was, whatever I was caught in the middle of, it was a great deal older and a great deal more complicated than anyone had bothered to tell me.

I set the book on the bedside table, lay back on top of the blankets still fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling until the last ember went dark.

Sleep, when it finally came, was not restful.