The Dragon King's Mate

Chapter 6: The Farewell Rite

The old dragon's name was Vorr, and he had been a general once, and he was dying on the north shoulder of the mountain in the proper dragon way — which is to say, slowly, publicly, and with everyone pretending not to count the days.

"He flew up there a month ago," Toren said, as they climbed. "When the Creeping takes the wings, an old one chooses his place. It's the last choice the stone leaves you. He chose the north shoulder. His wife's stone is there. Three hundred years she's been waiting in the rock, and now he — " Toren cleared his throat, roughly " — he'll lie down next to her and finish."

"And the rite?" Wren asked. The path was steep and the wind was up, and her legs were burning. "Tell me the rite again."

"The Farewell." Toren did not slow down, curse him. "When an Old One is going, a Listener sits with him and hears his last words — his farewells, his messages, his — whatever a heart needs to say at the door. The Listener carries the words down to the family. Exact. Word for word. It's the most sacred duty we have." He glanced back at her. "It has failed for a hundred years, little bird. Because there are no Listeners. The last ones died before my grandfather hatched. For a century, our old ones have gone into the stone unheard, with their last words locked inside the mountain forever."

"That's — "

"Yes," said Toren. "It is. Climb."

Vorr lay on the north shoulder like a fallen tower.

He was bigger than Kael, or had been; stone had taken him strangely, a wing here, a flank there, so that he looked like a dragon half-carved out of the mountain and half-sunk into it. His living eye was the size of a cart wheel, and the color of it was going — gold dimming toward grey, the way a fire goes, from the edges.

His family waited below the shoulder at the proper distance: a daughter with silver-shot hair and a face set like a locked door; two grandsons, huge men even in human shape, standing like honor guards at a funeral that wasn't finished; a little girl, maybe seven years old, holding a bunch of mountain flowers that were already wilting in the wind.

The daughter looked at Wren — small, human, out of breath, a nobody from the valley — and Wren saw it all go across her face: the hope, and the hatred of the hope, and the wish that it had been anyone else, anyone dragon, anyone at all who mattered.

"The Listener," the daughter said at last, stiff as a board. "My father — " She stopped. Her jaw worked. "His wife. My mother. Her stone is the one beside him, there, the white one. He's been trying to speak to her stone for a month. If you hear nothing, mistress, I would rather you said so. We are not — we have had enough of courtiers bringing us kind lies."

"I don't do kind lies," Wren said. "Ask the king. It got me in terrible trouble the first day."

Something in the daughter's face moved, unwillingly. "Climb, then, Listener."

Wren climbed.

Up close, Vorr was warm. That surprised her — the stone parts of him were sun-warm and the living parts were fever-warm, and the border between them crawled with fine gold cracks, like a road map of a country being lost. His great eye turned, with huge effort, and found her.

Wren laid her ear to the stone of his cheek, below the eye, the way she had with Ysra. She put her palms flat. She listened with her whole body, without wanting anything.

At first there was only the wind, and her own heart, and the slow grind of stone settling.

Then, below the stone, below the world: a heartbeat. Slow beyond slow. Each beat a minute apart, maybe more. A heart packing its bags.

And inside the beats — the way a dream is inside sleep — words. Not spoken. Felt, in the bones of her ear, in her teeth, in the small of her back, the way thunder is felt before it is heard.

She stayed there three hours.

The court below did not see much: a small woman with her ear to a mountain, unmoving, while the sun crossed the sky. The family did not see the general stir once — just once — and sigh, a sound like a rockfall in a far valley, when Wren's hand found the place over his fading heart and pressed, and said aloud, to the stone, to the old soldier, to no one:

"I'm here. I hear you. You're not alone in the dark. Speak, general. I'll carry it all."

Kael stood with the family the whole time, in the wind, unspeaking, with his chest uncovered by any court rule — and his heart-scale burned gold for three straight hours, steady as a lighthouse, while his mate did the oldest holy work of his people on a mountainside.

Toren, standing at his shoulder with the honor guard, remarked to the wind, to the family, to whoever heaven assigned to such duties: "The king is proud. In case anyone missed it. Three hours of proud. We may need to shade him before he ignites the general."

Nobody hushed him. The daughter was crying too hard to hush anyone.

Wren came down the shoulder at dusk with stone dust in her hair, moving like a woman carrying a full bowl of water across a frozen lake.

She went straight to the daughter, and took her hands, and gave the words back exact. Word for word, the way the rite demands, in the general's own rough shape:

"He says: Daughter. The white stone is your mother and I am going to her now and you are not to grieve the manner of it. He says: the north gate key is under the third stair where it always was, and your brother owes the miller money, and it is to be paid without argument, because a Vorr pays. He says — "

Wren's voice shook, and she made it steady, because this part belonged to a little girl with wilting flowers.

"He says: for the small one. Tell the small one the story of the fox and the moon is true, all of it, and the moon is minded to prove it. And tell her — "

"Tell her," the daughter whispered, holding Wren's hands like a rail in a flood, "tell her what, Listener?"

"Tell her Grandfather hears her," Wren said, "when she talks to the white stone. He's been listening a month with his ear turned. He says the stone isn't deaf. The stone is just slow. And he loves her past the end of words, which for a Vorr — " the ghost of the old soldier's own dry humor came through her like weather " — is saying something, because words were never our family's gift."

The little girl wailed then, happy and broken at once, the way only children can be both, and thrust her wilting flowers at Wren, and the two huge grandsons went down on their knees in the mountain dust to their father's Listener, and the daughter bowed her silver-shot head until her forehead touched Wren's hands.

And on the path above, unnoticed by Wren, Lady Sylara stood in her wine-dark dress with her attendants, and watched a general's family kneel to a human girl on a mountainside, and watched the court that was meant to be hers move its weight — quietly, like a mountain shifting in its sleep — and her beautiful face showed nothing at all, except, for one unguarded moment, the look of a woman doing sums she does not like.

By full dark, the general's heartbeat had slowed past hearing.

Wren sat with him until it stopped. It did not go cold. It went quiet — like a house where someone beloved is sleeping in the next room.

"Rest now," she said, to the mountain that had been a general. "You were heard. All of it. I promise."