The Dragon King's Mate

The storm came down off the Dragon Mountains like the sky was falling. Wren Alder stood in her doorway with a lamp in her hand and watched the rain turn her yard to soup. The chickens were shut in. The goats were shut in. Her fire was lit, her soup was on, and there was exactly one warm dry place in the whole valley tonight, and she was standing in it. Then something screamed in the chicken coop. Not a chicken scream. Wren knew every sound her animals made, the way she knew her own name. This was bigger. This was hurt. She pulled her coat over her head and ran. The coop door hung half open, banging in the wind. Inside, the chickens were mad with fear, all of them up on the high roosts, screaming at the thing in the straw below. The thing in the straw was a lizard. A lizard the size of a horse. It lay on its side in the broken straw, and in the lamp light Wren saw it all in one breath: scales black as wet coal, each one edged in gold. A wing — a real wing, folded wrong, with the thin skin of it torn in two places. A long tail that curled around the water bucket it had clearly tried to drink from. And up its left front leg, from the claws to the shoulder, the scales were wrong — grey, dull, and hard in a way that had nothing to do with being alive. Grey like stone. Because it was stone. Wren put out a careful hand and touched the leg, and under her fingers it was cold and rough and dead as a cliff face. "What in the world," she whispered, "has been happening to you?" The lizard opened one eye. The eye was gold. Not animal gold — old gold, deep gold, with a black line down the middle like a crack in a coin. It looked at her for a long moment, and Wren had the strangest feeling of her whole life: the feeling of being known. Seen right through, down to the bone, by something that had been alive since before her village had a name. Then the eye closed again, and the great head dropped into the straw with a sigh like a bellows, and the whole huge body shook once with pain and went still. "Oh, no you don't," Wren said, to a lizard, in a storm, like a madwoman. "You do not crawl into my coop and die. My girls will never lay again." She worked. She was the village's animal healer — herbs for the goats, splints for the dogs, poultices for every cow and horse in the valley — but nothing in twenty-four years of hurt creatures had taught her how to sew a wing. So she did it the way she did everything: slowly, out loud, explaining herself to the patient. "I'm washing this first. It'll sting. You're a big lad, you can take it." She cleaned the torn wing with warm water and yarrow, and the lizard's breathing slowed under her hands. "Now the sewing. Small stitches. Hold still. If you bite me, I'll bite you back, and I warn you, I've had practice." The eye opened again at that. She would swear on her mother's grave that there was something in it that was almost — offended. "Don't give me that look. Royalty gets the same stitches as goats in this coop." She packed the stone leg with warm cloths, which did nothing she could see, and left them anyway because her hands needed to try. She made broth — good broth, her own supper — and held the bowl to the long jaw until, doubtful as a cat, the lizard drank. "You'll do," she said at last, sitting back in the straw, soaked through, filthy, lit gold by the lamp. The chickens had settled. The rain beat on the roof like the whole mountain was knocking. "You'll live, I think. Whatever you are." And because she was who she was — because she had talked to hurt things her whole life, in the dark, the way other people prayed — she put her palm flat on the great black chest, over the heart, and said the thing she always said: "There. I hear you. You're not alone in the dark. Rest now." Under her palm, the heart beat. Slow. Enormous. Uneven — a beat, a pause, a grinding wrongness in it, like a clock with a stone in the works. And under the scales of that chest, right beneath her hand, one single scale was different from all the others. It was warm. The others were rain-cold; this one was warm as skin after sun. And as Wren stared, it began, very faintly, to glow — a deep gold light, pulsing. Faster. Faster. In time — she counted it twice to be sure — in exact time with her own startled, hammering heart. "That's not possible," Wren said. The lizard did not answer. But the glowing scale pulsed on, gold and steady, and the great gold eye stayed closed, and the storm raged, and Wren Alder sat in her chicken coop in the middle of the night with her hand on a dragon's heart, feeling two heartbeats become one rhythm. She slept there in the end. Curled in the straw with her coat over them both, because the wounded thing shook with cold in its sleep and she would not leave a patient cold — that was the rule, and the rule did not have exceptions for dragons. --- She woke to grey dawn light and an empty coop. No lizard. No blood. The straw where he had lain was pressed flat and still faintly warm. The bowl was empty and clean. Her chickens strutted and clucked like nothing in the world had ever been wrong. One thing only: the door of the coop stood open, and in the mud outside it there were footprints. Not claw marks. Boots. Wren followed them, barefoot, in her nightdress, with her hair full of straw — and stopped dead at the edge of her own yard. A man stood at her gate. He was tall, and dressed in black and gold, and his hair was black as wet coal and his face was the kind of handsome that has nothing kind in it at all — sharp and proud and carved, with eyes the deep old gold of a coin's cracked heart. His left sleeve hung stiff and strange, as if the arm inside it did not bend the way an arm should. He looked at her standing in the mud with straw in her hair, and she looked at him, and the whole wet grey morning held its breath. "Your wing," Wren said, because her mouth worked faster than her fear. "How is your wing?" Something moved across the carved face. Surprise. Then something else, slower, that she could not name. "It will heal," said the Dragon King. "You sew well. For a woman with — " his gold eyes went to her hair " — straw." Wren became aware, all at once, of the nightdress, the bare feet, the straw, and the fact that she was scolding royalty before breakfast. Heat went up her face in a wave. And over the stranger's heart, through the black cloth of his shirt, a single point of gold light bloomed — warm, deep, pulsing. Faster when she blushed. Steady as a drum. Exactly keeping time with her own heart. "Oh," said the King of the Dragons, looking down at his glowing chest with an expression of a man watching a hundred years of hiding burn down in one morning. "Oh, little bird. We are in a great deal of trouble."