The cavern – the great hall – is bigger than she has words for, except maybe league. Uncle had once shown her a map-book of the capital he’d been paid to bring out to some rich Marquis. There was picture after picture of the Sun Temple’s ceiling: a web of ridges and arches, dyed over and between with everything from blocks and patterns of colour to the most detailed paintings, and all of it in what seemed like every colour a dye could be and far too much gold leaf. The dragon’s roof is at least that fancy. She’d have to ask Jeweller Gretel to be sure if the constellations are made out of gemstones, but she thinks so. And how big must they be that she can see them from all the way down on the floor?
On the east side, the wall is lined with bookshelves, and for a moment she thinks they’re just left there, open to the elements – but when she looks closer she realises every single one of them has doors of glass, so flat they leave no room for dust or damp to get in and so clear they could almost be empty air. And there’s so many of them! She could line these shelves up along the traderoad, starting right at the Cleave, and still make it out the other side of the village; only dragon’s amused rumble at her staring breaks her attention away.
“Should we come to a deal, you will have many years to explore my library. For now, there are more important things, and all of them are better done well-rested.”
Reluctant, but knowing he’s speaking sense, she follows onwards, taking in tapestries and carpets woven in so many rich colours she can only be glad the Sun can’t reach through stone to fade them. Endless rows of stone pillars and platforms, each the size of the great barn if not larger, hold up boxes of that same impossible glass. Inside, there are more types of art than she knows the names of, and never mind trying to count the pieces.
Idony would be fluttering over her dyepots, trying to mix just the right shades. Hana would sit with all the fabrics tracking warp and weft with clever fingers. Oliga would roll her eyes and complain and indulge them anyway, practicing her dances to pass the time, drawing them into teaching-songs and tale-chants old and familiar enough not to distract them while they work.
If it weren’t for the floating road of magic, clear as bookshelf-glass, which speeds her along to match the Bronze Judge’s full stride and lifts her high enough to see the full measure of his hoard, she thinks this would have been maybe the better part of three thousand very boring paces. As it is, she wants to ask him to slow down, to show her every piece and tell her its history, to teach her to bend magic to her will with a flick of her fingers. She remembers stories of the Thousand Kings who sail the western islands, whose alchemists practice ‘wizardry’ and ‘sorcery’, shaping the world around them without tools or time. Maybe this is related.
She wants to ask, but she’s never drunk so deeply of any magic but the Sun’s. The Stars watch over their people while the Sun rests, but they’ve little and less to spare even when the Moon is too badly wounded to come out and blight them. She’s starting to prickle all over, and every blink feels heavier than the last.
When they finally reach open floor – enough of it to fit the whole village in – they’re only halfway to the end of the hall. Offset towards the west wall is a circular pit; at a glance she’d say it’s probably twice the width of the market square, but how deep it goes she has no idea, because it’s full of more coin than she’s ever imagined.
If she wasn’t so tired, she probably wouldn’t have been able to stop the bubbling brightness from coming out as giggles. “… Dragons really sleep on piles of riches?”
“Some. Others think there are better ways of gathering power. I believe it is foolish to judge without checking for oneself; another twenty years and I will know enough to decide. And on the matter of sleep, you will need suitable rooms. ”
He makes another half-gesture, and behind the gold-bed, a tapestry flies off its hangings. At the same time, further along the wall, a broad section of painted stone slides forwards to reveal a rack of shelves, already near over-full. Emilia can see the edges of brocades, carpets, silks, fabrics she doesn’t recognise; Hana’s smile might actually show teeth if she saw this. When it retreats, it lies flush with its neighbours, smooth as a well-split shale.
Setting his hands onto the stone, the Bronze Judge lowers his head, and bracing with all six limbs exhales a spark of dragonfire.
In her studies, she’ll learn that the name is ill-fitting: there’s no heat to it at all, in truth, but it shimmers like the air over a hearth and most mortal kindreds trust their eyes over all other senses. Fear-tales of flame run rampant have nothing on the reality of dragonfire, so it becomes an easy tale to tell and to believe. And so many have believed for so long that the spirit of the world is well used to the idea.
Uncle always says, she’ll think as she remembers this moment, that just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
But that learning has yet to come, so her spirit experiences its offcast magic as something like heat, as if she’s suddenly standing in front of an open forge, and she doesn’t think to question it.
She watches, spellbound, as a colourless glimmer sweeps through solid stone like a hand waving away smoke. It churns and spreads and grows, cutting out a dragon-sized archway and then expanding further and is that supposed to be where she lives now?
Rooms, plural. Just what she can see could swallow her entire house!
It takes less than a hundred heartbeats for the Bronze Judge to relax his focus, and less than ten more of stone flowing like honey to outline the arch and – she finds, as she paces out the lengths and widths of eleven separate rooms – shape the walls and ceiling with the same sort of ridges and carvings as the rest of the lair. Except there aren’t any murals; she’ll think about that when she isn’t struggling to walk in a straight line.
Perhaps for a dragon this is no great gift, but heartbeats of his attention has produced months of work for a master Mason: a manor bigger than the Magistrate’s. Bigger than Uncle tells her the Baron’s keep is.
When she’s finished discovering that the only room not larger than the home she grew up in is the privy, she finds him mostly done crafting enough furniture for a village of lordly nobles. She watches it dance, floating all about his head. Where did he even get the wood, the cloth, the dyes? Sun and Stars, is he using his hoard for this?
“Is this really all mine, Lord?” It’s one thing to hide your fear at being eyeballed by a dragon. It’s another to not really have to.
“This is hardly a great estate. A hall, for you to meet visitors whom you do not wish to invite into your private space. A study, workshop, and personal library, for you to learn. A pantry and kitchen, to feed and water you. A bedchamber, solar, privy, and washroom, for your comfort and leisure. A treasury, should you wish to hoard more than merely the books and art you seem to hunger for, and to keep your coin. And a servants’ quarters, for teachers and the like. The furnishings are made from things I have hoarded over the years, yes – I saw you looking for a source – but you are guesting beneath the shelter of my wings. I am not giving it away, only changing how it is kept.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
It’s the patience of it more than anything else. The way he pays attention: noticing how she was drawn to the endless rows of books and that she was scared of taking from his hoard, knowing that mortals eat and sleep and suffer the cold poorly, listening to her speak and answering her questions.
When she was all of eleven, a nameless Delver had scrabbled up the Cleave with bloody fingertips, eyes darting over every shadow, flicking to every movement. Innkeeper David, firmly ignoring the man’s hoarse muttering, had put a warm cloak over his shoulders, coaxed him into the brewhouse for a hot dinner and a mug of good ale, and died for making the wrong noise in the blindspot of a man stretched to the breaking point. For all his ribs were visible at twenty paces, he’d drunk deep of the Scar’s magic, as Delvers do, and one swing of an arm no thicker than Emilia’s tore flesh like threadbare rags.
He hadn’t meant to do it, but the law was the law and the Magistrate the Magistrate. Word went out to the Baron. Emilia, perched in a tree, watched a massive brute with a massive moustache thunder down the traderoad, outpacing his Armsmen’s horses afoot, and bellow in the face of a desperate, broken man she didn’t know until years later was no grown man at all. Uncle had caught her foot, pulled her down, muffled her shriek against his chest, and run.
That had saved her from seeing the fight, but there’d been nothing anyone could do to stop their children seeing the damage it left behind. The buildings, at least, could be fixed, but Emilia knows how people use power when they have it. They’ve all lived with the consequences.
Just with what he’s shown her already, the Bronze Judge could have swept aside that nameless Delver boy and the Baron and all his Armsmen. If one part in ten of the dragon-tales are true, he could sweep aside armies, anyone and anything short of the greatest alchemists in the kingdom sallying out to meet him. But he doesn’t act like it. He pays attention. He tries to speak to her like – like a person who just happens to be a dragon, rather than a dragon-lord to a peasant girl.
She expected, if she wasn’t just eaten or burned, that she’d be kept for the having of her, like Hawker Feodor’s caged songbirds. That would have been fine; many dragon-tales speak at length about what makes one dragon different and more dangerous than another, but they all agree that a dragon will sooner die than part with one coin of its hoard. That protection would have been enough.
Everything she’s ever heard and read about dragons says this doesn’t happen. Most of them live far from the kingdom’s borders, far from any kingdom’s borders, and wandering into their territory is death. Some build lairs near to mortal settlements, taking taxes for their hoard, and refusing them is death. A very few kill someone important enough for nobles and kings to care about; great alchemists are dispatched, mighty Delvers hired for ruinous sums, and once or twice in a thousand years, a dragon dies, if they’re young and weak and arrogant enough. More often, the dragon takes insult: fields are burned, settlements razed, and a dynasty falls.
But not a single dragon-tale ever had one spending time and effort talking to mortals instead of just commanding.
She has so many questions, but the Sun is near a fifth rested already and she’s tired. If the Bronze Judge wants her to walk back down to the village tomorrow, she’ll need her sleep – and if he’s willing to listen and talk and answer, surely she can ask later.
The bed is softer than anything she’s ever felt.
When she rises, the lair’s sourceless light creeping back in with the dawn, her nose guides her to the kitchen. There’s fresh hot nutbread, soft goathog cheese, scrambled eggs thick with flecks of herb, and a bowl piled high with fruits and berries. There’s even a greatapple, somehow already ripe a season too soon. A night’s sleep has done wonders, but for all the Bronze Judge’s lair is steeped in more Sun-magic than the Scar has taint, a body needs fuel when you work it.
She leaves the greatapple where it sits; either she’d waste most of it or not be able to eat aught else. Why this instead of bunchapples?
Well-rested, belly quickly filling, Emilia has attention to spare on more than just not falling over or offending a dragon’s lordly pride. The questions she put off last night come rushing back to her. How the dragon knows what he does is clear enough: he watches, listens, and remembers. Plenty of dragon-tales warn that a dragon’s most dangerous weapons aren’t size or strength or dragonfire or even the unnatural power of their alchemy, but their ability to think, quicker and surer than any mortal.
So why might a dragon use such strength of mind to build and deal?
Peasants come together to survive, because no mortal can learn all the crafts it takes to live well. Because a fighting man good enough to be useful if a Scarbeast comes hunting is a man who’s spent all his life on fighting – if you want him to defend you, you have to provision and support him. Because the keeps and burhs that keep control of the Scar itself eat up fighting men by their thousands, so the Camlan dynasty takes tithes of men and provisions, spreading the cost over the whole kingdom.
The Bronze Judge built and furnished a manor fit for some high noble with a breath of dragonfire and a passing touch of alchemy; his impossible great hall surely took not overmuch more. Wherever this food came from, it’s as fine as any fare she’s ever had. Any Scarbeast that would fall to heartland alchemists and Knights, let alone a lordling’s Armsmen, would surely fall to a dragon. What is it he can’t do or learn to do himself, that he thinks he can get more easily from mortals?
She knows exactly what Young Tom wants, and why, and that there’s nothing she can do to move him on it. It’s awful strange for a dragon to be so much more confusing and so much more reasonable than a mortal. Tailor Kalina, Terracer Stanweg, Ranger Juraj, Trapper Roki, and eleven Armsmen died in the Baron’s brawl against a scared boy Delver who got screamed at and panicked when everyone knows that someone suffering the Moon’s touch should be given care and time and support.
Why is it a dragon who’s willing to just talk?
As she turns it over in her head, she circles through the study and the solar and the library – empty, for now, but like all the other rooms somehow still fuller than her home. Her Ma’s home, once her Uncle’s home, and before them Grampa and Gramma who Uncle never talks about.
Midwife Ziva had lived there a few years, taking care of Emilia as an infant orphan and as a girl-child finding her walking legs. Her husband, the Riverkeeper who ‘prenticed Riverkeeper Antal, had been one of near a score to die in some Scar-sickness not a month before Emilia’s birth, passing the workshop and the rooms above it to his successor. It was a hard time, still spoken of darkly, but she can’t regret being raised with love, even if what led to it would have been better off never happening. Even if it hurt being left mostly to her own ends after her second mother went to the Sun too.
The sourberries are calling her back to the kitchen, but setting out for most of a day’s walk on too full a stomach would be foolish. She’ll pack them in her lunch bundle.
A heavy handful scatter across table and floor as she startles. It takes her a moment to recognise the hammering thunder as dragon-sized knocking at the door to the hall and rush over.
“Lord?”
“We likely do not have overlong to discuss what I might offer to and ask of your Baron, if you wish to return in good time.”
Sun and Stars, she’d been tired. It had slipped right out of her head while she’d been distracted with everything else.
Emilia fails to cover a cringe as the Bronze Judge plucks a scale from the side of his neck. Young Tom had once jumped away from the swing of her palm with half a fistful of chestnut locks, so unlike Uncle’s coal-dark scruff; if scales are rooted anything like hair is, that surely must be painful.
“To prove you speak on my behalf.”
It’s the size of the serving platters the Magistrate eats off; if it fits in her bag at all it will be sticking out, leaving the flap to hang open. She thought it might feel like metal, but it’s too rough, too light, and too strangely warm for that – carrying it down the ridge won’t be so awful a chore, at least.
When she glances up at the wound, there’s no wound at all.