Bitter Coals

By morning you've moved into the nursery.

Nobody exactly agrees to it. You just carry your blanket, your trauma bag and your half of the shell down the corridor at dawn, after a night of writing to a prince who couldn't get his son to stop crying and was too proud to say so in more than five words at a time. You don't think about the last thing he wrote before Noodle finally fell asleep. You think about logistics.

The nursery is a round room off the Cradle with a deep sand nest in the middle, a bronze brazier at its head to keep the sand warm, and a skylight that shows the clouds rolling by below the mountain like a white sea. There's a cot along the wall for a nurse dragon. You claim it.

Kieran is asleep in the chair by the nest when you walk in, long legs stretched out, head tipped back against the stone, Noodle curled in a loop across his chest. They're both snoring. Kieran's hand is spread across his son's back, huge and careful.

You stand in the doorway a second longer than you need to.

Then Noodle smells you, shrieks with joy and launches himself off his father's chest, and Kieran wakes up with a start and grabs for a sword he's not wearing.

"Morning," you say.

He looks at you, then at his empty arms, then at Noodle climbing your leg like a cat up a curtain. He clears his throat. "He slept."

"I heard."

"Four hours."

"I know. You told me. In detail."

Something like color creeps into the edges of his face. He stands, straightens his shirt and walks out without another word, and you're almost sure the tips of his ears are pink.

By noon you've met what Noodle calls, in his squeaky-hinge chirp, absolutely everybody.

The court comes to see the heir in a slow, curious procession, and every one of them looks at you like you're a stain on the floor.

King Hadwin doesn't come. He can't. He's in his sickroom with what everyone calls wing-rot, and the healers say he hasn't left his bed in two months. But he sends a message with a servant, scrawled in a shaky hand: I hear my grandson bites. Good. Feed him well, girl. H.

You like him already.

The second visitor is the Chancellor. Mattias Quillon is fifty-eight and silver-haired and handsome in a soft, grandfatherly way, with kind brown eyes and long fingers ink-stained at the tips. He kneels by the nest and lets Noodle sniff his knuckles and doesn't flinch when Noodle sneezes on him.

"Remarkable," he murmurs. "Simply remarkable. You've done what the whole College of Healers could not." He takes your hand in both of his. "Kieran has told me everything, Ava. I raised that boy after his mother died, you know. If he's been rude to you, it's my fault. I never could teach him manners."

"He's been fine," you say, which is a lie.

Quillon laughs. It's a warm laugh. When he smiles wide you notice a faint grey line along the edge of his gums, just where they meet his teeth, like a pencil mark. Something tugs at the back of your mind, some old patient, some old chart. Then Noodle bites the Chancellor's sleeve and the thought is gone.

Lord Rhodri Drakemoor comes next, and he's trouble. Kieran's cousin is thirty-three and golden-brown and laughing, with curls falling into his eyes and the general energy of a man who's never been told no by anyone who meant it. He's almost as good-looking as Kieran, which feels unfair to the rest of the population.

"So this is Ava, the famous human," he says, circling you. "Kieran said you were terrifying. He didn't say you were pretty."

"He doesn't think I'm pretty."

"He definitely thinks you're pretty. He's just an idiot." Rhodri leans over the nest and wiggles his fingers at Noodle. "Hello, small cousin. I'd make a much better king than your father, you know. Ask anybody." Noodle hisses at him. Rhodri grins. "Fair."

The last visitor doesn't come in. She stands in the doorway like a portrait of winter.

Lady Seren Merrowby is twenty-eight, tall and pale, with black hair pinned up in silver combs and a face so perfect it's almost hard to look at. She looks at Noodle in the nest for a long time. Her eyes are very bright.

"My sister should be in that chair," she says to you. Not loud. Just clear.

"I'm sorry," you say, and you mean it. "I heard she passed."

"Egg fever. Four months ago. She laid him and she faded." Seren's gaze moves from Noodle to you and turns to ice. "And now a human sits in her place, holding her half of the shell."

She turns and is gone before you can answer.

The afternoon gets weird in a way that has nothing to do with the court.

You start charting because you can't not. You borrow paper and a pen from Fenwould, who looks offended, and you write down everything: when Noodle eats, how much, when he sleeps, what his breathing looks like, what he spits up.

By evening you have a page full of things that don't add up.

His pupils, which should be big round silver pools in the dim nursery, keep shrinking to pinpoints for no reason. His front feet tremble when he stands. When he yawns, his tongue isn't pink. It's faintly grey-blue, like a bruise.

Newborns are weird. Dragons are weirder. But you've been charting sick people for eight years and you know what a pattern looks like when it's starting.

You look at the times. You look at them again.

Noodle is fine all morning. He gets worse after noon. He's at his worst at night. And every time he crashes, about twenty minutes earlier, a servant in a blue sash comes in and changes the coals in the bronze brazier at the head of the nest.

"Fenwould," you call. The old healer is grinding something in the corner with a mortar and pestle and the expression of a man being forced to babysit. "Who changes the brazier?"

"The coal-keepers. From the Chancellery stores. Three times a day. A royal nest must be kept hot." He sniffs. "Why?"

"Just asking."

At nine o'clock the servant in the blue sash comes back. He bows to you, kneels by the brazier, rakes out the old ash and pours in fresh coals from a covered bucket. They hiss and catch.

You pick Noodle up and hold him on your chest and watch.

Five minutes. Ten.

The room fills with a smell, faint at first and then not faint at all. It's sweet and metallic at the same time, like a fistful of wet pennies dropped into a vase of lilies.

Noodle goes stiff in your arms. His pupils shrink to dots.

"Hey," you whisper. "Hey, baby. What's—"

He lurches, coughs, and vomits a stream of thick grey sludge all over your lap.