The Tribute Stone

They chain you to the altar at dusk, and the last thing your father ever says to you is, "Don't show them your wrist."

Not goodbye. Not forgive me. Not even your name.

Lord Edmar Dunmere of Greywatch sits his gray horse at the bottom of the Ashen Steps with his gloves still on, as if touching you might stain them, and watches his soldiers lock iron around your ankles. The wind off the mountain smells like smoke and snow. Above you, Mount Khaldris goes up and up into cloud, black as a burned-out hearth.

"You should be proud," says Ser Hadrik Volm, the captain of your escort, tightening the last shackle. He has a handsome, hard face and the kind of smile men practice in mirrors. "Twenty-four years a nobody, Ava Fallow. Tonight you're the most important woman in Halvenmark."

"Then unchain me," you tell him, "and I'll give you a speech about it."

A few of the soldiers laugh. Volm doesn't.

You are wearing white because the treaty says brides wear white. It's a borrowed dress, cut for your half-sister Briallen, who was supposed to be standing here instead of you. It pinches under your arms. Your hair, dark honey-brown, has been brushed by strangers until it shines. Someone pinched your cheeks for color.

Somewhere in the castle behind you, Briallen is probably crying into a pillow, relieved and guilty and alive.

You're not angry at her. You were never angry at her. She didn't choose this any more than you did.

Your father chose.

"Light the braziers," Volm calls.

Four iron bowls flare up around the Tribute Stone. The altar is a slab of black rock carved with flames, worn smooth by three hundred years of brides. The treaty is older than anyone's grandmother: every autumn, at the first dark moon, Halvenmark sends one woman of twenty-one or older up to the dragon, and the dragon leaves the lowlands alone for another year.

No bride has ever come back. Not one. Not a bone, not a scrap of white silk.

You keep your left arm pressed flat against the stone. Under the iron cuff of the chain is another cuff, worn leather, the one your mother buckled onto you when you were four years old.

Never take it off, Ava. Not for anyone, sweetheart. Promise me.

You promised. You've kept that promise through baths and fevers and summers so hot the leather left a pale band on your skin. You've kept it through twenty years of your father's household asking what you were hiding, through your mother's funeral when you were thirteen, through tonight.

You don't even know why. She died before she could tell you. All she left you was the cuff, and a smooth black pendant like a drop of jet on a cord, which you wear under the white silk now, against your heart.

Under the leather is a mark. Small, the size of a thumbprint, the color of a coal just under the ash: a little shape like a flame with a ring around it. It isn't a birthmark. Birthmarks don't get warm when you're angry. They don't glow, faintly, in the dark, when you've had a nightmare.

Your father looks at your left wrist from the bottom of the steps. Then he turns his horse.

"My lord," Volm calls after him. "Will you not stay to see it done?"

"No," says Edmar Dunmere, and rides away.

You watch his back until the dusk swallows it. You don't cry. You decided on the road that you wouldn't give anyone that.

The soldiers leave in a hurry once the sun is gone. They mount up and ride hard down the valley road, glancing over their shoulders at the mountain. Nobody wants to be near the Tribute Stone when the sky goes dark.

Nobody except Ser Hadrik Volm.

He stays. He stands behind the altar, out of your line of sight, and you can hear him breathing.

"Your men are gone," you say.

"I know."

"Aren't you afraid?"

"I have orders," he says.

There's something wrong with the way he says it. You twist your neck and catch a glimpse of him in the brazier light, his hand resting on his belt, his eyes not on the mountain but on you.

"Whose orders?"

He doesn't answer.

Then the stars go out.

Not all at once. In a long, swallowing line, from the top of the mountain down, like something enormous is unrolling across the sky. The wind stops. The brazier flames lie flat and shiver. Every hair on your arms stands up.

You hear wings.

You have heard the stories all your life. Children in Greywatch play dragon and bride in the mud. Mothers say eat your supper or the black king will hear you. You thought you knew what you'd feel.

You didn't. You don't. The sound is so deep you feel it in your teeth, a slow beat like a heart the size of a house, and then the dark above you has a shape, and the shape has eyes.

Gold. Molten, burning gold, each one bigger than your head, with a slit of black down the middle.

The dragon lands at the top of the Ashen Steps and the whole mountain shudders. Rock dust rains down. He's black, black as the mountain, scales like polished obsidian catching the brazier light in edges of red. His wings fold with a sound like sails. He lowers his head on a neck as long as a church nave and looks at you.

You stare back. Your mouth is dry, your heart is slamming, and some stubborn, stupid part of you lifts your chin.

"If you're going to eat me," you say, "get on with it. This dress pinches."

The dragon goes still.

Behind you, you hear steel whisper out of a sheath.

You don't have time to understand it. A hand grabs your hair and yanks your head back, baring your throat, and something cold and sharp touches the skin under your jaw, and Ser Hadrik Volm says, very fast, very low, "Orders are orders, girl, nothing personal..."

The dragon breathes.

Fire.

It roars over the altar, gold and white and blinding, so loud it isn't sound anymore. You close your eyes and wait to burn.

You don't.

The heat pours around you like water around a stone. You feel it lift your hair, sting your eyes, rush past your skin like a warm wind. The chains on your wrists flare orange. The hand in your hair is gone. The cold edge at your throat is gone. There is a sound behind you, short and terrible, and then nothing.

The fire falls away.

You open your eyes.

Ser Hadrik Volm is gone. There is a scorch on the stone where he stood, and a knife lying in the ash, its blade glowing red.

The iron chains on your wrists and ankles are glowing too, soft and orange, and they don't hurt. They just slide off you, softened like wax, and clank onto the altar.

And the leather cuff on your left wrist is ash.

You look down. The mark is bare to the night for the first time in twenty years, and it's shining. Not faintly. Bright as a coal someone blew on, gold-red, pulsing like it has a heartbeat of its own.

You look up.

The dragon is not a dragon anymore.

He is a man. Or the shape of one: tall as a door, at least six and a half feet, standing at the top of the steps in the smoke. Long black hair falls straight past his shoulders. He wears black leather trousers and boots and a heavy mantle of black fur thrown over shoulders that are bare beneath it, and his chest and arms are all hard, golden, firelit muscle, with a faint shimmer of black scales fading along his collarbones as you watch. His face is the kind painters invent and nobody believes: high cheekbones, a stern mouth, a jaw carved like a weapon.

His eyes are still gold. Still molten. The pupils narrow from slits to something human as he looks at you.

At your wrist.

He comes down the steps slowly. Every step, the braziers lean toward him like flowers toward the sun. He stops an arm's length from the altar. Up close, heat comes off him like a forge, and he smells like cedar smoke and storms.

"Who," he says, and his voice is low and rough and shaken, "are you?"

"The tribute," you say. Your voice cracks. You hate that. "Ava. Ava Fallow. Who are you?"

He doesn't answer. He's staring at the mark like a man who has walked three hundred years through a desert and just seen water.

Then the dragon king of Mount Khaldris goes down on one knee in the ash at your feet, and bows his head.