Chương 236: 41. Dragon Rider 2

The entire corridor seemed to go still. Not because the world had actually gone silent. Because my own ears, in the instant those words landed, very honestly went blank.... King. Not consort. Not close retainer. Not some specially named permanent companion at the princess's side. King. I'd usually have something ready — a joke to hold the moment together, asking whether the Dragon Kingdom covered funeral expenses for people they frightened to death, or simply saying that sounds like more trouble than dragonfire.

None of it surfaced. Because for the first time I truly understood what Albatros had given me. Not a title. A country. Ignicia stepped back slightly, and looked at me again. Her gaze was steady. Calm. No girlish embarrassment at having said something revealing. No trace of are you happy about it? She looked like someone who had just personally placed an unbearably brutal document on my desk and was now waiting for me to open it myself.

"That means," she said, "you and Eckhaus will need to reach a resolution eventually." That sentence finally pulled me back from the near-blank I'd been drifting in. Eckhaus. I wasn't a man who'd fallen from the sky with no origin. I had a kingdom, a delegation, a king, a chain of obligations, a life trajectory that had been heading somewhere else entirely. The Dragon Kingdom could push me onto this road with a single audience. But I couldn't pretend the other side simply ceased to exist.

If I was truly going to become what she'd just called me, I would have to turn back and face everything on the other side. Not sever it quietly. Not muddle through. Face it directly, inform it directly, end it directly. Which meant— I wasn't being permitted to escape into a new fate. I was being required to clean up the old life before I could step into it.... That, at least, was very Dragon Kingdom of them. I smiled, slightly, without much humor.

"So you're not telling me the future is bright."

"I never intended to."

"You're telling me I need to start clearing my old accounts first."

"Yes."

"And not at a leisurely pace."

"Yes." I looked at her, and felt a genuine urge to sigh.

"You seem particularly fond of yes today."

"Because you particularly need someone to be clear with you today."... Fine. I'd admit it. That one was fair. Ignicia straightened and restored the distance between us. That brief moment of proximity had apparently served its sole purpose — delivering a lethal truth directly into my ear. Once delivered, she became immediately, seamlessly, the composed and cold princess again, the one who could press an entire floor of fire flat just by standing in it. She turned and continued walking.

"Come on. I'll walk you back." I followed. Honestly, I needed the time. My brain required a few minutes of motion to slowly reassemble itself from you are the future King of the Dragon Kingdom. Midway, I couldn't help asking:"Did you already know what your father was going to do, back in the audience hall?"

"Part of it."

"And you managed to stand there that calmly?"

"I don't wear my reactions on my face the way you do."

"Should I take that as a compliment?"

"Take it as a reminder." Wonderful. Another small cut. But strangely, the crushing pressure I'd felt at the start was already gone. Not because anything had gotten simpler — but because it had finally been said out loud. Sometimes the most frightening thing isn't the weight itself. It's not knowing what's pressing down on you. Ignicia had just turned the stone over and shown me what was written underneath.

The word happened to be king, which was deeply inconvenient, but at least now I knew what the thing looked like. We walked back to the quarters I'd been given. The attendants and guards at the door, seeing her personally escort me back, went noticeably quieter than before. I suspected the entire inner court of Latpan was in the process of forming a new unspoken consensus: don't stare, don't ask, and don't attempt to categorize the foreign man who'd been carried in from the sky.

Because the work of defining him clearly didn't belong to any of them. At the door, Ignicia stopped. I stopped with her. Morning light came in from the corridor outside, tracing one thin bright edge along her profile and the rim of her black horns. That face was still cold, still composed — still the princess who had stood at the throne's side in the Twilight Audience Hall and could silence a room without raising her voice. But I knew now that underneath that composed surface there was something else.

She simply hid it better than most people ever would. She looked at me, her tone a shade lighter than before.

"You have three days."

"Three days from now, the outer field of the Dragon Court. First lesson: don't fall to your death off a dragon's back."

"Retained. Very quickly."

"That information has a direct bearing on whether I continue to exist." Something like a faint sound escaped her.

"Before that — think through what needs thinking through."

"Including Eckhaus?"

"Including Eckhaus," she said.

"And yourself." I was quiet for a moment. Then I asked a question that was probably a little stupid, but which I genuinely needed answered.

"What if I'd chosen the second option, back in the hall?" She looked at me. No trace of humor in it.

"You wouldn't have."

"How can you be so certain?"

"Because you ran back to the harbor," she said. Just that. And I found, suddenly, that I had nothing to say. She was right. If I'd have chosen the second option, I wouldn't have jumped off that wagon. Wouldn't have run back against the tide of people evacuating. Wouldn't have said, in the middle of a sea of fire, the words that burned every last escape route I had. People are carried, step by step, to where they were always going to end up by the choices they've already made.

It's just that most of the time, they don't admit it until they've reached the end of the road. I looked at her, and finally only said:"... You have a particular talent for saying things that leave no room for argument."

"That's because I don't have the patience to listen to you talk in circles." That was very Ignicia. Good enough that I almost laughed. She turned as if to leave. Then, one step out, she paused — not looking back — and left behind one last quiet line.

"Cedric."

"Mm?"

"Don't think too long tonight." I hadn't even managed to say that advice has approximately zero practical value before she was already moving again. Her cloak drew a clean red-and-black line behind her as she went down the corridor. The guards and attendants on duty lowered their heads as she passed, and she didn't look back. I stood at the door and watched her back disappear around the corner. After a while, I slowly pushed the door open and went inside. The door closed behind me.

All at once, the entire Dragon Kingdom — its protocols, its gazes, its order, its fire — seemed to be held one layer back by the wood between us. The room was quiet. The medicine and water on the table were still there, untouched. Through the window, I could see the towers of Latpan and a wedge of sky. This place was incomparably safer than the harbor, and yet standing here, I felt a genuine headache begin to settle in. I walked to the table and sat down. Elbows on my knees, head low, I looked at my own hands.

These hands had touched her reverse scale. Had gripped the saddle on her dragon's back. Had held her in return, in the harbor's fire. And had, not long ago in that audience hall, formally accepted a name that was going to rewrite my entire life from the ground up. Rider. I'd thought that was already enough weight. Now I knew it had something else attached to the back of it. King. I closed my eyes and let out a long, slow breath. The breath carried exhaustion. Absurdity.

A slow-rising, belated fear that had only now finally begun to seep up through the floor. And something else — an unwilling, undeniable acknowledgment of reality. After a long while, I finally said it, in a voice low enough that only the room could hear:"... But I never wanted to be a king." The words settled into the quiet like a pinch of ash. And I knew that starting tonight, they would probably follow me for a long time. I'll admit this slightly awkward truth: I do have one genuine strength. Not bragging.

Just a fact. I am very good at pulling my own head back together. Most people, upon being informed they might one day become a king, land in one of two places. Either they're overcome with joy — convinced fate has finally recognized them as its chosen one. Or they're overcome with despair — convinced their freedom is gone forever, their future a wall of darkness, and that the correct response is to find a chair immediately and spend quality time questioning the universe. I, very rationally, split the difference.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Which is to say— Maybe I'll never actually live to see that day. I stared at the cup of water on the table for a few seconds, and the more I thought about it, the more constructive this line of reasoning seemed. First: Ignicia was a fully grown adult dragon.

And from everything I understood, the kind of existence that dragon society would refer to as a fully grown adult without any hint of embarrassment was not twenty years old. Not thirty. That bar sat well above a hundred, and not just barely above it. Which meant that the face currently making people wonder whether she was just someone with a very bad temper who happened to look young was, in reality, sitting on top of an accumulation of years I couldn't match across several lifetimes. Then there was her father....

My prospective father-in-law, I supposed. The moment that phrase formed in my head, I felt my own nerve quite possibly getting out of hand. In any case: His Majesty the Emperor was not, by any reading of the situation, the short-lived type. That was already a generous way to put it. His level of existence didn't so much look like it could comfortably survive a thousand years as make you feel, standing in front of him, that using thousand as the unit of measurement might actually be slightly disrespectful.

And most critically of all— He looked extremely healthy. Steady breath. Sharp eyes. More frightening standing than sitting. Even when he'd mentioned giving me one breath of dragonfire, he'd said it with the same unhurried calm as setting down a cup of tea. The kind of person who, if told they'd be ruling for several more millennia without issue, I would nod at immediately and without reservation.

Which meant, running the numbers— This future King of the Dragon Kingdom of mine was going to spend a very, very, very long time sitting in the future part. Long enough that I could comfortably die of old age first, and no one would be particularly surprised. I leaned back in the chair and slowly exhaled. Then admitted, with total honesty:... That actually cleared things up considerably.

When it came down to it, as long as that becoming king moment remained somewhere in an unspecified future era, the most pressing problems were still the ones right in front of me. Three days until the Dragon Court's outer field. Don't fall to my death off a dragon's back. Eckhaus needed to be addressed eventually. And— Ignicia. At that last one, I put my hand over my face and let out a short, quiet laugh. Excellent, Cedric.

Your life plan has evolved from how to survive long enough to complete the delegation's mission to how to avoid dying prematurely while navigating a future kingship, a dragon Emperor father-in-law, and a fire dragon princess. If I told this story in a tavern, the most generous response I could expect was: friend, you've had too much to drink.

I'd intended to sit a while longer and preserve this hard-won composure, but somewhere between one thought and the next, the light outside the window had quietly made its way from morning all the way to evening. Latpan's dusk was nothing like the harbor at Isca Apubra. The harbor's sunsets had been sea, salt, wind, and the noise of people in constant motion. Here, evening meant towers and stone walls and cloud layers all sinking together.

The entire capital seemed to be slowly submerged in a layered twilight of dark gold and deep red. Far off, dragons swept past spire tips. Evening bells carried across the high ground in long, unhurried waves — older-sounding than any bell in a human country, as if this city hadn't been built on the earth at all, but on some order I didn't yet have the vocabulary to understand. I was considering whether to lie down for a while before dinner when someone knocked at the door. I got up and opened it.

Ignicia was standing outside. She'd changed into something lighter for evening — still deep red and black-gold, but stripped of the hard-edged ceremonial weight she'd worn in the audience hall. Her red hair fell loose over her shoulders. Her horns caught a faint gleam from the corridor lights. The iron-cold edge she'd worn in the hall was gone from her face. She looked at me, and for a moment, it seemed as though she didn't quite know what title to use to start the conversation.

Then she said, very quietly:"Cedric... dinner's ready." I blinked.... Hm? Wait. What was that tone? I looked at her for two full seconds, genuinely entertaining the possibility that I'd opened the door too fast and this was some other red-haired princess I'd never met before. Because normally, when she addressed me, it was either Hey, or human, or that particular endearment — short-lived race — which, every time I heard it, made me want to survive out of sheer spite. But Cedric...

dinner's ready, with that faint, almost imperceptible softness trailing off the end—... Good grief. That unsettled me more than the Emperor offering me two options this morning. She must have caught something off in the way I was looking at her, because her brow furrowed slightly.

"What's that expression for?" I answered honestly.

"I'm checking whether something strange has taken up residence in your body." Her eye twitched.

"So your way of recovering your composure is to recover your mouth first."

"No, I just—" I searched for a safer phrasing.

"I'm not used to you suddenly being so..." I'd been about to say docile, but my survival instincts caught the word at the last possible moment and wrestled it back down. Using docile on her, in any country, in any language, was the kind of thing that qualified as actively inviting an early death. So I swapped it for something marginally safer.

"... speaking like an actual person." She stared at me. I was fairly certain that one more syllable and she would personally dismantle whatever fragile, barely-there warmth had somehow managed to grow between us tonight. But in the end, she only let out a very quiet sound through her nose.

"If you'd rather stay in here talking to yourself, that's also an option." My eye twitched.

"You were listening?"

"No." She answered very quickly. Suspiciously quickly.

"You just looked exactly like someone who'd been sitting there thinking themselves in circles."... Fair enough. She wasn't wrong about that. I pulled the door shut behind me and followed her toward the dining room. After a short stretch of walking, she spoke again.

"Cedric."

"Mm?"

"Don't drink too much tonight." I glanced over at her.

"Is that an order or concern?"

"A reminder."

"Sounds about the same."

"It isn't." She said it calmly.

"The wine served at inner court dinners in the Dragon Kingdom isn't particularly kind to constitutions like yours."

"That sentence sounds very much like you're telling me I'll die face-down on the table."

"Nothing that dramatic," she said.

"You'd just embarrass yourself." I raised an eyebrow.

"So the priority isn't my life. It's my dignity."

"Your dignity stopped being the main concern a while ago." She didn't even glance at me.

"What I'd rather not hear is you getting drunk in front of a full table and saying something I can't be bothered to smooth over afterward."... Right. Understood. Two seconds of silence. I still couldn't help it.

"Such as?" She finally turned her head and looked at me, those gold eyes catching the corridor light in a quiet, steady gleam.

"Such as — if you say I just want to stay by your side as a toast again—" She paused. Her voice didn't change. But the tips of her ears turned, very suspiciously, a shade of pink.

"I will crush your wine cup first, and then drag you out." I nearly laughed out loud on the spot. Not on purpose. It was genuinely too difficult to hold back. She narrowed her eyes immediately.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing." I coughed and worked my expression back into something presentable.

"I just suddenly feel that tonight's wine really is quite dangerous."

"Now you understand."

"Don't worry. I'll exercise restraint."

"You'd better." We arrived at the inner court's side dining room somewhere in the middle of that exchange. Dining room turned out to be a considerable understatement for what I'd been imagining when I heard evening banquet — but also not the kind of hall built to make foreign dignitaries feel small.

It was a formal dining space within the residential wing of the royal quarters: ceiling still high enough to suggest the Dragon Kingdom had some kind of architectural minimum height requirement written into its founding charter, walls carved with dragon reliefs and fitted with deep-gold lamp brackets, a long table that wasn't excessive, but was more than sufficient to seat a group of people who absolutely should not all be in the same room together. And the moment I walked in, I knew— Tonight was not a dinner.

Several people were already seated. Two white-haired senior court ministers. A middle-aged general in high-ranking garrison attire. A lady official who had been so still since I entered that she seemed less like a person and more like a shadow that had simply chosen this particular chair.

Add myself and Ignicia, and the table had few enough people that each one felt individually significant — the kind of individuals where a single sentence from any of them would set three layers of orders into motion somewhere below. The good news: Albatros was not present. The bad news: that didn't reduce the pressure by much. If the Emperor had been there, this dinner would simply have been a second round of the morning's audience.

His absence, instead, turned it into something more patient, more fine-grained, and considerably more effective at making a person quietly uncomfortable. Everyone rose to bow to Ignicia. Then several of them offered me a small nod. Not the equal-footing kind. Not the standard courtesy extended to a foreign envoy. More like — they hadn't fully decided where to put me yet, and so they were defaulting to the highest level of caution available. Honestly, that was more exhausting than being openly disliked.

Ignicia took her seat at the position just beside the head of the table. And when I saw the chair left for me, my eye made a quiet, involuntary decision to twitch. It was right next to hers. Not the end of the table. Not the guest seat reserved for visiting envoys. Not the kind of corner placement that says feel free to leave early. It was placed beside her in a way that was very clear, very deliberate, and absolutely unreasonable.

As I sat down, I could feel the silence from the ministers at the table grow a fraction heavier.... Wonderful. This wasn't a dinner. It was a social execution. The courses began arriving. Dragon Kingdom cuisine turned out to be less everything must be charred until it reflects light than I'd expected — though there were certainly a few dishes that appeared to have been completed primarily through the application of extreme heat and force of will. Smoked mountain fowl cooked to exactly the right point.

Highland fish with a sharp, salt-edged spice. Thin-sliced hot meat. A deep red broth. And some kind of fruit that, when cut open, looked as if it had a sunset stored inside it. Everything was good. Good enough, in fact, that I found myself wondering whether the Dragon Kingdom had funneled all the intelligence not required for running an empire into the single project of making food more intimidating. As for the wine— One sip was all it took to confirm that Ignicia's warning had not been decorative.

The first moment it touched the tongue, it was almost pleasant — faint fruit notes, a hint of barrel. But the moment it went down, the aftertaste arrived like a small, very irritable fire-dragon kicking its way from the throat straight to the stomach. Hot in a way that left no ambiguity. Strong in a way that had nothing to do with ceremonial drinking. It didn't taste like wine at all. It tasted like a carefully packaged tactical weapon. I set the cup back on the table without ceremony. Very good.

Tonight was clearly not an evening for conducting experiments with my dignity. The conversation at the table was sparse. Or more precisely — everyone at the table was extremely skilled at saying things that sounded ordinary while testing the boundaries of something else entirely.

One white-haired minister asked whether my journey back to the capital had been difficult, in a tone so genuinely warm that it almost sounded like simple concern for a traveler — except that anyone paying attention could hear the real question underneath: why did Her Highness bring you back herself?

The garrison general mentioned, in passing, that preparations for the Dragon Court's outer field in three days were underway, voice as level as a weather report — which was, in effect, a public announcement to everyone at the table that the foreign man sitting here was not a guest who would be escorted back to the outer residence after dessert. I answered what I could, navigated around what I couldn't, and didn't make the mistake of treating this like an ordinary diplomatic table.

Because every time I thought about the way Albatros had looked at me when I spoke this morning, I was reminded, very naturally, that in this place, what you think you're saying and what the other person is hearing are sometimes two entirely different things. Ignicia said almost nothing throughout. In this kind of setting, she was quieter than usual, and more completely the princess. When something relevant was addressed to her, she answered briefly and precisely.

When something wasn't worth a response, she didn't give it a syllable. But strangely — whenever the table's attention began pressing toward me with too much obvious intent, she would say something, and the direction would simply change. Not protective in any obvious way. But not uninvolved, either.

The clearest instance came when the white-haired minister, in the midst of a toast, said in a tone of almost excessive warmth:"Lord Cedric has today been honored with a name granted personally by His Majesty — a precedent the Dragon Kingdom has not seen in centuries. We old ministers have witnessed something quite remarkable." A very elegant sentence. Only missing the words so what exactly do you intend to do with yourself to be completely unambiguous. My wine cup had barely touched the table before Ignicia spoke.

"Since it was my father's decision, there's no need for the ministers to broaden their horizons on his behalf." She said it without lifting her eyes. The minister went quiet immediately. I watched from beside her, and came very close to lighting a candle for the old gentleman. Because in that moment, something became extremely clear: She wasn't just the princess who breathed fire. She was the kind of person who could make an entire table quietly pull back half a step with a single sentence.

And sitting next to her, holding that wine cup that was dangerous in the most polite possible way, I felt something strange settle over me. Not satisfaction. Not simple relief. More like — I was watching something Ignicia had chosen in the harbor's fire being made real, quietly, one sentence at a time, right here at this table in the capital's inner court.... That was a slightly frightening way to think about it. But it was also, unmistakably, exactly like her.

For the latter half of the dinner, I treated the wine as decoration. Ignicia caught my pace — just lips, no motion — and asked under her breath:"Not brave enough to drink?" I kept my voice equally low.

"I just realized I'm statistically more likely to die from the Dragon Kingdom's wine than from the Emperor's twilight flame." The corner of her eye moved, just slightly.

"At least you have some self-awareness."

"Primarily because I'd like to survive to the third day and at least see what the Dragon Court's outer field has planned for me."

"Relax." She lifted her own cup, tone perfectly even.

"It won't disappoint." That was not remotely reassuring. By the time the dinner ended, I wasn't drunk, but I was more tired than I'd been all day. Not physically — it was the kind of exhaustion that comes from holding yourself together across dragon backs, thrones, formal names, political undercurrents, and table etiquette, one layer after another, until even your brain starts feeling like it's been slow-roasted. Ignicia walked me back to the guest quarters herself.

This time, she stopped short of the door — pausing in the corridor instead, as if conscious that enough eyes in the capital had already had a long night, and she didn't want to give them additional reasons to lose sleep.

"Go get some rest," she said.

"Is this the second time you've said that to me today?"

"Because you don't look like someone who takes his own advice."

"That's a high opinion of me."

"It isn't a high opinion," she said, flatly.

"It's experience."... Also not wrong. I stood at the door, hand on the handle, without going in right away. She glanced at me.

"Something else?" I thought about it, then said it anyway.

"Ignicia."

"Mm?"

"You've been..." I picked my words carefully.

"Considerably more civil than usual today." Something in her expression caught for a visible instant.

"You're imagining things."

"Am I?" I looked at her.

"You've said my name so many times today that I'm starting to wonder if I've been reclassified as an endangered species." The tips of her ears went faintly pink again. Very faintly. But I saw it.

"... Shut up."

"Sure."

"And—" She clearly felt that was too easy a win for me, and added a parting cut.

"Don't push your luck just because I'm being civil right now." I smiled slightly.

"So this is the civil version." She gave me a look. The threat in it was familiar enough to be almost comforting.

"If you're not inside in the next ten seconds, I'm putting you there myself."

"Understood." Before I pushed the door open, I looked back at her one more time. The corridor lights were warm. She stood there, red hair and the edges of her black horns softened by the glow, nothing like the cold, untouchable princess she'd been in the Twilight Audience Hall. And yet she was still, completely, Ignicia. The one who had cried in the harbor's fire and hit me and buried her face against my chest — and then turned around and blown up an entire port and flown me back to the capital.

I suddenly felt that surviving to this moment had taken a genuinely unreasonable amount of effort. She seemed to find my gaze slightly uncomfortable, and frowned.

"Now what?" I shook my head.

"Nothing. I just suddenly feel very strongly that I really shouldn't have had any wine tonight." She blinked first, then seemed to realize something, and her expression turned immediately dangerous.

"Cedric."

"Going in, going in." I closed the door behind me with all appropriate haste. The moment the room went quiet again, I felt something in me release all at once. Not relaxation exactly — more like the particular loosening that comes after holding yourself upright for an entire day, when you can finally put your bones and your brain back where they belong.

I walked to the table and sat down, pressing my fingers against my temple, the faint smell of that lethal Dragon Kingdom wine and the inner court's lamp smoke still caught somewhere in my collar. I'd meant to sit for just a moment. Somewhere in the middle of that, the night had quietly deepened around me. The sounds of the capital outside were distant — distant enough to feel like another world. Occasionally a dragon swept past at altitude, casting a brief, faint shadow.

The night-watch bells drifted between the towers, low and long, layering themselves over Latpan's darkness one peal at a time. I didn't know how long I'd been sitting. Maybe I'd closed my eyes for a while. Maybe I hadn't. When I lifted my head again, only the small lamp on the table was still lit, and the window outside had gone fully, completely dark. And then— Knock. Knock. Not fast. Not heavy. But those two sounds brought me fully awake in an instant. I raised my head and looked toward the door.... At this hour?