Chương 237: 42. First Night 1

Late at night, the sounds of Latpan grew very distant. Distant enough to feel like another world. The towers, the wing-fields, the patrol routes, the bells, the watching eyes of the day — all of it had been pressed down, layer by layer, beneath the dark. Only the occasional wind past the window remained, and somewhere higher up, the low resonance of a dragon's wingbeat fading into nothing. The room held only a single small lamp, its flame unsteady, laying a thin film of haze over the edge of the table and the wall.

Two knocks came from outside the door. Knock. Knock. Not heavy. Not urgent. It wouldn't be Hans at this hour — if the Deputy Head came looking for me in the middle of the night, he wouldn't knock this politely. He'd be more likely to shove the bad news through the door along with himself. It didn't feel like an inner court attendant either; their knocking always carried a certain trained restraint. These two sounds were different.

How to put it — they felt like they came from someone who wasn't entirely sure what attitude they were supposed to be standing there with. I got up and opened the door. Ignicia was outside. She'd changed into something lighter for the night — not the full formal dress she'd worn in the Twilight Audience Hall, with the weight of the entire capital's protocol built into every seam, and not the battle armor from the harbor's fire, still carrying the smell of ash, blood, and metal. This was softer.

The fabric moved more easily. Deep red and black pulled her lines in clean and spare; the collar sat lower, the shoulders less rigid, her red hair half-down, the edges of her black horns catching a faint ring of light from the corridor lamps. She stood there, looking at me, as if she'd been about to say something — and at the last moment, pressed her lips together instead.

"... You're still awake." I leaned against the doorframe and looked at her for two seconds.

"That line loses some credibility coming from the person who just knocked on my door in the middle of the night." The corner of her eye shifted slightly.

"Knocking on your door doesn't mean I couldn't sleep."

"Then what does it mean?"

"It means I have something to discuss with you."... Good. That was much more like her. I stepped to the side.

"Come in?" She didn't move right away. She looked at me once more, then walked inside. I closed the door. The sound it made was quiet, but the air in the room seemed to shift with it. The night wind outside, the corridor lights, the towers of Latpan and its patrol bells — all of it was left on the other side. What remained was the small lamp, the table, the bed, the two of us, and a silence that had grown, from the moment she stepped through the door, subtly less well-behaved than before. She didn't sit.

She stood near the lamp and swept a glance across the untouched water on my table and the coat I'd left scattered.

"You were still thinking." I exhaled.

"You make me want to call it necessary psychological recalibration."

"And?" Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"And it went well, actually." I pulled out a chair and sat, turning the other one toward her.

"I worked it out." She finally sat, one eyebrow lifting slightly.

"Worked out what?" I looked at her, and decided that if I didn't say this out loud, it would be a genuine waste of the hard-won clarity I'd arrived at. So I walked her through the full chain of reasoning. Carefully. Methodically. Starting with the fact that she was a fully grown adult dragon. Moving on to the completely unreasonable number of years that fully grown adult implied.

Then arriving at her father, who looked in excellent health, and showed every sign of being content to occupy that throne for several more millennia without any inconvenience. I delivered all of this calmly and in good order. When I reached the part about my prospective father-in-law, I even had the decency to pause briefly, in case she wanted to object or correct me. She didn't. She just listened.

When I finished — with the conclusion that this future king business of mine is therefore probably purely theoretical — she was quiet for two breaths. Then. She smiled. Not a warm, open smile. The corner of her mouth lifted just a little, and then those gold eyes curved into an arc I knew very well, and very much did not want to be seeing right now. A wicked little smile. The textbook version. The specific kind that said: you think you've just found a way out — and I'm about to close it in front of you personally.

Every alarm in my head went off at once.

"... Hold on." I stared at her.

"That expression is dangerous."

"Is it?"

"Yes. Extremely." I leaned back a fraction, purely on instinct, to preserve minimum escape distance.

"Every time you smile like that, whatever you're about to say does not go well for me." She looked at me, the amusement in her eyes not fading — if anything, deepening.

"The fact that you've learned to read that so quickly is almost touching."

"I'd rather you not find it touching right now."

"Too late."... Wonderful. I knew this was bad. And from the moment she said those two words, I also knew — realizing this now was probably a little late. Ignicia propped her chin on her hand, voice light in a way that made my scalp prickle.

"Your calculation wasn't wrong," she said.

"If you were an ordinary human, you really wouldn't live to see my father abdicate." A muscle in my brow jumped.

"... Ordinary human?" She repeated it, slowly.

"Ordinary." Then she took her hand away from her chin and leaned forward just a little. The lamp lit the curve of her cheek and left the rest in shadow. Those gold slit-pupils gleamed with something that had nothing to do with normal life planning.

"But have you forgotten, Cedric." She watched me, voice as flat as if she were commenting on the weather.

"What my father recognized in you tonight was not a mortal's path." Whatever fragile clarity I'd been nursing shattered in my chest with an almost audible snap. I stared back at her, and after a long moment managed:"You don't mean—""I'm not saying you'll wake up tomorrow with a millennium in your pocket," she cut in, completely unbothered.

"But if you truly become a Rider, you won't be bound to an ordinary mortal's lifespan."... Good. Thank you. My entire self-comfort framework had just been retroactively classified as a joke. I covered my eyes with a hand and let out a very sincere sigh.

"Ignicia."

"Mm?"

"Did you come in the middle of the night specifically to stomp on the psychological balance I'd just managed to build?"

"No," she said. I had just started to say that's a relief when she added:"I came to correct you." That was worse. She stood. Not fast. But as she rose, the room's tenuous late-night conversation atmosphere shifted — sliding toward something I'd had the luxury of only vaguely sensing earlier, but which I was in no mood to face directly now. She came around the table and stopped in front of me. I was sitting. She was standing. That height difference had never been my friend.

On top of that, she'd always been particularly good at making people aware, when she looked down at them, that they'd run out of room to retreat. I tilted my head up, looking at that face split between light and shadow, and felt my throat work, traitorously.

"Are you done correcting me now?" I asked.

"Almost."

"What's left?" She didn't answer right away. She reached out instead and set her fingertips against my collar. Lightly. The touch still felt like fire, running straight down through the cloth. Every muscle down my spine snapped tight. She watched that reaction, and the corner of her mouth curved a fraction more. Apparently satisfied.

"You said all the right things in front of my father today," she murmured.

"No more staying untouched, no more calling everything an accident. You chose the first path. You said you wouldn't step back." Her fingers pressed down along the edge of my collar. Not hard. But I was absolutely certain that if she went one inch lower, I was going to lose the ability to continue pretending we were only discussing succession and lifespan.

"So?" I looked up at her, my voice dipping with hers. She didn't answer at once. She leaned in instead, red hair sliding off her shoulder and over my hand, over my knee — a trace of warmth, faint and clean, neither blood nor smoke nor court perfume. Just her. Close enough that I didn't dare breathe too loudly. And then, very near, she said:"You've already done two things you shouldn't do lightly to a dragon." Something jolted in my chest. There it was.

She hadn't named them in the hall, but we both knew what hung there. Reverse scale. Sharing a roof. Two lines etched in long ago. From the harbor to Latpan, we'd been pushing each other deeper with every step. There was no way to pretend we hadn't seen them.

"Ignicia," I said, my voice rougher than it should have been. Her eyes were terrifyingly calm — like a layer of fire held down perfectly flat.

"Now," she whispered, "we finish the third."