The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(66)

The voice says, “Long live the Guard!” Someone not a guard giggles.

“Bern?” Isco says.

“Who else?” Another guard comes forward.

“Indeed,” Isco says, “who else?” He waves his crossbow toward the door. The faintest of shadows moves. “You come most carefully,” Isco says.

“Bern,” the shadow says with a girl’s voice. “You said there wouldn’t be—”

“Isco,” Bern says, “the clock’s struck twelve. Go to bed.”

Isco lowers his crossbow. “With pleasure. It’s bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.”

“Aw,” the shadow says. “He’s a poet.”

Bern hushes her. “Have you had a quiet guard?” he says.

“Not a mouse stirring,” Isco says. “And if you wish the mice to stay quiet . . .”

“There’s a bottle of warm behind my bunk,” Bern says. “That should salve your heart.”

Isco salutes Bern, then the shadow, which giggles again. Relieved, he goes downstairs.

After the door clicks shut, the shadow pads to Bern and resolves into a maid still wearing her knee-length black chiton. Her bare arms shiver, and she slips beneath his.

“Where’s my bottle of warm?” she says.

“I thought I was,” Bern says. She hits his chest. He hands her a flask. “Now let me salve you,” Bern says. He puts his other arm around her.

She hugs him and pulls away. “You promised to show me something exciting first.”

He takes her hand and leads her to the southwest curve of the tower. The Quiet Tower squats at the end of the West Wall, which slopes downhill protecting the homes of deputies and juniors, functionaries and factotums, that is, the Greater and Lesser Silk, until naked cliffs make it unnecessary.

“There’s my dorm,” she says. The servants’ quarter lies below the tower, eventually bleeding into the warehouses, rope houses, closed houses, taverns, and casinos of the Harbor.

“Not down there,” Bern says and points west across the cliffs. “There. A shadow climbing, maybe flying.”

“I don’t see anything,” she says. “It’s too dark. Have you been putting me on?”

“There was more moon the other night. I heard a strange whooshing too when the shadow came close.”

The maid shivers again. “I can’t hear anything either,” she says. “The wind is too loud.” She takes a pull on the bottle and wraps her arms around her chest. “Do you really stand here all night long? By yourself?”

“Yes,” he says. “When war comes, I may be the first to know. This is probably where I’ll fight too.” He pulls on her arms to unwrap her. “We shouldn’t waste our last doomed hours.”

She twists aside. She wanted to see something wondrous, not think about war. She lifts the bottle then changes her mind. “Can we go inside? Maybe I should go.”

Bern says, “Wait. Did you hear that?”

“Now you’re just trying to make me stay.”

“No,” Bern says. “Look, here it comes again.” He gets behind her to guide her gaze. A shadow rushes at them.

“I hear it now,” she says, “the whooshing.” She laughs and presses against him. “You said it was bigger.”

The shadow closes. The stars atop the bay are blotted out. Then maid and guard are whooshing upward, claws digging beneath their collarbones. She screams and Bern blows his horn, but they’re too far above the city already for anyone to hear.





2




* * *



On a small bench beside his front door, Livion sits in his stocking feet while his partner, Tristaban, dresses down their servant girl for leaving a spot of mud on the toe of his dragonskin boots. He can’t see it, but he trusts it’s there. Nonetheless, he wishes he could save the girl. He knows what it’s like to be dressed down in front of another, that’s the life of a sailor, and it only got worse as a mate. He didn’t grow up in a world of glossy boots and girls who shined them, though, so he leaves the issue to Tristaban and considers the hall tiles.

When did it stop feeling strange to spend his days on unmoving stone?

Tristaban looks like she’s conducting musicians, the way she’s moving her finger around. It’s not like the boots aren’t going to get filthy once he gets to the Harbor. He’d rather wear sandals, which are less conspicuous and comfortable. And boots, like the Aydeni who favor them, have gone out of fashion. But “Trist insists.” If he wants to solidify his new position in the Shield, he has to remind people constantly how he became a Hero of Hanosh and why her father let them be partnered.

She wasn’t so conscientious when they were seeing each other behind her father’s back: meeting in artisan taverns where no one would recognize them, finding quiet places alone beyond the walls, even taking a room for a week in Hanoshi Town and playing at living together as if they were common laborers or farmers come to sell their crop. She was coy, adventurous, and lively. Now she is . . . pretty. When she smiles. Thanks to her father, Chelson, he lives far more comfortably than he would have in the stern cabin he pictured for himself as a boy. He does love her. And he can’t shake from his memory the looks she used to give him right under her father’s nose, even as she orders their girl to wipe his boots again and dismisses her.