Stephen Deas - The King of the Crags

Eyrie-Master Isentine bowed as best his age and stiff back would let him. 'A thousand apologies, your… Your Highness.'

'That's all I am, Eyrie-Master. For as long as my mother… for as long as Queen Shezira is alive. Even imprisoned within the Adamantine Palace, she is your mistress. You should call me student and I should call you master.' That had been one of her mother's last commands. Isentine was getting old and they'd need a new eyrie-master before long. A master or perhaps a mistress.

She tried to smile but it seemed she didn't know how any more. Isentine stared at his feet.

'Not much,' she said after they'd stood in awkward silence for far too long. 'Hyrkallan has plundered Drotan's Top. The speaker's dragons have taken a couple of his riders but so far he evades her grasp. Everyone demands that I call him back and make him knight-marshal in Nastria's place.' She shook her head. 'We don't even know that Nastria is dead. Almiri begs and pleads for us to go to war. My husband-to-be is alive and still hasn't found his way to Sand. His father, King Sirion, continues to shout for revenge for Hyram's death but can't decide whether it's Zafir or Shezira who should feel his wrath. And I, I just feel that my time is running out. I want to climb onto Silence and fly away. Far, far away and never come back. Except Silence is gone.'

Isentine screwed up his face in horror. 'Holiness!'

'Highness!' Jaslyn scowled.

'Highness! You cannot-'

'Cannot speak like that, Eyrie-Master? If not to you then to whom? Our knight-marshal is dead and our queen is imprisoned for treason. I'm surrounded by men and women I barely know who wear long stern faces and expect me to be my mother when I'm not. My elder sister only wants my dragons and my younger sister Lystra is far away, married and a hostage to that monster Jehal.' She clenched her jaw. Sometimes when she thought of Lystra she wanted to cry, but that wasn't allowed, not even where only Isentine would see. 'I miss her most of all, Eyrie-Master. In her letters she, at least, sounds happy.'

'Perhaps, Your Highness, she will persuade…'

'My- Queen Shezira and King Valgar have been in the speaker's dungeons for more than a month. Our knight-marshal plotted with King Valgar to murder Speaker Zafir, and our queen apparently pushed Lord Hyram off a balcony.'

'Lies, Your Highness. All lies.'

'Really? I want to believe you, Eyrie-Master. But their accusers are not Zafir's servants or Jehal's. They are Adamantine Men. Perhaps they might be bribed to lie about Nastria, but about Hyram? They were his own Guardsmen. He died under their watch. They failed. Why would they lie? I cannot believe they would conspire against their own lord.'

'But surely you cannot believe-'

'What? Can't believe that my mother would have pushed Hyram to his death? After the way he betrayed her? I remind you, Isentine, of whom we are talking.'

Jaslyn tore herself away from Morning Sun, walking briskly towards the looming tower of Outwatch. Isentine struggled to match her pace. Walking meant he couldn't see her face. She wasn't like her mother. She couldn't hide it all away. She couldn't be strong all the time on the outside no matter what she felt on the inside.

She took a deep breath. 'That's not why I came here, Eyrie-Master, nor why you called me.' Although any excuse would do. She liked the bleakness of Outwatch, sitting on the top of its cliff, presiding over miles and miles of tunnels and caves where the dragons were kept. Liked the flight over endless miles of barren featureless burning sand and rust-coloured stone that brought her here. Liked this isolated and inexplicable oasis of green that just happened to be the greatest eyrie in the north. Now that Isentine knew better than to turn out the guard for her whenever she arrived, it was the windy, lonely, lost place it had always been meant to be, and it drew her in whenever it could.

'It feels empty here,' she murmured, as much to herself as to Isentine.

'Most of your dragons are at Southwatch,' huffed Isentine. Of course they were. She'd sent them there, after all, to stand guard over Almiri in case the speaker brought war across the Spur.

'Yes.' And the few she'd left here spent most of their time in the Worldspine. Wasting their time searching for the remains of the white dragon that had nearly killed her.

'I might have found the dragon you're looking for.'

The words grabbed hold of her as surely as a strong pair of hands. She froze. For a moment she thought he meant the white.

'What?'

'There's been another hatchling, Your Highness. A male. A hunter.'

Jaslyn's heart climbed into her mouth. 'What colour?' 'Deep blues and greens, Your Highness.'

Jaslyn started walking again. An overwhelming disappointment settled around her. Not the dragon she was looking for. Not her Silence.

'But he's a vicious one, Your Highness. He won't eat or drink anything we bring him. He attacks the Scales. He'll die before the end of the week. I've never met anything quite like it. We've always had hatchlings that wouldn't take and there have been a lot of them lately, but this… this is exceptional. I might even have put him down if it wasn't for your order.'

'Does he speak?'

Isentine didn't reply. As far as the eyrie-master was concerned, it seemed that anyone who thought dragons could talk probably believed in ghosts and gods and all manner of other foolishness. It didn't help that the one time Silence had spoken to Jaslyn, as he lay dying, he hadn't spoken as such; rather, his thoughts had mingled with hers.

Or maybe she was going mad.

Silence had been ash-grey. He was dead now, but in his last thoughts he'd told her that he would be reborn. He'd told her that dragons lived in an eternal cycle of birth and death. No one had ever thought to mention this to Jaslyn before, but Isentine had confirmed, when she'd pushed him, that the alchemists believed this was true. It was a secret passed down among them, shared only with kings and queens. She was as good as a queen, he'd said, so now she could know. She'd nearly hit him for that.

They don't remember, though. They don't speak. He'd told her that too. Jaslyn didn't know whether she believed him or not but she didn't want to, and so she was looking, hoping that out of all the eyries across the realms, Silence would be reborn to one of hers.

One of my mother's…

'I'm looking for a sooty grey, Eyrie-Master.' It sounded like madness, but when she'd spoken to the alchemists, they'd looked at her with shifty eyes as though she'd uncovered some secret that she wasn't meant to know. Several secrets, in fact. They wouldn't tell her, and when her demands grew more threatening, they haughtily reminded her that, for now at least, she was a mere princess, and that the alchemists of the realms answered only to kings and queens. Only Isentine would answer her questions and she no longer trusted even him.

She walked past the yawning doors that led into the cavernous halls of Outwatch, on to the edge of the scarp slope. The wind was strong there, tugging at her hair. At the bottom of the slope was a lake. Above it, caves studded the cliffs, dark holes leading into the tunnels of the eyrie. She couldn't look at a cave now without a shudder of fear, without smelling smoke, without starting to cough and choke, but if she closed her eyes she could imagine herself at Clifftop, Jehal's eyrie in the southernmost corner of the realms. A place almost as far away from Outwatch as it was possible to be, but another eyrie built over underground caves and tunnels at the top of a cliff looking out over water. If she tried, she could bring back the smell and the sound of the sea, of the waves breaking at the foot of the cliff. Of Lystra, standing next to her, looking around at her new home with wonder in her eyes and laughter on her lips.