Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Release Date: March 28, 2023
Publisher: Razorbill
Source: Library
Genre: Young Adult / Dark Fantasy
Darling Seabreak cannot remember anything before the murder of
her family at the hands of House Dragon, but she knows she owes her life
to both the power of her Chaos Boon and House Kraken for liberating her
from the sewers where she spent her childhood. So when her adoptive
Kraken father is captured in battle, Darling vows to save him—even if
that means killing each and every last member of House Dragon.
Talon Goldhoard
has always been a dutiful War Prince for House Dragon, bravely leading
the elite troops of his brother, the High Prince Regent. But lately his
brother’s erratic rule threatens to undo a hundred years of House
Dragon’s hard work, and factions are turning to Talon to unseat him.
Talon resists, until he’s ambushed by a fierce girl who looks exactly
like the one his brother has painted obsessively, repeatedly, for years,
and Talon knows she’s the key to everything.
Together,
Darling and Talon must navigate the treacherous waters of House
politics, caught up in the complicated game the High Prince Regent is
playing against everyone. The unlikeliest of allies, they’ll have to
stop fighting each other long enough to learn to fight together in order
to survive the fiery prophecies and ancient blood magic threatening to
devastate their entire world.
Chaos & Flame, by co-authors Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland, is part one of a two part duology. Once upon a time, there were Six major Houses: House Dragon, Kraken, Sphinx, Gryphon, Cockatrice, and Barghest. House Dragon is now the most dominate House left with other Houses were combined under one umbrella. House Kraken has chosen a path of rebellion and assassination of key players in House Dragon in order to regain their status as a major player. This story revolves around two key characters: Darling Seabreak and Talon Goldhoard as well as Caspian Goldhoard.
Darling Seabreak is a war orphan who cannot remember anything before the murder of
her family at the hands of House Dragon, but she knows she owes her life
to both the power of her Chaos Boon and House Kraken for liberating her
from the sewers where she spent her childhood. After so many years in the dark, Darling is forced to wear glasses so that she can see. The curious aspect is that thanks to her Chaos Boon, she can heal from almost any wounds which made her a legend. So when her adoptive
Kraken father, who rescued her from the sewers 7 years ago, is captured in battle, Darling vows to save him—even if
that means killing each and every last member of House Dragon.
her family at the hands of House Dragon, but she knows she owes her life
to both the power of her Chaos Boon and House Kraken for liberating her
from the sewers where she spent her childhood. After so many years in the dark, Darling is forced to wear glasses so that she can see. The curious aspect is that thanks to her Chaos Boon, she can heal from almost any wounds which made her a legend. So when her adoptive
Kraken father, who rescued her from the sewers 7 years ago, is captured in battle, Darling vows to save him—even if
that means killing each and every last member of House Dragon.
Talon Goldhoard
has always been a dutiful War Prince for House Dragon, bravely leading
the elite troops of his brother, the High Prince Regent. But lately his
brother Caspian’s erratic rule threatens to undo a hundred years of House
Dragon’s hard work, and factions are turning to Talon to unseat him.
Talon resists, until he’s ambushed by a fierce girl, "the eyeless girl" who looks exactly
like the one his brother has painted obsessively, repeatedly, for years,
and Talon knows she’s the key to everything.
has always been a dutiful War Prince for House Dragon, bravely leading
the elite troops of his brother, the High Prince Regent. But lately his
brother Caspian’s erratic rule threatens to undo a hundred years of House
Dragon’s hard work, and factions are turning to Talon to unseat him.
Talon resists, until he’s ambushed by a fierce girl, "the eyeless girl" who looks exactly
like the one his brother has painted obsessively, repeatedly, for years,
and Talon knows she’s the key to everything.
Caspian is the High Prince Regent of Pyrlanum.
Since a young age, he’s been plagued with prophecies that manifest as
paintings. Specifically, he can’t stop painting a single girl with
blackness for eyes. After House Sphinx was wiped out by House Dragon thanks to machinations of unknown players, Caspian has been playing a very long game not letting anyone, including his brother Talon, or his aunt in on his plans. Then Darling arrives and everything changes. After Caspian names Darling as scion of House Sphinx, the two play a highly dangerous game knowing that other Houses are just waiting for Caspian to make a mistake.
Since a young age, he’s been plagued with prophecies that manifest as
paintings. Specifically, he can’t stop painting a single girl with
blackness for eyes. After House Sphinx was wiped out by House Dragon thanks to machinations of unknown players, Caspian has been playing a very long game not letting anyone, including his brother Talon, or his aunt in on his plans. Then Darling arrives and everything changes. After Caspian names Darling as scion of House Sphinx, the two play a highly dangerous game knowing that other Houses are just waiting for Caspian to make a mistake.
Darling is not used to the political atmosphere
of House Dragon. She’s not sure who she can trust. It also puts Talon
and Darling into an enemies to lovers situation. Together, Darling and Talon must navigate the
treacherous waters of House politics, caught up in the complicated game
the High Prince Regent is playing against everyone. The unlikeliest of
allies, they'll have to stop fighting each other long enough to learn to
fight together in order to survive the fiery prophecies and ancient
blood magic threatening to devastate their entire world.
of House Dragon. She’s not sure who she can trust. It also puts Talon
and Darling into an enemies to lovers situation. Together, Darling and Talon must navigate the
treacherous waters of House politics, caught up in the complicated game
the High Prince Regent is playing against everyone. The unlikeliest of
allies, they'll have to stop fighting each other long enough to learn to
fight together in order to survive the fiery prophecies and ancient
blood magic threatening to devastate their entire world.
YES, this book ends on a twisted cliffhanger ending that nobody will see coming, and I mean NOBODY!
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The first time the scion of House Dragon painted the eyeless girl, he
was only six years old. She was nothing but a face shaped with finger
smears of brown, a darker crooked line that might've been a sad smile,
and huge, swirling black holes where her eyes should be.
"I don't know how to save her," he said to his mother when he presented the art to her.
His mother accepted the soft parchment, doing her best to hide the
horror she felt at the red-rimmed, furious eyeholes in her son's
painting. Casually, she asked, "Why is she in danger?"
"I don't know."
"What happened to her eyes?"
"Nothing yet." The little boy shrugged.
Though the Dragon consort asked a few more delicate questions, he could
give her no answers. But he drew the eyeless girl again and again, and
told his nurse about her, and his aunt, and his father eventually. That
was a mistake, because he was far too old for imaginary friends, his
father growled. The consort promised her husband, the Dragon regent, it
was only childish play, and their son would grow out of it.
Better an imaginary friend, she thought, than the truth she suspected
deep in her heart: her son had been gifted with a boon, but it was a
prophetic one, and prophecy always, always drove the wielder mad.
The people of Pyrlanum would never accept a regent with such a wild
boon, and to shield her eldest son, the consort extracted a promise from
him to stop talking about the girl, and certainly to stop painting her.
He must never paint anything from a dream or vision. It was dangerous.
The young scion agreed, thrilled to have such an illicit thing binding
him with his mother.
And he kept his promise for two entire years, until his mother was murdered.
The day she died, the consort and the scion were pruning in their
private garden. She injured herself on a few reckless roses, and when
she gasped, the scion saw a flash of vision, in strokes of vivid paint: a
fan of dark blue skirts against the harsh black-and-white checkered
floor of his mother's solar, golden sunlight smeared in streaks, and a
kiss of crimson splattered at her mouth and in her hair. A spilled cup
near her hand, leaking sickly green.
It would have been a beautiful painting, had he been allowed to create it.
But the scion had learned his lesson well. His boon was a curse and he did not say or do anything.
Later, when his mother lay dead on the marble floor, the boy realized
this was not a game, not a thrilling secret: it was a matter of life and
death. Had he been braver, he might have saved his mother from the
poison in that cup.
He wailed and clawed at his hair until his
aunt, his mother's sister, gathered him up in her arms. "What happened,
little dragon, who did this?"
The scion hugged her neck so
tightly. "Don't tell anyone," he begged. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I
couldn't save her, I didn't even try! I'm sorry! Please."
"Hush, hush, it's all right."
"I didn't save her," he whispered, sobbing. "I have to save her."
"It's too late, little dragon," his aunt murmured.
"No," he said again and again. He threw himself away from his aunt and
ran to his rooms. Found chalk and old cracked paint pots and ripped
paper out of books in a tantrum. The scion drew and drew, scrawling
images of that eyeless girl. He refused food, he refused his father and
his baby brother, he refused everything but paint, and finally locked
the door, screaming to be left alone unless anybody was going to help.
When his aunt had the door kicked in, the scion's room was a disaster
of paintings and spilled color. Wasted effort, childish, ugly pictures.
Blurs and shapes that looked like nothing but the impressions of
landscapes or people, castles and gardens and ships and massive, ancient
creatures the Houses called their empyreals. A figure of fire, broad
winged and gorgeous. The eyeless girl. His aunt recognized the monsters,
if not the girl. Dragon, gryphon, barghest, sphinx, cockatrice, kraken.
And the First Phoenix.
But the scion tore the phoenix painting
down the middle and threw a heavy book at his aunt. "Bring me a master,
to show me how it's done," he cried. "I have to find her. It's soon."
"What is soon?" asked his aunt. She put her arm around him. "Who is she?"
"You'll see," the young scion said, pulling away.
***
While the young scion lost himself in painting dreams, Pyrlanum
descended into violence. House Dragon accused House Sphinx of murdering
their beloved consort. The grief-stricken Dragon regent demanded
retribution, forcing all the great Houses to choose sides, and reviving
the House Wars after more than twenty years of peace.
Bloodshed consumed the land, and the young scion found he could not save the eyeless girl.
"It's too late," he whispered to the disaster of art surrounding him,
the night his father-leagues away-massacred the entire family line of
House Sphinx.
***
The new House War raged on
for years, and instead of the eyeless girl, the scion painted darkness.
Thick black streaks, chunky peaks of gray and angry blue, the underlying
red-red-red, heartbeat red, of sunlit memories behind tight-shut eyes. A
bruise of purple over green-black, ocean-black, midnight, moonless
black.
When his baby brother asked what he painted, the scion only hissed at him, chasing him from the room.
House Dragon took more and more of the country, forcing the other
Houses into submission. Finally House Dragon captured Phoenix Crest, the
ancient home of the Phoenix, those keepers of peace who had vanished
during the first House Wars more than a hundred years ago. The Dragon
regent declared himself High Prince Regent over all Pyrlanum.
His family left their northern mountains to occupy the fortress, and
there the Dragon scion's aunt was left in charge of the boy and his
small brother while their father continued his war. Though House
Cockatrice fled Pyrlanum entirely, she managed to hire artists to tutor
the scion-Cockatrice had been the house of her birth, after all, and
that of her sister. She bought the scion paint and paper, canvas and ink
and charcoal. He grew as his skills did, becoming taller and stronger
but still very pretty, with a constant flush of fever in his sharp white
cheeks, a ghostly gleam in his pale green eyes. He was prone to fits of
laughter or staring at nothing, sure signs of madness, the court
gossiped. At his aunt's prodding, the Dragon scion learned to be
charming, too, and concealed the wildness he felt. He studied language
and policy and economics. He flirted and argued and led council meetings
during his father's frequent absences. Soon everyone believed his
disposition to be merely long-running grief. After all, his mother, the
late Dragon consort, had been glorious and special, hadn't she? So her
glorious and special son would survive; he would lead them well. Chaos
willed it, no matter that his painting boon would be useless in a
leader.
But his aunt-she knew the truth of his boon. She
whispered to him that she had always had gently prophetic dreams. They
ran in their family. Her grandmother had been a brilliant prophet, too.
His aunt offered to take the secrets he painted and use them for House
Dragon on his behalf. The young scion agreed.
She studied every
painting for clues, and when she discovered them, told the High Prince
Regent unknowable things: where the last remnants of House Sphinx hid,
the location of an ambush, the look of a spy. The High Prince Regent
gave her the title of Dragon Seer, and the young scion was glad to have
his secret kept so well, as his mother had wished.
***
Time passed. The scion painted. He dreamed of the eyeless girl but kept
her to himself. He had not saved her from the darkness, just like he
had not saved his mother. They haunted him, left him wracked with grief
some days.
On the morning news reached the fortress that the
High Prince Regent had been murdered by House Kraken, the scion woke up
laughing. He laughed and laughed, caught in visions of silver swirls of
light, hot light, bright light-sunlight!-on the eyeless girl's face. She
had survived.
But the scion had not even dreamed of his own father's death.
That very day, ten years after the first time he'd clumsily painted
her, the scion sketched the true shape of the girl's cheeks and chin and
nose, the wide, eager smile, and bright tilted eyes perfectly shaped,
perfectly beautiful, except inside they were churning spirals of
darkness. He mixed new colors, thrilled and focused, painting her in
long strokes against the entire southeast wall of his bedchamber,
directly onto the stone, from crown to chin as tall as the prince was.
Her hair curled out into the shadows of the room like a god of storms,
and in her pupils dotted tiny explosions of fire.
When his
serious little brother ventured up to the scion's tower, he frowned at
the overwhelming sun on her face, finding the art too intense, too real,
and he looked at the scion like he'd never seen him before. "What's
wrong with you?" the younger boy asked, knowing nothing of prophecy and
its curses.
The scion laughed, determined to keep his brother
innocent of his secrets. "I'm only tired, dragonlet," he said. "Leave me
to my dreams."
In the wake of their father's death, the scion
was made not only the regent of House Dragon, but High Prince Regent,
ruler of all Pyrlanum.
Freed by a crown on his head, the High
Prince Regent let his generals take over the war, while he took over the
tallest tower in Phoenix Crest to paint his eyeless girl again and
again. Sometimes he vanished into his tower for days, long enough and
sudden enough to foster again those rumors of madness, rumors of a wild
spirit or a curse. Each time he emerged, a new painting leaned against
the tower walls: the girl in full sunlight, arms crossed defensively,
curls flared in a gust of wind and a mask across her eyes. The girl with
a sword in hand, strange goggles making her eyes like those of a
bumblebee. The girl, older, standing at the top of a cliff, peering over
ruins, eyes covered by small masks, one that laughed and one that
screamed. The girl in a library beside a hearth as big as a giant's
mouth, holding a dagger made of a curving gryphon talon, and her eyes
full moons. The girl in the Phoenix Crest ballroom wearing a cream gown,
holding the empty air like she was dancing with a ghost, with eyes made
of massive black pearls.
***
The High Prince
Regent was eighteen years old when he painted the girl engulfed in
flames. The House Wars his father had reignited had raged for an entire
decade.
He barely remembered mixing the colors of fire, or
throwing his brushes in the corner. With his hands he drew flames like
ivy growing up her body, twisting and burning, but feeding her power. He
felt it, too, hot and hungry, the promise of melting in such an
inferno. The fire licked up the edges of the canvas and up his wrists,
twining his forearms with pain.
The High Prince Regent screamed
through his teeth, refusing to stop, as smoke burned tears down his
cheeks and his hands shook. He closed his eyes, blocking it out, the
fear and heat and pain: it hurt so much, the memory of this future pyre.
He woke up alone in his tower room, nostrils filled with the tinge of
old smoke, but there was nothing around him except splatters of paint
and every image of the eyeless girl, surrounding him, watching him with
her pits of eyes, her bumblebee eyes, her full-moon eyes, sea-glass
eyes, ghostly fish-bitten dead eyes, and eyes of pearls. Most of all a
new painting on a messy unframed canvas: the girl made of flames, her
eyes like twin suns.
There had never been a fire eating him whole.
But there would be.
In four years: a high rampart, a bright blue sky, warships on the
brilliant horizon, something sticky in his hand, an awful taste on his
tongue. And the eyeless girl, standing before him, her lips on his lips.
For the first time he could see her eyes not as furious wells of power,
but gentle brown with flecks of gold. Then the fire. It would happen.
It must.
Alone in his tower room, the High Prince Regent waited
for the sun to rise over his land, torn apart by constant war, then he
carefully rent the fiery painting into strips and set them alight.
1 DARLING
I had a dream about the dark.
Not the night, which has stars and the moon to cast shadows, but an
all-consuming dark, one that devoured and twisted and changed a girl
into something else, something defiant and monstrous. She scrabbled in
the abyss with the other women of her house: sisters and mothers and
cousins and friends, each of them dwindling away until she was the only
one left. When it finally came to pass that she was liberated from that
hole, her eyes had learned to live without the light, to love the cool
comfort of the shadows. And so she wept in the arms of her liberators,
not because she was sad, but because her poor damaged eyes had no idea
what to do with sunshine.
I dream of my childhood every night
before a battle, which is a lot, considering Pyrlanum has been at this
worthless war since before I can remember. Fighting might be a rite of
passage, one that feels less triumphant the longer we're in combat, but
my dreams are so familiar they've become equal parts comforting and
distressing. Lucky me, I learned to make peace with fear long ago.
"Darling, heads up!"
A knife flies past my face, close enough to slice a line across the
deep brown skin of my cheek and take a chunk from my ear. A curl that
has managed to escape from the twin buns at the nape of my neck falls to
the ground. I don't swear at the sudden blossom of pain, just turn to
wait for the next blade, ready to deflect it with one of my long knives.
"Really, Adelaide? This close to a battle?" I say, swallowing a sigh.
Adelaide Seabreak, second scion of House Kraken and my adopted sister,
grins at me from across the deck of the Barbed Tentacle, flagship of the
Kraken navy. The wind whips her long brown hair around her face, and
even though her skin is tanned, it is nowhere near as dark a brown as
mine. They say that all the members of House Sphinx had skin as brown as
the leather of their beloved treatises, but there is no one else to
verify this. I am the only one left.
was only six years old. She was nothing but a face shaped with finger
smears of brown, a darker crooked line that might've been a sad smile,
and huge, swirling black holes where her eyes should be.
"I don't know how to save her," he said to his mother when he presented the art to her.
His mother accepted the soft parchment, doing her best to hide the
horror she felt at the red-rimmed, furious eyeholes in her son's
painting. Casually, she asked, "Why is she in danger?"
"I don't know."
"What happened to her eyes?"
"Nothing yet." The little boy shrugged.
Though the Dragon consort asked a few more delicate questions, he could
give her no answers. But he drew the eyeless girl again and again, and
told his nurse about her, and his aunt, and his father eventually. That
was a mistake, because he was far too old for imaginary friends, his
father growled. The consort promised her husband, the Dragon regent, it
was only childish play, and their son would grow out of it.
Better an imaginary friend, she thought, than the truth she suspected
deep in her heart: her son had been gifted with a boon, but it was a
prophetic one, and prophecy always, always drove the wielder mad.
The people of Pyrlanum would never accept a regent with such a wild
boon, and to shield her eldest son, the consort extracted a promise from
him to stop talking about the girl, and certainly to stop painting her.
He must never paint anything from a dream or vision. It was dangerous.
The young scion agreed, thrilled to have such an illicit thing binding
him with his mother.
And he kept his promise for two entire years, until his mother was murdered.
The day she died, the consort and the scion were pruning in their
private garden. She injured herself on a few reckless roses, and when
she gasped, the scion saw a flash of vision, in strokes of vivid paint: a
fan of dark blue skirts against the harsh black-and-white checkered
floor of his mother's solar, golden sunlight smeared in streaks, and a
kiss of crimson splattered at her mouth and in her hair. A spilled cup
near her hand, leaking sickly green.
It would have been a beautiful painting, had he been allowed to create it.
But the scion had learned his lesson well. His boon was a curse and he did not say or do anything.
Later, when his mother lay dead on the marble floor, the boy realized
this was not a game, not a thrilling secret: it was a matter of life and
death. Had he been braver, he might have saved his mother from the
poison in that cup.
He wailed and clawed at his hair until his
aunt, his mother's sister, gathered him up in her arms. "What happened,
little dragon, who did this?"
The scion hugged her neck so
tightly. "Don't tell anyone," he begged. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I
couldn't save her, I didn't even try! I'm sorry! Please."
"Hush, hush, it's all right."
"I didn't save her," he whispered, sobbing. "I have to save her."
"It's too late, little dragon," his aunt murmured.
"No," he said again and again. He threw himself away from his aunt and
ran to his rooms. Found chalk and old cracked paint pots and ripped
paper out of books in a tantrum. The scion drew and drew, scrawling
images of that eyeless girl. He refused food, he refused his father and
his baby brother, he refused everything but paint, and finally locked
the door, screaming to be left alone unless anybody was going to help.
When his aunt had the door kicked in, the scion's room was a disaster
of paintings and spilled color. Wasted effort, childish, ugly pictures.
Blurs and shapes that looked like nothing but the impressions of
landscapes or people, castles and gardens and ships and massive, ancient
creatures the Houses called their empyreals. A figure of fire, broad
winged and gorgeous. The eyeless girl. His aunt recognized the monsters,
if not the girl. Dragon, gryphon, barghest, sphinx, cockatrice, kraken.
And the First Phoenix.
But the scion tore the phoenix painting
down the middle and threw a heavy book at his aunt. "Bring me a master,
to show me how it's done," he cried. "I have to find her. It's soon."
"What is soon?" asked his aunt. She put her arm around him. "Who is she?"
"You'll see," the young scion said, pulling away.
***
While the young scion lost himself in painting dreams, Pyrlanum
descended into violence. House Dragon accused House Sphinx of murdering
their beloved consort. The grief-stricken Dragon regent demanded
retribution, forcing all the great Houses to choose sides, and reviving
the House Wars after more than twenty years of peace.
Bloodshed consumed the land, and the young scion found he could not save the eyeless girl.
"It's too late," he whispered to the disaster of art surrounding him,
the night his father-leagues away-massacred the entire family line of
House Sphinx.
***
The new House War raged on
for years, and instead of the eyeless girl, the scion painted darkness.
Thick black streaks, chunky peaks of gray and angry blue, the underlying
red-red-red, heartbeat red, of sunlit memories behind tight-shut eyes. A
bruise of purple over green-black, ocean-black, midnight, moonless
black.
When his baby brother asked what he painted, the scion only hissed at him, chasing him from the room.
House Dragon took more and more of the country, forcing the other
Houses into submission. Finally House Dragon captured Phoenix Crest, the
ancient home of the Phoenix, those keepers of peace who had vanished
during the first House Wars more than a hundred years ago. The Dragon
regent declared himself High Prince Regent over all Pyrlanum.
His family left their northern mountains to occupy the fortress, and
there the Dragon scion's aunt was left in charge of the boy and his
small brother while their father continued his war. Though House
Cockatrice fled Pyrlanum entirely, she managed to hire artists to tutor
the scion-Cockatrice had been the house of her birth, after all, and
that of her sister. She bought the scion paint and paper, canvas and ink
and charcoal. He grew as his skills did, becoming taller and stronger
but still very pretty, with a constant flush of fever in his sharp white
cheeks, a ghostly gleam in his pale green eyes. He was prone to fits of
laughter or staring at nothing, sure signs of madness, the court
gossiped. At his aunt's prodding, the Dragon scion learned to be
charming, too, and concealed the wildness he felt. He studied language
and policy and economics. He flirted and argued and led council meetings
during his father's frequent absences. Soon everyone believed his
disposition to be merely long-running grief. After all, his mother, the
late Dragon consort, had been glorious and special, hadn't she? So her
glorious and special son would survive; he would lead them well. Chaos
willed it, no matter that his painting boon would be useless in a
leader.
But his aunt-she knew the truth of his boon. She
whispered to him that she had always had gently prophetic dreams. They
ran in their family. Her grandmother had been a brilliant prophet, too.
His aunt offered to take the secrets he painted and use them for House
Dragon on his behalf. The young scion agreed.
She studied every
painting for clues, and when she discovered them, told the High Prince
Regent unknowable things: where the last remnants of House Sphinx hid,
the location of an ambush, the look of a spy. The High Prince Regent
gave her the title of Dragon Seer, and the young scion was glad to have
his secret kept so well, as his mother had wished.
***
Time passed. The scion painted. He dreamed of the eyeless girl but kept
her to himself. He had not saved her from the darkness, just like he
had not saved his mother. They haunted him, left him wracked with grief
some days.
On the morning news reached the fortress that the
High Prince Regent had been murdered by House Kraken, the scion woke up
laughing. He laughed and laughed, caught in visions of silver swirls of
light, hot light, bright light-sunlight!-on the eyeless girl's face. She
had survived.
But the scion had not even dreamed of his own father's death.
That very day, ten years after the first time he'd clumsily painted
her, the scion sketched the true shape of the girl's cheeks and chin and
nose, the wide, eager smile, and bright tilted eyes perfectly shaped,
perfectly beautiful, except inside they were churning spirals of
darkness. He mixed new colors, thrilled and focused, painting her in
long strokes against the entire southeast wall of his bedchamber,
directly onto the stone, from crown to chin as tall as the prince was.
Her hair curled out into the shadows of the room like a god of storms,
and in her pupils dotted tiny explosions of fire.
When his
serious little brother ventured up to the scion's tower, he frowned at
the overwhelming sun on her face, finding the art too intense, too real,
and he looked at the scion like he'd never seen him before. "What's
wrong with you?" the younger boy asked, knowing nothing of prophecy and
its curses.
The scion laughed, determined to keep his brother
innocent of his secrets. "I'm only tired, dragonlet," he said. "Leave me
to my dreams."
In the wake of their father's death, the scion
was made not only the regent of House Dragon, but High Prince Regent,
ruler of all Pyrlanum.
Freed by a crown on his head, the High
Prince Regent let his generals take over the war, while he took over the
tallest tower in Phoenix Crest to paint his eyeless girl again and
again. Sometimes he vanished into his tower for days, long enough and
sudden enough to foster again those rumors of madness, rumors of a wild
spirit or a curse. Each time he emerged, a new painting leaned against
the tower walls: the girl in full sunlight, arms crossed defensively,
curls flared in a gust of wind and a mask across her eyes. The girl with
a sword in hand, strange goggles making her eyes like those of a
bumblebee. The girl, older, standing at the top of a cliff, peering over
ruins, eyes covered by small masks, one that laughed and one that
screamed. The girl in a library beside a hearth as big as a giant's
mouth, holding a dagger made of a curving gryphon talon, and her eyes
full moons. The girl in the Phoenix Crest ballroom wearing a cream gown,
holding the empty air like she was dancing with a ghost, with eyes made
of massive black pearls.
***
The High Prince
Regent was eighteen years old when he painted the girl engulfed in
flames. The House Wars his father had reignited had raged for an entire
decade.
He barely remembered mixing the colors of fire, or
throwing his brushes in the corner. With his hands he drew flames like
ivy growing up her body, twisting and burning, but feeding her power. He
felt it, too, hot and hungry, the promise of melting in such an
inferno. The fire licked up the edges of the canvas and up his wrists,
twining his forearms with pain.
The High Prince Regent screamed
through his teeth, refusing to stop, as smoke burned tears down his
cheeks and his hands shook. He closed his eyes, blocking it out, the
fear and heat and pain: it hurt so much, the memory of this future pyre.
He woke up alone in his tower room, nostrils filled with the tinge of
old smoke, but there was nothing around him except splatters of paint
and every image of the eyeless girl, surrounding him, watching him with
her pits of eyes, her bumblebee eyes, her full-moon eyes, sea-glass
eyes, ghostly fish-bitten dead eyes, and eyes of pearls. Most of all a
new painting on a messy unframed canvas: the girl made of flames, her
eyes like twin suns.
There had never been a fire eating him whole.
But there would be.
In four years: a high rampart, a bright blue sky, warships on the
brilliant horizon, something sticky in his hand, an awful taste on his
tongue. And the eyeless girl, standing before him, her lips on his lips.
For the first time he could see her eyes not as furious wells of power,
but gentle brown with flecks of gold. Then the fire. It would happen.
It must.
Alone in his tower room, the High Prince Regent waited
for the sun to rise over his land, torn apart by constant war, then he
carefully rent the fiery painting into strips and set them alight.
1 DARLING
I had a dream about the dark.
Not the night, which has stars and the moon to cast shadows, but an
all-consuming dark, one that devoured and twisted and changed a girl
into something else, something defiant and monstrous. She scrabbled in
the abyss with the other women of her house: sisters and mothers and
cousins and friends, each of them dwindling away until she was the only
one left. When it finally came to pass that she was liberated from that
hole, her eyes had learned to live without the light, to love the cool
comfort of the shadows. And so she wept in the arms of her liberators,
not because she was sad, but because her poor damaged eyes had no idea
what to do with sunshine.
I dream of my childhood every night
before a battle, which is a lot, considering Pyrlanum has been at this
worthless war since before I can remember. Fighting might be a rite of
passage, one that feels less triumphant the longer we're in combat, but
my dreams are so familiar they've become equal parts comforting and
distressing. Lucky me, I learned to make peace with fear long ago.
"Darling, heads up!"
A knife flies past my face, close enough to slice a line across the
deep brown skin of my cheek and take a chunk from my ear. A curl that
has managed to escape from the twin buns at the nape of my neck falls to
the ground. I don't swear at the sudden blossom of pain, just turn to
wait for the next blade, ready to deflect it with one of my long knives.
"Really, Adelaide? This close to a battle?" I say, swallowing a sigh.
Adelaide Seabreak, second scion of House Kraken and my adopted sister,
grins at me from across the deck of the Barbed Tentacle, flagship of the
Kraken navy. The wind whips her long brown hair around her face, and
even though her skin is tanned, it is nowhere near as dark a brown as
mine. They say that all the members of House Sphinx had skin as brown as
the leather of their beloved treatises, but there is no one else to
verify this. I am the only one left.
