Beneath the Mountain

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They came up into the Ashfall Reach at dusk.

Lucian had never been there. No human had, in four hundred years, and returned to say so. He had expected scorched earth, bones, the skeletons of burned villages. What he saw instead, as Kaelen carried him out of the last tunnel and into the light, took his breath away.

A city of gold. It climbed a mountainside in terraces and spires, every roof tiled in beaten copper, every window blazing with firelight. Bridges of black glass arced between the towers. Lanterns the size of carriages hung over streets that smelled of cedar and woodsmoke and hot stone. And over everything, in the thin high air, flew shadows with long wings.

"Put me down," Lucian said. "Have you lost your mind? I'm human. I'll be torn apart."

"I helped you escape," Kaelen said. "We are even."

"That is not what even means."

"Do not touch me there."

"I am not touching you."

"I know. I was talking to the mate-heat I triggered, which has still not been properly soothed." The dragon's lip curled. "We have a long night ahead of us, Commander. Are you ready?"

"Let me go. This is how you start a war between our races."

"Commander." Kaelen stopped. His eyes were very bright. "The moment you saved me today, the war had already begun."

---

The court of the Ashfall Reach went silent as they came through the gate.

Scaled guards in bronze armor. Courtiers in long robes the colors of embers. A hundred pairs of golden eyes, turning, widening. A murmur began at the back of the hall and ran forward like a spreading flame.

"His Highness is back."

"Who is that in his arms?"

"It is Lucian Winters. The butcher of the human border."

"He has killed countless dragons."

"Come and see if you are capable," Kaelen said pleasantly.

A man in the front rank stepped forward, tall, black-haired, with a scar through one eyebrow and a curl of contempt on his lip. Lucian knew the face from a dozen intelligence files. *Varrick, cousin of the Prince. Rival for the throne.* The man's hand went to his sword.

"Who dares touch him?" Kaelen said.

The hall was quiet enough to hear the lanterns burn.

"From this moment on, Lucian is mine." The prince's voice rolled out over the assembled court, level and cold. "He is mine, and he is under the protection of the heir of the Ember Conclave. Anyone who raises a hand to him raises it against me."

"Your Highness," someone said. "But he is..."

"*Mine.*"

Lucian, who had spent eleven years learning to keep a face of stone, felt a flush climb his neck and could do absolutely nothing about it.

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The prince's chambers occupied the top of the tallest tower. They were enormous and strange: a ceiling lost in shadow, walls hung with banners the color of old blood, a bed the size of a small boat heaped with furs and silks. The floor was gold. Not gilded; *gold*, coins and chains and cups and crowns, drifted into dunes. It sighed and shifted under Lucian's boots as he was set down on the edge of the bed.

"Take me back," he said. "Take me back to the border."

"Send you away." Kaelen was at the window with his back turned, shoulders rigid. "A dragon's mark is not a thing one undoes. And your human border has already declared you dead."

"I told you. I have a position. I have responsibilities."

"I told you." The prince turned. "You cannot escape me."

"I..."

Lucian's voice failed, because something had begun to happen in his body.

It was subtle at first: a flush that was not the fever. A restlessness in his limbs. His skin felt too tight, his collar too close. Where the mark lay on his neck, a pulse of warm gold began to beat in time with his heart, and each beat sent a long slow ripple of want down through the center of him. The scent of the room, smoke and cedar and Kaelen, had become unbearable and necessary at the same time.

"Kaelen," he said unsteadily.

"Are you sure?" The dragon was across the room now. He had stopped a pace away, hands at his sides, not touching him. His eyes were enormous and entirely soft. "Say the word, Lucian, and I will leave. I will sit outside the door all night. I swear it on my mother's bones."

"I need..." Lucian could not finish. The shame of it was a knife. "I need you."

"Say it properly."

"Kaelen." His hands closed in the silk of the coverlet. "I need you. Please."

A slow, dazzled smile broke across the dragon's face. "Such a good boy," he whispered.

Lucian would have broken his jaw for that, any other day. Tonight he lifted his chin to meet the warm descending mouth, and the door of the tower swung shut behind them on its own, and in the whole city of gold not one lantern flickered.

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