Give Me Your Eyes

======================================================================

What rose from the dais was no longer a man.

It rose in pieces, and each piece was worse than the last. The silver hair went first, burning off in a gout of black smoke. The skin split along the arms and chest and spine, and beneath it ran veins of molten red, branching, swelling, fusing into plates of dark armor that crawled outward from the crystal like frost across a window. Thorne grew. Eight feet. Fifteen. Thirty. His shoulders broke through the golden breastplate and sent it spinning across the square. Thorns of black iron burst from his forearms, whipping and trailing like chains, and from his ruined mouth came a voice made of a dozen voices, all of them screaming.

"*I will not be erased!*"

The soldiers broke.

It was not a retreat. It was a flood. Forty thousand people tried to go through six exits at once, and the roar of their panic drowned even the monster's cry. Lucian was knocked sideways by a stampede of bodies; Elder Vane was swept up in the arms of a sergeant and carried bodily away. Overhead the sky had turned the color of a bruise.

"Lucian!"

Kaelen's wing came down over him like a roof. The first lash of the thorn-chains struck it, and the dragon screamed, a sound that Lucian felt in his own bones, through the bond, as if the whip had cut across his own back.

"Get on."

"I can fight..."

"You have nothing left to fight with. *Get on.*"

He got on.

---

It was the worst battle of his life, and he spent most of it holding on.

Kaelen was fast. He was enormous and quick and angry, and he came at the crimson giant from all sides at once, tearing, scorching, ducking under the whipping chains. Gold fire washed across Thorne's armor and was swallowed whole. A swipe of black claws opened a long gash in the monster's flank, and the wound sealed itself over in seconds, knitting and hardening. Every time the dragon struck, the thing laughed.

"*Your fire is mine!*" Thorne roared. "*I have eaten a hundred of you! Every one of you, in the end, feeds me!*"

A chain caught Kaelen's wing. It tightened. The dragon bellowed, twisted, and hit the paving of the square with a crash that shook the colonnades. Lucian was thrown clear. He landed on his shoulder, rolled, and came up on his hands and knees with the taste of blood in his mouth.

The monster loomed over them, vast against the dawn.

"*Mine,*" it said. "*Your core. Your power. Your pretty human. Everything.*"

*Lucian.*

The voice in his head was faint, and fraying at the edges.

*Lucian, go. Run. I will hold him.*

*No.*

*He will kill you.*

*I said no.*

He stood. His legs shook. His mind was a burned-out field, his gift all but spent, the whole of his body one long scream of exhaustion. He walked across the broken stones to where the great black dragon lay with a chain around its throat, and he put both hands against the scaled face.

"Kaelen."

A huge gold eye rolled toward him.

"I have a plan," Lucian said. "It is not a good one."

*Tell me.*

"The core in his chest is the source of everything. It is made of dragon fire and hatred, and no fire can burn it, because it eats fire. But it cannot eat a thought." He swallowed. "The Tempest Mind Spike. My father used it as he died. It is a single psychic strike, the deepest I know, and it does not work on a body, only on a mind. If I could put it through the core..."

*You have no power left.*

"Not my own." Lucian pressed his forehead to the dragon's. "But I have yours."

A long silence.

*The mark*, said Kaelen, understanding. *You want to use the bond. To pour my flame through your gift. A dragon and a Winters, in the same blow.*

"It might kill us both."

*Yes.*

"Then say no."

*Lucian.* There was a smile in the voice, a crooked, tender, outrageous smile. *I have waited fifteen years for you to ask me for something. Do you think I am going to say no?*

"Give me your eyes," Lucian said. "We will kill him together."

---

The world opened.

It was not like the first time. The first time had been a flood, a drowning. This was a door swinging open on a lit room, and he stepped through it, and Kaelen was there.

He saw the square through dragon eyes. Everything was brighter, sharper, and strange: the monster, a seething knot of heat, and in its center a wound of black light, throbbing, a hole where the core ought to be. He saw the chains lashing down. He saw the sky. He saw himself, a small dark figure with his hands against a dragon's face, burning with a blue-white radiance that hurt to look at.

*There*, said Kaelen. *The heart. Do you see it?*

*I see it.*

*Then do it.*

Lucian raised his hand.

The monster saw them. For the first time, something like fear crossed that ruined face. It drew back a fist the size of a carriage and brought it down. The whole square seemed to hold its breath.

And Kaelen opened his jaws.

The fire that came out was not gold. It was blue-white, and shot through with lines of violet, and it did not burn the air as it passed; it *sang*. It went across the square like a thrown note. It struck the monster's chest dead center, and where it struck, the dark armor did not melt. It *stopped*. Every plate froze, mid-motion, as if the thing had been struck by a thought too large for its body to hold.

*Tempest*, said Lucian.

And the world broke into light.

---

When it ended, the sun was fully up.

Founders' Square lay in a drift of white ash. The great Spire stood silent, untouched. The dais was gone, the banners were gone, the colonnades along the eastern side had come down in a landslide of marble. In the middle of the wreckage, on his back among the cracked stones, lay a man of fifty-four with white hair and a pale, empty face.

He was breathing. Barely.

Lucian crossed the ruins on unsteady feet, with Kaelen's arm around his waist and the dragon's weight against his side, and stood over his uncle for a long time.

"Lucian."

The old man's eyes had cleared. There was no madness in them now, and no fury, only an immense and weary clarity.

"Aldric hid it from me," he said. "The boy. The dragon. He sealed your memory himself when you were twelve." A dry, cracked chuckle. "I was always so sure I was cleverer than he was. For fifteen years he kept that secret under my nose, because he knew that I would find a use for it. He loved you both. More than the throne. More than me." His mouth twisted. "Fool."

"He was not a fool," Lucian said.

"No." The eyes slid shut. "No. I suppose not."

He did not speak again.

It was Kaelen who knelt, after a time, and closed the old man's eyes, and Lucian stood beside him and found that the grief he had expected would not come. There was only a great quiet, and a strange lightness, as if a stone had been lifted off his chest.

"It is over," he said.

"It is over."

"My father."

"Yes."

"Is he..." He could not finish.

"He is proud of you." Kaelen's voice was very soft. "I knew him for only an hour, in the rain. But I know that much."

Lucian turned his face into the dragon's shoulder, and the whole of Founders' Square, silent and white and full of ash, watched them stand there.

---

The treaty took four months.

It took four months of shouting, and four months of cold tea, and four months of two proud and frightened races sitting across a table from each other for the first time in four centuries and trying to remember how to speak. There was an Elder Vane who cried in a corridor and denied it. There was a High Elder Maldrec who walked out three times and came back four. There was a cousin named Varrick, who arrived at the first session with a bandaged knee and sat in sullen silence until the end, when he rose, bowed stiffly to Lucian, and said, "The scrap pipe was a good blow."

Lucian passed the Nexus Trial in the spring. He was Lord Winters by summer. He signed the Ember Accord in the cathedral square with a pen that had belonged to his father, and a dragon prince stood at his shoulder in the black formal coat of a foreign ambassador, with a very small, very private smile.

It was, everyone agreed, a historic day.

Lucian remembered almost none of it. He was too busy being aware of the exact position of the dragon's left hand.

---

"Kaelen."

"Hm?"

"You are in my light."

"I am doing no such thing." The voice drifted lazily across the study. "I am standing at a perfectly reasonable distance, holding a teacup, and admiring the view."

"The view is a stack of border tariffs."

"It is a very nice stack."

Lucian sighed and took off his glasses. He had needed them for a month now, thin wire frames, absurdly dignified, the result of too many late nights and too many treaty clauses. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked up.

The prince was leaning against the bookcase with a cup of tea in one hand. He had abandoned the ambassador's coat hours ago. His black shirt hung open to the sternum. The study of Winters Hall, with its red curtains and leather spines and the map of the northern territories under glass, had never looked less like a place of business.

"You are staring," Lucian said.

"I am."

"I have eleven more pages."

"I know." Kaelen set the cup down, with enormous care, and crossed the room in four long strides. A hand slid to the back of Lucian's chair. A mouth came to rest beside his ear. "I have waited six months, my Commander. Six months of ceremonies and committees and dull old men. Six months of keeping my rut chained, so that you could rest and heal and do your very important work."

"You have been very good."

"I have been a saint." The warm breath ghosted down the side of his neck, across the line of gold that had never faded. Lucian's pen slipped from his fingers. "But your psychic power has fully recovered now, I think. Which means it is time to make up for all six months."

"Kaelen. The desk is..."

"The desk is very sturdy. I have tested it."

"You have *not*."

"Tonight," Kaelen murmured, with infinite relish, "I will teach you how paperwork is done."

Lucian opened his mouth to scold him. He found he could not remember a single word of the speech. A hand lifted his chin. A pair of gold eyes, bright as coins, filled the whole of his sight.

"Look at me," said the dragon.

He looked.

Outside, beyond the tall windows, the first snow of the new winter was beginning to fall over Wintergate, soft and white and quiet, over the colonnades and the cathedral and the broad grey river. Somewhere in the hall below a clock chimed the hour. In the great study, with its glowing hearth and its gold-framed portraits of nine generations of stern northern lords, a pair of spectacles slid slowly across the blotter, and a pen rolled off the edge of the desk, and nobody went to pick it up.

Fifteen winters ago, a boy had held out a bleeding hand to a stranger in the snow.

It had taken the world a long time to catch up.

It had taken Lucian Winters just one night to stop running.

THE END