Chapter 4
The sound hummed straight into the bones of her knees, leaving a prickle of gooseflesh along her forearms.
By the ninth day, the routine had hardened into a desperate siege.
The meat rations allocated to the Lower Mews were strictly monitored. When Oriana tried to present Pip with fresh calf-liver—the standard weaning diet intended to kindle the fire-gland—the little creature had violently recoiled. He had tucked his head under his wing-nubs, wheezed twice, and sneezed directly into the bloody offal with unmistakable, aristocratic disgust.
He wouldn't touch meat. He wouldn't touch marrow.
Instead, on the eleventh night, Oriana woke from a dead sleep on her straw cot to the sound of dry rustling.
*Scritch. Crunch. Masticate.*
She sat up, rubbing the grit from her eyes, reaching instinctively for the tallow lamp.
The small lantern-light bloomed over the corner table where she kept her only possessions: a chipped clay pitcher, an extra woolen smock, and a bundle of yellowed, water-damaged manuscripts she had salvaged from her father's study before the Inquisitors had put the rest to the torch. They were ancient commentaries on the *Founding Codex*, written in the dense, archaic glyphs of the First Solar Dynasty.
Pip was sitting squarely on the middle of the table.
In his mouth was the bottom third of an eight-hundred-year-old scroll.
"Pip!" Oriana gasped, lunging forward. "No! That's vellum! That's three hundred years of judicial commentary on aerial boundaries!"
She grabbed the parchment, attempting to pull it gently from his jaws.
Pip clamped down. For a creature who could barely crack a dried pea, his jaw possessed the immovable density of an anvil. His milky eyes squinted shut with stubborn bliss, his blunt throat working as he swallowed down a four-inch strip of ancient calfskin covered in High Valdic script.
"Let go, you catastrophic idiot!" Oriana hissed, prying his gummy jowls apart with her thumbs. "You'll choke! It's coated in oak-gall ink and lead-dust!"
Pip gave a vigorous gulp. The parchment vanished.
He smacked his gums together twice, let out a dry, papery burp, and stared at the remaining text with greedy, myopic focus.
Oriana looked down at the torn document in horror. The missing section was the legal preamble to the *Lex Draconis*, specifically bearing the wax-imprint of the imperial solar seal—the three-sun glyph of Emperor Aurelius the Lawgiver.
She picked Pip up by his middle. He was surprisingly heavy, like an iron kettle filled with wet sand, but his belly felt soft and pleasantly warm.
"You ate the law," she whispered, staring at his blank, milky face. "You literally ate an imperial edict."
Pip blinked his cataract-filmed eyes once, rested his heavy chin on her thumb, and fell fast asleep, snoring like a dry leaf caught in an autumn gale.
***
The first true sign that something was rotting in the foundation of the Weyr came on the sixteenth day.
The Upper Ring of the mews was reserved for the battle-wyverns of the High Aristocracy. Every afternoon, the young nobles of the Sun-Guard brought their mounts down to the lower sandy yards for tethered subjugation drills. It was a display of sheer, terrifying power: fifty young drakes, their wings banded with polished steel, their necks bound in thick silver-inlaid null-collars.
Lord Gideon himself stood on the observation balcony, his arms folded across his chest, overseeing the drills.
Oriana was lugging two heavy wooden buckets of lye-water across the perimeter of the ring, her smock soaked with sweat, her knuckles raw and bleeding from scrubbing the winter pens.
In the center of the ring, Lord Vane's son, Corin, was attempting to force his mount—a magnificent, twenty-foot sapphire storm-drake named Zephyr-Bane—into the *Kneeling Submission*.
"Bend the crest!" Corin barked, raising his silver-tipped control rod. The runes along his gauntlet flared with violet witch-fire. "*Submittas, vermis! Ad terram!*"
The standard Imperial domination spell. It sent an agonizing psychic shock straight through the silver pins driven into the drake's skull, forcibly suppressing its primitive instincts and replacing its will with the rider's command.
Usually, the drake would shriek, drop to its belly, and press its snout into the dirt until the rider released the current.
Oriana passed within ten paces of the timber barrier, the apron around her waist bulging slightly where Pip was curled into a ball against her stomach, sleeping off another meal of warm broth and shredded scraps of ancient municipal tax codes.
Corin struck the air with his rod, unleashing the mental lash.
The violet spell-arc didn't hit Zephyr-Bane.
At least, it didn't hit him the way it was supposed to.
The moment the coercive wave rippled through the air, crossing the invisible boundary near Oriana’s apron, the air went dead. A terrible, ringing silence dropped over the yard, so absolute that the buzzing of a fly on the railing sounded like a saw hitting timber.
Zephyr-Bane did not kneel.
The sapphire drake threw its head back with a scream so shrill, so soaked in pure, unadulterated agony that two squires dropped their reins and clamped their hands over their ears. The great beast didn't drop to its belly; it crashed sideways into the sand, clawing frantically at its own temples with its hind talons, foaming at the mouth. Its eyes rolled entirely white, blood leaking in twin rivulets from beneath its silver cranial pins.
"What is he doing?!" Corin shouted, staggering back as the drake's massive tail lashed out blindly, splintering a heavy oak support post into kindling. "The link broke! My head—gods, my skull!"
Corin dropped to his knees in the sand, vomiting violently, clutching his forehead as if his brain had been pierced by a red-hot bodkin.
Across the yard, four other war-drakes suddenly recoiled in blind panic.
They didn't roar. They whimpered. Colossal, armor-plated engines of war backed themselves into the corners of the stone walls, tucking their heads beneath their wings, shivering so violently that their iron scale-guards rattled like loose change.
"Back!" Gideon's voice cracked from the balcony, cold and sharp as breaking ice. "Cut the mental leads! Release the pins!"
Attendants scrambled into the pit with snips, severing the ether-wires connecting the riders' gauntlets to the collars.
Oriana stood frozen, clutching her lye-buckets, her heart hammering in her throat.
Down in her apron, Pip shifted slightly. He stuck his snout out from the pocket, sniffed the air, gave a tiny, bored sneeze, and retreated back into the dark warmth of her wool skirt.
On the balcony above, Gideon’s eyes did not look at the thrashing, bleeding sapphire drake.
He was looking down at the sand.
Looking at the path Oriana had walked.
His flint-gray eyes were narrowed to razor slits, his jaw set in a hard, pale line. For three long seconds, his gaze locked onto her smock.
Oriana ducked her head immediately, turned on her heel, and hurried down the dark stone stairs into the Sub-Level pens, her boots splashing through the filthy drainage gutters.
"A bad draft from the deep fissures," she heard the Master of the Forge shouting behind her in the yard, trying to calm the panicked nobles. "Sulfur pockets in the volcanic vents! It poisons the ether-currents! Clear the yard!"
*Not sulfur,* Oriana thought, her hands trembling so hard the lye-water sloshed over the rims of the buckets, burning through her stockings. *That wasn't sulfur.*
