Ashes of Emberfall

Prologue

The Waking of the Cinder Queen

For three hundred years the valley of Emberfall forgot to be afraid. The orchards grew heavy with red apples, the wheat ran gold to the edge of the hills, and the children played a game called Sleeping Queen, in which one child curled up in the middle of a ring and the others crept close, daring each other to touch her nose before she woke. Above it all stood Mount Cinder, quiet and grey, wearing a crown of cloud.

The old songs said a dragon slept beneath that mountain. Vyrathax, they called her, the Cinder Queen, whose scales were the red of a forge at full heat and whose wings, spread wide, could shade a whole village at noon. The songs said she had fought the giants of the north when the world was young, and that when the fighting was done she had folded her wings over her treasure and closed her eyes. Most folk in Emberfall thought the songs were only songs. Grandmothers sang them to make bread rise faster.

Then, on the first cold night of autumn, the mountain breathed. A low sound rolled down the valley, deeper than thunder, and every dog in Emberfall began to howl at once. Shutters rattled. Milk shivered in its pails. People ran into the lanes in their nightclothes and looked up to see the cloud-crown on Mount Cinder glowing from beneath, orange, then red, then white.

A shape climbed out of the summit and unfolded against the stars. When it roared, the sound was not angry so much as it was grieving, though no one in the valley understood that yet. By morning the eastern woods were burning, and by the end of the week the sky over Emberfall never went fully dark at all. The Sleeping Queen had woken, and she was looking for something.

Chapter 1 of 9

The Burning Sky

The four of them arrived in Emberfall on the same night, from four different roads, and none of them had planned to stay. The village sat on the shoulder of a hill, a tumble of thatched roofs and crooked chimneys, and beyond the ridge behind it the whole sky pulsed a slow, sick orange, as though the world were a coal someone kept blowing on. Ash drifted down like grey moths. The air tasted of smoke and burnt sugar.

Down the main lane came the refugees, a long line of carts and lanterns and tired faces. Farmers pushed barrows piled with bedding. A goat bleated from the top of a hay wagon. Dame Hilde Ironhold, a dwarf in heavy plate with her red hair bound in two thick braids, saw a cart sink to its axle in the mud and simply walked into the ditch, set her shoulder under the wheel, and heaved. The cart rolled free. "No one gets left behind on my road," she said, as if reading from a promise carved somewhere inside her.

A little girl in the cart was crying. Brisa, a dragonborn bard with copper scales and a scarf the colour of marigolds, swung the lute off her back and began to play a silly song about a goose who wanted to be a knight. By the second verse the girl was hiccuping instead of sobbing. By the third, half the line was humming along.

At the edge of the lane stood a young man in spectacles, clutching a satchel so stuffed with scrolls it would not close, a lantern swinging from the top of his staff. "Odo Crane," he said to nobody in particular. "Wizard. Mostly. I came to study the mountain, and the mountain appears to be on fire." From the roof of the mill above them, an elf in a green hooded cloak lowered her longbow. Lyra Swiftbough had been watching the ridge for an hour. "Not the mountain," she said quietly. "The woods. And the fires are moving in circles, like someone searching."

Chapter 2 of 9

The Baron's Bounty

Castle Harrow crouched on a crag above the valley, its towers black against the glowing sky. The great hall inside was long and cold despite the torches, hung with banners showing a silver hammer on a red field. At the far end, on a throne raised so high that visitors had to tip their heads back to look at him, sat Baron Ulric Harrow. He was a lean man with a trimmed grey beard and rings on every finger, and he smiled the way a merchant smiles at a sale.

"The beast has burned three villages," he said, his voice ringing off the stone. "My people sleep in ditches. I offer five hundred gold crowns to any company brave enough to climb Mount Cinder and end her." He gestured, and a servant lifted the lid of an iron chest. The gold inside caught the torchlight like a second fire.

Odo raised a hand, then lowered it, then raised it again. "Forgive me, my lord. Dragons who sleep for centuries do not usually wake for no reason. Did something happen? Before the fires?" The hall went very quiet. The baron's smile did not move, but his eyes did. "Beasts need no reason, boy. But I am not helpless. My smiths are forging a blade from the Emberstone, a fire-gem my miners found in the mountain. When it is finished, no dragon will stand against it. Your task is to buy me time."

Hilde stepped forward, her plate clanking. "I'll not take your gold, Baron," she said. "I swore an oath at my forge-father's anvil to stand between the helpless and the fire. That oath is my wage. We'll go to the mountain for the people in the ditches." Behind her, Lyra said nothing, but her sharp eyes had found the baron's guards. Every one of them wore gauntlets scorched black at the fingertips, and none of them had been anywhere near the burning villages. Brisa noticed it too, and played a single, thoughtful note on her lute as they left.

Chapter 3 of 9

The Ash Road

The road to Mount Cinder ran through what had once been the Brightwood, and was now something else. Black trunks stood in rows like burnt candles. Ash fell without stopping, soft and silent, and it settled on Hilde's armour and Brisa's scarf and the brim of Lyra's hood until they all looked like statues of themselves. Every footstep sent up a small grey puff. Nothing sang. The only sound was the hiss of embers still glowing deep inside the stumps.

Odo lit the lantern on his staff and held it high, though it was midday. "It's ridiculous to be frightened of trees," he muttered. "They can't do anything. They're already burnt." A branch cracked behind him and he jumped so hard his spectacles slid down his nose. Brisa laughed, but kindly, and fell into step beside him, humming a marching tune until his shoulders came down from around his ears.

Lyra knelt often, brushing ash from the ground with her fingertips. "Look at the burn lines," she said. "She isn't attacking. She's sweeping the forest the way a mother sweeps a room for a lost ring. Over and over, closer to the castle every time."

The wolves came in the late afternoon. There were five of them, gaunt and grey and half-mad with hunger, their fur singed, their eyes reflecting the lantern like coins. They poured out of the ash in silence. Hilde planted her feet and swung her warhammer in a wide arc that sent the leader rolling. Lyra did not hurry. She drew, breathed, and loosed, and an arrow thudded into a trunk an inch from the second wolf's nose, then another beside the third. "Go home," she told them softly. "There's nothing here for you." The pack hesitated, whined, and melted back into the grey. Odo let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since breakfast. "Remind me," he said shakily, "never to argue with you about anything."

Chapter 4 of 9

The Hermit of Greyhollow

Greyhollow was a cleft in the hillside that the fire had somehow passed over, and in it, behind a curtain of hanging moss, was a cave that smelled of thyme and woodsmoke. Bundles of herbs dangled from the ceiling. Old maps were pinned to every wall, maps of the mountain drawn and redrawn by the same patient hand. By the fire sat Old Maddoc, a man so old his white beard reached his belt, wrapped in a cloak of grey fur. He had been expecting them. "Sit," he said. "Eat. Then I'll tell you what the baron didn't."

They ate barley stew while the fire popped, and Maddoc talked. "My family kept the Queen's door for twelve generations," he said. "We swept her stair, we sang to her in her sleep, we kept fools from her treasure. Before she closed her eyes, three hundred years ago, she laid a single egg. Dragon eggs are slow. They take centuries to warm. My grandfather's grandfather told me it would hatch in my lifetime, and I believed him."

He turned to the flames. "Last spring, men came up the mountain with picks and chains. Harrow's men. I was too old to stop them. They carried something down wrapped in wet sacks, and it glowed through the cloth like a coal." Odo had stopped eating. "The Emberstone," he whispered. "The fire-gem. It isn't a gem at all." Maddoc nodded slowly. "It's her child. And that fool means to break it open on an anvil and forge its fire into a sword."

For a long moment nobody spoke. Then Hilde set her bowl down very carefully. "Then the fires," she said, "are a mother looking for her baby." Brisa touched the strings of her lute but did not play. "And every village the baron sends us to defend," Lyra added, "he's the one who set it burning." Maddoc unrolled one last map and laid a knotted finger on a thin line across a chasm. "There is an old way into the back of the castle," he said. "But you'll have to cross the Bridge of Bones."

Chapter 5 of 9

The Bridge of Bones

The chasm was called the Wound, and it went down farther than any light could follow. Across it, from cliff to cliff, lay the skeleton of a dragon so enormous that at first the party mistook its ribs for a row of white stone arches. Its skull rested on the far side, jaws open, each tooth taller than Hilde. Beside it, swaying in the hot wind that rose from below, hung a rope bridge of grey planks and fraying cord.

"Whoever she was, she was older than the Cinder Queen," Brisa said softly, and she sang a few bars of a dragonborn mourning song, low and rolling, to the great bones. The wind seemed to answer, whistling through the ribs like a far-off flute. Lyra went first, light and sure, testing each plank. Brisa followed. Hilde, in her heavy plate, crossed slowly, one hand on each rope, muttering prayers to her ancestors with every step.

Odo was last. He stood at the edge with his knuckles white on his staff. "I have read," he said, "eleven books about bridges, and in nine of them, the bridge breaks." Lyra called back across the gap. "Then this is the tenth book. Eyes on me, Odo. Not down. On me." He swallowed, stepped onto the first plank, then the second. Halfway across, a board snapped beneath his boot with a sound like a bone breaking.

He dropped. His satchel of scrolls swung out over the darkness. But Odo did not let go of his staff, and he did not scream. With his free hand he tore a scroll from his belt, shouted a single word, and a cushion of shimmering air caught him beneath the arms and held him there long enough for Hilde to reach down and haul him up by his collar like a kitten. He sat on the far cliff, shaking and laughing at the same time. "Featherfall," he gasped. "I've been carrying that scroll for two years. Never thought I'd be brave enough to read it."

Chapter 6 of 9

The Baron's Vault

The old way led through a drainage tunnel slick with soot and into the roots of Castle Harrow. They moved by Odo's lantern, turned down to a single orange thread of light, past storerooms and wine racks and a sleeping guard whose snores shook his own moustache. Lyra went ahead, silent as a cat. Twice she raised a fist and they all froze, listening to boots pass on the stair above.

The vault door was iron and bore the silver hammer of House Harrow. Beyond it lay a room that felt like the inside of a fist. Chains hung from the ceiling. A great forge squatted against one wall, its coals banked but breathing. Hammers and tongs and long cruel chisels were laid out on a bench in neat rows, waiting. And in the centre, on a pedestal of black stone, sat the Emberstone.

It was the size of a shield and shaped like an egg, its shell red and orange and gold all at once, swirling slowly like light inside a storm. It was warm enough to feel from the doorway. "Oh," Brisa breathed. "Oh, little one." Odo crouched beside the pedestal. Pale runes ringed the stone, a warding circle. "If we lift it, every bell in the castle rings," he whispered. His hands were trembling as he unrolled a scroll, but his voice did not shake when he read it. One by one, the runes flickered and went dark.

Brisa began to hum, a lullaby her own grandmother had sung to hatchlings, and as the notes filled the vault the glow inside the egg pulsed in time, slow and steady, like a heartbeat answering. Hilde wrapped it in her cloak and lifted it against her breastplate. "I have you," she told it. "My oath is yours now too." That was when the last rune, the one Odo had missed, flared bright red. Somewhere far above them, a bell began to ring.

Chapter 7 of 9

Ride Through the Burning Fields

They burst from the stable yard on four stolen horses as the gate crashed shut behind them, and for one wild moment the night was silent but for hooves. Then the torches came. Thirty riders poured out of the postern gate, Baron Harrow at their head in a cloak of red velvet, his voice ringing across the dark. "Bring me the stone! Burn anything that stands in your way!"

The soldiers flung their torches into the wheat. The fields of Emberfall were dry and gold and waiting, and they went up with a roar. In moments the party was riding through a corridor of fire, flames leaning over them on both sides, smoke stinging their eyes, sparks whirling around them like angry bees. Hilde rode hunched over the egg in her cloak, shielding it with her own body. "Hold on, little one," she growled. "Hold on."

Lyra turned in her saddle, knees guiding her horse, and drew. Her first arrow cut the strap of the lead soldier's saddle and sent him tumbling into the stubble. Her second struck a torch from a rider's hand. Her third pinned the corner of the baron's red cloak to his saddle so that when he raised his arm to shout, he nearly pulled himself off his horse.

The fire was closing ahead of them. Odo, white-faced, bouncing so hard his spectacles kept leaping off his nose, rose in his stirrups and flung out his staff. "Wind!" he shouted, and then, remembering the actual words, shouted those too. A gust tore down the row of burning wheat and split the flames apart like a curtain. Brisa whooped and sang a bright, galloping war-song, and the horses, hearing it, found speed they did not know they had. They thundered through the gap and into the dark beyond, and behind them the flames closed again, and the baron's riders reined up, shouting, on the wrong side of the fire.

Chapter 8 of 9

The Lair of Vyrathax

The heart of Mount Cinder was a cathedral built by fire. Rivers of lava wound across the floor in slow orange ribbons, and the air shimmered so hard the far walls seemed to ripple. In the centre rose a hill of gold, coins and crowns and goblets and shields heaped higher than a house. And on that hill, as the party stepped onto the last ledge, something moved. The gold slid and rang like rain on a tin roof, and Vyrathax the Cinder Queen lifted her head.

She was beyond enormous. Her horns curled back like the prows of ships. Her wings, half spread, blotted out the far side of the cavern, the long finger-bones showing through the glowing membrane. Her eyes were molten gold, and when they fell on the party, the heat of her look alone made their skin prickle. "Thieves," she said, and her voice was a landslide. "You come to my home smelling of the one who took my child. Give me a reason I should not end you."

Brisa stepped forward. Her knees were shaking, but she did not play her lute. Instead she sang, unaccompanied, in the oldest tongue of her people, the language dragons themselves had once taught to the dragonborn. It was the lullaby from the vault. The dragon went utterly still. A thread of smoke curled from her nostrils. "Where," she said, very softly, "did you learn that song?"

Hilde Ironhold walked out onto the ledge. She unbuckled her warhammer and laid it on the stone at her feet, and the clang echoed through the whole mountain. Then she unwrapped her cloak and held the egg up in both hands. Its light flared, brighter than it had ever been, and pulsed toward its mother like a heartbeat calling home. "We didn't steal her, Great One," Hilde said. "We stole her back. I swore an oath to stand between the helpless and the fire. I reckon she was the most helpless thing in this whole valley."

Chapter 9 of 9

Dawn of Embers

Vyrathax lowered her head until her great jaw rested on the ledge beside Hilde, and with a breath as gentle as a sigh she washed the egg in fire. The party flinched, but the flame did not burn them. It wrapped the shell in gold, and the shell cracked, and cracked again, and out tumbled a hatchling no bigger than a pony, wet and wobbly and furious, who sneezed a puff of sparks directly into Odo's spectacles. Brisa laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Baron Harrow arrived at the cavern mouth an hour later with what was left of his riders, and stopped short. The Cinder Queen raised her head, her hatchling curled between her claws, and looked at him. She did not breathe fire. She did not need to. Behind the baron, his own soldiers looked from the dragon to the scorched gauntlets on their hands to the man who had ordered them to burn their neighbours' fields, and one by one they lowered their spears. Old Maddoc, who had followed them up the mountain on a mule, told the whole valley the truth that very day, and by midsummer Ulric Harrow was answering for it before the king's court.

The party watched the end of it from a cliff above the valley as the sun came up. Below them, Emberfall was green at the edges already, the first shoots pushing up through the ash. The Cinder Queen rose from Mount Cinder with her child flapping clumsily beside her, and the two of them climbed into the golden morning, circling once over the village, so low the people in the lanes could see the little one wobble.

"She's sparing the valley," Lyra said. "For now." Hilde picked up her hammer and slung it on her back. "For good, I'd wager," she said. "She's got better things to do than burn barns." Odo cleaned his spectacles on his sleeve and squinted up at the sky. "I'm going to write a book," he announced. "Eleven books about bridges, and not one about this." Brisa tuned her lute, and as the dragons became two bright sparks against the sunrise, she began to make up the song that Emberfall's children would sing for the next three hundred years.