"Then we were already damned when we signed," Lucen said. "I will not leave Isera in Grell hands because I got shy of a lock."
Isera Solenne was seventeen, sharp-tongued, currently "visiting" the Grell keep under terms that had been written as hospitality and enforced as inventory. Brynna's father had called it temporary. Temporary things had a way of growing roots when debt was involved.
Brynna's jaw worked. For a moment Lucen thought she would strike him, or kiss him, or both, the way people did when love and fury shared a room and neither would leave first. Instead she stepped past him to the left door and set both palms against the wood.
"Then we open them together," she said. "If you fall for a principle, I will not be the widow who learns about it from a steward."
He came to the right door. The wood was colder than it should have been. Under his hands he felt the faint vibration of that deep breathing, transmitted through stone and timber like a secret passed along a table of drunk men.
They pushed.
The doors resisted the way old things resist: not with malice, but with the weight of having been left alone too long. Then the iron hinges complained, and the arched leaves swung inward on a darkness that was not empty.
The chamber beyond was cavernous. Torches burned in high brackets along the walls, their orange light fighting a cooler blue that fell from somewhere above—an aperture in the vaulted rock, or a ward-glass, or a wound in the world that preferred blue to honesty. The floor was the same large slabs, but here they were scored with shallow channels as if someone had once planned for water, or blood, or both, and then thought better of finishing the plan.
And on the floor, vast and black, lay the dragon.
Vorath's scales were thick, not glossy, the color of wet charcoal and old iron. Bat wings folded along the long body like collapsed tents. Horns swept back from a heavy brow. The creature's eyes were closed, but even shut they seemed to hold a banked heat, as if orange and red waited behind lids the way coals wait under ash.
Brynna made a sound that was not a word.
Lucen's hand found hers without looking. Their shoulders touched. For one held breath the only motion in the chamber was the slow rise and fall of the dragon's side, and the blue light drifting like cold dust.
Then Vorath's head lifted.
The eyes opened.
Glowing orange-red regarded them with a focus that made Lucen feel inventoried. Not hunted, exactly. Assessed. The way a judge assessed a petitioner who had arrived late and without the right papers. The dragon's nostrils flared. Smoke, or steam, or the idea of fire, ghosted out and vanished in the blue.
Behind them, the doors were still open.