The dawn came like a wound not yet healed.
Jaede opened his eyes to a slit of grey-white light seeping through the cracks of the planks overhead.
Full day had not yet come,but it was enough—enough for the mould-rotten air and the sweat-stink of the night not yet fully fled to go on squatting in this shed.
He lay a while,fixing his gaze on the roof blackened by smoke,listening to the gasps and mutterings of a dozen men in their sleep around him.
The straw beneath him pricked at his back.
He moved his fingers. In his palms lingered the ache of blisters torn raw from the hammer`s haft.
That ache was familiar to him now,as familiar as his own name,as the colour of his hair—black as the coal-dust deep in the mine,black as the eyes of all the enslaved in this northern land.
"Jaede."
The voice was low,coming from the straw pallet on his right.
He turned his head and saw Muddy already sitting up.
The lines on that forty-year-old man`s face were like a riverbed cracked by drought in the morning light.
But his eyes—black as well,the same as Jaede`s—held something Jaede seldom saw in others.
The old miners by the campfire called it"a soul the coal-dust hasn`t yet choked dead." Muddy himself never spoke the word.
"I know," Jaede said.
He knew. Today was a mining day.
Outside the shed,the cold air hit like a slap.
Spring in Northernia was crueller than winter on the Silver Plateau.
The wind swept in from Blackrock`s direction,reeking of brimstone and char—that mountain never truly rested.
Jaede drew his patched burlap coat tighter. The cloth at the collar was worn nearly sheer and kept out little,but he had long learned not to mind.
He was sixteen years old.
His mother and father were on this same land, waking on other straw in other sheds, the same black in their eyes reflecting the same grey-white light of morning. He did not go to see them.
Because in Northernia,on the lands of Marquess Bearman, under the watch of Ser Hilliam, a mining slave who wore his heart too plainly gave others a rope to lead him by.
"Form up!"
The voice came from the camp`s centre.
It was Goram, the overseer,a former miner with a wen on his neck and two fingers missing from one hand—he had lost them in a cave-in,but that had lent him not a shred of mercy for those still digging.
He struck harder than any,as though those missing fingers were a debt he could never repay, and the way to repay it was to make every other man suffer more than he did.
Thirty-two men.
That was the count for today.
Yesterday it had been thirty-five. The day before, thirty-seven.
The numbers changed,but the logic behind them never did—Blackrock needed coal, and coal had to be clawed from the earth,and the men who clawed it were like oil in the miners` lamps: once spent, they were replaced.
Five men stood nearby, their weapons catching the cold gleam of morning.
Militiamen.
They called it"escort" but the truth was they were there to make sure no one ran.
Truth be told, running on Ser Hilliam`s lands was a folly almost laughable.
Where would you go?
North was the deeper Northernia.
South, the patrol lines of the Aurantian cavalry.
West,the castle of Marquess Bearman.
East, the sea.
Besides,Ser Hilliam treated them well enough—well enough meaning he would sometimes send an extra bundle of straw for the sheds, and the number who froze to death in winter was half what it had been under the previous knight.
And each month,fifty coppers. Not enough to buy a cup of sour ale in the mining town`s tavern, but it meant Hilliam remembered they were men,not beasts.
The line was thin. But on this land, a thin line was all anyone could hold.
"You lazy bones!" Goram`s whip cracked the air and fell on the shoulder of the lame man at the rear of the column.
The man grunted and quickened his pace.
"Ser Hilliam sees you fed, and this is how you repay him?"
No one answered.
No one looked back either. That was the rule. When the blow came,you did not turn your head. Turning earned another.
Jaede walked near the middle of the column, a little to the back.
Ahead of him was the broad back of Muddy.
That man`s shoulders were like a boulder worn smooth by wind and rain.
They bore their own scars,fresh layered over old,yet they still stood straight.
"Keep your chin up," Muddy said without turning, his voice low as wind through a stone crack.
"Walk with your head down, and you`ll stumble."
Jaede did not reply, but he lifted his chin a little.
Blackrock lay to the north. From the camp to the mine was a walk of near two hours.
The road was dirt, packed hard by countless feet and coal carts.
On either side stretched a grey waste, with only the occasional thornbush whose leaves were grey as well.
The sky was grey, the ground grey, the air grey—even breathing felt like drawing ash into the lungs.
But today,along the southern horizon,there was a colour that did not belong.
Smoke.
Not the perpetual pall of Blackrock`s coke-fires, but a thinner,straighter, blacker kind. Jaede stared at it for a long time before Muddy`s voice came again.
"You see that smoke?"
"Yes."
"That`s war-smoke."
Jaede drew his gaze back to the back of the man`s head before him.
"They said it was only skirmishing."
"Skirmishing." Muddy let out a short laugh,a sound like stone striking frozen earth.
"When the lordlings call it 'skirmishing' it means our heads are what will meet the blade. King Stephen Warick wants the silver mines of the Silver Plateau. The King of Aurantia wants our coal. Their dogs have snarled at each other across the fence for three years. Now the fence is about to fall."
He paused, his steps never faltering, grey dust rising and settling around his feet.
"You know why Blackrock matters?"
"The coal." Jaede said. Everyone knew that. Blackrock`s coal was the lifeblood of Northernia—steel needed it, winter needed it, King Stephen`s warships and the armour of his steelbears needed it."
"Aye. The coal. But you know why now?"
Muddy`s voice dropped even lower,nearly swallowed by the wind.
"Because Marquess Bearman`s land—this land, forty leagues around Blackrock—was Dragon`s Fallen, eighty years ago."
Jaede`s step faltered.
Dragon`s Fallen.
The name was a spell in Northernia.
Utter it, and even the wind seemed to pause a heartbeat.
He had heard the crippled old miners sing songs of it by the campfire.
He had listened to the oldest slaves whisper tales in the sheds at night.
But never—never—had he heard a living, waking man like Muddy, a man who did not waste words,speak it aloud in daylight on the open road.
"Your grandfather told you?" Jaede asked.
"My grandfather told my father. My father told me." Muddy`s gaze was fixed on Blackrock in the distance, that grey-black hill like a crouching beast in the morning mist.
"Five dragons. Five of them, tearing at each other in the sky."
His voice had changed.
It was no longer the tone of idle talk, but something closer to…recitation.
As though he were drawing out something etched into his very bones,word by word.
"Red fire, black fire, green fire. Even the clouds caught flame, burning into clots of rust-colour,rolling in the wind like the whole sky was bleeding."
"Soldiers slaughtered each other beneath the mountain."
"Cavalry charged into the ranks of footmen,the sound of breaking lances reaching the foothills."
"The dead piled into hills—men and horses and all manner of Great Beasts heaped together. Blood ran in rivulets down the slope,and after three leagues it was still red."
Jaede`s breath slowed.
He found he was no longer walking but following the current of Muddy`s voice, as if the grey dirt road were becoming some battlefield of another age.
"The roars of the dragons carried for leagues."
"My grandfather said his father was among those soldiers."
"He said that sound was not something a man could imagine—it was mountains splitting,the sea reversing its course,the world saying'I am no longer the world you knew.'"
Muddy`s throat moved.
""Then they fell. One by one. Like spent stars. The earth shook for three days."
"Every tree within twenty leagues of Blackrock was felled. Then came three months of rain. Three months of black rain, falling like the colour of blood after it has set."
"The last dragon…"
He stopped and looked toward Blackrock.
"The last dragon did not die on the battlefield."
"It flew into the mine, wailed in the mountain`s belly for three days and three nights before it expired."
"My grandfather said it was a female. Her young lay deeper in the tunnels,burned to charcoal before they could hatch."
"Perhaps she wanted to be close to her source. Dragons came from the deep fire beneath the earth. When they died, they should return to it."
"So Blackrock`s coal…" Jaede said.
"Blackrock was not always black." Muddy turned his head and looked at him.
His black eyes reflected the grey-white sky,but deep in their pupils,Jaede swore he saw something burning.
"It was grey, like the northern sea-cliffs. That battle burned it black. Dragonfire can burn stone, burn soil,burn water,burn air."
"The flames of the battlefield went out. but the fire in the mountain did not. It burned beneath the earth for three whole years."
"Three years."
"Three years. The ground was hot. The air was hot. Rain that fell on that mountain turned to steam before it could touch the ground."
"In the end. it was Lord Warick—they were not yet 'King' then, but already the greatest Ryder of his house—with his steelbears, and the Archmage of Solitarium, with forty-three mages,who stood on the mountain`s peak for seven days and seven nights to quench the fire."
Muddy`s voice returned to its usual dryness,as if all those words had drained every drop of moisture from his throat.
He coughed and spat onto the ground.
"So now you know. What we walk on is not coal. It is dragon. Dragon bone, dragon blood,dragon hatred."
"The Aurantians want this mountain not for coal—there is coal elsewhere. They want what lies beneath. They want the dragon."
"Dragons are extinct," Jaede said.
"Aye. Extinct."
Silence stretched between them, as long and grey as the road ahead.
At the head of the column, Goram was cursing again.
This time it was the young man at the front,because he had stepped in a puddle and splashed mud on the overseer`s boots.
When the whip fell, every head bowed,including Jaede`s.
He bowed his head,but his ears listened.
Dragons.
He had heard the word before, in songs, in the ramblings of drunkards,in old tales told to lull children to sleep. But Muddy`s telling was different.
When Muddy spoke,the dragons seemed to fly in the sky overhead.
The flames seemed to burn somewhere just behind him. The roars seemed to echo still in the depths of this land.
He slid his left hand inside his shirt and touched his chest. No reason for it. Only to be sure he was still breathing.
To be sure he was still alive.
And the meaning of being alive,today—as on every day—was to walk beneath that mountain,enter that hole,dig out the coal, and walk out alive.
That and nothing more.