They had been on the road for less than half an hour when it happened.
The first to notice was a militiaman at the very rear of the column, a young man named Henk with a reddish-brown beard.
The crossbow in his hands had not been wound—proof enough that he had not truly believed he would need it today.
But he stopped abruptly, raised his right hand, palm facing back.
*Halt.*
Everyone stopped.
Not because he commanded any authority, but because the silence that descended so suddenly carried its own weight, a presence as tangible as stone.
Even Goram fell silent. His hand, missing two fingers, gripped his whip; the lash lay still upon the ground.
Jaede heard it.
The wind had died. The insects that had been droning across the wasteland had ceased their chorus.
Hoofbeats.
Three of them.
Henk's face went pale.
He began to wind his crossbow, his fingers trembling. The string slipped twice before it caught.
The other four militiamen were doing the same, their movements clumsy and frantic, like men yanked from a dream who find a blade in their hand but cannot remember which end to hold.
"Aurantian outriders," Muddy's voice came at Jaede's ear, so low it was almost no sound at all.
"Light cavalry. Scouts."
"What are they doing here?"
Jaede asked.
"What did I tell you? War is coming."
The hoofbeats grew louder, heavier, and the ground began to shiver.
Jaede could see the dust rising at the far end of the earthen track, and beneath it, three blurred shapes moving like arrows loosed from a bow.
"Form up!Form up!*"
Goram had finally shaken off his stupor. He threw down his whip and drew a short blade from his belt.
The steel was spotted with rust, looking about as reliable as the man who held it.
Thirty-two pit slaves stood where they were. None ran. Where would they run?
North was the ice sheet.
South were the Aurantian horsemen.
West was Bearman's castle, too far to reach.
East was the sea.
This land offered no path of escape to a pit slave.
When the riders emerged into full view, Jaede's first thought was:their armor is so fine.
The Aurantian scouts did not wear the drab wool and boiled leather of Northernians. They wore light plate, coated with something black as silver, that drank the grey light of the sky.
Their horses were larger than any Northern breed, their legs hairless, their hides gleaming with an unnatural bronze—
"Ryders,"
Muddy breathed at his side.
"Those horses are rydings. The Aurantians don't ryding bears. They ryding those. Bronze horses that never tire."
The three bronze mounts slowed to a halt fifty paces from the column, their hooves carving shallow furrows in the packed earth.
The riders wore the same black-silver armor, their faces half-hidden by helms that left only their eyes exposed.
The lead scout did not look at the militiamen. He did not look at Goram. He did not even look at the thirty-two pit slaves.
He looked at Blackrock.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he spoke. His voice was not loud, but his command of the Morphese was unnervingly refined:
"Coal Hill?"
No one answered.
Henk raised his crossbow and aimed at the man.
His hand trembled. The tip of the bolt traced small, unsteady circles.
The scout leader lowered his gaze to the crossbow, then to Henk's face, and then—
The blade was faster than the eye.
Jaede did not even see the man draw.
He only saw Henk's head leave his shoulders, tumble once through the air, and strike the ground with an expression still frozen in terror—no time yet for pain.
The headless body stood where it was for two full seconds.
The crossbow in its hands discharged with a sharp *clack*, the bolt flying upward to vanish into the grey-white clouds.
Then the body fell.
Then came the killing.
The five militiamen might as well have been paper targets before three horsemen.
One took a lance through the chest; the point emerged from his back trailing splinters of rib.
Another was sent flying by the impact of a horse's shoulder, landing in a posture like a crushed insect, limbs still twitching but no longer human in shape.
Goram ran three steps before the second horse's hooves came down upon his back. The sound of his spine breaking was as crisp as a dry branch snapped in two.
He lay on his belly, blood frothing from his mouth, his three-fingered hand still clawing at the ground, dragging himself half a foot before it stopped.
The fifth militiaman ran.
He made it perhaps twenty paces before the third rider uncoiled a rope from his saddle, spun it twice above his head, and cast it forth with a serpent's hiss. It looped around the man's neck.
The horse did not slow.
The man was yanked from his feet. His hands flew to the rope, nails scoring white lines into the fibers as his body bounced, rolled, scraped across the ground, churning dust and flesh together into a single dark smear that stretched longer and longer.
Jaede stood where he was.
His feet had not moved, but his body shook, shaking like the deep tunnels of Blackrock itself, those places where the rock was always on the verge of collapse.
His ears rang. The world before him had become unreal.
Too bright, those Aurantian blades, bright as ice.
"Run!"
Muddy's hand closed around his arm.
The strength in that grip was astonishing; pain shot up Jaede's arm.
"Run where?"
Jaede heard his own voice, hoarse as sand dragged over stone.
"The mine! Get into the mine! They won't—"
An arrow cut Muddy off.
It came from the second rider's short bow, a black-shafted thing that struck Muddy's left shoulder with a sound like a butcher's cleaver meeting a cutting board.
Muddy grunted but did not fall. He did not even loosen his grip on Jaede's arm.
"Run!" he roared.
And then everyone was running.
Thirty-two pit slaves scattered like startled birds, fleeing toward the wasteland, toward the brambles, toward anywhere that was not here.
But the Aurantians were light cavalry.
Their bronze horses could run three times faster than a man across the open ground.
Their bows and blades were longer than a man's arm by three times.
And their eyes—those eyes behind the black-silver helms—looked upon the running men as men look upon rabbits on the moors.
Jaede ran.
He saw nothing but Muddy's hand on his arm and the black silhouette of Blackrock Mine growing larger before him.
His lungs burned. His legs burned.
The ruined shoes on his feet, with their toes poking through, had worn bloody against the gravel, but he felt no pain.
Behind him, screams.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six—
He did not look back.
He could not.
Muddy ran beside him, the arrow-shaft bouncing with each stride, blood running down his arm to drip upon the earth and mix with dust into mud.
But he ran. Forty-some years old, an arrow in his shoulder, and he ran.
He was even speaking as he ran, though Jaede could not make out the words—only the movement of his lips, like some silent prayer.
Then they reached the mine entrance.
Blackrock's mouth gaped open like a throat.
Timber props held up the stone above, and the lantern that had hung from them had been knocked down—someone had run in ahead of them, sent it crashing to the ground, oil spilt and wick still smoking.
Beyond lay blackness.
Not the black of night, but the black of the deep earth, the black that light dare not enter.
Jaede's foot came down on something soft as he crossed the threshold.
He looked down.
A man.
A pit slave who had reached the entrance before him, lying on his face with an arrow through his chest.
The shaft had gone through back to breast, the tip trailing shreds of cloth and flesh.
He was not dead yet. His eyes were open. His mouth opened and closed like a fish cast upon the shore.
Jaede stepped over him.
He did not want to.
But he did.
Because behind him Muddy was still running, and behind Muddy, the hoofbeats of the third horse had reached the entrance.
"Deeper!" Muddy shoved him forward.
The force sent Jaede stumbling to his knees on the broken stone, skinning flesh from bone.
"Don't stop! Go deeper! As deep as you can!"
They ran on.
The air in the tunnels grew hotter, thicker, the smell of sulfur strengthening.
The walls shifted from grey to black, from black to a deep purple that seemed to hold its own light.
Cracks in the rock breathed warm vapors, carrying some scent Jaede could not name. Not sulfur. Not pitch.
Something older, deeper, something that smelled like the entrails of the earth itself.
Then came the explosions.
From the direction of the mine mouth.
One after another, like summer thunder but heavier, more solid, more weighted.
The rock above them shook; small stones rained down, pattering against Jaede's head, shoulders, back, like a silent hail.
"They've collapsed the entrance,"
Muddy's voice came out of the darkness, eerily calm.
"They mean to burn the mountain."
"Burn it?"
Jaede stopped, looking back toward where the entrance had been.
"Coal Hill. You light it, it doesn't go out. Eighty years ago the Archmage of Solitarium and Lord Warick took seven days and seven nights. Who puts it out now?"
Muddy leaned against the tunnel wall, breathing hard. He reached up, took hold of the arrow shaft, clenched his teeth, and snapped it off with a sharp crack. Splinters drove into his palm. He did not even flinch.
"The others?" Jaede asked.
Muddy said nothing.
They both knew.
Thirty-two men.
Five militiamen.
Goram.
Thirty-eight souls had left the camp.
Now, only the two of them stood here.
No—Jaede listened. In the darkness ahead, footsteps.
Light, distant. Perhaps a few others had made it in.
But behind them, the fire was growing brighter, bright enough for Jaede to see the sweat on Muddy's face, the blackened crust of blood around his wound, the reflection of flames in his eyes.
"Come,"
Muddy said.
"Further in. If the fire reaches us, we'll find a side tunnel. Blackrock runs deep. There are branches. Maybe—"
He did not finish.
Because behind them, the sound of the flames had changed.
It was not the sound of burning.
It was the sound of breathing.
Jaede heard it.
From the depths of the mine.
From every crack in the walls.
From the very ground beneath their feet—breathing.
Deep, slow, carrying a vibration that resonated in his very bones, like some great beast that had slumbered for decades stirring in its sleep, prodded by a red-hot iron.
"Muddy," Jaede's voice shook."Do you hear that?"
There was no reply. Jaede turned and saw Muddy slumped against the wall, his wound weeping black blood.
The arrow had been poisoned.
Muddy was dying.
"Son... if you live through this..."
Muddy's face was blank. His lips moved.
Jaede leaned close to hear.
"I'll carry you," Jaede said."We'll go out together."
He would not let this man—this man who had been like a father—die here alone.
Muddy's eyes had lost their light, but he kept speaking, as if to himself.
"Go to Viridis. That is our home. We Viridians were not born to be slaves..."
"The last dragon."
"It wailed in these mines for three days and three nights..."
His sightless eyes turned toward Jaede.
Perhaps he was already blind.
Those black eyes reflected the fire drawing closer.
Behind them, the flames surged forward like a tongue, licking at every inch of the tunnel walls.
The air was burning.
The oxygen was being sucked away.
Jaede's lungs fought for each breath, each one like swallowing broken glass.
"The last dragon..."
"Three days..."
He kept repeating the words.
The fire came.
Jaede tried to take hold of him, but his fingers found only dust on Muddy's tunic.
Then the wall of fire swallowed him.
Jaede ran.
He did not know how long he ran.
Only that the path sloped ever downward, ever deeper, and the air grew hotter, thinner, and each breath was torture, like pouring molten lead into his lungs.
His eyes wept.
The walls were changing.
The black coal was gone.
In its place was a kind of stone Jaede had never seen—deep red, like frozen blood, its surface smooth as if polished, but warm to the touch, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic beat.
Like a heartbeat.
He fell at the end of a side tunnel.
His knees struck stone. His hands came down on something cold.
Not stone.
Iron.
His fingers found a plate of iron, worked with patterns—something like scales. Row upon row of scales, each no larger than a thumbnail, each etched with a different grain, together forming some design he could not understand.
He traced the iron plate upward, found an edge, a hinge—no, a binding.
A book.
An iron book.
It was longer than his forearm, wider than his head, thick enough to serve as a shield.
He wrenched it from the rubble just as the fire lit the whole tunnel behind him.
He could see it now.
Orange and red and rolling, a flood of devouring flame surging down the passage toward him. The air screamed. The walls cracked. The stone beneath his feet was melting.
There was nowhere to run.
The tunnel ended. His back was to the wall. Before him was the fire.
He clutched the iron book to his chest.
He was going to die here.
His parents were not here. Muddy was not here. Ser Hilliam was not here. No one in all the world was here.
Only this book.
This iron-bound thing that had fallen from some age, some world, into the deepest dark of Blackrock.
He closed his eyes.
The fire struck him.
He lost consciousness, but his arms remained locked around the iron book.
The blood from his wounds seeped into the iron covers.
And the iron book drank. Like a living thing, greedy for what he fed it.
The book blazed against his chest.
A light so fierce, so blinding, so white—like dragonfire, like the sun, like the mountain fire of eighty years compressed into the space between two iron covers.
It bled through his fingers, formed a barrier around his body, translucent and pale gold, like a giant's hand cupped around him.
The flames struck that barrier and broke against it, like waves upon a sea-cliff, shattering into a thousand sparks that scattered in every direction.
Jaede at the heart of the fire, at the deepest end of Blackrock's tunnels, on the very spot where the last dragon had drawn its final breath eighty years before, holding a book inscribed in a tongue no living man could read, and not a single burn marked his skin.
The flames that could melt stone, the flames that had taken the Archmage of Solitarium and forty-three conjurors seven days and seven nights to quench—
They raged within a finger's breadth of his face, roaring, surging, trying to pierce that pale gold light.
But they could not enter.
The iron book vanished, as though it had melted into his very flesh.
Jaede dreamed.
In the dream, he looked down at the book in his arms. The scale-like patterns on its cover were glowing, every scale blazing, joined together into the shape of a dragon coiled along the spine.
It *was* a dragon.
On the iron cover, a dragon lay coiled, scale overlapping scale, wings folded at its sides, head raised, mouth open.
Jaede opened the book.
The first page.
No words.
Only an image.
An eye.
An eye with a vertical pupil, golden, looking at him.
He looked at the eye, and the eye looked at him.
A sixteen-year-old pit slave, hair black, eyes black, an iron book clutched to his chest, staring into the eye of a dragon.
The flames raged around them.
But they stood at the heart of the fire, unharmed.
Outside the tunnels, the three Aurantian scouts had already wheeled their horses and ridden away.
Their task was complete.
Coal Hill was alight. Blackrock burned. Northernia's most vital source of fuel was aflame, and the scales of war had tipped before the first battle was ever fought.
They did not know that a man still lived in the depths of the mine.
They did not know of the iron book.
They did not know what the last dragon had forged with its final breath, before it died.
They did not know that on the first page of that book, a golden eye with a vertical pupil watched the direction of their going.