After My Husband Abandoned Me, I Rule All Dragons novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: By Sundown

Alys stands between Wystan and the crossbows and walks him out of Highcrag with Dorrit, until Drystan and the Wing block the north gate.

Somebody on the wall shouted, "Loose!"

Nobody loosed.

But I heard thirty crossbows come up at once.

The naked man on the cobbles didn't flinch.

He was staring at me, and his grey eyes were already going pale at the edges.

I walked out into the middle of the yard and stood in front of him.

"Put them down," I said.

The captain of the guard was a man I'd fed soup to when he had the flux.

He didn't put his down.

"Voice, step aside. That's the feral."

"I know who he is."

"He burned the Emberwatch."

"Three ferals burned the Emberwatch. He sat in the sky and watched it, and then he carried me out of it."

I could feel Wystan behind me, breathing too fast.

The white was creeping in.

I started humming the pot song under my breath.

His breathing slowed.

"Listen to me," I told the yard. "He's holding on by my voice. He's been burned for a year. If you put a bolt in him, he goes back into the fire, right here, between the kitchens and the hay barn."

A woman in the crowd pulled her little boy behind her skirts.

"So shoot me first," I said. "Then you can find out what he does next."

The crossbows wavered.

Drystan came down the hall steps with Celandine on his arm.

He looked at Wystan.

"Chain it."

"He's not an it."

"Chain him, then. In the old pen, with the dragon irons."

The guards looked at me.

I kept humming.

Then the King came out onto the steps behind them, wrapped in a fur, with the Chancellor at his elbow.

He looked at the huge scarred man on his cobbles, and his mouth worked.

"Is it safe?"

"While I'm singing to him, Your Majesty."

"And if you stop?"

"Then he isn't."

The Chancellor bent and murmured in his ear.

The King's hand shook on the rail.

"Take your creature out of my city," he said. "By sundown tomorrow. I want neither of you here after that."

Drystan turned on him. "Majesty, that's the bounty of the decade."

"It's the bounty," the King snapped, "until it's a fire in my kitchens."

He went back inside.

Celandine smiled at me over Drystan's shoulder.

Then they went in too.

The crossbows came down one by one.

Dorrit was still holding her bucket.

She set it down, unbuckled the groom's whip from her belt, and threw it on the cobbles at the captain's feet.

"I quit," she said.

"You can't quit. You're the head groom."

"Watch me. I've shovelled that bronze bastard's dung for eight years, and he just left my best friend on a burning roof."

The captain opened his mouth.

"And you can tell the Marshal I said bastard," Dorrit added. "Spell it right."

She stomped off toward the stables.

Wystan made a noise behind me.

I turned.

He was laughing, very quietly, with his face in his hands.

"Who," he said, "is that?"

"Dorrit."

"I like her."

"Everybody does, eventually. It takes about a year."

Dorrit came back with a horse blanket and threw it at him.

"Cover yourself up. There are ladies."

He wrapped it round his waist.

It reached just past his knees.

We spent the night in the empty end of the hay barn.

I didn't sleep.

Every time I stopped humming, he woke with his eyes going white, and I started again.

Near dawn he said, very low, "I'm sorry. You must be tired of this."

"I've done it for five years," I said. "For a man who never said sorry once."

He was quiet for a while after that.

At noon Dorrit pulled an Eyrie feed cart round to the barn door, behind a grey mare with a temper.

"Stole it," she said. "Well. It's the crown's, and I'm owed wages."

Wystan climbed into the back among the oat sacks in his horse blanket.

The cart groaned.

"How much do you weigh?" Dorrit asked him.

"In which shape?"

"Don't be clever. Any shape."

"About the same as this cart."

"Lovely. She'll kill us both before the moors."

I climbed up beside her on the box, and the mare pulled us out through the Eyrie gate and into the city.

People came out of their doors to watch us go.

A baker threw a loaf into the back.

Wystan caught it and looked at it like he'd forgotten what bread was.

"Eat it," I said over my shoulder. "Slowly."

He ate half and held the other half out to me.

I took it.

By late afternoon we came round the last bend before the north gate.

Dorrit pulled up the mare.

The gate was open.

The road beyond it was not.

Six drakes of the Wing stood across it in their blue and silver, with Drystan in front of them.

He'd changed into his riding leathers.

He had one hand on his sword.

"Alys," he said, loud enough for the whole street. "You can go wherever you like. The feral stays."

He nodded at the six behind him.

"Hand him over, or we shift, and we burn the pair of you right here on the road."

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