After My Husband Abandoned Me, I Rule All Dragons novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Pot Song

The Wing refuses to shift against her, Alys secretly hums Drystan back from the burn, and on the road north she sings Wystan through the night before his own sister's arrows hit the cart.

"No," I said.

Drystan sighed.

He turned to the drake on his left.

"Shift."

The boy was twenty-two, with a cowlick and a broken front tooth.

Two winters ago I'd sung him down out of a blizzard over the moors.

He looked at me, and then at his boots.

"Sir, I'd rather not."

Drystan stared at him. "What?"

"I'd rather not, sir."

"You." Drystan pointed at the next one. "Shift."

That one I'd called back the night his father died, when he'd gone into the burn over the river.

He shook his head.

"Sorry, Marshal."

The third one just took a step back.

The fourth said, "She carried me in her coat, sir. Naked as a fish. I'm not burning her."

Somebody in the crowd by the gate laughed.

Drystan's ears went red.

The last two didn't even wait to be asked.

They both said, "No, sir," at the same time.

Bakers, carters, a woman with a basket of eels.

Dorrit leaned over to me on the box and whispered, "Oh, he's going to do something stupid."

He did.

He tore off his coat and shifted right there in the gateway.

The bronze dragon came up out of him with a roar that blew the eel woman's hat off.

The crowd ran back against the walls.

Behind me in the cart, Wystan went very still.

I felt it through the boards.

His breath was turning rough.

"Stay with me," I said, without looking round, and started humming.

Drystan's dragon reared over us.

"Give him to me!" the dragon roared.

His eyes were white at the edges.

I knew that white.

I'd watched it come and go for five years.

Rage did it fastest.

He swung his head toward the crowd, toward a cart of apples and the children behind it.

He was going.

I just kept humming, the same tune I was already humming for Wystan, and I let it go a little louder.

The bronze head stopped.

It swayed.

The white drained out of his eyes.

The dragon sank onto its knees in the gateway and shrank.

Drystan knelt there on the cobbles, naked and panting, in front of half the north quarter.

A child started giggling.

Drystan got up.

One of his drakes ran forward with his coat.

He snatched it and held it in front of himself.

"Go, then," he said, breathing hard. "I'm letting you go. Remember that."

"I will," I said.

Dorrit clicked to the mare.

We rolled through the gate between the six young drakes.

The boy with the broken tooth touched two fingers to his brow as I went past.

Dorrit waited until we were out of earshot.

Then she said, "You hummed him down."

"Yes."

"In front of everyone."

"Nobody noticed."

"I noticed. He thinks he did that by himself."

"He always has."

She didn't say anything for a mile.

Then she said, "I'd have let him eat the apples."

That night we camped by the road at the edge of the moors.

Wystan sat by the fire in his horse blanket and shook.

It wasn't the cold.

His teeth chattered, and his eyes kept flicking pale and back.

"It wants out," he said. "It's been out a year. It thinks this is a cage."

I sat down beside him and sang.

The pot song, slow, with his name over it now.

Wystan. Wystan.

The shaking eased.

Dorrit rolled herself in a sack on the other side of the fire and snored.

"How did you know my voice?" I asked him. "On the tower. I'd never sung to you."

"You had," he said.

I looked at him.

"Every hunt this year. Every time the Wing came over the moors after me, you were on one of their backs, singing their boys down."

He was looking into the fire.

"I'd hide in the cloud and listen. It was the only thing in my head that wasn't fire."

My throat went tight.

"Why did you keep running, then? If you heard me?"

"Because they had chains." He turned his scarred arm in the firelight. "And you were wearing his colours."

"I'm not anymore."

"No," he said. "I noticed."

The wind came up off the moor.

He opened the blanket without a word.

I hesitated.

Then I got in.

He was hot as a hearthstone all down one side.

His arm came round me, heavy, and his hand settled flat on my ribs under my coat.

I could feel his heart going hard against my shoulder.

Mine was going just as hard.

"Keep singing," he said into my hair. "Please."

I sang.

His thumb moved once over my ribs, slow, and I lost the tune.

He breathed out against my neck.

"Sorry," he said.

He didn't move his hand.

I didn't ask him to.

"There's a gorge below my Hold," he said, after a long time. "My clan's young are in it. Burned. Chained. Nobody up there can call them, because the crown says there's only one of you."

"How many?"

"Six, when I went. I don't know now."

Four days later we reached the foot of the Greyspine.

The road turned to stones and went up between pines.

Wystan was asleep in the oat sacks.

An arrow hit the side of the cart a hand's width from my knee.

The mare reared.

A tall girl with black hair in a warrior's tail stepped out from the trees with a third arrow already drawn.

"Get down from that cart," she shouted, "you crown witch, before I put this one through your pretty earring."

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