After My Husband Abandoned Me, I Rule All Dragons novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Tower
Drystan carries his first love off the burning tower and leaves Alys to the fire; she rides a feral dragon to court, tricks him into signing their severance and resigns in front of the King, and the dragon turns into the north's outlawed king.
The Emberwatch was on fire, and my husband had room on his back for one.
I was on the tower roof when his bronze dragon dropped out of the smoke.
Two of the Wing's boys were burning in the sky above me.
I had my hands cupped around my mouth, singing their names over the pot song.
One of them heard me.
He tipped out of the smoke and came down on the moor in a skid of heather and sparks.
He'd wake up a man, naked and crying, and he'd live.
The second one was still screaming somewhere up in the dark.
Three ferals from the north had hit the tower at dusk.
They'd set the hay store alight, and the stairs had gone with it.
"Alys!"
Lady Celandine Ferrers was crouched by the battlements in pale green silk, holding her skirts out of the soot.
She had no business on a border tower.
She'd ridden out that afternoon "to watch the Voice at work."
I'd told her to go home twice.
Drystan's dragon folded its wings and landed between us, and the whole roof shook.
The bronze head swung toward me.
Then toward her.
Celandine burst into tears.
"Drystan, please. I can't breathe."
He lowered his shoulder for her.
She climbed on in her silks, neat as a lady mounting a pony.
I stared at him.
"There's another boy up there burning," I said. "I need to get down to the moor."
The dragon's voice came up out of its chest, low and rough.
"You're the Voice. Call yourself something."
Then he took off.
The wind from his wings knocked me to my knees.
I watched him carry her away over the moor, toward the lights of Highcrag.
Five years I'd been his wife.
Five years on his back in every fight, humming him down each time his eyes went white.
He'd never once asked what I was doing back there.
The stone under my hands was getting hot.
Smoke came up through the cracks in the roof.
Behind me, the north stair caved in with a roar.
I got up.
There was a shadow circling the tower, bigger than any dragon in the Wing.
It had been circling for an hour, black against the fire, with a torn edge on its left wing.
A feral.
Every drake in the Wing had hunted that dragon for a year.
Nobody had got close to it and come home.
I had nothing else.
I climbed onto the battlement, put my hands to my mouth, and sang.
Just the pot song, the one the cooks hummed in the Eyrie kitchens when I was small.
No name to put over it, because I didn't know his.
The black dragon turned its head.
It came around once, low, its wing tip throwing sparks off the burning roof.
Then it landed on the tower so hard the battlements cracked.
Its eyes were white all the way through.
Burned.
It should have torn me in half.
It put its head down by my boots and breathed on me, slow.
"Good," I said, and my voice shook. "Good. Keep listening."
I climbed onto its neck.
It jumped off the Emberwatch just as the roof fell in.
On the way over the moor, I sang the second boy down.
He landed in a bog, which was the best place for him.
Then I turned the black dragon toward Highcrag.
The great hall was full when I walked in.
There'd been a harvest feast, and the court was still at the tables.
Drystan stood in front of the throne in his blue and silver, a man again, his hair wet from the wash.
He was holding Celandine's hand and kissing a scratch on her knuckles.
The ladies at the front table were sighing.
Somebody saw me and stopped laughing.
I was black with soot.
My braid was singed, and the hem of my coat was still smoking.
Drystan turned.
For one second he looked surprised I was alive.
Then he looked annoyed.
"Good, you're back. Did you get the boys?"
"Both."
"There you go," he told the court. "I said she'd manage."
Celandine leaned on his arm. "She's so brave. I never could."
I didn't look at her.
I took the Wing's dispatch folio out from under my coat.
I'd carried it since noon, waiting for him to stand still.
"You need to sign these before the riders go at dawn."
He sighed.
He took the quill from the King's clerk and signed every page I turned for him.
He didn't read one of them.
He never had.
Grain orders. Saddle repairs. A boy's leave to visit his mother.
And on the eleventh page, a writ of severance, with my name already on it.
He signed that too.
He handed the folio back without looking at me.
"Is that all?"
"Almost."
I unhooked the silver torc from my throat.
It had sat there since I was eighteen.
I walked to the foot of the throne, knelt, and laid it on the step.
The hall went quiet.
"Your Majesty," I said. "I resign as the Voice of the Wing."
The old King blinked at me.
Drystan laughed.
"She's tired. Alys, get up. You can't resign without my leave, and you don't have it."
"Darling," Celandine said softly, with her hand on his chest.
"The Voice answers to the crown alone. Everybody knows that."
"She doesn't need your leave for anything."
She smiled at me when she said it.
She thought she was getting rid of me.
She was right.
The clerk picked up the torc with two fingers.
Drystan's jaw went tight. "Fine. Resign. You'll still be my wife in the morning."
"No," I said. "I won't."
I opened the folio to the eleventh page and held it up so the front tables could see.
"A writ of severance between Drystan Mortlake and Alys Loxley. Signed by both, before the King's clerk."
I gave it to the clerk.
He looked at the signature, then at Drystan, then at the King.
The King waved one tired hand.
The clerk pressed the seal.
Drystan's face went from red to white.
"You tricked me."
"You signed it without reading it," I said. "In front of the whole court. Like everything I ever gave you."
Someone at the back laughed and turned it into a cough.
I walked out down the middle of the hall, and nobody stopped me.
The black dragon was where I'd left it, in the Eyrie yard under the torches.
Thirty guards ringed it with crossbows, and none of them was brave enough to shoot.
Dorrit Wicks, the Eyrie's head groom, was the only one close to it, holding out a bucket of water.
It lifted its head at my steps.
Its white eyes cleared to grey.
It shuddered all over and folded in on itself, scales and wings and fire sinking down to the cobbles.
A man knelt there instead.
Naked, huge, black hair over his face, burn scars running down his whole left side.
The court had followed me out to watch.
Somebody whispered the name.
Then everybody was saying it.
Wystan Hawksley, king of the northern drakes.
The feral with the biggest bounty in Aldmere on his head.
"His sister's held the north for him all year," Dorrit breathed beside me. "Bettris. She shoots our riders off their dragons for sport."
He raised his face and looked straight at me.
"You called me back," he said hoarsely. "Don't stop."
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