The Dragon Queen's Gambit novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Cradle
Three days after the birth, Queen Ysmera hears her consort and the midwife admit the swap, takes the baby from the weir cottage, and at dawn answers 'Our daughter.'
Three days after she gave birth, Queen Ysmera Dunmorrow heard her husband sell her daughter through a nursery door.
She was twenty-six years old, and dragon blood had mended her body faster than any midwife expected.
She had walked down the cold stone hall alone, barefoot, to look at the baby without anyone watching.
The door stood open a finger's width.
Lamplight spilled out, and so did Aldous's voice.
"Say it again," he said. "Tell me no one will know."
"No one," the midwife said.
Her voice shook.
"The queen's girl is at the weir cottage with your lady."
"And the other child?"
"She is in the royal cradle."
"And the mark?"
"A dragon child shows nothing until the First Ember, at twelve. By then the girl will be loved."
"Good."
Ysmera stood with her hand flat on the wall.
Her heart did not race. It went very still.
She looked through the gap.
Her husband stood over the royal cradle with his hand on the rail.
He was smiling the soft smile he used on council men he meant to ruin.
In the cradle lay a baby with dark hair and a red, furious face.
She had held her own child for a single day, and she could not have sworn to this face.
But the midwife had no reason to lie, and Aldous had every reason.
She did not scream, and she did not break the door.
She walked back down the hall as softly as she had come.
In her tower room she pulled on her riding leathers with hands that did not shake.
She went up the spiral stair to the roof, where her dragon slept in the dark with its chin on the stone.
It opened one gold eye.
"Take me down to the river," she said. "Quietly."
The old red dragon said nothing, because dragons never did, but it lowered its wing.
The weir cottage sat on the bank below the palace, with one window lit.
Ysmera landed in the reeds and walked to the door.
She did not knock.
Inside, a young woman sat by the fire with a baby wrapped in her arms.
She had brown hair in a plain knot and a dairy girl's red hands.
Ysmera knew her face from the palace kitchens, where she had once carried milk.
Her name was Mirelle Fenn.
She stood so fast the chair fell.
"Majesty," she said.
Her eyes were wet, and they flew to the baby and back.
"Give her to me," Ysmera said.
"Majesty, please."
"I am not asking for the other one."
"I know where she is. I know who put her there."
Ysmera held out her arms.
"Give me my daughter."
Mirelle's mouth opened.
For a moment she seemed about to speak.
Then her eyes slid to the window, where the lamps of the palace shone above the trees.
Her expression hardened.
She crossed the room and laid the baby in Ysmera's arms.
The child was warm and heavy and smelled of milk and woodsmoke.
She opened grey eyes and looked up at the queen without blinking.
Ysmera's chest cracked open.
"Be good to her," Mirelle whispered. "Please. Be good to her."
"I will," Ysmera said. "And you will say nothing to anyone, or I will burn this cottage with everyone in it."
Mirelle nodded, and tears ran down her face.
Ysmera carried the baby out into the reeds, tucked her inside her leather jacket, and climbed onto her dragon's back.
They flew north through the dark, over three ridges.
They came to the old hold in the mountains, where her nurse had kept the fires burning for forty years.
The nurse took the baby without a word and held her to the light.
"Whose is she?" the old woman asked.
"Mine," Ysmera said. "From tonight, only mine."
She was back on the palace roof before the sun cleared the eastern peaks.
At dawn the whole court gathered in the Ember Hall to see the princess.
Aldous stood at the top of the dais with the dark-haired baby in his arms.
Lords and ladies bowed in rows beneath the high windows.
He turned to Ysmera with a smile that was almost tender, and held the child out for her to see.
"Our daughter," he said.
Every eye in the hall was on her.
Ysmera looked into the face of the stranger's baby, then up at her husband, and she smiled back.
"Our daughter," she said.
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