The Dragon Queen's Gambit novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: First Ember

Year Twelve. Ysmera was thirty-eight, and today was the day the dragon line showed its blood.

At twelve years old, a child of the line held a candle in her bare palm, and the wick lit.

It had lit for Ysmera at twelve.

It had lit for her mother, and for her mother's mother, back to the first queen.

She stood in the kitchen of the mountain hold at dawn with a white candle in her hand.

Fia stood in front of her in her nightgown, twelve years old and all knees and elbows, with her gray eyes round.

"Hold out your hand," Ysmera said.

Fia held out her right palm.

Ysmera set the candle upright in it and stepped back.

They both waited.

The wick stayed pale.

"Think of something hot," Ysmera said. "A forge. A hearth. A dragon's breath."

Fia screwed up her face.

Nothing happened.

"Think of being angry."

"I'm trying, Mama."

"I know you are."

The candle stood unlit in the small brown palm.

Ysmera's chest felt tight, and she kept her voice easy.

"It comes late for some. My aunt was fourteen."

"Is something wrong with me?"

"No." She closed the child's fingers over the candle. "Nothing is wrong with you."

A shout came from the yard.

One of the hold-keepers burst in, white and out of breath.

"Majesty. Riders on the lower track. A dozen, in river blue. They have the consort's banner."

Ysmera did not ask how.

Six years of watching the spring roads, and Aldous had finally put a man on her dragon's trail.

"Get your cloak," she told Fia. "Quickly."

"Where are we going?"

"To the palace."

"The palace? But you said I couldn't ever."

"I know what I said."

She had planned this for years, and she had never wanted to be ready.

If Aldous reached the hold first, he would take the child as a prisoner.

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