The Princess of Ash novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Harrowmere Burns
The border keep burns, a dragon lands in my father's hall, and my father offers him me. I volunteer with a knife on my thigh.
My father gave me to a dragon in front of the whole court, and I thanked him for it.
The messenger from Harrowmere was still on his knees when the glass broke.
His coat smelled of smoke, and he had been saying that the border keep was ash.
Every household guard in the hall looked up at the same moment.
Then the great window above the throne came down in a rain of coloured glass.
A black dragon the size of a barn dropped through it and landed on the dais.
The stone cracked under his claws.
My father's chair slid back two feet with him still in it.
Nobody screamed, because nobody in Carrow had ever learned what to do.
The dragon folded his wings, and the heat rolled across the floor.
Then the shape went liquid and bent, and a man stood where the dragon had been.
He was tall and bare to the waist, with black hair and a ragged pair of dark breeches.
His eyes were amber, and I had been taught to read eyes.
These ones were counting the exits.
"I am Auren Vask, Sovereign of the Cinder Throne," he said.
His voice was low, and it carried to the back of the hall without effort.
"Somebody has put my banner on the men who burned Harrowmere, and I would like to meet him."
My father rose and spread his hands.
King Berengar had a face made for portraits, and he used it now.
"Sovereign, this is a terrible misunderstanding."
"Your border keep is burned."
"By brigands, surely, wearing false colours."
"My colours."
"Which proves they were false," said my father, smiling.
The dragon sovereign looked at him for a long moment.
I stood at the foot of the dais in mourning grey, as I had stood for eleven years.
At my left, Lord Perrin Hask, the king's spymaster, gave me the smallest nod.
I knew that nod, and I knew what it meant.
It meant the evening had gone exactly as he'd planned.
"Carrow is a peaceful kingdom," my father went on.
"We would hate for a few thieves to cost us the friendship of the Ashmarch."
"What do you offer, Berengar?"
"A guarantee of the blood."
My father turned, and I felt the whole court turn with him.
"My daughter, Thessaly," he said.
"The Ash Princess, our people call her, because of her mother."
A few of the courtiers shifted, and one of the ladies behind me whispered.
They always whispered it, the name my mother's burning had given me.
"She is unwed and twenty-four," said the king.
"Take her as your bride, Sovereign, and let Carrow's blood and yours end this."
He did not look at me while he said it.
He had not looked at me in eleven years, not since the night my mother died in the north tower.
I wore her ashes in a locket at my throat, and the metal was cold against my skin.
The sovereign's gaze moved over the hall, over the guards and the lords, and came to rest on me.
"She is not asked?" he said.
"She will obey," said my father.
I did not wait to be told.
I walked up the three steps of the dais and stood beside the king's chair, just out of his reach.
My grey skirt was long and full, and under it, strapped flat to my left thigh, was a six-inch knife dipped in ash-root.
Lord Hask had taught me to throw it, and he had taught me to carry it.
He had never once said what it was for.
I had known since I was fourteen.
"I'll go," I said.
My voice did not shake, because I had practised it in a mirror.
"I will marry the Sovereign, and I will go to the Emberhold tonight."
My father's mouth tightened, because I had spoken before he told me to.
The court gasped, in the soft pleased way of people watching someone else pay.
Auren Vask came down the steps toward me.
He moved easily for a man his size, and the heat came off him in waves.
He stopped close enough that I could count the black flecks in his amber eyes.
He was the man who had set the fire.
That was what Lord Hask had told me when I was thirteen, with my hands still black from digging, and I had believed him.
He looked at me like a man seeing a stranger he had been told to expect.
"You are very calm, Princess."
"I'm very willing."
"I see."
Then he bent his head, until his mouth was beside my ear and his breath was warm on my jaw.
"Bring the knife," he murmured.
My heart stopped.
"I want to see how you hold it."
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