Chapter 5

Lyra

For one long second, no one in the dormitory moved. Then Elin made a small sound at the back of her throat. "What."

The chamberlain did not stand up.

"There has been a mistake," I said. "He cannot be asking for me."

"He is asking for you, Tribute Walker."

He straightened, then, and turned, and waited at the head of the corridor. Elin's voice came up sharp behind me. "It cannot be her. I survived the fire. He is looking for me. I—"

"Per the rules of selection," the chamberlain said, without turning, "a tribute summoned by the King is to be brought without delay. Please, Tribute Walker."

I had not even washed my face. I followed him.

We walked for a long time, past the halls I had crept through the night before and into wider ones I had not seen, with carpet underfoot and tapestries on the walls. The chamberlain did not speak, and I did not ask.

My mind was racing through every story I had ever heard about the King. What to say. What not to say. Where to put my eyes. Whether to kneel before I was told to, give my name before he asked, mention my father in case the King had heard of him. None of the answers seemed safe.

None of the stories ended well.

The girls in the towns who had been chosen and never come home. The old midwife in our village who had said a tribute had escaped once, three generations ago, and had been found in a field a week later with no marks on her body and no breath in it.

I had survived my family. I had survived the dragon's chamber. I would survive a king.

We came to a tall double door of black wood. The chamberlain stopped and folded his hands at his waist.

"You will go in alone," he said. "Do not turn your back on him."

"Wait — "

"You will go in alone, Tribute Walker."

He put one hand on the door and pushed.

The room beyond was huge. Gray morning light fell through a great glass ceiling. There were no people, no throne, no banners, no tables — only a stone floor wide enough for a wedding feast, warm dry air, and at the far end, a coiled mass the color of wet coal.

The chamber door clicked shut behind me.

The dragon's eye opened. Yellow. Bright. Already on me. There were no chains.

I stepped backward without thinking and my heel caught on the carpet and I went down on one hip. The dragon was already moving. It poured across the stone in one long lunge, and was on me before I could draw breath, its forelegs bracketing me on either side, the great hot weight of its chest above my face.

I was going to die in this room. I had time to know it.

I made myself look up.

The eye was very close. A river of black slit down the middle of the yellow. Inside the slit was a darkness I could not name.

I held the eye.

My hands were shaking against the floor. My breath would not come properly. The dragon's chest moved above me, and each breath drove the air from my lungs and back into them. But I held the eye, the way I had held my father's the morning he ordered the guards to take me away.

I do not know what the dragon was looking for. I do not know what it found. I only know that its breath touched the side of my face, smelling of iron and something older than iron, and that it could have ended me without thinking.

The dragon did not breathe fire on me.

Still, it only looked. Its black scales caught the light through the glass ceiling. Then the long head dipped, and the long neck slid, and the dragon's shoulder pushed up under me — a smooth, deliberate motion, as if I weighed nothing — and I was no longer on the floor.

I was on its back. Before I could understand that, the floor dropped away from us.

The wings beat once, and the air in the great chamber became wind. The glass ceiling rushed toward me. Then there was no glass ceiling at all, only open white sky.

I clung. I clung with both arms around the great black neck. The wind tore at my hair, my skirt whipped against the dragon's side, my knees were locked against the heat of its body, and I could feel the muscles of its shoulders working under me as it climbed.

Below, far below now, a courtyard came into view, and people in it like spilled grain.

A voice carried up the cold air. A man's voice, broken and shouting.

"A tribute is riding the dragon!"

A second voice, a woman's, very clear:

"That's impossible. The dragon only bows to its queen!"