The Silver Kings Read Online Free

own arm, an unconscious gesture, stroking her own roughness of skin the size of a thumbnail, always kept carefully hidden away; then settled and set her head to the wind until the dark clouds broke into a brilliant sky and they emerged from the storm. She left Tuuran to his thoughts, and crossed the rough mangled stone of the eyrie rim, between the piles and mounds of random debris, the crates and accumulated pieces of this and that piled outside the dragon yard walls. The rim had been a place for dumping anything that might one day be useful even back in Baros Tsen’s day. Chay-Liang had been the worst. There were piles of broken gold-glass from when the Vespinese had come and one of their glasships had crashed.
    Zafir moved among them. She climbed the slope of the dragon yard wall, smooth white half-god stone, and walked down the steep steps set into the other side. Everyone else had had the sense to stay in the tunnels, but the Black Moon sat in the middle of the yard, guiding them through the storm. Zafir carefully didn’t catch his eye. Diamond Eye and the hatchlings perched alert around him; Diamond Eye looked at her and cocked his head as she approached. She could read his gestures now. It was a cock of the head that said Yes, please. She climbed onto his back, and he jumped onto the wall and pulled away into the air and stretched out his wings.
    No more dragging at chains , she said . Let the wind carry them. Let the Black Moon’s hatchlings do his work.
    He soared for her, high and fast, wheeling and diving and spiral­ling for the sheer joy of it, perhaps because he knew this was her homeland where she longed to be, or perhaps because this was his home too, where he had hatched and grown. Zafir looked back once at the eyrie. She watched it draw away from the curtain cloud of the storm-dark stretched like an iron wall across the sea. She watched the five ships that slowly emerged, one after another behind it, watched for long enough to see that the sixth never came. Lost in the silence in the storm-dark’s heart, she supposed. Removed from existence, its slate wiped clean, its memories gone. After that she turned away and didn’t look back.
    You hatched a few miles from where my mother birthed me , she said to Diamond Eye as they skimmed the sea. The dragon slapped his tail into the wavetops, explosions of spray left in his wake. The eyries of the Silver City. Do you remember?
    I see them through the fog of your alchemists and their poisons. He paused. I have had many hatchings. None were more special than the rest. There were mountains in this world. They were cold, and I like the cold better than desert heat. But I soar for the other dragons I will find here. My brothers and sisters, awake again. I soar with the memories of them as we were long ago.
    The hard truth jolted her again, that everything she remembered was likely gone. Dragons and furious fire. Cities razed, palaces smashed. Do you feel them already? she asked, careful to keep her thoughts in check.
    Distant and muted. It is harder to reach them in this realm. I had forgotten how different the air is here. In that I prefer the other lands, where everything was easier. We have devoured so much of this one. Its weave is weak and dry. His thoughts seemed to wander, kept within himself. I had forgotten , he said again.
    The eyrie was far away now. Zafir rode Diamond Eye far and wide, roaming across the waves for days, searching. There were books and charts in the Taiytakei libraries that might have told her which ways to go, but they were left behind, and the first land they found was an unfamiliar coast hundreds of miles from any place she knew.
    Once she saw a speck in the distance. Too large to be a bird.
    The others know we are here, she thought . Dragons so far out to sea would have told her that something was terribly wrong, if she hadn’t already known it. No one from the other worlds sailed here any more. Have they told you what happened while