The Silver Kings Read Online Free Page A

we were gone?
    Yes.
    Then show me.
    He showed her how the dragon Snow had woken, and the dragon Silence, chained in the eyrie of Outwatch and then set free; Silence who had given Zafir the slow death of Hatchling Disease, and who had tried twice more to kill her until Diamond Eye had bitten off the little dragon’s head, but dragons always came back. He would be here again somewhere; then further into the memories Diamond Eye had seen. The razing of the eyrie at Outwatch, the burning of Sand and Bloodsalt, the siege and destruction of the Adamantine Palace, the murder by poison of a thousand dragons in the eyries outside the Silver City, and the great hatching that followed of a thousand new eggs across the realms. The death and fire and end of everything she knew; and as he roamed the past they flew, following the snaking line of unknown shores until slowly they became places she recognised, until she saw the outline of Tyan’s Peninsula with its dyke a line across its neck, and the miles-wide mouth of the Fury river beyond, and on the far bank, the ruin of what had once been a city.
    Furymouth.
    Memories collided inside her. Of the first day she’d come here, and of the last. The city bright with lights, the air thick with its stink of smoke and rot and the sea. The Sea Kings kept their ­dragons away from their city and their ships, so Zafir had always come by land until her defeat over the Pinnacles. Fleeing here. Flying over the city, looking down at it and burning the traitor Jehal’s Veid Palace in petty vicious vengeance.
    Do you remember? Diamond Eye had been there with her on that day.
    Yes. Fire blossomed in the dragon’s memories. She saw the palace burn, through her own eyes and through his. Such a strange rush of emotion, unexpected and strong. The anger and the pain and the loss and the betrayal, and carrying with them an overwhelming sadness. Nostalgia. The Zafir who’d burned the Veid Palace hadn’t known who she was or what she’d wanted, only that whatever she had was never enough. She wasn’t sure that she knew any better now, but looking back at who she was was like looking at a ­stranger. The Veid Palace at least was much as she remembered it, save that it wasn’t ablaze this time.
    She brought Diamond Eye lower. Most of the palace was built of stone; dousing it in fire hadn’t hurt it much, but time had had its turn too. Weeds grew in the cracks. The black scars she’d left across its gardens were gone, turning into a fairy dust chaos of spring flower colours. Creepers had found purchase in the tower walls. Seagulls cried, squawking danger to each other as they circled. She shivered, spooked. From the air the city looked the same now as it ever had, only quiet and overgrown and empty. The air smelled of the sea. It didn’t smell of people any more, not of shit and rot and smoke.
    I never belonged here. The unbearable stillness shook her. The aloneness. Take me to the palace. I want to see it.
    Diamond Eye swooped. The Veid Palace was a mosaic of narrow towers linked by bridges and walkways, a design that had never made any sense until she’d seen the gold-glass tower-palaces of the Taiytakei. That was where the palace of the Sea Kings had its heart, in the edgy ebb and flow of love and hate between the kings of Furymouth and the night-skinned sea lords. She landed beside the great Veid Dome, the palace’s centrepiece. One of its great brass doors, twenty feet tall, hung open, askew. The other was missing. She slid from Diamond Eye’s back and walked closer, and then stopped and listened. The seagulls had fallen quiet, and the breeze rustling from the sea was the only sound. The sun beat down, warm and caressing. A comfort, unlike the relentless heat she remembered from the Taiytakei deserts.
    The dome’s other brass door lay fifty feet across the yard, half buried in weeds, bent out of shape, a glitter in the sun. The quiet crept inside her. It crawled under her and settled in her heart