THE FIRST FIRE

A bonus scene from Ashmarked to the Exiled Dragon

Kira Deveraux

Caen wakes before her, which he always does, and lies still in the grey light of the archive that is not only an archive anymore, and watches his mate sleep with her boots off and her back to the wall and one hand open on the furs between them, and thinks that he will never be used to it, the open hand, the dropped guard, the fact of her choosing to be unarmored within reach of a dragon she once swore she would spend every day proving was a monster.

It has been a month since the sealing. The stronghold has stopped flinching when he passes. The Varek in the cells has begun, exactly as Caen said he would, to talk, a little more each week, the story cracking in Mordraig the way it once cracked in Caen, and Dravon's people are copying the road west onto Lyra's maps in a colored ink that means walk here in force, not here be silence. The world is turning toward the fight that is still coming. But it is not turning this morning. This morning there is only the grey light and the open hand, and Caen has learned, at last, that a man is allowed to have a morning.

Lyra wakes the way she does everything, all at once, no drift, her eyes open and already thinking. She looks at him looking at her and does not pretend she was resting her eyes, which is a thing she gave up weeks ago, and she says, "You are staring."

"I am."

"Why."

"Because I am permitted to." He reaches out and pushes a strand of hair off her face with the back of one finger, and she lets him, which still undoes him, the letting. "I spent six weeks certain I would die at a gate. I find I like being wrong. I intend to keep being wrong about it for a long time."

She catches his hand before he can withdraw it. That is new too, in the last month, the catching, the small claimings she makes without deciding to, and Caen holds very still for them the way he once held still for everything, except that this stillness is not discipline. It is wonder. She turns his hand over and looks at the palm of it, the scars, the heat that lives under his skin, and something crosses her face that he has come to recognize as the scholar deciding to run an experiment.

"Teach me," she says.

"Teach you what."

"The fire." She does not look away from his palm. "Mara carries it. The record says a sealed mate can. I have read the mechanics a hundred times and I have never once tried, because for a month I have been telling myself I did not want it, that I would carry the bond and not the fire, that I would keep at least that one line between what happened to my sister and what happened to me." Her jaw sets, the old stubborn set he loves. "And this morning I woke up and I realized I have been keeping a blank space on my own map. Refusing to draw a thing because I was afraid of what it would mean if I could. And I am done leaving spaces blank because I am afraid of them. So. Teach me."

Caen sits up. The furs slide. She sits up with him, cross-legged in the grey light, her hand still holding his, and he looks at her, this woman who mapped the world to keep it from surprising her and is now, deliberately, on purpose, walking into the one place on the map she left empty out of fear.

"You do not summon it," he says. "That is the first thing, and it is the thing that trips every human who tries. You cannot want it forward. It does not answer wanting. It answers the bond, and the bond answers attention, so you do not reach for the fire. You reach for me." He turns his hand in hers so their palms meet, the heat of him against the cool of her, and he feels the bond sit up between them, bright and immediate, a thread pulled taut. "Feel that. Not the fire. The line. The place where I stop being separate from you. Put your attention there and hold it, and do not think about the flame at all."

She closes her eyes. He watches her do the thing she does with everything, the fierce narrowing of a mind that has never once been able to leave a problem unsolved, and he feels her attention move down the bond toward him like a hand feeling along a wall in the dark, and he holds himself open for it, which is its own kind of nakedness, letting her all the way in.

"There," he says, low, so as not to break it. "You have it. Now stop trying so hard. The fire is not a thing you take. It is a thing that is already yours, on my side of the line, waiting for you to stop treating it like a stranger's."

The heat comes up through their joined palms.

He feels it happen, feels the exact moment her attention stops being a reach and becomes an opening, and the fire that has lived in him his whole life pours down the bond toward her the way water finds the low ground, easy, inevitable, glad. Her eyes fly open. Above their joined hands the air shimmers, a distortion, a heat-haze, and then, small and perfect and impossible, a single tongue of flame stands in the air over Lyra Larkin's open palm, gold and steady, and it does not burn her, because it is his fire, and his fire knows her, and it will never harm the thing he is bonded to protect.

She stares at it. He watches the whole of her arc cross her face in the space of one breath, the fear she carried up three days of hard passes, the sister she came to save, the ridge she was so afraid of, the blank space at the edge of every map she ever drew. And then he watches it resolve into something he has no name for except joy, unguarded and total, the same sound-made-visible he felt in her the first time she let him in.

"Oh," Lyra says. It is not a scholar's word. It is not precise or considered. It is just the sound a woman makes when a thing she was told would cage her turns out, in her own hand, to be the opposite. "Oh. It does not feel like a leash at all."

"No," Caen says. His voice is not steady. He does not make it steady. "It feels like being given something. I have carried it my whole life and I never once knew that was what it felt like from the other side, because no one ever chose to take it from me before. You are the first." He curls his fingers, closing his hand around hers, and the small flame banks down to nothing, held now, hers to raise again whenever she reaches, and he brings her knuckles to his mouth. "You are the first thing I have ever had that I did not have to hold a torch to keep."

She looks at him over their joined hands with the flame gone and the heat of it still humming in her palm, and there is a thing in her face that was not there a month ago, that was not there at the gate, that a scholar who spent her life refusing to be surprised did not see coming and could not have mapped in advance.

"Again," she says. "Show me again. And then." She leans in, and the grey light is going gold at the window, and the fight that is coming is not coming this morning, and her mouth is very close to his. "And then you are going to come back to these furs, and I am going to spend what is left of the dawn learning a different thing you have carried your whole life and never had anyone choose to take from you. On my own terms. Awake. In the daylight."

"Yes," Caen says, which is the only word he has, and she laughs, low, the sound he would burn the world to keep, and pulls him down, and the fire she is learning to carry banks warm between them, hers now, chosen, no space on the map left blank.

THE END

Return to Ashpeak in Book Four: Firebound to the War King.