I remembered most of the text of the inscription that Tavia and Ramban had found in my father’s lair, beneath my own. One thing that I remembered was right at the start, where Sekteretesh stated that it was in the four-hundred and fifty-second year of the City of Rains that he murdered He Who Darkens The Night.

  The first of the three letters that the scholars had found was dated five years before that. Sekteretesh had been in Malyon for five years, befriending Father’s servants, including Drobal, who was so close to Father that Mother knew him by name and remembered him hundreds of years later. Five years of pretending to be a friend while plotting betrayal and murder.

  I hadn’t thought it possible to hate the man more, but I did. And yet his sister, the empress, called him honorable and valorous, and clearly loved him very much. It was intolerable.

  “I want him to have been hated,” I growled to Mak. We still hadn’t moved from the small glade where we’d settled down so she could read the letters to me. “Backstabbing bastard! Fucking viper! How could anyone love a man who pretends to be a friend for half a decade?”

  Mak looked decidedly uncomfortable — like she wanted to say something, but thought it better not to. Or perhaps it was that she couldn’t.

  You know better than that, Conscience sighed in my mind. You’ve heard all the same bits of history I have, not to mention what’s in these letters.

  Shut up, I growled. I was not in the mood to be objective.

  No! she snapped back at me. You know nothing about Night except that he was your father, and that Embers liked him. But you know what? I don’t think she’s a good judge of character! She thinks killing thousands is a reasonable way to prevent future inconveniences, for God’s sake!

  Shut up! I roared, much more forcefully. Don’t talk about her like that!

  Why the hell not? And she’s not who we need to talk about, anyway! Bloody listen, would you? Read between the lines! This Okitiri or whatever her name was, she was terrified! She was the queen of a country where dragons, and it sounds like one dragon in particular, used to rule like gods! Fuck’s sake, they call it the Soul Dragon! Think about that. Think about what you can do. Imagine if you decided to just take over Karakan. How hard would it be? I know you’ve thought about it. If you walked into a Council session, how many minutes would it take to enslave them all and bring the city under your heel? How quickly would you grow in power with access to the city’s treasury? How strong could you become if you funnelled all the city’s taxes into your hoard? And if anyone objected to that, to all their tax money going not to improving their own life and those of their fellow citizens, but to making the tyrant ruling them ever more powerful, what the hell could they do about it?

  Are you trying to tempt me? I asked, only partly facetiously, as Mak abandoned any attempt at answering me and instead went into calm-and-soothe mode.

  I could feel Conscience’s exasperation. You know I’m not. I’m trying to make you think. For all that we both miss her and worry about her right now, you’re better than Scaly. You can look at things from a perspective other than your own. Use that! Imagine if our grandparents, our human grandparents, and their parents before them, and theirs before them and so on for hundreds of years had lived under an immortal, heartless tyrant that bled the country dry. Our mum and dad were the first generation to be free. And then you had a chance to make sure that no one else would ever have to live like that. Wouldn’t you be willing to do what it takes?

  You’ve got a way higher opinion of who we used to be than I do, I grumbled. And I meant that. I liked to think that I’d step in if something was happening right in front of me, but I’d never seen myself as a rebel, revolutionary, or freedom fighter, or anything similar. I would never have been the type to go on the kind of life-consuming mission that Sekteretesh apparently had. But for all my snark she was actually making me think, and I didn’t like what was popping up at all.

  And Conscience knew all of that. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean, she said. This world fears dragons, and they’re right to. Even you. I know you’re trying to be better than the stories. Hell, for all that I ride your ass a lot of the time I’m proud of how much restraint you’ve shown. But have an honest think, yeah? Look at what you’ve done by accident. How many people you’ve enslaved — sorry, enthralled — even when you didn’t really want to. And that’s in less than a year, and with you the weakest you’ll ever be. And now imagine yourself in five hundred years. Imagine what you could do with all the power you’re likely to gain.

  That doesn’t mean that I would! I insisted. Hell, we don’t know that Night was doing that, intentionally or not!

  Nah, yeah, you’re right. We don’t know. But think back on what your mum said about him surrounding himself with humans. Think about the bloody shrine they built right next to their palace, and the mural of him surrounded by adoring fans. Think about what Sekky’s sister said about the leaders of the city worshipping him in secret! What do you think is more likely: that they were all just really grateful, or that he was slowly taking over? You can’t hate someone for being terrified of that, especially not knowing what we do about Tekeretek’s history with dragons. You can’t hate them for wanting to be free! I don’t think you can even hate Sekky for killing Night! If you need to hate him for something, hate him for whatever he did to Scaly and her siblings. Killing the mind-controlling dragon, that I can understand. Doing God-knows-what to his kids, and leaving a baby locked up, asleep and alone in that weird magic pit circle thing for five hundred years? That’s pretty fucked up.

  The worst part about being lectured by Conscience was how it sounded exactly the same as how I’d silently berated myself my entire life. Same voice, same tone, same vocabulary. If she’d said I instead of you I might have simply forgotten that she was a whole separate personality, not me talking to myself. As it was, a lifetime of refusing to argue with that voice made it hard to bite back sometimes. Especially when she was right about a lot of things.

  Tekeretek used to be ruled by dragons. I knew that. Everything I’d learned, including from Tammy, who’d heard it from her elders, said that they were dragon worshippers. I’d assumed that it had to do with dragon cults, what Mother called her flock, but hearing Mak read the words Soul Dragon… well, Conscience was right about that, too. It put things into perspective. Of course they’d literally worship something that could do what I could. They’d have no more choice than Tammy did.

  So, yeah, I could very well imagine how terrified a ruler might be if she knew that generations of her predecessors had been mind controlled into absolute adoration and obedience. I might even have sympathized if not for one thing. Half of me came from Instinct.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Sekteretesh had murdered my father, killed my siblings or taken them as fucked up trophies, and trapped me in some kind stasis for hundreds of years. And he’d broken Mother’s heart. Maybe it was my human side, but that last part was unforgivable.

  You know what’s fucked up? I asked the vestige of a human in my head. Taking that monster’s side against my family. You don’t know what Night did any more than I do. Maybe he was controlling half the aristocracy; maybe they truly were just that grateful to him for saving the city. Maybe everyone close to him, from Drobal down, was bound to him the way Herald is to me: through love. We don’t know. We’ll probably never know. All we have is a few letters from a woman who loved her brother, responding to whatever allegations he may have made. We don’t know that anything Sekteretesh thought he knew was right, or that he was honest with any conclusions he drew. He may have— hell, it’s likely that he came to the worst possible conclusions, simply because of how much he feared and hated Night. But in the end, I don’t give a damn. Sekteretesh deprived me of my father. I don’t know if a dragon can feel love the way a human does, but Mother, at the very least, saw him as a dear friend. She still misses him, half a millennium later. And from the timing it’s starting to look more and more to me like Sekteretesh is directly or indirectly responsible for the goddamn Cataclysm, so his fucking intentions and fears and whatever don’t really matter; he destroyed a civilization advanced enough that the people here still haven’t recovered everything they lost. So with all due respect, which from where I’m standing isn’t a damn lot right now: stop being such an insufferable bitch, and shut the hell up until you have something useful to say!

  Conscience didn’t respond. She did exactly what I’d asked. Not a word of argument. Not a word in her own defense. She just… shut the hell up. In fact, she did me one better: she vanished entirely, the way she left only the faintest trace telling me that she’d taken refuge in one of my humans’ heads. Probably Kira; she adored Kira. And just like that, for the second time in as many days, I was alone in my head again.

  But I wasn’t alone outside of it.

  “Hey,” Mak said, her arms wrapped tight around my neck. “You’re okay. Everything’s okay. What happened?”

  “What did you feel?” I asked, my voice shaky with emotion.

  “Anger. Betrayal. A lot of sadness.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense.” Especially the betrayal. I mean, I knew that Conscience basically existed to play devil’s advocate and make me feel bad about myself, but there were limits to how much I could accept. “I had a bit of a row with my remaining… I don’t even know what to call her in Karakani. Do you understand headmate in English?”

  “I do, and I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and my heart hurt at how pained she sounded. “But she’ll be back. They both will. And whatever passed between you, I’m sure you’ll work it out. I know how forgiving you can be, and if I understand your nature, I suspect you get that from her.”

  “Unless I took all of it and she’s just left with stubbornness and spite,” I muttered. I knew that wasn’t the case, but I wasn’t feeling much of that lauded forgiveness right then. Did she have to always be on? I called her Conscience, but that was my name for her. She’d adopted the persona happily enough, but I was sure there was more to her than that. Couldn’t she just read the goddamn room once in a while? I mean, I could admire the way she was able to sympathize with almost anyone — slavers aside — but there were times I’d really appreciate it if she'd send some of that sympathy my way. “Besides, she took it upon herself to tell me how bad I should feel for Sekteretesh and his family. I think it might take a minute to agree to disagree on that.”

  “This is all my fault,” Mak said, squeezing me tighter. “If I hadn’t said anything—”

  To make it entirely clear that I placed exactly none of the blame on her, I lifted one arm to squeeze her against me. Very carefully; I knew she was tough, but I didn’t intend to pit my strength against her toughness. “This is all on her,” I said. “And maybe a tiny bit on me for losing my shit. But mostly on her.”

  When Mak couldn’t find anything useful to say I told her, “Let’s head back. I’m tired. Is there anything in that third letter I should know?”

  I thought I’d been so gentle, but when Mak responded, her voice was so thin and labored that I had to practically let her go out of worry. “There is,” she said, breathing just a little harder than normal after I stopped stress-balling her, “but nothing that can’t wait. Nothing that shouldn’t wait, really, with how my ribs feel right now.”

  “That was supposed to be reassuring,” I said, feeling more than a little sheepish.

  “I know.” Her arms were still around my neck, and she gave me a squeeze before letting go and stepping back. “And it was. And you know that if anyone can take it, it’s me. But, as you say, let’s head back, yeah? It’s early yet, but you feel exhausted.”

  I really was. I’d barely done anything physical all day, but the constant tension, and then the impotent anger at Sekteretesh and the frustration and disappointment I felt at Conscience’s stance regarding him, it all added up to make me just want to lie down and sleep. I thought I might have done well as far as my position with the dragons went, but it still felt like a bad day.

  It certainly didn’t help that as mad as I was at Conscience, and even at Instinct for touching that damn crystal, I felt lonelier than ever. It was an absence only comparable to when I suddenly couldn’t feel Herald and Mak anymore, and it was just plain awful. It felt like I’d lost them both.

  Please don’t be gone forever. The thought came unbidden, so sudden that for a moment I thought that Conscience was back. My disappointment when I realized that it was my own internal voice was telling. I was no less angry with her, but that didn’t mean that I wanted her gone. A few minutes was enough for me to know that I’d rather suffer her lecturing than not have her around. And Instinct… I felt like we’d been understanding each other and getting along better and better. She may have done something suicidally careless, but I hoped and prayed that it wasn’t literal. Frankly I blamed myself much more than her. I’d goaded her into going down there, and then I’d left her in charge despite how recklessly she’d been behaving. Which, of course she had; she was a child, and I was an adult, dammit! I needed to remember that.

  But for that to matter, I needed her back. And Conscience, too. We belonged together. Completed each other, perhaps — I certainly felt incomplete without them.

  I hope you come back, I spoke into the places where they weren’t. I already miss you. It’s so empty without you.

  I needed a lot of comforting the rest of that day, and only Mak knew why. But all credit to them, even Sarina, Marvan, and Maglan made an effort to cheer me up. Nobody flattered me, or tried to dig into what was wrong, but I was surrounded by cheerful conversation, friendly games of chance or wit, and even song and music — through some eldritch sorcery, Avjilan had made himself a simple flute from green wood. It didn’t have a big range; as best I could tell it only had seven notes. But Avjilan used each of those notes to the fullest.

  Mercies, I wished I’d met that man in some other way than him trying to kill me. It would’ve been nice to have just befriended him instead of burrowing into his soul.

  But for all their efforts the one who did the most for my mood was Herald. That would normally have been no surprise, but in this case it really wasn’t fair, and I knew it. She wasn’t even properly conscious most of the time. And I really did appreciate everyone; even when the cheer they filled the rotunda with felt forced, I still knew that they were doing it for my sake. But I don’t think that anyone could have blamed me for my excitement when, late in the evening, Herald snorted, rose on her elbows with a start, and looked around frantically until she caught sight of me. As I scrabbled over to her — scaring the ever-living shit out of the mules, literally in poor Apple’s case — her eyes slowly focused. Then she smiled tiredly, said, “Good. Good,” and relaxed back onto her bedroll before falling asleep.

  I don’t think she heard a single word I said to her as I gushed about how relieved I was, and how much I’d missed her. I didn’t need her to. Mak had told me that she’d been awake for a short moment before, and now I’d seen it with my own eyes. That was enough.

  My city might be full of interlopers who wanted to carve up my island into little fiefdoms. My two original halves, my two constant companions from whom I’d been created, may have left me with only my own thoughts and a terrifyingly unfamiliar emptiness in my head. But I wasn’t alone. No matter how I felt in my lowest moments, I never had been. I had Mak back, and soon, I was convinced, I’d have Herald as well. I’d always had Kira and Ardek, Avjilan and Zabra and Tammy right there, ready to support me in anything, and I had Maglan, Sarina, and Marvan who, though they didn’t love me, at least respected me. I’d just needed something to remind me.

  For the rest of that evening, I joined in anything I could. I talked, and I played, and I even sang a little. And once we all settled in to sleep, I couldn’t even remember why I’d felt so lonely. I slept like a baby that night.

  Good thing, too. I didn’t know it, but I was about to have a very long day, and I’d be glad for any rest I could get.

  and get 8 chapters early of both Draka and , as well as anything else I’m trying out.

  Join us if you want to chat with other readers, or just hang out!