Chapter 6: The Hoard

Lyra

The dragon climbed until the city walls fell away and the forest below became a single dark sweep. The air grew so cold my teeth hurt, and the wind tore the breath from my mouth.

I do not remember thinking about anything except clinging.

When we began to descend, I felt the angle of the dragon's body change. Below us, a black mountain rose out of the gold afternoon light, one slope hollowed into a wide stone mouth.

The dragon flew into the mouth.

The wind stopped. The light dimmed. The wings folded with a leathery sound that filled the whole space, and we landed on something that crackled under us.

I looked down. It was gold.

There were piles of it. Drifts of it, sloped against the cave walls. Coins, plates, twisted necklaces, a sword sheath with the leather rotted off, a circlet with a stone in it the size of an apple. The hoard reached as far back into the dark as my eye could follow. Some of the piles had been undisturbed long enough that the dust on them was as deep as a finger. The air smelled of cold metal and old earth. Somewhere in the back of the cave, water dripped onto stone in a slow, patient pattern.

The dragon set me down on the soft top of one drift.

I sat very still. The gold shifted under me, sharp and uncomfortable, and a coin slid out from under my thigh and skittered down the slope.

"Why am I here?" I said.

The dragon did not answer. Of course it did not. It curled the long black weight of its body in a loose ring around me — not touching, but close enough that I could feel the heat of its scales — and laid its head down across the entrance.

I was not getting out.

Mother had told me stories about this when I was small — dragons hoarding princesses the way magpies hoarded buttons, keeping them on piles of gold until only their bones remained. I had been five. I remembered thinking the moral was about greed. Now I wondered if it was about escape.

I drew my knees up against my chest. My back hurt. My knee hurt where the bandage had soaked through.

I waited for the dragon to do something.

It only watched me from the cave mouth, its yellow eye half-open, the slow rise and fall of its ribs the loudest thing in the room.

I had not slept in two nights. The cold was not as deep here as it had been in the air. The heat coming off the dragon's body, six feet from me, was strange and dry, almost like the heat from a banked fire. Worse, it made no sense, but inside the circle of its body, my hands stopped shaking. My eyes burned. I closed them, just for one second.

When I opened them again, the cave was the dim gray of dawn, and I was lying on my side on the gold.

I was not alone.

There was a man on the drift beside me, asleep, one arm thrown above his head. A line of old silver scars crossed his ribs. He was naked from the waist up, and the blanket over the rest of him had slipped halfway down one hip.

I did not breathe.

I had never seen a man without his shirt at this distance, not in real life. He was too broad across the shoulders, too lean at the waist, his skin marked by sun and old shadows.

The dark hair. The hard jaw. The long mouth. The dried blood across the knuckles I had touched the night before.

It was the wounded man from the hallway.

Then he opened his eyes.

They were green, the color of pond water in winter, somewhere between brown and gray. Then dawn struck them, and for one breath, they flashed dragon-gold. His face was cold. His hair on one side of his head was sticking straight up where he had slept on the other side, in two soft, stubborn curls that did not match the rest of him at all.

"Who are you?" he said.

His voice was lower than I expected. It sounded unused, rough at the edges.

"Who are you?" I said back, because I could not think of anything else to say.

He looked at me for a moment. His eyes did not move from mine.

"I am the Dragon King," he said.

The world seemed to stop.

Gold lay under me. Dawn cut a thin yellow line across the mouth of the hoard where the dragon's head had been. I remembered the chains, the yellow eye, the wounded man in the corridor with the bloody knife and the slow, easy breath against my hand.

The dragon. The man. The King.

His hand was already moving.

Something flashed between us, and then his weight shifted onto his elbow, and then there was a thin, cold pressure against the soft place under my jaw. A knife. The same knife. I could feel the dried blood on the flat of the blade.

"Now," he said, very quietly. "You will tell me why my dragon brought you to my hoard."