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“Get up,” whispers Camilla Valeria, patting the face of the stranger in her bed. “Get up! My brother’s back early from Delphine’s.”
In a few days, the woman sprawled in Camilla’s strewn sheets will be renamed by a thunderclap. Dragons will dread her. Skalds will sing of her first battle-feats. Now she twists her face, assailed by hurried hands and the light lancing in from the window, and makes a muzzy noise.
“Here,” says Camilla. “Here, your shirt, your breeks, your rock—”
The voice that will kindle fires is hoarse with sleep. “Dragonstone.”
“—your belt, your boots—”
The woman in the bed, with groggy amusement, lifts her chin. “And?”
Camilla blinks down at her. Then, with a swift, sweet shopgirl’s smile, she drops a kiss on the other woman’s lips.
“I think you’re right,” she says, breathless. “I’ll marry Faendal. Then I won’t have to put up with Sven’s mother.” She grins down at her companion. “Unless you have a farm you haven’t told me about?”
The woman who will be called Dragonborn smiles with some effort.
“No,” she says, and stretches like a dancer. Her bruises burn. “I don’t have anything."
* * *
She has the rock—the Dragonstone, she corrects herself, following the Jarl’s plodding packhorse down the switchbacks of the Hvit. She has, too, the hundred aches and scrapes suffered in Helgen—she tries not to think of the screams, the charred-meat smell, the severed heads rolling from the upended basket—and last night in the barrow of the wight. The thing had probably been interred with the rock in its frail arms. But the ages had crumbled armor to rust and bones to dust; she’d lifted the Dragonstone from the sunken cavity of its chest, choking every Khefrish prayer she knew for quieting the dead. When she ran out of invocations, she made up soothing words that meant nothing in any tongue.
Drem, she’d murmured to the corpse, prying its withered hands from the stone. Her own hands shook. In the flicker of her torch, the scratches on the walls had seemed to burn. Praan, midaargolz, vodahmaan faazselaas—
The horse tugs its lead with an impatient huff. She staggers after it through the scratchy scrub, the sap-sticky branches, the patches of shade and light. Sun dapples the beast’s flanks. The river flashes as it polishes its stones. The leaves shriveling in the foreign trees blaze in all the colors of fire.
The burning standards, she thinks, the sun hot as fever on her neck. The horse-thief with his face in the dirt, his breath a wet, punctured noise. The severed heads rolling from the upended basket.
Then she grins, forcibly, like the dragon-skull mounted on hooks behind the Jarl’s throne. She draws the parcel wrapped in oilskin from the horse’s twitching back, soothing it with the praises she’d overheard in the Jarl’s stable; she doubts the wizard will let her look at her prize later. She thinks hard of the coinpurse in wait for her, the leg of mutton at the table of the Jarl, the smiling woman who fills the cups. The folds of waxy cloth fall open.
She blinks. She is, she realizes after a moment, holding the rock wrong-side up. The obverse side stares back at her, chiseled with scratches that mean nothing in any tongue.
The wind sticks, whispering, to the sweat at the back of her neck. Something in her stirs with a rattle of scales.
“Here lie our fallen lords,” she murmurs—aloud, halting, as though one of her old tutors scowls over her shoulder still. The words flower in the back of her throat like fire. “Until might of al du in—”
The trees shiver. The horse shakes its head and stamps. A head with suns for eyes tilts somewhere, listening.