The General crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut.

  Eirik caught the clay bowl before it shattered on the stone floor. The blood inside sloshed against the rim but did not spill.

  He set it down carefully.

  Abercrombie lay on his side. The punch was careful to not kill him on the spot but enough to render a strong man unconscious for a good while.

  How long, exactly, was the question.

  Cassian stood frozen by the doorway. His eyes traveled from the unconscious General to Eirik to Lyanna and back again in a loop that seemed incapable of resolving itself.

  "Cassian."

  Nothing.

  "Cassian. Move."

  The guard's eyes finally focused. He took a step, then stopped, staring at the General's prone form.

  "We don't have time for this," Eirik said. "The chains."

  He was already crouching beside Lyanna. The manacles were heavy iron, bolted to the ceiling through thick links. There was a peculiar keyhole that required a specific iron key.

  A key the General would have carried.

  Eirik patted the unconscious man's robes and found it in an inner pocket. He rose and fitted it into the left manacle.

  The lock turned with a sound like a bone cracking.

  Lyanna's arm dropped.

  Eirik unlocked the second manacle.

  Both arms fell to her sides. For a moment, she remained upright on her knees through nothing more than habit. Then her body listed sideways and she would have struck the floor if Eirik hadn't caught her.

  She weighed almost nothing.

  "Cassian. Your cloak."

  The guard blinked. Then he tore his outer cloak free and crossed the chamber in three strides, wrapping it around Lyanna's shoulders with hands that shook badly.

  "Easy," Eirik murmured, lowering her against the wall. "Easy."

  Cassian was already stripping his under-tunic, pulling it over his head and offering it to Eirik without a word. His chest was bare now, the cold raising gooseflesh along his arms, but he didn't seem to notice.

  Eirik dressed Lyanna as gently as he could manage. The tunic hung on her like a tent. She neither helped nor resisted—her arms moved where he placed them, her head lolled where gravity took it. But her eyes were open, and they watched him.

  The singing had stopped.

  "How long does he normally spend up here?" Eirik asked.

  Cassian swallowed. "Twenty minutes. Sometimes thirty. The guards below expect him to descend within the half hour."

  "How long has it been?"

  "Perhaps five minutes since he entered."

  Fifteen to twenty-five minutes. That was everything.

  Eirik straightened and looked at the unconscious General. The man's chest rose and fell in a slow rhythm. His face, in repose, looked older than it had in the war room. He looked like a man who had not truly slept in a very long time.

  "There's only one way out of this," Eirik said.

  Cassian looked up from where he'd been tucking the cloak more securely around Lyanna's thin frame.

  "I transform. Right here, right now."

  The guard's face went through three distinct expressions in rapid succession—confusion, comprehension, horror.

  "No." The word came out hoarse. "No, that's—you can't possibly—"

  "There is no alternative."

  "You don't even know if it works! You assumed—you assumed the blood would grant you the transformation. That is the largest assumption anyone has ever made about anything. Do you hear yourself?"

  "I hear myself perfectly well."

  "The General has performed this ritual hundreds of times. He has a specific process, specific preparations. This is the most private and closely guarded secret in the entire city. I served as his personal guard for years, and even I was never allowed to witness the actual moment of transformation. Not once."

  "Then I'll improvise."

  Cassian made a strangled sound. "Even if—even if by some miracle of the gods this actually works—you cannot simply become the Dragon without warning. This isn't something that happens out of the blue. When the General transforms, the entire army knows in advance. There are horns, signals, a chain of command that activates the moment the General announces his intention. You don't just sprout wings and fly over the walls."

  "Then the notice will be short on this occasion." Eirik met his gaze. "Can you get a horn?"

  Cassian stared at him.

  "A war horn. The kind they sound when the Dragon flies. Can you get one?"

  "There are signal horns at every major post along the walls. I could reach the nearest one in five minutes, but—"

  "No more buts. Get the horn and sound it so everyone in this city knows exactly what is happening. Their General is going to war. He is calling on every soldier, every officer, every man and woman who swore an oath to these walls. And everyone—everyone—will understand that their duty to serve is now."

  Cassian closed it for a moment, but opened it again.

  "Bear with one last 'but'." He pointed at the unconscious figure on the floor. "He will wake up."

  Eirik said nothing.

  "Unless you mean to kill him right here and now—and I pray you don't—he will wake. And when whatever Dragon form you've conjured dissipates, and the real General is found alive and furious, what then? What happens to you? To me? To her?"

  He gestured at Lyanna, and his voice cracked on the last word.

  "That," Eirik said, "is precisely why your role in this will be the most important of all."

  He began unbuckling the sword at his hip. Grave Drinker slid free of its sheath with a faint, cold ring that seemed to darken the air around it.

  "Lyanna needs to be somewhere safe and hidden. And the General needs to be locked in a place that no one knows about. No one." He held the blade out to Cassian. "Take this to Kael. You've proven you can find him without being seen."

  Cassian took Grave Drinker with both hands, the weight of it clearly more than he'd expected.

  "When you find Kael, whisper these instructions to him and him alone."

  Eirik leaned close and spoke directly into Cassian's ear. The words were too soft for even Lyanna to hear—a sequence of instructions, names, locations, contingencies. Cassian's face shifted as he listened, cycling through disbelief to finally reluctant understanding.

  When Eirik pulled back, the guard's jaw was set.

  "Are you certain about this?" Cassian's voice had gone very quiet. "When they find the General—when they understand what's happened—the punishment for this is beyond anything you can imagine. You, me, your men—we will suffer a fate that makes death look like mercy."

  Eirik looked at him steadily.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  "I think quite the opposite will happen."

  "Why?" The word was almost a plea.

  "Because when the Dragon flies north, it did so not just to provide cover for you." Eirik's voice hardened. "I've studied their camp. The timber lines, the supply chain, the waystation—I'm going to burn all of it. And when I do, fifty thousand nomads who have spent their days sitting comfortably on their arses will suddenly discover that there only way forward is to counterattack."

  He stepped over the General's unconscious body.

  "And when the Khorath horde comes screaming toward these walls—guess who is the Dragon defending the city now?"

  Cassian said nothing.

  "And guess who holds their General. And guess who holds the source of power that their General has been drinking from every morning for three months." Eirik's eyes were cold and bright. "I am done going to the high table and asking lords and nobles nicely whether there is room for me to sit. I will walk to that table and claim the central chair. And every man in this city will understand—very quickly—that rather than playing games to remove me or deny me, their lives are in my hands."

  He paused.

  "Now go. While I do my part."

  Cassian looked at the clay bowl and the blood that pooled dark inside it.

  His face twisted.

  "Don't do it here." The words came out ragged. "There's a place."

  He crossed the chamber and pressed his hand against a section of the wall that looked no different from any other. A seam appeared—a hidden door, narrow and steep, opening onto a staircase that spiraled upward into darkness.

  "There's an open platform at the top. If this actually works, you'll need the space. Otherwise you'll bring the whole tower down."

  Eirik nodded.

  He picked up the clay bowl and moved toward the passage. At the threshold, he stopped.

  "Cassian."

  The guard was already kneeling beside Lyanna, lifting her carefully, cradling her against his bare chest as though she were made of glass.

  "How long?"

  Cassian didn't answer.

  Eirik turned and climbed into the dark.

  Twenty steps.

  A wooden trapdoor waited at the top. Eirik pushed it open with one hand and climbed out onto the platform.

  The sky spread above him.

  The platform was perhaps fifteen feet across. Stone railings, waist-high, ringed the edge. Below, the city slept. Beyond the triple walls, the enemy camp glittered with a thousand points of firelight.

  Eirik set the bowl on the stone.

  The blood was dark. Nearly black in the starlight. It had cooled during the climb, a thin skin forming on its surface.

  He lifted the bowl to his lips and drank.

  ———

  The cold woke Corvinus before the pain did.

  That was how it always began, seeping through the blankets, finding the dead meat of his legs where no sensation should exist and yet somehow did.

  Then the pain arrived in waves, radiating upward from the stumps to his spine.

  He lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling.

  The timber beams above his bed were dark with age and smoke. He had memorized every knot in the wood during the thousands of mornings he had spent in exactly this position—flat on his back, waiting for the worst of the spasms to pass before attempting the indignity of rising.

  The spasm came.

  His left hip seized with a violence that arched his back off the mattress. His teeth clenched as he breathed through it.

  In. Out. In. Out.

  The spasm subsided.

  Corvinus reached for the wooden frame that hung above his bed—a contraption of his own design, pulleys and leather straps that allowed him to haul his upper body into a sitting position without assistance. His arms had grown powerful over three years of compensating for everything his legs refused to do. The muscles of his shoulders and chest would have been the envy of any soldier in the garrison.

  Small comfort.

  He pulled himself upright and swung his dead legs over the edge of the bed. They hung there, wrapped in the linen night-bindings that prevented the skin from developing sores during sleep. The chamber pot was positioned beside the bed. Close enough to reach. But never close enough to preserve what remained of his dignity.

  This was the part he hated most.

  He finished, wiped himself with a cloth, and lifted himself into the wheelchair.

  The chair was positioned precisely eighteen inches from the bed's edge—a distance he had calculated through weeks of trial and error during the early months. Too close, and the transfer became awkward. Too far, he would end up on the floor.

  Because imperfection, for a man in his position, was fatal.

  The Third Assault had taught him that.

  Years ago, he had stood on the outer wall as Captain Corvinus. The Blade of the Northern Bastion. He had held the breach against a tide of Khorath warriors while the engineers sealed the gap behind him. An arrow struck the joint between his backplate and tasset—a gap of perhaps two inches that existed because he had neglected to properly cinch the lower armor strap that morning.

  A moment's carelessness that resulted in him falling from the wall, twenty feet onto stone.

  He dressed himself—tunic, belt, the light cloak he wore indoors. His legs received their daytime wrappings, tighter than the night-bindings. The wheelchair's wheels needed oiling. He noted it, filed it, moved on.

  The wheelchair was his punishment and his education. With no legs to carry him into battle, he had learned to fight with his mind instead. He became the mind behind the dragon that kept the walls standing.

  The General's mood had been lighter yesterday evening.

  That was, perhaps, the worst part. This, in the General's case, meant he had made a decision. He would do exactly what the Archmage suggested: sacrifice the boy.

  And yet.

  The General was wrong.

  If Corvinus had the choice, he would have picked Stormcrow a thousand times over the Archmage.

  His men would die for Abercrombie. Every one of them. They would march naked into the Khorath lines at his command and consider it an honor. But the thing in the tower was different.

  Dying was simple, because it asked nothing of the soul. What the General did each morning asked everything, and the men who served him were forced to know it, and knowing it condemned them.

  Even if Velthan delivered everything he promised, the price would exceed the purchase, because the price was the principle upon which the Sunless City stood.

  When a man finds himself cornered, with no path forward and the walls closing in, he faces a choice that defines not merely his fate but the fate of everything he has built. He can rely on his own mind to devise a solution from whatever meager materials remain at hand. He may fail. Failure is not merely possible but probable. But in the failing, he preserves something that no power, however magnificent, can restore once lost.

  Honor.

  It was the load-bearing wall. Remove it, and everything above collapsed into rubble, no matter how fine the stonework appeared from the outside.

  The Khorath were savages. If the defenders of the Sunless City met darkness with darkness, sword with sorcery, sacrifice with sacrifice—then what, precisely, distinguished the two sides? What principle was being defended behind these magnificent triple walls?

  Corvinus allowed himself a chuckle.

  It came out dry and mirthless. Here he sat—a man who could not walk, could not ride, could not relieve himself properly—and he was composing mental treatises on honor.

  He wasn't an idealist. He was too old and too crippled for that kind of foolishness. Idealists didn't hold cities together, and he knew that point better than anyone on the council.

  But people underestimated just how much power lay behind that single word.

  With honor, men gave their lives without asking anything in return. They staked everything on a principle, fought with a courage and ferocity they could summon from no other source, because honor—ephemeral though it was—mattered to them in ways that gold and steel never could.

  That was something no amount of coin could purchase, no weapon could replicate. It was why civilizations were called civilizations and stood for eras while savage tribes came and went like weeds in the wind. A nation that valued nothing beyond the crude necessities of survival would rot from within, no matter how pristine the outer walls appeared.

  And what the Archmage and that eunuch Septimus were doing was exactly that.

  Yes, the dragon was magnificent. But how long would its power last? Would it preserve the spirit of the city in the centuries to come, or merely prolong its death?

  The boy, for all his recklessness and bluntness and youth, possessed that quality in a way no one else in the Sunless City did.

  He had counseled the General to keep the boy alive and give him a genuine chance. He knew, even as he'd spoken those words, that they would not be enough, but he had said the words anyway.

  Dawn was spilling across the floor in pale, cold sheets. The city would be waking soon.

  And Corvinus had much to do.

  He positioned himself before the chamber door and pulled the cord that summoned his attendants.

  Footsteps outside. The door opened as one guard entered.

  Corvinus frowned.

  "Where is Cassian?"

  The guard, Varro, removed his helmet. "I was going to ask you the same, my lord. He wasn't at the morning assembly."

  Corvinus went still.

  Cassian had served as his personal attendant for three years. In all that time the young guard had never once missed a morning.

  "Has anyone seen him since last night?"

  "No, my lord. I've checked the barracks. He wasn't in his bunk. Wasn't at mess."

  Something was wrong.

  "Take me outside," he said.

  Varro gripped the handles and wheeled him into the corridor. They had barely reached the end of the corridor when the sound hit him.

  A horn.

  Not the short, sharp blast of a sentry's alarm—the sound that meant Khorath at the walls. Corvinus had heard that horn a thousand times. This was different.

  This was the long, rising call. Three sustained notes, ascending in pitch, each one held until the hornblower's lungs emptied and the next began without pause.

  The Dragon's call.

  Corvinus's blood went cold.

  "My lord?" Varro had frozen behind the chair.

  "Move," Corvinus snapped. "Get me outside. Now."

  Varro pushed. The chair rattled down the corridor as they burst through a side door and onto the broad terrace that overlooked the inner courtyard.

  Officers were emerging from doorways. The horn continued its cry, echoing off the triple fortifications and out across the plain beyond.

  But the General had said nothing.

  No order had been given. Corvinus had spent the evening reviewing the next day's schedule with the General personally, and there had been no mention—not a hint—of a transformation.

  This was impossible.

  "The wall," Corvinus barked. "The highest point. Get me there."

  Varro pushed him toward the ramp that led to the outer battlements. Other soldiers cleared the way without being asked—the sight of Corvinus's wheelchair moving at speed was its own kind of alarm.

  They reached the top of the outer wall.

  The wind struck him full in the face. The sky had begun to lighten in the east, a thin band of grey separating the black earth from the black heavens.

  Corvinus gripped the battlement's edge and looked up.

  His heart stopped.

  Against the paling sky, silhouetted by the first intimation of dawn, a shape.

  Wings. Vast, membranous, and white. A body of impossible scale, sinuous and armored. The head swung on a neck like a siege tower's arm, and from the jaws, a light gathered—pale blue, cold as the heart of a glacier.

  Ice.

  Corvinus stared.

  The Dragon he knew was black. The Dragon he had watched from this very wall a dozen times burned with the fury of a furnace given will and wings. Its scales were black.

  This creature was white.

  White as bone. White as the snow that buried the garden at the tower's base. Its scales caught the first light of dawn and threw it back in fractured rainbows, and where its wings beat the air, frost crystallized and fell in glittering curtains that dissolved before they reached the ground.

  It banked over the city, and Corvinus saw its eyes.

  Blue. A pale, luminous blue that he had seen only once before.

  In a small antechamber, across from a cushion, in the gaze of a boy who had spoken of breaking sieges.

  The Dragon turned north.

  It climbed, higher and higher, until it was no more than a pale sliver against the sky. Then it folded its wings and dove.