I have never seen the King.
Say that among dragons, and the elders fall silent. Because before me, no dragon could ever say it. Even the furthest flood-dragon cousin of a cousin was carried into the inner hall at hatching, for the King to breathe one breath of dragon-breath across its eyes. The genealogy is explicit: until the dragon-eyes are opened, one is not of the clan.
By the time I hatched, the inner hall was already sealed behind the tide gate.
So my eyes were opened by the old matron, with half a cup of dragon-breath saved from three hundred years ago. It barely sufficed. To this day I see one layer shallower than my elders — where they read seven colors in a tide, I read only light and dark. The matron holds me and says: it is not your fault, child. It is the age that owes you.
What has become of the dragon clan, the outside tells loudly enough: the old King unseen for three hundred years, the tide gate wound tighter every year, the sea patrols abandoned to the yakshas. All true. What the outside does not know is how the palace itself lived through those three centuries —
it lived around an egg.
This one. After the sealing, the palace's spirit broke. Consorts scattered; ministers sank into silence. And precisely then, from the old well of the rear hall, an egg floated up. Laid by whom — unclaimed. Conceived when — none could say. By law an egg of unknown origin cannot be kept. But the matron says the old ones of the palace watched it through one entire night, and at dawn the Grand Tutor said one word: hatch it.
"A palace needs something it is waiting to see hatch. Otherwise the days cannot be lived."
That is how I came to be. Hatched out of a whole palace's last hope.
But no one knows this: inside the shell, I was not alone.
It is dark in an egg, and warm. For a long, long stretch, a voice kept me company in the dark. It did not speak. It was simply there. Then, in the last days before hatching, it drew suddenly close and — syllable by syllable — left a command with me. I remember the shape of every word. I cannot assemble their meaning. It was not dragon-speech, not water-speech, not any tongue I have learned since. When the matron asked what it was like, all I could say was: like a great deal of water, somewhere very deep, all turning around at once.
The Grand Tutor heard this and did not keep hold of his teacup. He pressed me: did the voice come from outside the shell — or was it inside the egg with you from the beginning?
I cannot say. That is the strangest part — it sounded nearer than anything outside the shell has ever sounded.
Since then the Grand Tutor looks at me differently. Not tenderness; not wariness. Something I have seen in the eyes of old soldiers: the look of one who has received an order.
I am older now, and permitted out of the palace. Every day I swim the length of the tide gate with my ear against the chains, listening to the dull concussions at its foot. And at every boom, the command I carried out of the shell burns once against my heart — once, and again — as if something were verifying a count.
The children from the shore mean to open the gate. The whole palace is afraid. I alone am not.
Because I half-understand now that my life runs backwards: other dragons join the clan first and receive their charge after. I received my charge first — and have yet to join the clan.
On the day the gate opens, when the thing at its foot looks at me —
perhaps I will finally know whether the command in my shell was to stop it,
or to set it free.