The Dragon's Price by Bethany Wiggins
Golmarr alights beside me and without a word takes a knife from his sleeve and cuts the rope from my ribs. More pearl buttons fall from my corset, bouncing on the ground and toppling over the cliff. Golmarr tugs the rope three times and it is whisked away. His eyes meet mine.
“Are you crazy?” My entire body is trembling, even my voice. “What are you doing down here?”
He scowls and puts the knife back into his sleeve, then bends and picks up his father’s hunting knife from the ledge, roughly pressing it into my limp hand. “I figured you didn’t stand a chance of surviving alone. But with me, your odds will be a little better. I am armed, and I have fought in half a dozen battles.”
My throat grows tight and I can’t talk, so I throw my arms around him and hug him as hard as I can. “Thank you,” I croak against his shoulder. Then I realize I am holding him and quickly push away.
“Don’t thank me yet.” He adjusts the bow on his back, loosens his sword in its scabbard, and strides into the cave.
“Wait!” I call. He turns around, a mere shadow in the darkness, and scowls at me. “Where are you going?”
“To find a way out before the dragon finds us.” He tilts his head to the side. “You weren’t going to just sit here and actually wait to be eaten, were you?”
Yes, that was my plan unless I could scale the cliff, but I don’t tell him. “It’s as black as pitch in there. How are we going to find our way through the cave if we can’t see anything?”
Golmarr strides back out into the sunlight and stops in front of me. He lifts the dragon scale flask that is attached to my necklace. “Do you know what this is?”
“Of course I do. It’s a dragon scale.”
“And do you know what they do in the dark?”
I look at the flask dangling from his hand. “Glow?” I guess.
He nods. “Yes. They have eternal light. At least until the dragon it came from dies. So if it glows, we know the dragon is still alive. It came from the fire dragon that lives in these mountains, right? Not from one of the others?”
“That is what I was told.”
“Well, then let’s get going. We don’t have any food or water, so we need to find a way out of the mountain fast.”
He starts walking back into the cave, but again I blurt, “Wait!” I unsheathe the hunting knife and hand it to Golmarr. Turning my back to him, I put my chin down and say, “Please cut this stupid corset off of me. I would like to spend my last living minutes breathing freely.” He takes the knife but pauses. I peer at him over my shoulder. “What?”
“This could have been our wedding night.” His face is so close that I can feel his breath on my skin. His fingers brush the back of my neck, and my cheeks start to burn. Carefully, he pops the corset’s laces with the knife, and it falls away from me, leaving a wrinkled, voluminous white shirt tucked into my skirt. I kick the corset over the side of the cliff and then pull the pearl tiara from my hair and throw it down, too. Taking a deep breath, I turn to the mouth of the cave.
“I am ready,” I say, tucking the hunting knife into the back waistband of my skirt. Together we walk inside. When the cave entrance is far enough behind us that it gives off no light, the dragon scale starts to glow.
Golmarr puts his hand on his sword. “It looks like the fire dragon is still alive.”
To say the dragon scale glows is like saying the moon lights the night. The moon does light the night…sort of. But not well enough to go on a walk through rocks and gravel and boulders without stubbing your toes every other step.
The air is damp and cool, and it stinks like animals—like a chicken coop that has never been cleaned out. I am a mess, tripping over my skirts, crawling over boulders on my hands and knees, tearing my nails and scraping my arms and legs. Golmarr gets ahead every few minutes, and then pauses for me to catch up. I can see his patience waning in the way he taps his toe and keeps looking over his shoulder, leading us deeper into the blackness of the cave.
“You’re not very strong, are you?” He says it like it is an accusation and frowns as I slide down a rock on my butt.
I glare at him. “I’ve never climbed on rocks before.”
“Not even when you were a child?”
I brush my hands together, ridding them of lingering grit. “I have never been allowed to leave my chambers except to attend private family events, and for dancing and riding lessons.”
“You’re not allowed to leave your chambers?” he asks.
“Not without my father’s permission. And he rarely gives it.”
He shakes his head in disbelief. “Why?”
“Because the queen doesn’t like to see me,” I admit, my voice quiet.
“The queen, as in your own mother?”
“Yes. She doesn’t like seeing me because I have brought her nothing but sorrow since I was born.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, looking into my eyes.
I shrug, pretending like it is not a big deal, pretending like talking about it doesn’t make it hard to swallow. “Don’t be sorry,” I whisper, looking away from him. “I hardly know her.”
We keep making our way deeper into the cave, and Golmarr isn’t as impatient when he stops to wait for me.
“If this is a dragon’s cave, then where are all the bones and treasure?” I ask, swinging down from a grime-covered boulder taller than me. I wipe my hands on my shirt, leaving two dark smudges down the front.
“If a dragon truly lives in this mountain, if this is one of its caves, it isn’t going to keep its treasure here. It is going to hide it as deep as possible. Look.” He points up. I crane my neck and squint. The ceiling seems to be moving. Squirming. I hold the dragon scale above my head and shudder. A dense canopy of bats covers the cave’s roof, making it impossible to see the stone they are hanging from.
“I guess that explains the smell and the stuff all over the boulders,” Golmarr adds, his voice amused.
I cringe and look at my filthy palms.
“The legends say the fire dragon is as tall as a two-story house. There is no way it could fit in this cave. The ceiling is too low.”
I shudder, still intent on the brown smears on my hands, and wipe them down the front of my shirt again. Where I’ve wiped, my shirt is brown and red.
Golmarr lifts one of my hands, uncurling my fingers to look at my palm. “You’re bleeding.” Without another word, he reaches behind me, takes the hunting knife from the back of my skirt, and unsheathes it. “I’m going to cut your skirt shorter so you don’t have to crawl over the boulders,” he explains, kneeling in front of me and lifting the fabric.
I gasp and pull away from him and shake my head. “No, please! That wouldn’t be…proper,” I blurt. My cheeks start to burn at the thought of having my legs exposed.
He groans and looks up at me. “We are about to be eaten by a dragon, you’re crawling on bleeding hands through bat droppings, and you’re worried about being proper?” I bite my lower lip and nod. I really don’t want him to see my legs. He stands and presses the knife into my hand a little too roughly. “Suit yourself.”
We keep moving deeper into the cave—Golmarr leaping over boulders and me crawling and stumbling after him. In the darkness there is no way to measure time, except by how thirsty I am. The longer we wander, the thirstier I become. I lick my dry lips and keep going.
The cave curves to the left, and Golmarr stops, pointing to something long and coiled, resting between two rocks. He picks it up. It is a piece of rope leading deeper into the cave. “This looks like the same rope they lowered us down with. The rope taken from the lamb.”
After we have gone twenty steps, he pauses and frowns, rubbing the rope between his fingers. “This feels different,” he says, and holds it close to the dragon scale. The rope is blackened and brittle. “I think…” He holds it up to his nose and sniffs. His eyes grow wide and he drops it. “This is burned!” he whispers. “The fire dragon must cook its food before it eats it.”
My stomach tu
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s smaller than the history books say it is. But it has been here.” Beneath our feet, the ground rumbles. Overhead, the thousands of bats coating the ceiling start to screech and drop, catching themselves in midair a mere instant before they hit us. They surge around us and over us, flying in the direction of the cave’s opening. Golmarr and I look at each other with wide eyes. He clutches my hand in his and starts pulling me deeper into the cave.
“Shouldn’t we be following the bats? We need to get away!” I say, grasping layers of skirt and petticoats in my free hand in an attempt to keep up with him.
“We’re not trying to get away. We’re trying to find somewhere to hide!” He leaps over a rock, and my hand is torn from his. I stumble on my skirts and fall to my knees. Without a word, Golmarr leaps to my side and lifts me to my feet. I silently curse myself for not cutting off my ridiculous skirt earlier, because far, far ahead, an orange glow lights the darkness. And I can barely run.
The entire tunnel is illuminated. It looks like a long orange worm, and the light is growing brighter and brighter. The air around us is being drawn toward the light, sucking my shirt against my back and pulling loose wisps of hair that have escaped my braid forward around my face.
“Fire,” Golmarr yells. “We need to find shelter!” He is looking everywhere, his eyes scanning the ground, the walls, the ceiling. I’m too petrified to move, so I stare at him in a daze. “Sorrowlynn! I need your help! We need to find somewhere to hide before the fire reaches here.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and gives me a firm shake. “You’re destined to die by your own hand, right?” I blink at him and nod. “Well, if you are burned to death, you are not dying by your own hand. That means you’re going to survive this, so help me!”
I look around the cave, at the rocks, the walls, the ceiling, but there is nowhere to go. And then Golmarr’s hand wraps tight around my wrist, and he is pulling me to the side, toward a jagged crack in the wall. The wind is roaring now, the tunnel glowing like midday. The fire is almost upon us.
Golmarr practically throws me at the crack. I put my hands up to shield my face and fall forward, landing hard on the ground. Golmarr tumbles to the ground beside me, and then we are engulfed in heat. I dig my elbows into the ground and drag myself forward, away from the smoldering air and deeper into the crack in the side of the cave. The farther I go, the cooler the air becomes. I crawl until I come to solid rock and can go no farther. Together, Golmarr and I huddle against the rock and shield our faces from the heat. I peer through my fingers. The crack we fell through looks like a slash of orange lightning. And then, like a flock of birds flying past a window, the fire is gone and we are plunged into darkness.
The dragon scale hanging from my neck looks hardly brighter than an ember buried by ash. The air is hot and dry and seems to solidify and darken, and then the horse lord and I are coughing as smoke fills our lungs and stings our eyes. I put my sleeve over my mouth and nose and breathe through it, but it hardly helps.
“Get down,” Golmarr says between coughs, pushing me toward the ground. I press my cheek against the stone floor and breathe, and the air is a little fresher. Golmarr slithers on his belly toward the wall’s opening. I stop beside him, our shoulders barely fitting side by side in the narrow fissure, and look out into the cave. It is like trying to see with a thick blanket over my head, but the air is a little less smoky. I lay my cheek down on my arm. The horse lord shifts, and I feel him lay his head down beside mine. His hair spills over my hand, and I run my fingers through it.
“How did you know?” I ask.
“Know what?” His face is so close to mine that his breath tickles my skin when he talks.
I inhale and choke on smoke. “That I am supposed to die by my own hand,” I gasp.
“I’ve known all my life, I suppose. Well, probably since I was two. That’s how old I was when you were born. My brothers and I talked about you a lot when we were growing up.” His voice is hoarse from the smoke.
“I hate that ridiculous prediction. I have been called Suicide Sorrow behind my back for my whole life because of it,” I grumble.
Golmarr laughs a whispered laugh. “Do you want to know what my brothers and I would say about you, Suicide Sorrow?”
“Not really,” I say, which makes him laugh again.
“We would say, ‘I wish I had a birth prediction like that, because I would know without a doubt that no matter what I did, I wouldn’t die…unless it was by my own hand.’ I remember taming a stallion a few years ago, and the first time I rode him he tried and tried to buck me off. All I could think was, If I had a prediction like that stupid, spoiled Faodarian princess, this would be a lot less scary, because if I’m not careful this horse is going to throw me and I’m going to break my neck.” He laughs, and I laugh, too. “That is why, when I saw that fire coming, I knew you were going to survive. That fire was not your own hand, so it couldn’t kill you.”
I lay in silence and think about what he said. There is only one thing that can kill me. I open and close my hands, and for the first time in my life, the weight of my birth prediction is taken from me.
“Suicide Sorrow,” Golmarr muses. It sounds more like a warrior’s name when he says it.
“Do your people have birth predictions?” I ask.
“Yes. My family does, anyway, since we are the ruling family. Nayadi gives them to us when we are born, but because she is an invisible witch, no one knows we get them. We don’t make them public, like your family does.”
“Invisible witch?” I ask. “What does that mean?”
He is silent for a long time. The smoke has thinned, so the dragon scale lights up his face. He is staring at the cave ceiling, one arm bent behind his head, his forehead creased. “We don’t talk about it,” he says. “Let me rephrase that. I swore an oath of secrecy to never speak of her outside of my family.” His gaze shifts to my face. “I’m sorry.” Our faces are so close that my nose is almost touching his. He is flawless in the dim light, and his closeness makes my breath come a little quicker.
“That’s all right.” I smile. “I’m just glad you’re here with me. It’s nice to have a…friend.”
He returns the smile and brushes a strand of hair from my cheek. “It is an honor to be considered such.” He touches a finger to his forehead, and then makes an X with his two pointer fingers.
“What is that?” I ask, touching my finger to my forehead and then making the X.
“It is a formal salute of respect given between two people,” he explains. “It means honored friend.”
“You speak with your hands?”
“Over a century ago, the king of Anthar created a language spoken strictly with hand gestures instead of words so that his warriors could remain silent in battle. We still teach it to all of our warriors.” He climbs to his feet and holds a hand down to me. I pull against his hand to stand. “We need to keep going.”
“Wait.” I take the knife from my waistband and hand it to him.
He frowns. “You don’t want the knife?”
I grip my skirt and pull it taut. “Will you please cut my skirt so I can move more freely?”
He nods, kneels at my feet, and begins the arduous process of cutting through the fabric of the skirt and the four petticoats, depositing a pile of hewn cloth beside my feet. When he is done, he looks at my bare legs and sucks his breath in through his teeth. “That’s why you didn’t want me to see your legs.”
I glance down, and a wave of shame dampens my mood. Even in the dim light, the scars stand out against my skin like puckered white veins. I smooth what is left of my skirt, pressing it down over my knees as far as it will go.
“Please don’t tell me all of those scars are from you riding astride,” he says.
“No. Only this one.” I bend down and touch a thin scar on my ankle. “The rest are from other times. My father whipped my legs whenever I was disobedien
“How disobedient?” he asks, voice skeptical.
“I was forbidden to call the queen mother, and when I forgot, she would get so upset that she would take to her rooms for days, so my father started whipping my legs to help me remember.” His face is as still as stone, so I continue, “It only took two whippings for me to never do it again. And once I got whipped because I hugged her. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to touch her—I was only five. If I daydreamed during lessons and my tutor reported it, my father would whip me, so my tutor stopped reporting it, and if I left my rooms without permission, I got whipped.” I trace my finger over the biggest, puffiest scars. “The worst whipping I got was when Melchior—our wizard—left. That’s what these are from.” I can’t bear to look at him, so I stare at his hands. They are clenched so hard that they’re trembling.
“Why did you get whipped when your wizard left?” he asks, his voice harsh.
“He said his fate was tied to mine, and there was something he had to do for me. No one has seen him since, and there aren’t any other wizards or witches in our land—except Nayadi—so my family no longer has the guidance of a seer.”
“How old were you when he left?”
“Eight. My father carved grooves in the willow switch that time, and it tore my skin.” I can still remember the white-hot pain, and the fury in my father’s eyes. But the worst part was the days following. The agony of my bleeding legs lingered much longer than the initial whipping. “I hate my father,” I whisper, finally looking at Golmarr.
He nods and the muscles in his jaw pulse. “I do, too.” His gaze shifts to my slippers. “How are your feet?”
I wiggle my toes and cringe. “Sore, but I’ll manage.”
He looks at my legs once more. “Come on, Princess. Let’s find a way out of here.”