The dragon king's first words to me were, "You're late. I've been dying for three days."
I was on my knees on black stone with iron on my wrists. Three days in a cart. My braid was gone, sawn off at the border by the queen's women "for lice," and the back of my neck was cold in a room as hot as a bread oven.
Nobody had told me he was dying. Nobody had told me why, out of every unmarried son and daughter in Ostrel, he had asked for me.
"King Idris." Master Orrin Thale stepped past me with the treaty scroll held out in both hands, the way you hold a dish you are afraid to drop. "Maren Hale, younger daughter of the house of Hale, delivered under the Treaty of the Pass."
Orrin was physician to Queen Aurelie and had once been my father's best pupil. Three days ago he had held my shoulders still while the queen's women cut my hair. He had not looked at me since.
The king did not take the scroll.
He sat on a throne cut from the crater wall itself, black rock veined with something that glowed dull orange, as if the mountain were still deciding whether to be a mountain. He was younger than I had expected. Dark hair, a long hard face, a black coat buttoned to the throat. Behind him rose tier on tier of galleries cut into the inside of the volcano.
And his breath was white.
Every time he breathed out, it smoked, like a man standing in snow. In that heat. Once I had seen it, I could not stop watching it.
"I sent a dragon to your queen on the twelfth," he said to Orrin. "It would have had her here by nightfall."
"Her Majesty felt a cart was more fitting for a hostage."
"Did she." He said it quietly. "And the chains?"
"Customary."
"Not here." He looked at me for the first time. His eyes were the gold of a coin left in a fire. "Can you stand, Maren Hale?"
I stood. My legs had other ideas, but I made them. "I can stand. I can also speak, if anyone wants to ask me what I'm for."
A ripple went along the galleries. Somebody laughed and turned it into a cough.
"You're a healer," the king said.
"I'm a healer in Ostrel. I heal people." I lifted my wrists so the chain swung. "I don't heal dragons."
A man came forward from the step below the throne. He was tall and fair, with rings on every finger and a voice like warm oil. He smiled at me as if we were old friends at a dull party.
"Then she is only a mouth to feed, cousin." He spread his hands. "The treaty says a hostage must be kept. It is quite silent on the condition."
"Lord Sarrik," the king said, without turning his head. "Be quiet." Then, to me: "Heal me and you go home at the thaw, free. Your house never sends another hostage. You have my word in front of my court."
It was the best offer anyone from Ostrel had ever had from this throne. I could feel the galleries waiting for me to take it.
I put my bound hands to my throat instead, where my mother's old locket hung under my collar. Inside it was a curl of yellow hair. Elspeth and I had traded the night before she left, hers for mine, so neither of us would be the one left with nothing.
"Six years ago," I said, "you sent my sister home in a box the size of a bread crate. Bones and her shoe buckles. That's all that came back of her. Your father's people burned her in your tower." I made myself look at him. "So no. I won't."
Something moved behind his eyes. "Is that what they told you."
"It's what happened."
He held my gaze a moment longer. Then he stood up from the throne to dismiss me, and I saw what it cost him.
It was small. A hitch in the shoulder, a hand that went to the arm of the throne and stayed there a beat too long. He took one step down the dais. On the second step his knee simply stopped working, and the dragon king of Karreth fell the rest of the way to the floor in front of me.
The sound of his skull on the stone went right through me.
Nobody moved. Sarrik had one foot on the step and seemed to have forgotten to bring the other one down. Orrin backed up.
I was already on my knees.
I don't remember deciding. That is the truth and I have never liked it. My hands were on him before my hatred had its boots on. "Get these off me," I said, and somebody's key was in the lock, and the chains slid away, and I tore open the buttons at his throat.
His skin was cold. Not cool. Cold as a stone pulled out of a river in winter, in a hall where sweat was running down my back.
Across his chest, from a point just left of his breastbone, ran black lines like frost ferns on a window, branching and branching, reaching for his shoulder and down under his ribs. Where they began, over the heart, sat a mark the size of my thumbprint, raised and dark, like a knot under the skin.
Elspeth used to say I'd stitch up the devil if he bled on me. I'd hated her for saying it. I hated her a little more now, kneeling there with my palm flat on a dragon.
I closed my eyes and let the gift come.
It never feels like magic. It feels like reaching into a sewing basket in the dark. A fever is a tangle of wet wool under my hands, a bad lung is a fraying rope. I pushed into the cold of him and found what was there, and it was thread. Hard, tight, deliberate thread, crossed and recrossed and pulled down into him.
Seven crossings, and a locking loop doubled back underneath, so the harder you pulled, the tighter it held.
My eyes opened.
He was awake. Frost was spreading on his lower lip. "Well?" he said, very quietly, for me alone.
I couldn't answer him. I was looking at my own hand on his chest.
I knew that knot. I had learned it at eight years old, at my father's kitchen table, with a curved needle and a cut of pork, while my father counted the crossings out loud.
It was the Hale knot. My father had invented it. And someone had tied it into the dragon king's heart.