“Argent? Why Argent?” Lorien spluttered.
“Means silver.”
We all stared at Barry. The man said very little. That was maybe because Lorien and Dain were squabbling the entire time, but I got the feeling he was a man of few words. That was fine, but he’d have a few to say to me.
“You called your silver dragon, Silver?” Lorien snorted before turning back to his dragon. “I’ll come up with something far grander for you, lad. How about… Steelheart?”
“Steel’s a totally different metal,” Dain shot back.
“Then… Brightfang.” The dragon on Lorien’s shoulder lifted his head at that. “You like that one, lad? Brightfang it is.”
“What about you?”
I blinked, Barry looking my way finally. He seemed pretty content to ignore me the entire journey, making me more suspicious by the moment.
“What about you?” I replied, shooting him a dark look.
“Don’t have a dragon.”
The twist of his lips made clear he was mocking me deliberately, and that had my back straightening. I glanced down at the sleeping creature in my arms, wondering how thehell Mother came up with a name for me, when his eye opened just a crack. Each dragon was as silver as a newly minted coin, but his was a darker shade. It kind of reminded me of the roof tiles we’d skimmed across too many times.
“Slate,” I said, and my dragon nodded. That feeling of wellbeing bloomed hotter in my chest, making clear he approved. My fingers twitched, wanting to stroke his butter soft scales. He liked it, dropping into deeper sleep as a result, but I stopped myself. “So what’s your story? Last time I saw you was when you dragged my mother screaming out of our home.”
Barry stopped staring at me, focussing instead on the road.
“If you don’t tell me, we’re?—”
“The Duke…” Not many people said the man’s title with the same kind of loathing I did. “He sends me to ‘clean up his messes.’ Thinks he knows what that entails, but he doesn’t. Every child of some lord who fucked the wrong woman, every malcontent. I’m supposed to knife them in the dark, but instead, I made a public spectacle of their ‘removal.’ His lordship liked that. Thinks it makes him seem more frightening than he is. Gave me a perfect means to drag people out of the city with much hue and cry. No one steps in to save the victims, though.”
His jaw muscle twitched.
“At first, that just pissed me off. Why not stand up for your fellows? The Duke can only do what he does because we allow it. Well, if they weren’t going to act, I was.” His eyes gleamed in the low light as he stared at me. “Got the job because my father and his father before him killed the Duke’s enemies for him, but I saw something they didn’t. People shrink back in the face of the Executioner. I could use that power to save the victims, not kill them.”
What he described, it couldn’t be real. All those people he’d dragged from the city. Where…? How…? I was about to find out, because as the horse walked up to the top of a rise, I saw it.
Wasn’t a fancy place, not like those on Silk Row in Blackreach, but it was a big, sprawling building. Smoke curled up from the chimney lazily, but it wasn’t that which had my attention. Children roamed around the garden, either working in the vegetable patches or weeding the flower beds, and with them? I reached down, sure Slate had dug his claws into my chest, but he slept on peacefully. Because there she was.
A small figure, the details not clear from this distance, but something white hot coursed through my veins, burning brand new channels. Hope, I realised, as I fought to take a breath. She lifted her hand, put it to her brow to help her see more clearly, and I followed every movement as we got closer and closer. Then as the horse pulled up out front the house, I saw that Barry hadn’t lied.
“Mother…?”
Slate stirred, making a sleepy sound, but I could only hold him tightly as I dropped down from the coach before it fully stopped. My feet were moving towards her, across the yard, up to the small gate, and then through it.
“Mother…”
“And who do we have here?”
Her gentle tone, I knew it as well as my own. She scanned the lot of us with a welcoming smile, which faltered when she saw me. Her face fell and so did her mouth, gaping as she stared, then she took a small step forward. My strides closed the gap in seconds, my spare hand reaching for her.
Perhaps this was all just part of the nightmare of Drathnor’s cave. Maybe I was lying on the cavern floor, bleeding out from the Executioner’s blade, believing I’d bonded with a dragon and had found my mother.
“Kael…?” She sobbed out my name, tears gleaming bright in the evening light as she clasped my hand. “Oh, my boy! He found you!”
I was yanked closer, enfolded in her arms, only for Slate to protest, scrambling up onto my shoulder and hissing at Mother. That had her crying, laughing as she pulled back and looked the both of us over.
“And who’s this, then?”
“Slate, my dragon, and…”
