Midnight on the Dragon Tower

Dawn came in through the gap in the flap and fell directly across her face.

She was already awake. She had been lying still while around her the tent breathed with the slow rhythms of eleven sleeping girls and one troublesome boy. Someone near the eastern pole even snored with cheerful dedication. The air held the ghost of last night’s rice.

Today, she was to present the twice fake seal to Imran. She dressed in the half-dark. The hem was still damp from yesterday’s procession. Movement stirred across the tent. Ern was getting up too.

They swallowed leftover rice, and milk, painted their faces and slipped out together into the morning. The servants were already at work. A dais had gone up against the far wall, with the timber frame faced in red-lacquered panels freshly painted with the imperial dragon. On it, a throne waited in pieces and two men in palace livery were lashing the back into place. Beside them, another arranged the step-stool that would allow the Emperor — or whoever sat in his place today — to ascend without undignified effort. Around the dais, servants were positioning lantern-stands and lighting a brazier at the foot of the steps. The first thread of incense began to unspool into the damp air.

She studied the dais from where she stood. The angle of the steps, the altar table to the left where the regalia would be laid. Nine paces from the Guardian of the Seal’s position to the prince’s seat. She had walked those nine paces until they lived in her tendons. She counted them again now, across the air. One of the servants misjudged the weight of a bronze lantern-stand and it listed badly before his partner caught it.

The Thorns were waiting at the courtyard gates: twelve of them in polished breastplates and red-plumed helmets, halberds tipped with the imperial dragon. They formed up in two lines, and behind them a drummer took his position with a small lacquered frame drum held against his chest.

“We should take our positions,” Yolanthe said.

Ern turned from the dais. For a moment, in the early light, the ceremonial composure she wore as habitually as her face paint slipped, and what showed beneath it was almost fear. Then it settled back.

“Of course. We should.”

They crossed the courtyard to where the escort waited, and the drummer’s first slow beat fell into the morning. Through the archway and into the corridors of the palace: Thorns ahead, Thorns behind, the drum marking the pace.

The inner route took them through the Silver Hall, past the Amber Hall’s honeyed glow, through a long gallery where the morning light came sideways through the colonnade pillars and laid itself across the floor in bars of pale gold. Servants pressed to the walls as the procession passed. A young page carrying a tray of cups stepped back too fast and nearly lost his footing. The cups rattled. No one looked.

They emerged into the central courtyard, where banners transformed the space into a forest of silk. Musicians played somewhere distant and their festival drums made a counterpoint to the measured tread of the ceremonial guards. The lace-stone bridge began here, arcing outward over the Dragon Square and towards the Dragon Tower.

At the bridge’s foot, the escort halted. The drum cut off clean.

In the sudden quiet, she heard the sea. Below the bridge, Dragon Square’s water caught the morning light and broke it into fragments.

Ern had gone still at her side. Her face was correctly arranged, her eyes on the Tower’s base where the bridge met the bone-white arch of the entrance. But her jaw was set a fraction too hard, and a muscle moved along it with the rhythm of teeth pressed together.