Carson Caplan and the Ember of Ashfang

The dragon remembers what the king has forgotten.

— old saying, Westborough

1. The Feast

The dragon came in through the roof.

Carson Caplan would tell the story differently later — slower, with a fire crackling, with the right pauses in the right places — but the truth was that simple. One moment the great hall of Aldermere was full of music and roast pheasant and the soft particular hush that follows a princess's laugh. The next, the beams above the high table came down in a shower of splinters and ash, and Vrak the Ember was inside the castle.

Carson was fourteen rows back, holding a tray. He remembered three things from the next minute, in this order: the smell of pitch, the sound the king made when his only daughter was lifted into the air, and his own knees deciding, without consulting him, that he was going to do something about it.

It was a stupid decision. He kept it.

2. The Empty Throne

In the morning the king sat on the throne with no daughter in the hall, and the hall sat very, very quietly back.

Aldric was a small man made larger by the weight of his crown and the breadth of his shoulders, neither of which were doing him much good today. He looked, Carson thought from the back of the hall, like a man trying to remember a song he hadn't sung since he was a boy.

"Half the kingdom," the king said at last, "and her hand, to whoever returns her."

The hall stayed quiet. Sir Brennan, who had killed three boars and a man at the autumn tournament and made each kill look easy, found something on the floor to look at. The Master of Horse coughed. Someone, very far off, set down a cup.

It was the kind of silence that, once it has gone on long enough, you cannot fix from the inside. You can only stand up out of it.

Carson Caplan, fourteen rows back, stood up.