The Dragon King’s Cinderella Bride

Cerys Vale was halfway beneath the royal buffet when someone offered forty thousand crowns for a woman who looked ready to be sick.

The woman stood on a dais in rose silk. Her father raised his bidding paddle before she had finished answering the priest’s question.

Forty thousand crowns would have bought back the clock shop. It would have bought the house adjoining it, the copper gutter her father had meant to replace, and bread enough for the whole of Bell Street until winter. Cerys counted out that imaginary fortune while reaching past a silver dish for one actual loaf.

Her left shoe squeaked.

She stopped breathing.

Above her, a gentleman said, “Is there a mouse?”

“A very well-fed one, if there is,” answered a woman.

Their shoes moved away. Cerys eased the loaf from its basket. Still warm. She tucked it inside the canvas tool bag strapped beneath her borrowed skirt, where a clean cloth waited between the bread and her father’s smallest screwdriver.

Elska would get the crust. Her younger stepsister always said she preferred it. For three days Cerys had pretended to believe her.

At twenty-nine, Cerys knew enough about hunger to recognize the lies people told around it. Her stepmother had developed a different set: that accounts were temporarily inaccessible, that a household must keep up appearances, that the last two eggs had been needed to wash her hair before the palace invitation arrived.

Veyra had left in hired velvet. Cerys had left by the scullery window.

Now she needed to return through the kitchen passage, turn right at the laundry, and go out with the empty wine hampers at half past eight. She had watched three deliveries before trying the servants’ entrance. The men collecting the hampers wore gray aprons. She had one folded beneath her coat.

The palace clock struck eight.

Wrongly.

Cerys looked toward the musicians’ gallery. Her father had installed that clock eleven years earlier, when the royal household still paid its craftsmen. She knew the tone of its fourth bell. Tonight it dragged against the fifth, a sour metallic overlap that meant the striking train had lost its governor.

She put a hand on the table leg and felt a faint vibration through the wood.

Someone had coupled the damaged clock to something much larger.

She could leave. The shop was sealed, her father’s name was still on the seizure notice, and six weeks of petitioning had earned her one interview with a clerk who wanted payment to tell her which clerk to pay next. She owed the palace nothing.

Another vibration traveled along the floor.

The rose-silk woman flinched. Beside her, a shallow bowl of blue fire climbed its own rim.

Cerys stayed under the table.

“The choosing flame receives the generosity of House Tallis,” announced the auctioneer. “Forty thousand crowns, pledged upon acceptance of the royal betrothal.”

So that was the polite shape of it. Fathers purchased the chance to make their daughters queen. The fire decided whether the offer pleased it. A woman answered a question while men discussed her family’s annual revenues.

Lady Tallis stared past the flames. Cerys could see the effort it took her to remain on the dais.

The bowl rang like a struck glass.

A thin blue tongue escaped beneath the brass cradle supporting it.

Cerys followed the pipe running down the dais to the wall. It entered a service cabinet below the musicians’ gallery. The cabinet bore her father’s maker’s plate.

She swore quietly, caught her hem on the table bolt, and tore it freeing herself.

“You there.”

A footman blocked the passage. He was young, with a copper button missing from one sleeve and a tray trembling in his hands. His attention fell to the bulge in her bag.

“This is a guests’ table.”

“Your governor’s failing.”

He glanced at the gallery. “The musicians?”

“The clock mechanism. Who services the fire feed?”

“I carry plates.”

“Find someone who doesn’t.”

He reddened. “You cannot speak to me like that.”

Fair. She was frightened, and he had not confiscated the shop.

“Please,” she said. “There’s a cabinet beneath the gallery. The brass pipe goes into it. If it keeps feeding at this pressure, that bowl will spit across the stage.”

He looked again. Blue light spread over Lady Tallis’s skirt.

The footman put down his tray.

“I’ll get the steward.”

He ran toward the servants’ door. Cerys should have run with him.

Instead she crossed to the cabinet.

Its cover had been painted over. Someone had sealed the maintenance latch with gilt plaster to make an ugly working object fit the room. Her father would have been furious. Cerys took out the screwdriver, set its tip against the latch, and struck the handle with the heel of her hand.

Gold chips fell onto the carpet.

“Stop that!” called a guard.

The panel came away. Behind it, the governor’s little fan spun almost level with the shaft. Its retaining pin had walked out, so the fan no longer offered resistance. The mechanism was racing. Beside it, a pressure needle tapped the upper limit of its dial.

Cerys reached for the manual stop.

The handle broke off in her hand.

Cheap cast brass. Someone had replaced Brenn Vale’s iron handle with a decorative one.

She threw it aside, wrapped the bread cloth around the exposed valve spindle, and turned.

It moved a quarter rotation. Hot air stung her eyes.

The guard seized her shoulder.

“Hands where I can see them.”

“If you pull me away, the feed stays open.”

“You are not authorized—”

The bowl cracked.

Lady Tallis screamed, and the guard released Cerys to turn toward her. Two of the dais attendants sprang back. The priest stayed where he was, lifting his hands over the fire as though he expected it to settle.

A man rose from the chair beyond the stage.

Until then Cerys had seen only its high black back. She had assumed the dragon king watched his auction from another room, screened from ordinary people by one more expensive precaution.

He came down the steps quickly. His black coat hung open over a plain gray shirt. He had neither the gilded wings nor the jeweled teeth popular in street pictures; he looked like an exhausted man with a broken night’s sleep behind him.

The crown was worse than the pictures. Narrow points hooked inward along his temples. As he approached the bowl, one point shifted against his skin.

He tore off his right glove.

“Get her down,” he said to the attendants.

One of them caught Lady Tallis around the waist. The other hesitated at the spreading fire.

The king put his bare hand against the cradle.

Brass softened beneath his fingers.

Cerys saw a drop of metal strike the stage and burn through its varnish. The woman’s hem was almost touching the puddle.

“Left!” Cerys shouted. “Bring her down on the left!”

The attendants obeyed. The priest finally retreated, stumbling over a stool.

Cerys forced another quarter turn out of the valve. The cloth began to smoke.

“There’s no lock left on it,” she called. “I can’t hold this and pin the governor.”

The king looked across the room at her.

For a moment she was conscious of his eyes rather than the heat: amber-brown, sharply attentive, finding the open cabinet and her strained hand before returning to her face.

“Can you shut it?”

“If someone holds the spindle.”

He crossed to her. Guests withdrew from his path so quickly that a chair overturned.

“Not with that hand,” she said.

He stopped.

The guard made a strangled noise. “His Majesty—”

“Has just melted brass. This is brass.”

The king looked at his fingers. A blackened mark extended from the ring finger toward his wrist, shifting under the skin like something seen through dark water.

He pulled on his glove. Its lining was a thick pale material, visible at the cuff.

“Will this do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Better than guessing.” He crouched beside her. “Tell me where.”

She made him hold the spindle through the cloth, then took her father’s spare escapement pin out of its paper sleeve. Too fine for the socket. She bent its tip, threaded it through the governor’s collar, and caught the other end around the housing screw. A temporary stop, ugly and serviceable.

The fan shuddered and slowed.

The pressure needle began to fall.

Cerys sat back on her heels. Her fingers throbbed. Beside her, the king kept his hand exactly where she had put it.

“Can I let go?” he asked.

“Slowly.”

He eased away. The spindle held.

For three breaths, she heard ordinary things: a woman crying, a dropped tray rolling to a stop, one musician still playing before realizing everyone else had stopped.

Then blue light slid over the king’s shoulder.

The choosing flame had left its bowl.

It traveled along the brass pipe, a narrow thread moving against the feed. The damaged cradle behind it had gone dull. Cerys backed away until her shoulder met the cabinet door.

The king reached toward her, then checked himself before his gloved hand touched her sleeve.

“Stay still,” he said.

“What will it do?”

“Usually it stops at the dais.”

“Usually isn’t helpful.”

His mouth tightened. “I agree.”

The thread of fire reached the open cabinet. It passed the valve without warming the cloth and crossed the space between them.

Cerys felt it at the hollow below her collarbone, beneath the mended neckline of her dress. The old scar there prickled. She had been told it came from a nursery burn, although no one could tell her which stove or who had carried her away.

Now the flame settled over it.

It did not hurt.

That frightened her more than the failing furnace had.

“Take it off,” she said.

The king stared at the light. “I can’t touch it.”

She caught his wrist before he could draw farther away. Through the glove she felt neither heat nor cold, only the rigid tendons of a man trying not to move.

“Then tell them to stop looking at me.”

He turned his head toward the room.

“Bring a screen.”

No one moved. The auctioneer was watching Cerys with an expression she had seen on creditors when a debtor unexpectedly inherited something.

The footman returned with an older woman in a steward’s chain. Between them they carried a folding screen from the musicians’ robing area. The king stood and helped position it, careful to touch only the fabric-covered edges.

Behind the screen, Cerys released his wrist.

Her tool bag had slipped open. The loaf lay against her knee, marked with flour and a little gilt dust.

His eyes went to it.

“I was going to leave,” she said.

“With that?”

“Yes.”

He crouched again, farther away this time, leaving her room to get up.

“Are you hungry?”

“Does the answer decide whether you arrest me?”

“No.”

She waited. He appeared to understand why.

“You won’t be arrested for the bread,” he said. “I’ll tell the steward in front of you.”

“My sister hasn’t eaten.”

“Where is she?”

“Outside this room, thank every useful god.”

He looked tired enough to appreciate that answer. Cerys noticed a patch of uneven stitching at the edge of his glove, repaired with the wrong black thread. Someone had mended it in haste. It was absurdly ordinary to find a poor repair on a king, and she wanted to know who had done it.

She looked away before curiosity became anything less manageable.

Beyond the screen, the auctioneer rang his handbell.

“The flame has chosen.”

The king rose. “Do not make an announcement.”

“The articles require—”

“I said wait.”

Cerys stood, gathered her tools, and pushed the bag beneath her arm. Blue light still showed through her dress.

The auctioneer stepped around the screen with a clerk at his heels. He bowed to the king without looking at her.

“We have the register, Majesty. The selection is valid.”

“I didn’t enter,” Cerys said.

The clerk opened his ledger.

She recognized the paper first. Cream laid stock, red fiber through the corner. Her father’s supplier used it for guarantees. She had signed half a hundred repair receipts on those sheets.

Her name filled the line under CANDIDATE.

Her stepmother’s filled the line under SPONSOR.

Below them was a signature that looked exactly like her own.

“Cerys Vale,” the clerk read. “Registered six weeks ago. Upon a choosing, the successful candidate becomes the king’s intended bride.”

Six weeks ago, the palace had sealed the clock shop.

Cerys pressed the loaf against her ribs and looked at the man beside her.

She had come here to steal from him.

Someone had already sold him her name.