The Boy in the Mountain

The inside of the mountain is not what the songs promised either. The songs promised a hall. Gold, the songs said. Treasure-light and the great slow breathing of kings. I climb a path of black glass for most of a day, the pull behind my ribs reeling me in hand over hand, and at the top of it I do not find a hall. I find a boy. He is sitting on the edge of a crater of living flame — a lake of it, gold and red and moving, throwing its light up the cavern walls — and he is sitting the way you sit when you have been sitting somewhere a very long time and have run out of more dignified positions. Knees up. Chin on knees. He is perhaps my age. He has dark hair full of ash and a face that would be handsome if it were not, at this exact moment, set in the particular scowl of someone whose afternoon has been ruined. He does not look like a dragon king. He looks like a furious art student. "You're angry," he says. He says it as an accusation. "I felt you the whole way up. You're the first Hearthkeeper in three hundred years who climbed my mountain *sulking*." "I'm sorry," I say, "were you hoping for proud or weeping?" His head comes up. And for one moment something flickers behind the scowl that is not scowl at all — something startled, and almost, terribly, like hope — before he crushes it flat again. "I wasn't hoping for anything." He unfolds himself and stands, and as he stands the light of the flame-lake bends around him, and for a half-second I see the other shape laid over the boy-shape: vast, and winged, and old in a way that has nothing to do with years. Then it is gone and he is just a boy again, scowling at me across a lake of fire. "Hoping is for things that can change. I am Kael of the Caldera, the last of the dragon kings, and I have been sitting on the edge of this fire keeping it lit since before your grandmother's grandmother was a thought. There is nothing here to hope about. There is only the flame, and the tending of the flame, and now — apparently — you." *The last of the dragon kings.* The songs did not mention that either. The songs said *kings*, plural, a whole bright hall of them. "Where are the others?" I ask. Kael looks at the flame-lake for a long moment, and the scowl on his face does something complicated, and I realize — too late, the way I realize most things — that I have walked straight onto the bruise. "Gone," he says. "The flame needs a dragon to anchor it and a mortal to tend it. One of each. Always one of each. The dragons were many, once, and they could trade the burden between them — a century each, and then a long sleep, and then someone else's century." He picks up a stone and turns it over and does not throw it. "But dragons die, Hearthkeeper, even dragons, and they died faster than they hatched, and a hundred years ago the burden came round to me and there was no one left to hand it to after. So I do not get a century. I get all of them. Every century, until the flame goes out or I do." I stand on the black glass at the top of the world and I look at this furious trapped boy on the edge of his fire, and the line between my chest and the mountain — the line I have hated since the sky went the color of a match — does something I do not have a word for. It goes quiet. Not loosened. Not broken. *Recognized*, maybe. Like two people discovering they have been issued the same sentence. "How long is a Hearthkeeper's term?" I ask, though I think I already know, and I think that is why my voice has gone thin. Kael finally throws the stone. It vanishes into the gold without a sound. "Mortals are not dragons," he says. "You do not get a century. You get a life." He looks at me, and the scowl is still there, but under it now is the thing he crushed flat before, the startled almost-hope, and it will not stay crushed. "You wanted to leave the valley. I felt that on you the whole climb up. I'm sorry, Hearthkeeper. You did leave it. You're never going to see it again." The flame-lake breathes its gold light up the walls. And I, Wren Astor, who has wanted out since I was old enough to want — I look at the only other person in the world who is locked in here with me, and I feel something far more dangerous than despair. I feel the start of company.