The Sweetest Dark

CHAPTER 20




Third letter from Rue, dated November 17, 1809


Darling girl,

Time has stolen too much from me. Time has ensured we shall never again meet face-to-face. But there are a few things more I must share with you before I Travel On.

The first is a Word.

How strange it seems to me now, but there was an era when even penning this Word would summon grievous punishment from our tribal Council. We dared not write it, we dared not speak it. We lived it only in whispers. In public locations it seemed best not even to think it, lest some Sighted human steal it from our very minds.

But the Council is gone now, all those hoary old men finally Turned to dust. I confess I find no small satisfaction in surviving them. Little difference their laws ever made to me. I was always too bold for their liking. And so I tell my friend who is my eyes and useful hands in these hard, blind years to inscribe the following letters on this page: Drákon.

That is who we are. That is what we are. And your blood, my child, ensures that no matter how many of us are gone now, done in by humans or our own foolish devices, we are not quite extinct.

Not damned quite.

I’ve hidden you well. I hid your entire line from the Council and the tribe, and of all my many notorious accomplishments—I am not so modest as to deny they are many—the secret of your life and that of your progenitors is my greatest.

They never guessed where Kit and I went, or why. They never thought beyond Europe, certainly not so far as a land of warlords and rice fields and misted mountains.

A land where dragons are worshipped instead of butchered. A place where our boy, your great-grandfather, could show his true face to the sun and fly free.

Those dead old Councilmen, those iron-fisted bastards who strangled us nigh to death with their Rules. How I wish I could gloat in their faces.

You are my final vengeance upon them, and my final grace. You hold all my hopes now, as well as my heart.

All my love,

—Rue