Tending

Tending the flame, it turns out, is mostly boring, and I decide on the second day that the boredom is the cruelest part of the whole arrangement. The work itself is simple. Three times between one sleep and the next I carry a long iron rod down to the flame-lake's edge and I stir the fire — not to feed it, the fire does not eat, but to keep it *moving*, because a flame that stops moving begins to think about going out, and a dragon mountain whose heart-flame goes out does not cool quietly. It wakes. Kael has explained this twice now, both times in the flat voice of someone reciting a thing he was made to memorize, and both times I have noticed that he watches my face while he says it, checking, the way you check whether a frightening thing has frightened the other person enough. It has not. I am not frightened of the mountain waking. I have spent two days in here and I have begun to suspect the mountain waking would at least be *interesting*. "You're doing it wrong," Kael says, on the third day, from his crater-edge perch. "I'm stirring fire with a stick. There is no wrong." "There is, actually. You stir it like you hate it." He comes down off the ledge — he moves differently when he forgets to perform being a king, looser, younger — and he stands beside me at the flame's edge and puts his hand over mine on the iron rod. His hand is warm the way a stone in sun is warm, warm all the way through. "The flame answers what it's tended with. Stir it angry and it burns thin and mean. Stir it —" he searches, and the search costs him something — "stir it like it matters, and it gives back light enough to live by. Three hundred years of Hearthkeepers and not one of them ever stirred it angry until you." "Three hundred years of Hearthkeepers," I say, "and not one of them ever asked you a single question, did they." Kael's hand goes still over mine. I had not entirely planned to say it. But I have been watching him for three days now — watching the way he braces before he speaks, the way he crushes the hope flat every time it surfaces, the way he recites the rules of the flame like a boy who was handed a burden and a script in the same breath and has not been allowed a word of his own since. And I know that bracing. I wore it the whole way up the road. It is the posture of a person who has decided that wanting things is simply a way of being hurt more precisely. "They tended the flame," Kael says carefully. "That was the bargain. That was all the bargain ever asked of them." "That isn't what I asked." He takes his hand off mine. He steps back. And for a moment I think I have lost him — back up to the ledge, back behind the scowl, back into three hundred years of being spoken to only about fire. But Kael of the Caldera, the last of the dragon kings, stops at the foot of his ledge, and he does not climb it. He stands there in the gold light with ash in his dark hair, and he looks at me the way you look at a door you had stopped believing was a door. "No one has asked me a question in a hundred years," he says. His voice has gone very quiet, and very young. "I had — I think I had forgotten that I was a thing that could be asked." The flame-lake moves and breathes between us. "Then we'll fix that," I say, and I am surprised by how steady it comes out, and how much I mean it. "We are both stuck on this mountain for the rest of my life, Kael, and I refuse — I *refuse* — to spend it being lonely in the same room as somebody. So here is my first question, and you are going to answer it, and then it will be your turn." I plant the iron rod and lean on it like a staff. "What is your name? Not the title. Not 'the last of the dragon kings.' The thing you were before they handed you the fire. Tell me the name a friend would have used." Kael stares at me across the flame. And slowly — the way the dawn comes up the mountain, the way a flame stirred kindly gives its light back — the scowl on his face breaks, and underneath it, for the first time, is something that has stopped bracing. He tells me his name. His real one. It is short, and ordinary, and it sounds like a boy and not a king, and when he says it out loud the heart-flame of the whole mountain leaps a little higher — brighter, and warmer, and giving back, at last, light enough to live by.