The cellar air was thick with old stone and the faint, persistent warmth of secrets. My slippers scuffed over crumbling steps as I descended, slippers far too fine for this dim, forgotten place. I pressed my palm to the iron ring and pulled open the nursery door. Heat brushed my face—a living warmth, not the chill dryness of coal or the sourness of lamp oil. Here, in the bowels of the palace where the council never glanced, the dragon eggs waited.
My inheritance amounted to these: shelves of delicate, speckled shells, each cradled in faded velvet, each glowing softly from within. They pulsed with color—emerald, gold, lapis blue, and one near the stairs, smaller and paler than the rest, whose glow fluttered like a dying moth’s wing. The eggs looked nothing like the old councilor’s diagrams. The real things were heartbreakingly fragile.
The Royal Dragonkeeper Guild would want me gone from here. Every egg was a risk. Outside these walls, the kingdom depended on dragons: to heat the bathhouses, to pull the great sky-carriages, to keep the forges alight. But by order of the regency, only the guild could raise and own them. My father’s last act had been to bar me from council, to leave me the title—Princess, in name—a stipend and this locked, crumbling nursery, a ceremonial legacy the council thought too dangerous to destroy and too burdensome to use.
I knelt by the little egg. Its shell was almost translucent, the warmth it gave barely more than a fever. I remembered, as a child, listening for the heartbeat of a pet mouse, feeling how fine the thread of life could be. I had never been trusted with more than a lapdog, never a dragon. If I was to use my allowance—my one scrap of agency—I could tend to this creature, hire help, or petition the council for something bolder, a sanctuary of my own making. My stomach twisted at the thought of failure. The kingdom needed something new, not another title on a ledger.
A shudder ran through the cellar. Had the council already learned of my visit? The eggs gleamed in their velvet cradles, each one a promise or a threat. I brushed dust from my knees and drew a shaky breath, the little egg’s heat seeping into my hands. Time was short. I would have to choose now, before anyone could stop me.