The Last Loaf of Aldenmar

She did not finish the word.

The wyvern closed its golden eye, slowly, the way a person closes their eyes when they have been waiting a long time to be allowed to rest.

“How,” Ysolde whispered. “How do you know that.”

“Eat the bread, Ysolde.”

“How do you—”

“Eat the bread. Please.”

She had never heard a creature say please before. She had not been sure creatures could.

She did not eat the bread. She broke it instead. Half for her. Half for him. The loaf came apart in her hands with a soft cracking sound, releasing one last breath of caraway into the cold.

She held his half out across the flagstone.

He did not take it. He could not lift his head far enough.

So she crawled to him, on her knees, across the freezing stone, and she held the bread to his mouth the way you hold water to a dying person. His breath fogged her wrist. His teeth were as long as her forearm. He took the bread from her palm with a tenderness that made her sob once, a single dry sound that bounced off the chapel walls and came back wrong.

“I knew you before you had a name,” he said. “I knew you when you were still inside her.”

The cold went out of Ysolde’s body. Something else came in to replace it. She did not have a word for what.

“Who,” she said. “Who are you. Tell me who you are.”

The wyvern was quiet for a long time. The bird’s nest in the rafters, the same one she had noticed when she first stepped into the chapel, lost a small clump of snow from its rim. It fell to the floor between them without a sound.

“Your mother had a brother,” he said. “She had a brother no one was permitted to speak of.”

Ysolde began to shake her head. She did not stop shaking it.

“They told her he died in the mountains. They told her he was taken by a wyvern.”

“Don’t.”

“They lied to her. About the first part. The second part is true. We do not always die when we are taken. Sometimes we are kept. Sometimes, after a long while, we become.”

The wound along his ribs had stopped steaming. The blood was slowing.

“I came down the mountain to see you,” he said. “Once. I wanted to see you once. I am sorry it had to be the worst night.”

Ysolde put her forehead against the cold scales of his throat. He was already going. She could feel the going of him, the way you feel a fire stop being a fire and start being only warmth.

“Stay,” she said. “Stay. Stay. Stay.”

He did not stay.

When the soldiers found her at dawn, the loaf was gone, the wyvern was gone, and the princess of Aldenmar was sitting in the moonlight that was no longer moonlight, holding a single grey scale in her raw red hands.

She would not let them take it from her. Not then. Not for the rest of her long, strange life.

What does it mean to be recognized, finally, by the only thing the world told you to fear?