There are no female dragonlords. The line passes from father to son, and those that are not dragonkin assume it has nothing to do with mothers and daughters.
But just because their tongues do not know how to twist to call down fire and death from the sky does not mean their hearts aren't full to bursting with it.
. . .
Morgause comes into the world quiet and fierce, and already the candles reach for her. When people start asking pointed questions, she is whispered away to others. Women whose bones may not have been forged in dragonfire, but who know all too intimately the flame.
Morgana comes into the world screaming, like she is already trying to call down a dragon and is refusing to accept the fact that she can't.
This is your daughter, Uther, Vivienne thinks triumphantly. She has the blood of kings and dragons both. Do you really think your throne will stand?
She still couldn't believe the fool had thought she loved him. Did he not remember her father's name? Did he not remember how her brothers had died?
She would obey her husband's wishes and not kill Uther. She owed Gorlois that.
But if Morgana could not tame dragons, she would claim the Pendragon one for her own and burn Camelot to the ground and call it her flame. Vivienne promised her that in a whisper that scorched more than a dragon's breath.
. . .
The fire is in them from the moment they're born, and it snarls and spits and burns them from the inside out.
Balinor's mother had never made a careless movement in her life, he was sure, especially not near an open flame, but burns had always appeared at the tips of her fingers anyway, just as her face was stretched and pink even after weeks of cloudy days.
Her name had been Elaine, but no one except his father had ever called her that. They all called her by her title with careful respect, and they paled when their tongues tripped over the common version of the dragon tongue.
She never lost her temper around him, not once that he remembered, and her voice had been too quiet to dream of it being raised.
Everyone tiptoed around her all the more, because her skin was pink with dragon fire, and they were more afraid of the woman that could keep it in than they were of any amount of snarled, snappish words.
. . .
Morgana grew up running as free as a wildfire, and she didn't stop until she was penned in next to a cold grey hearth in Uther's castle.
She learned to sit quietly, more or less, but there was a dragon in her heart, and if she could not let it roar, she could at least let it breathe a bit of smoke as a warning.
. . .
Amira, upon learning she would never fly on a dragon's back, declared that she would learn to fly herself to the clouds. She joined the High Priestesses of Avalon.
The clouds spat lightning when she called them together and lifted herself up, and she laughed as it danced and thought this was far better than depending on someone else for wings.
. . .
Of course it was fire that burst from Morgana when visions were no longer enough. She shot up and stared at it in terror, not because she was afraid it would hurt her, but because she was afraid the flames that danced inside her were being used up.
. . .
Something had stolen Laudine's fire, everyone agreed. So many children, so close together, her health always so poor . . . It was no wonder she was no longer warm, even in sunlight, or that her tongue, once as lively as a dancing torch, had grown slow. There was an emptiness gaping in her that drove her husband to ever greater lengths to fill.
Perhaps that was why it took her so long to burn, those who were left whispered. The fire had to fill her up before it could claim her for its own.
. . .
Morgana let herself burn cold for a whole year of carefully constructed smiles and heroically swallowed hatred.
She thought back to the dragon and how it had roared its rage at the whole of Camelot and felt an odd longing that she put down to wishing that she could do it like that instead of playing this endless game of waiting.
But then, the dragon had died, and she didn't intend to.
. . .
Ulmire had painted mud on her face when she was six years old and declared that she would be a warrior. When she was sixteen, she painted on her grandmother's colors and rode out to her first battle.
The older she got, the hotter her fire burned, and she had no magic to vent it out with. She had no children to gift it to. It snarled and snapped within her, and she scorched her way through the wars to make Uther king, even though most thought her too old for it by then.
She'd lost count of her years when she rode out with the others at the height of the Purge. She'd never found herself wings, and the only fires she made were with flint and stone, and those poorly. There was a lifetime of dragon blood raging within her, and when it fell on the battlefield, it burned all who touched it to the very bone.
. . .
Morgana couldn't talk to Aithusa in a way they could both understand, and she couldn't order the little dragon to do anything, but she fell in love the moment she saw those wings.
It was right, somehow, in a way nothing else was anymore, so she clung to that feeling, and tried not to feel how the fire inside her was turning her to ashes, bit by bit.
. . .
There had been no dragonlords in Hunith's family for years upon years, but there was still a drop of fire in her veins.
Enough that when a child was born with golden eyes and anyone else would have sent him away to the druids for being so dangerous, that she instead held him closer and whispered with draconic force, "My son."
When he was old enough to fly on his own, he could leave, but until then he was hers, and she would burn the village down before she let someone touch her boy.
. . .
A blade forged in a dragon's breath will kill a High Priestess of the Old Religion.
It will kill a dragonlord too, and it will taste like betrayal when the steel meets blood.
It will kill the daughter of a dragonlord just as surely, but what no one knows, because no one has ever lived long enough to find out, is that the blade carries enough of the dragon's breath that when it breaks her skin, all the words she's spent her life searching for suddenly find their way to her tongue.
It was their breath that the dragons had gifted the first dragonlord, after all.
. . .
Uther killed their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, and their sons.
He would have left them alone if they had sat quietly.
But they were the daughters of dragons, and they had fire in their bones that scorched through their veins.
