The Seat That Was Always Empty

Legend has it… every dragon hatches whole — and some spend their whole lives making room for one more. When geese fly south in their long sky-line, and one of them is too tired to keep up and drops down to rest in a field, another goose drops down with it. It doesn't carry the tired one. It can't. It just lands beside it, and stays, until they can fly again together.

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Aurum is old now. Her snout has gone gray, and her gold scales have worn soft at the edges, the deep dull gold of an old coin. She still lives in the first ruined cave on Ash Lane, the one she mended with her own claws, with a gate that doesn't lock. The other forty caves belong to the dragons who live in them, each bought a coin a month from her, every coin a share. Up the hill the Gilt Vault belongs to everyone, and every evening at dusk, in every valley, there are long tables, set by gentle robots, full of dragons sitting down together. Nobody is hungry. Nobody needs a single thing.

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So there is nothing left for Aurum to give. Every table has room. Every plate is full. But she still does the one thing she has always done. At the end of every table she sits at, she sets one more chair — a small gilt chair from the Vault, gone shabby at the corners — and nobody ever sits in it. Her granddaughter Tansy, who talks enough for six, teases her about it. "Grandma, there's room for everyone. Who's the chair for?" Aurum smiles. "Whoever comes."

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But Aurum has always felt what others feel a little too easily — a stranger's empty saddlebags, the careful smile in the portrait hall. And sitting at the long table one autumn night, with everyone laughing and the soup going round, she feels it again: something missing, the way you feel a step that isn't there in the dark. She counts the faces down the table. She counts them twice. Her grandson Cinder is not there. He is never there.

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Cinder has everything. Supper comes to his door. His room is warm. And every evening he goes down into the old workshop under his cave, where he mends clocks by lamplight, and eats his supper there, alone, at the bench, with a clock in pieces in front of him. He isn't sad, he tells her, when she asks at his door. He doesn't need anything. "It's quiet down here," he says. "Everyone up there is so loud." Then he picks up his tweezers again, politely, and the door clicks shut.

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So Aurum does what she was raised to do. She gives. She brings him a basket of the best bread at the table. A warm cloak from the Vault's oldest chest. A set of clockmaker's tools, the finest the Forges make. Cinder thanks her every time, kindly, the way you'd thank someone for something you already have three of. He eats his supper alone at the bench. The basket sits on his windowsill. The cloak hangs on the hook. Aurum walks home past the golden pond, and stops.

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On the pond, the geese have come down to rest on their way south. One of them, very small, can't keep up — it has dropped behind, on the far side, alone by the reeds. As Aurum watches, a second goose lifts off from the middle of the flock and flies, low, all the way across the water, and lands beside the small one. It doesn't do anything. It just stays. Aurum stands at the golden rim a long time. "Oh," she says. "It isn't things anymore. It's time."

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The next evening, instead of going to the long table, she walks to Cinder's door. Before she knocks, she stands on the step and asks, out loud, the way the old smelter worker taught her over burnt bread: Is it good for me? Is it good for them? Is it good for the world? Then she knocks, and when Cinder opens the door she says, "May I sit with you? I won't talk." He shrugs. She sits down on his workshop floor — the way she once sat on a floor in Slagbottom, the first floor she was ever allowed to sit on — and holds out her claw for a screwdriver.

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Her friends don't understand. "Aurum, you're the heart of the table," they say. "Everyone asks where you are." Her own daughter, Cinder's mother, takes her aside: "He's fine, Mother. He has everything. Let him be." Tansy tells her straight: "Grandma, you're missing the soup." Aurum pats Tansy's cheek, and takes her shabby gilt chair, and carries it down the road to Cinder's door, and goes in, and down the steps, and sits.

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Down in the workshop it is very quiet. A hundred clocks tick on the walls, none of them together, and through a little window the water of a pond moves in the dark. She is terrible at clocks — she drops the same spring four times — and Cinder laughs, the first time she has heard him laugh in a year, and shows her how. They don't talk much. They sit at the bench in the evenings and eat their suppers. Some nights she brings soup. Some nights he makes every clock in the room chime at once, just to see her face.

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And once Aurum has felt one missing one, she feels them everywhere. At every long table in every valley there is one seat nobody sits in — and somewhere nearby, one dragon eating alone. A retired smelter-hand who stopped coming after his wife passed on. A shy hatchling who hides under the stairs at suppertime. A tenant in one of her old caves who has paid on the first of every month for thirty years and never once said why he eats alone. Aurum tells her friends, and they start to feel them too, and one by one they get up from the loud tables and go and sit down with the quiet ones.

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Then the harvest supper comes — the great one in the Gilt Vault, every leaf in the long table, the whole valley — and Aurum decides that this year Cinder will come. She knocks early. She talks him into it. She walks him in through the open vault doors herself, and the whole hall turns. Someone shouts "Cinder came!" and the fiddlers strike up. Two hundred faces beam at him at once; someone hands him a plate, someone claps him on the back. He goes pale. He backs out through the door and runs all the way home, and bolts the workshop from the inside, and when Aurum gets there the window is dark and he won't let her in. Not that night. Not the next. She sits on his step in the cold. And from the Vault, slowly, comes Hinge, the old delivery robot — very old now, one knee squeaking — that once stood at the town gate beside its ring of keys, waiting to be asked. Nobody asked it. It carries the shabby gilt chair from the end of the harvest table, sets it down beside Cinder's door, and stands beside it, arms empty, and waits.

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Aurum walks the long way home, past the Vault's oldest edge, into the first furnace house the gardeners forgot, and sweeps the soot from the ten thousand tiles with her old rough claw: You were never alone, little one. The harvest supper is still going on behind her. Cinder's window is dark. Does Aurum bank the fire and breathe — and go back to find who is missing — or blaze ahead, back to the harvest table tonight, the heart of the party, and let Cinder be?

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