Lillian fled.
Rayan pursued, trying to explain: he hadn’t meant to find her that day beneath the blossoms. He hadn’t meant to return every day since. He only liked to watch her dance, to hear her sing. The sight of her was like a still pool. Like a calm and soothing place.
Lillian stood with her back against the wall, trembling and wide-eyed, refusing to look him in the face. She fell to her knees, begging. It confused Rayan, who kept telling her to rise.
And then, all at once, he understood.
She thought he’d come to take her against her will. The way a stallion takes a mare.
The thought struck like a blow.
This time, it was Rayan who fled.
When Lillian looked up, she found herself alone. She picked herself up from the marble floor of her mistress’s salon. She looked and looked for the son of the dragon queen—but all trace of him was gone.
The next morning, Lillian woke to a bouquet of orange blossoms—delicate white petals in the shape of a star—and a note that said, I’m sorry.
Lillian returned to the orange grove. She found Rayan waiting, his back to her, looking up into the dark green boughs above. She could have left right then. He never would have known.
But she didn’t.
Lillian said the name of the second son of the dragon queen, and Rayan turned. His face changed at the sight of her, filling with light. When he stepped toward her, she didn’t run. She let him look. And as he looked, Lillian reached to touch his hair, his cheek, his throat.
After that day, their eyes met across courtyards. In dark and narrow halls, their hands brushed. Beneath the cover of night, in secret gardens and forgotten alcoves and tucked-away terraces, Lillian and Rayan gave themselves to each other.
It wasn’t long before a child grew within her. But such a thing was not permitted for a queen’s slave.
Betrayed by a fellow skral, Lillian came before her mistress, begging for mercy. When Rayan found out, he was beyond the city walls with his stallion. He raced back through the narrow, cobbled streets. He ran through the palace corridors. He burst into his mother’s throne room.
“I love her,” Rayan confessed. “I intend to marry her.”
Perhaps it was his youth. Or perhaps it was the foolishness of love.
His mother laughed in his face.
Rayan tried to defend himself. What he felt for Lillian was not infatuation. It wasn’t even love—it was something more. Love happened between a man and his wife. But the day he found Lillian in the orange grove, Rayan felt like the First Namsara laying eyes on his hika—his sacred mate, his holy match, fashioned for him by the Old One.
Lillian was his hika, Rayan declared.
His mother told Rayan to get out of her sight.
The dragon queen waited for the baby to be born, but no longer. She dragged her slave to the heart of the city and burned her alive in the public square while her son watched, held back by soldats, helpless to stop it.
Three days later, Rayan took his own life. He left behind a wailing baby girl. A girl who bore the name her mother gave her: Safire.
Three days after that, the queen was found dead in her bed. Some say she died of shame. Others say she died of grief. But whatever killed her isn’t the point. The point is this:
The son of a dragon queen dared to love a slave, and it did not end well for anyone.
Seven
Asha took the fastest route to the north gate: through the new quarter, past the temple. She moved quickly through the narrow streets. After Kozu’s attack, when this quarter burned for three days straight, her father ordered it rebuilt. The effort took almost six years and the labor of thousands of slaves.
Now, as Asha walked, a sea of green surrounded her. Green, the color of renewal. Slaves painted the walls green as a tribute to those who’d died in the flames.
The streets were no wider than a donkey cart, and while she was nowhere near the city’s largest market, merchants’ stalls clustered along the walls. Mountains of saffron, anise, and paprika rose out of rough canvas bags. The pungent smell of leather wafted from sandal stalls. Brightly colored sabra silk rippled in the breeze.
At the end of it all the white walls of the temple stretched toward a blue sky. Asha was halfway to it when a woman stepped in front of her and fell to her knees, blocking her way. The tang of iron hung around her, and from the way soot gathered in the creases of her skin and the edges of her fingernails, Asha guessed she was a blacksmith.
“I-Iskari.” Her head bowed low. Thick, blackened hands trembled as they clutched a long bundle of dyed cloth to her chest. “Th-these are for you.”
Slaves running errands for their masters slowed all around her. Asha felt their watching eyes. The blacksmith kneeling in the middle of the street drew too much attention.
“Get up.”
The blacksmith shook her head and raised her hands higher.
“Please take them.”
Asha glanced from the top of the blacksmith’s head to the shape of the long bundle wrapped in soot-smudged linen and secured with rope. A familiar shape. The hair on the back of her neck rose.
Asha took the bundle, burned hand and all. The moment the weight of it sank into her palms, she knew exactly what lay within.
“I worked through the night and finished at dawn,” the blacksmith said. “The Old One himself told me how to fashion them.”
Asha went rigid. She looked to the doorways and second-story terraces on the walls around them. When her gaze fell on any watchers, they withdrew behind teal or yellow curtains or wooden lattices.
Asha pulled the bundle close to her chest. “Did anyone hear you forge them?”
The blacksmith kept her eyes on the cobbles. “I often work through the night, Iskari. If they heard, it would not seem unusual.”
“Don’t speak of this to anyone.”
Without raising her eyes, the blacksmith nodded. Stepping around her, Asha left the woman kneeling behind her and clutched the bundle tight all the way to the gates.
The soldats at the gate didn’t give her trouble, but Asha heard their grumbled words as they unlocked the heavy iron door.
Where were her slaves? they wondered. And hadn’t she just returned from a hunt?
The Iskari always hunted with an entourage of slaves. Today, though, she was alone and heavily armored, with her hunting axe at her hip. Going into the Rift on her own, merely a day after her return, sparked suspicion.
They may have wondered where she was going, but the soldats didn’t stop her. Because Asha was the Iskari.
That wouldn’t keep the news from reaching Jarek, though.
Let it. Asha hardened against the thought of him as she moved deeper into the trees, following the hunting paths. When I return with Kozu’s head, Jarek will no longer be my concern.