Asha nodded, tearing off another hunk of bread and dipping it into the olive oil. “This”—she pointed to the gash he was stitching—“is from his tail.”
The slave’s stitching stopped. “Did you kill him?”
She put the bread in her mouth and shook her head, thinking of the shadow in the trees. The swish of a forked tail.
This is the first time I’ve come back from a hunt empty-handed.
The fist of her left hand tightened at the thought.
When she remained silent, the slave went back to work. He started humming the tune of a song only to stop, rearrange the notes, then sing them again in a different order. He did this over and over. Like he was testing the song and it kept failing him.
Asha lay back, letting his voice distract her from the teeth-grinding pain of his needle sewing her up.
A story rose to mind, unbidden.
Rayan strode through his mother’s orange grove and stopped sharp. Someone was singing. Someone with the voice of a nightingale.
Asha shook the story away. “Can I ask you something, skral?”
The tune halted. Keeping his face tilted toward his work, he raised his eyebrows, peering up at her with just his eyes, making his forehead crinkle.
“Do you believe in the Old One?”
Deciding this only warranted half of his attention, he went back to work. “I have no use for your gods.”
“But do you think he’s real,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows to look at him better. The movement sent a sharp pain through her side and she winced. He narrowed his eyes in disapproval.
“He’s real to a lot of draksors.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
Sighing, he slid the thread out of the needle and tied off the stitching. “Why are you asking?” Gently, he ran his fingers across the scarred skin of her side, inspecting his work.
At his touch, a strange warmth bloomed in her belly.
Asha studied him in the orange glow of the lamplight. The silver collar around his throat cast shadows in the hollows of his collarbone. He was a fugitive slave whose life was forfeit. She could tell him everything if she wanted to, and it wouldn’t matter.
When she didn’t answer, he washed her blood from his fingers in the basin of water on the floor. “I believe in one god,” he said, shaking his hands dry. “Death, the Merciful.”
She sat up to face him and the linen shirt fell down over her torso, hiding her scar.
He nodded toward her wound, white linen bandages already in his hands. “I still need to wrap it.”
“Death is a thief,” she said, thinking of an old story. One about Elorma, whose true love was stolen by Death on their wedding night.
The slave took the empty tray off her lap and set it back on the floor. Asha pulled her shirt up again to reveal the freshly stitched gash in her side.
“Maybe for you,” he said as he began to bandage her, winding the strips of white around and around her rib cage. More than once, his fingers brushed against her skin. “For some of us, Death is a deliverer.”
Asha’s gaze lifted. He leaned in so close, she could feel the warmth of him. Like the heat off a fire. When he leaned in farther, to pass the linen from one hand to the other behind her back, his cheek brushed her ear.
Asha’s pulse thrummed. He paused and started to turn his face toward her. But something stopped him and his chin straightened. Asha felt him strain to keep his cheek parallel to hers as he continued wrapping, around and around, binding her up.
Asha let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
A windowless room made telling the time of day impossible. So it might have been morning when Asha woke next, or it might have been midnight. But either way, sleep fled, leaving her to stare at shelves full of scrolls in the dim light of the lantern. Her ribs ached when she tried to move, so she didn’t move for a long time. When she couldn’t take being still anymore, she carefully turned on her side and found someone sleeping on the floor by her cot.
Jarek’s slave.
Asleep, he looked like a moonflower whose petals unfurled only at night, rare and beautiful in the starlight. Asha reached down and turned up the lamp so she could better watch the fluttering shadows cast by his eyelashes. She traced the hard, bony lines of him with her eyes. His hair reminded her of the sea in Darmoor: tossed and unruly, full of waves.
She thought of Rayan watching Lillian in the orange grove, then quickly turned on her back, staring up at the ceiling, willing the thoughts in her head to scatter. When they didn’t, she pulled the collar of the shirt she wore up over her nose and mouth, breathing in. His smell was there in the linen. A salt musk that made her stomach flutter.
She quickly tugged the shirt down and turned to the shelves full of scrolls on the other side of the cot, trying to distract herself. She touched their wooden handles, running her fingers along the smooth oiled wood. They were new, freshly carved. Asha could tell by the strong smell of thuya wood.
The next thing she knew, she was sitting, fully covered by the slave’s shirt. She pulled a scroll down into her lap, ignoring the pain flaring up in her side. It was too dark to see, so she reached for the lamp, bringing it onto the cot with her and turning up the flame.
The moment she started to read was the very same moment she stopped.
It was one of the old stories. The one about the third Namsara, a man who designed the city’s aqueducts during a yearlong drought. And just like the handles, the parchment was fresh and crisp. The black ink was bright and gleaming . . . but there was something odd about the strokes. They were shaky and unsure. And some of the words were misspelled.
Asha raised her eyes to the shelf, where hundreds more scrolls were carefully piled. She pulled more down, unrolling them to discover just what she feared: more stories. Each and every one of them forbidden. Stories of the Namsaras—seven of them in total—who rose to defend their people from danger, chasing out enemies and dethroning imposter kings. Stories of the First Dragon, the companion to each Namsara and the living link between the Old One and his people.
Asha pulled scroll after scroll down to her lap, reading one, only to drop it to the floor and reach for another. This was beyond criminal. The old stories had been banished and burned long before Asha was born. Transcribing them and keeping them here was treason.
When she unrolled the next scroll, though, she didn’t drop it. Instead, her grip on the handles tightened.
“What does it say?”
Asha glanced up. The slave on the floor yawned and ran his hands through his hair. She looked from him to the wobbly handwriting scrawled across the parchment.