Their father had to die. And Dax wouldn’t leave a task as dire as this to someone else. He would consider it his responsibility.
Yet the ancient law against regicide was unbendable. If Dax killed the king, Dax too would die. And if that happened, who would rule Firgaard?
Roa was a scrublander. No draksor would submit to her solitary rule.
Asha was the former Iskari, hated and feared by her people.
Safire was half skral and an abomination in the eyes of Firgaard.
That left . . . no one.
Dax couldn’t die. He needed to rule. But if he couldn’t die, then he couldn’t kill the king.
Which meant someone else had to.
Thirty-Nine
Asha spent the days before the weapons caravan arrived calling dragons. Torwin found her a dozen riders—mostly draksors and scrublanders, along with two skral. Asha raised an eyebrow when he brought the skral boys forward and Torwin shrugged. “You asked for riders. I found you the best.”
Asha told the old stories aloud and out of earshot, high above the tree line. She didn’t want them poisoning those in the camp, the way they poisoned her brother and her mother.
More than this, ever since the night of her binding, she’d noticed Torwin’s hands shaking. He was thinner than he had been, and there were dark half-moons under his eyes. When she asked him about it, he attributed it to exhaustion.
But Asha couldn’t shake the feeling that it was more than that.
So she called dragons alone, keeping the stories far away from Torwin and the camp, then passed the dragons off.
Torwin paired dragons to riders, showing them how to seal their links in flight. He recruited Asha’s former seamstress, the skral girl whose name was Callie. Her task was to sew coats, gloves, and skarves to protect the riders from the elements. But it was a lot of sewing, and if she was going to finish in time, she needed help.
At dusk on the third day, Asha found Torwin alone in the riders’ tent they’d erected high in the valley. He sat hunched in the light of a lamp, sewing the sleeve of a coat. It was still strange to see him without his collar. Her eyes often caught on the scars across his collarbone, hinting at where it used to rest.
But Asha did as Dax suggested. She kept her distance.
There was so much work to do and such limited time to do it in, it made avoiding Torwin easy. Despite spending the day in close proximity, they rarely spoke. And at the end of the day, when Torwin waited to walk her into camp, she shook her head and told him to go on without her. She still had work to do.
At meetings, she wedged herself between Safire and Dax. When Torwin sought her out at dinner, she fell into a conversation with Jas, who was endlessly curious and easy to talk to. When Torwin inserted himself into these conversations and it became clear that Jas valued his opinion, Asha sought out someone—anyone—else.
Sometimes, in the middle of the day, she felt him watching her. Sometimes, when she turned her back on him at dinner, she caught a glimpse of the hurt in his eyes. Like he knew what she was doing, and he was going to make it easy on her.
And why wouldn’t he? He was leaving.
Soon he stopped waiting for her. He stopped trying to sit next to her. He stopped seeking her out.
It hurt Asha’s heart.
So when no one was looking, she started watching him. From a distance, she saw his hands move with gentle reverence over dragon flanks, showing the riders how to calm their mounts and conquer their fears. He taught them various combinations of clicks that could make a dragon launch or turn or drop on command. He taught them everything he knew, until the spaces beneath his eyes grew even more hollow.
She watched him with Callie, the seamstress, as the two skral bent over her designs. Watched the way Torwin motioned with his hands, pointing out what he thought wouldn’t work or what might work better. Whenever he smiled his crooked smile at Callie, something in Asha broke a little more. She found herself comparing Callie’s smooth face to her own. The girl was pretty as a desert dawn. She was a skral, just like he was. Maybe Torwin would take Callie with him across the sea instead.
Back at camp, Callie and Torwin played music together with a handful of others. Asha didn’t dare follow them, but sometimes she lingered out of sight, sharpening her already sharp axe while she listened to the sounds of Torwin’s lute weaving with the sounds of Callie’s reed pipe and a scrublander’s hand drum, waiting for his unfinished song . . . only it never came.
If you want to keep him safe, you must keep him at a distance.
But now, after days of avoiding him, here she stood, alone with him in the riders’ tent.
Taking a deep breath, Asha crossed to the desk piled high with cut leather and carded wool. It was Callie’s desk. Her tools—knives, needles, charcoal, thread—were arranged in neat little rows. Beside the desk, on a rough-hewn chair, hung Asha’s wool mantle.
“Where’s Callie?” she asked, keeping her voice steady as she lifted the mantle and swung it over her shoulders. The walk back to camp was a cold one.
He didn’t look up from his work. “That’s the first time you’ve spoken to me in two days.”
Asha’s fingers paused on her tassels. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Asha.” He glanced up at her. The lamplight caught in his hair, making it gleam. “We both know you’re avoiding me.”
That might be true. But Asha had watched him introduce Callie to Shadow, showing her where the dragon liked to be scratched—right below the chin. She’d watched Callie linger at the tent entrance two days in a row now, waiting to walk him back to camp, and he always went with her.
“What about you?” she whispered.
He lowered the needle to his lap. “What about me?”
You’re giving up on me.
It was ridiculous, of course. She needed him to give up.
Asha tied the tassels around her throat. “Never mind.”
As she made for the tent entrance, she heard him say, “Safire’s right. You’re stubborn as a rock.”
Asha halted and looked back. Safire was talking about her? To Torwin?
That stung.
“Safire can eat sand.”
His mouth quirked up.
She shouldn’t have looked. If she hadn’t, she might have left.
But if she’d left, she wouldn’t have noticed the hunch of his thinning shoulders or the way his hands shook a little too hard as he worked. He looked wasted, there in the lamplight, with a half-sewn coat spread out across his lap and extra needles and thread on the rug beside him. He looked the way her brother had, before the revolt.
Fear gnawed at her insides.
But I’ve been so careful. Why is this happening?
Asha loosened the tassels around her throat. She stepped back into the tent, letting the mantle fall from her shoulders as she sank down next to him on the woven grass rug. Leaning across his lap, she grabbed a needle and thread, taking stock of his symptoms and trying to match them with her mother’s.
Rapid weight loss, unnatural exhaustion, tremors . . .