There was a long-standing tradition in Firgaard: whenever a dragon was killed, its head was presented to the dragon king. It was Asha’s favorite part of a hunt. The triumphant entry, the awed spectators, and most of all her father’s look of pride.
Tonight, though, a bigger, older dragon roamed the wilds beyond the city walls and Asha was restless, itching to sink her axe into its heart.
Soon, she thought as she and Safire stepped into the arching entrance of the palace’s largest courtyard. Music drifted out like smoke. The sound of a lute whispered beneath the brassy trumpet and the quick, driving beat of the drums.
Before entering the courtyard, out of habit, Asha checked her cousin for fresh bruises and found none. Instead, Safire seemed to glow in a pale green kaftan embroidered with honeysuckle flowers.
“I thought you hated those,” Safire said, gesturing to Asha’s silk gloves. They were a foreign style. Jarek bought them almost a year ago for Asha’s seventeenth birthday.
She did hate them. They made her hands sweat and always fell down her arms, but they kept her burn hidden.
Asha forced a shrug. “They went with the kaftan.”
A kaftan that had been waiting in a lidded silver box by her bed. Yet another gift from Jarek.
“Right,” said Safire, guessing at the real reason. “Just like the boots.”
Asha looked down to her feet poking out from under her hem. In her hurry, she’d forgotten to exchange her hunting boots for her gold slippers. She swore under her breath. Too late now.
Bronze lamps blazed along the galleries of the courtyard, their colored glass drenching the dancers in glittering light. In the center, a wide basin full of water stretched across the court, its calm surface glimmering beneath the starry black sky.
Normally the galleries were boisterous and the lush low-lying sofas full as people sipped sweet tea and gossiped in luxury. Not tonight. For a celebration in honor of the heir’s return, after a month away, the galleries were abandoned and the courtyard was crammed with draksors talking behind their hands and glancing toward the empty sofas.
Safire spotted the reason first.
“Look.” She pointed to where strangely dressed guests clustered together beneath the gallery, eyeing the draksors out in the court as if they expected an ambush. The draksors beneath the open night sky wore brightly colored kaftans or fitted knee-length tunics, decorated with complicated embroidery and delicate beading. The guests beneath the gallery wore much plainer garb. Cotton sandskarves were wrapped loosely around their shoulders, and their curving blades were sheathed at their hips.
“Scrublanders.”
Enemies in the heart of the palace. In the home of the king they’d tried to kill on three separate occasions.
What was Dax thinking?
For a group of people as committed to the old ways as the scrublanders were, they seemed surprisingly willing to defy their own god and ignore the age-old law against regicide. It was one of the only ancient laws her father allowed to remain. Rooted in the myth of the goddess Iskari, who’d tried to kill the Old One, the law declared that anyone who dared take the life of the dragon king or queen was condemned to death. Which meant every scrublander who tried to assassinate Asha’s father was knowingly committing suicide the moment he acted.
Safire called her name, drawing her out of her thoughts.
“Yes?” said Asha, turning.
“Hmm?” Safire was drinking in the scene, counting every scrublander and estimating which were the most highly trained and which were the most likely to have extra weapons hiding in their clothes. It was the first thing Safire did whenever she entered a room. It was second nature. A survival instinct.
“You just called my name,” said Asha.
“No, I didn’t.”
Asha looked back through the archway and into the shadowy corridor beyond, then to the soldats standing straight as spears along the walls. There was no one else nearby.
Before Asha could question it further, a chilling hush fell over the celebration. The music ground into silence. Asha knew the reason before she even turned back.
The Iskari had been sighted.
Best get it over with.
She stepped out from under the arch and into the court.
Every pair of eyes fixed on her. Asha felt the weight of their stares like she felt the weight of her own hideous heart beating in her chest. Some as angry as sharpened daggers, others as frantic as cornered animals. Asha stared back.
One by one, gazes dropped to the floor. One by one, people parted for her, carving a silent passage straight to her father, who met her dark gaze from across the court.
At his side stood a young man dressed in gold, an almost mirror image of the dragon king: curly hair, warm brown eyes, and a hooked nose that had been broken twice. Both times were his own fault.
The young man was Dax, Asha’s older brother.
But something was wrong.
After a month in the scrublands, Dax looked far less like his usual lighthearted self: eyes full of mischief, a smile that melted girls from across the room, and fists that seemed to find fights. That boy had been replaced by someone else. Someone tired and thin and . . . muted.
Asha left Safire behind. This was as close as her cousin came to the dragon king. As the child of Lillian, the former dragon queen’s slave, and Rayan, the former dragon queen’s son, Safire’s survival was a miracle. She had been allowed to live, never mind grow up in the palace where the forbidden union had taken place. The king’s grace alone allowed her to set foot inside this courtyard, but his grace only extended so far. Safire would forever stand outside the circle of her own family.
Asha stepped up to her father’s side. She threw Dax a concerned look before the trumpeted arrival of four of her hunting slaves. They brought forward the dragon’s head, displayed on an ornate silver tray. The yellow, slitted eyes were lifeless now, and the tongue lolled out the side of its mouth. It was a mere shadow of the fierce thing it had been.
Asha’s injured hand blazed at its closeness. She gritted her teeth. To combat the pain, she imagined the head of Kozu on that platter. Which only made her long to be free of the court walls, hunting him down.
And then: someone called Asha’s name again.
She turned, searching the crowd. Everyone she made eye contact with looked away. As if looking Asha full in the face would call down dragonfire.
She listened and watched, but the caller kept silent.
Am I hearing things?
For a half a heartbeat, panic sparked inside her. Maybe her treatment had been too late. Maybe the dragonfire’s poison had already found its way to her heart. How mortifying that would be, to die of a dragon burn before her father’s entire court.
Asha shook her head. It wasn’t possible. She’d treated the burn in good time.
Maybe the stories are finally taking their toll. Poisoning me the way they poisoned my mother.