The Feralheart Claim

1. Eradin

CHAPTER ONE

ERADIN

The bonewailer’s keen split the air as my fingers closed around the last sprig of graymallow. I froze, half-crouched in the undergrowth, the shriek echoing off the ridge above.

Once for the gathering.

Twice for the—

It sounded again.

The hunt had begun.

My heart kicked against my rib cage. The herb beds I was supposed to be harvesting lay a quarter-clek back, safely within the cultivated borders where servants like me were permitted.

But graymallow didn’t grow in tidy rows.

It thrived here, deep in the forbidden woods, where the canopy eclipsed the sun and the undergrowth could turn hostile.

Where I had no permission to be.

The north ridge was the fortress’s throat. Hunts started there with horns, banners, and the first sweep of elite dragon wings, before it spilled down over Shaleside and swept into the forest. The queen’s castle sat higher, a pale crown above the fortress’s black stone towers.

I grabbed as much of the graymallow as I could and shoved it into my gathering bag, adding it to the silverleaf I’d already stolen for my younger brother, Tolross. Without it, he’d die, though collecting it might kill me.

The bonewailer keened again. Getting closer.

Turning, I bolted. My gathering bag slapped against my hip with each step, the herbs inside bruising.

Evidence of theft.

The forest floor was a mess of roots and fallen branches, last night’s rain made everything slick.

I kept low, my soft-soled boots quiet but my breathing too loud in my ears.

The elite didn’t care who got in the way of a hunt.

Servants learned to make themselves scarce or they learned what dragon fire felt like.

The boundary stones appeared through the trees, three pale markers that separated the cultivated gardens from the wild.

A hundred more steps and I’d be back where I belonged, where I could explain my presence without losing my skin.

Then a low, guttural sound of an animal in distress shot from the woods on my right. Pain and fury twisting together.

My feet slowed, and I came to a stop.

The echo of my mother’s voice cut through my thundering pulse. She was dead, but I still heard her voice. A creature in pain doesn’t care about your fear. It only knows its own.

She’d said that the first time I’d balked at approaching a wounded dog in the street, its leg crushed by a cart wheel, baring its teeth at anyone who came near. She’d knelt beside it, humming until it let her touch the break.

The dog had lived, and I’d perfected my mother’s song.

I turned and hurried through the woods to my right.

The trapped beast crouched in a small clearing partially hidden by bracken and trees. I saw the dragon before I understood what I was looking at. A wild one, something I’d only seen once in my life and from a great distance.

This one was smaller than the aerie dragons, maybe two-thirds their size, with stone-gray and purple scales.

A pale stripe ran down its snout, the mark of wild-born bloodlines.

Its right hind leg had been caught in a trap, the kind designed to bite deep and hold tight.

The metal teeth had punched through its scales, and dark, almost black blood pooled on the ground beneath it.

A dead goat lay nearby, a rope around its neck. The tag hanging from its ear read, PROPERTY OF THE CROWN.

Bait for the dragon.

Bait for me if I stayed here too long.

The dragon saw me and thrashed. The chain attached to the trap went taut, bolted to a boulder half the beast’s size.

Its spiked tail whipped behind it, gouging lines in the earth.

Smoke curled from its nostrils, and the spikes jutting above its eyes splintered the dim light into silver shards.

Claws as long as my forearm dug into the ground as it tried to drag itself free.

This was the hunt’s quarry, the reason for the bonewailer, the riders, and the bloodseekers that would soon dive down through the canopy. They’d free the dragon with magic. As soon as the wild one had fled, they’d unleash the bloodseekers to follow the scent trail.

And the elite would hunt.

The dragon tipped back its head and shot flames into the sky, nearly lighting the canopy aflame.

The bonewailer keened, close enough the call echoed off the ridge.

I should run away. Tolross needed the herbs as much as he needed me alive and able to work. The dead couldn’t heal anyone. Survival was simple math. This dragon was already dead even if it hadn’t been freed yet to be hunted.

I stepped back toward the woods.

The dragon released a low, rattling sound, more plea than threat.

My mother’s hands had been burned pink to the wrists after she’d spent the last of her strength on the baker’s daughter, trying to save the child from the coughing sickness. Within a week, Mother was coughing herself. Within a year, she was gone.

I’d asked her once why she helped people who couldn’t pay and who made her sick. She’d touched my cheek with her ruined hands and said, because someone has to see them.

The dragon’s gaze pinned me in place. This wasn’t the dull, tolerant stare of bonded dragons, the ones who’d learned obedience so long ago they’d forgotten what defiance felt like. This one tracked me to see if I was threat or prey.

Someone had to see it even if seeing it killed them.

I dropped my gaze to its shoulder and crept closer, angling my body sideways to make myself appear smaller. I kept my hands open, almost feeling the strike of its foreclaws on my skin. The flames that would end my life with one blast.

My mother’s song found my throat before I had the sense to stop it. Hum, breathe. Hum, breathe.

I tore a strip from the hem of my tunic, slow enough to avoid startling the beast, and swung it to the left and the right, giving it my scent. The dragon’s pupils narrowed, following each swing. Its smoke thinned.

The hunters would kill it, and they’d take their time.

I could not allow that to happen.

The dragon’s head snapped up as I got closer, and it shot cinnamon-sweet smoke from its nostrils. A warning. I kept my hands visible and my movements slow. My mother had taught me how to approach an injured beast without triggering fatal panic.

“Easy,” I whispered, the word automatic and probably useless. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

Its lips curled back from fangs bred to rip flesh from bone.

Pausing beyond its reach, I waited for it to burn me to nothing or rip me apart with its talons.

It lowered its head and whimpered.

“Aw,” I said softly. “I know it hurts. Let me help you.”

Its gaze followed me as I got within reach and passed its head that curled around to track me.

When I reached the trap, I knelt beside it. Up close, the damage made my heart sink. The trap’s teeth had crushed scales and gouged along the muscle where the beast had tried to pull free.

My hands trembled as I ran my fingertips along the mechanism. The release lever lay underneath, designed so the animal couldn’t get to it.

I could.

The dragon flinched, and its tail gouged toward me, nearly severing my head from my neck. I froze. If I spooked it now, its claws would open me from throat to pelvis with one slash.

“It’s alright,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I’m trying to help.”

It watched me, its smoke curling between us, sweet, unlike the sulfurous reek of aerie dragons.

I slid on my knees through the bloody mud until the trap’s chain lay between us. The release bar was greasy with blood and rain. I groped blindly for the catch while my other hand stayed high and empty where the dragon could see it.

The dragon’s breath heated the back of my neck in gusts, and goosebumps rippled across my skin.

My fingertips brushed the secondary spring, the one that would snap the trap tighter if I touched it the wrong way. Sweat slicked my fingers despite the cool air. If I triggered it while the dragon was this close, I’d be dead before I could blink.

“Please,” I breathed. “Please let me help.”

The dragon’s jaws snapped shut with a bone-deep crack, missing my shoulder by a hair’s breadth.

I froze, my fingers still stretched toward the release.

The dragon’s breath burst hot and rapid against my cheek, smelling of copper and cinnamon.

One more inch and those fangs would punch through my lungs.

I counted to twenty while my vision went spotty.

When its breathing steadied back to something that wasn’t quite a growl, I hooked my fingers around the release bar and wrenched.

The jaws sprang apart with a wet, ugly snap.

The dragon yanked its leg free and lunged backward, dragging itself away from me in a frantic scramble of wings and claws and spiked tail. I fell backward into the mud, my breathing ragged and my fingers numb. It was going to kill me. This was how I’d die.

It crouched a short distance away, its sides heaving. Blood ran down its leg in steady rivulets.

Wingbeats stirred the canopy. The hunters would arrive in moments.

Tolross’s healing herbs, stolen because the apothecary wouldn’t extend credit and my father and I barely made enough to feed and house us, still waited in my bag. They’d give my brother another week, maybe two.

I pulled them out.

The dragon’s eyes followed my movement as I approached it slowly, my hands outstretched. Its nostrils flared, scenting the graymallow and silverleaf.

“Hold still and I’ll heal you as best I can,” I said.

I crept past its head. Its foreleg. Slowly approaching the wound on its right hind leg.

Stooping, I slid my fingers along the intact scales above the wound.

Its hide was hot, not the coolness I was used to with elite dragons, but alive in a way that startled me.

I could feel its heartbeat through the scales.

Quick and steady, my mother would say if she was here. The wound doesn’t care if you’re scared.

The wound didn’t care that my hands were shaking either. I crushed the herbs between my palms, the way she’d taught me, releasing the oils, and pressed the clump into the torn flesh. The dragon made a low, pain-filled sound but didn’t pull away.

I worked fast. Graymallow would slow the bleeding. Silverleaf would fight infection. I had no water to make a proper poultice, so I used spit and the pressure of my palms.

This much graymallow would keep a week of Tolross’s fever-sweats at bay. The silverleaf meant ten days of him breathing without a horrible rattle in his chest. Together, they were the difference between my brother lasting until next month or not making it to the week’s end.

I pressed them into the dragon’s wound anyway.

Heat gathered under my hands, the warmth that meant my mother’s gift was waking, the thing I never named as magic because magic in a commons woman meant attention I couldn’t afford.

The bleeding slowed and stopped.

But the heat in my palms didn’t fade. It bit. The skin along the heels of my hands glowed an angry pink, as if I’d held them too close to a cookfire. I tried to make a fist. The skin cracked at the knuckles, and pain shot up my wrists. I bit the inside of my cheek to hold back my whimper.

My mother had paid this price too every time she’d used the gift. I’d watched her hands turn from pink to red to the mottled white of old scars, layer upon layer until she could barely hold onto a cup.

I’d sworn I wouldn’t use it. That I’d let the gift die with her rather than burn myself hollow.

So much for promises.

Sitting back on my heels, I sucked in a few breaths. The herbs were gone. Tolross’s supply, the thing I’d risked my life for, pressed into the wounds of a wild dragon.

The beast shifted, testing weight on its injured leg.

It curled its massive head around and chuffed in my face, a sweet-smoky smell that made me want to cough. I held it back, not daring to breathe.

Its gaze held mine, and I didn’t know how to handle that. No one looked at commons. We were hands that worked and bodies that performed tasks lords and ladies found beneath them. Problems that needed managing.

But this wild, bleeding dragon I’d just saved truly looked at me.

It dragged its gaze from mine and scrambled across the small clearing, launching skyward.

One wing didn’t catch the air quite right, but it was flying up through the canopy, branches cracking as it hit them in its ungainly flight.

I caught a final glimpse of bruised-stone scales and the pale stripe on its snout before the gray sky swallowed it whole.

Without a blood trail, the bloodseekers would find nothing.

I stood in the clearing, surrounded by torn earth and bracken and the dead goat still leaking its own blood into the soil.

The dragon was free, and I was still here, trapped in the smallness of my life.

A bitter tang rose in my throat. If only I could follow the dragon.

Up.

Out.

Gone.

But women like me didn’t fly. We survived. And I still had a brother to save.

Dragon's blood and the green-brown of stolen herbs stained my arms. Smears painted the front of my shirt, and my pants were worse, mud and blood ground into the knees.

Wingbeats thumped around me. The hunt was close now. Too close.

A shadow passed overhead, fast and huge.

I bolted into the underbrush.