Wyvern’s Gold (The Ruins Of Men Book 1)

Chapter 75

Seventy-Five

Ayla

W e had to enter Saveah's house from the back door. The front was still locked tight. I rushed in first, half expecting to see the interior trashed the way Zasen's had been after the first fight. Instead, it looked just like it had when I'd left.

"Saveah?" I called out. "It's us!"

Zasen chuckled at that. "And now she yells in the house."

Ignoring him, I hurried up the hall, trying to jog on my lame leg, and quickly pulled the bookcase aside. In the little closet, a single candle in a jar was burning on the top shelf. It made a soft golden glow that showed Taris sleeping on a pile of pillows. Tamin was coloring in a book, but he looked up. Across from him, Saveah was watching me.

"Kanik?" she asked nervously.

"Fine," I promised. "It wasn't him - and the Moles are gone."

"So it's safe?" she asked.

I nodded. "They left. We ran them out."

"Good."

Saveah leaned forward to take the coloring book from Tamin, then pointed to the door. Obediently, the boy got up, but Zasen and Kanik had followed me up the hall. As soon as Tamin was out of the closet, Zasen swept him up to sit on his hip.

"Hey, kiddo," he told the boy. "Did you stay nice and quiet for your momma?"

"Yes, but I gotta pee!" Tamin whined.

"Then let's go do that," Zasen said as he carried the boy away.

Saveah chuckled, but passed Taris to me. Kanik turned me so he could snag her from my arms.

"I'll put her in her crib, Saveah," he promised.

So I offered Saveah a hand. She'd been sitting there a while, in a somewhat cramped space, so I had a feeling her legs would protest. Accepting the offer, I pulled as she stood, which made her lurch upwards, almost into my chest.

Her eyes dropped.

Her body stilled.

Then she grabbed the leather throng at my neck and pulled. "Where did you get this!" she snarled, pulling again.

"It's my sign die," I explained, trying to grab the leather above her hand.

So she yanked, and hard. The knots slipped, the leather lengthened, and then I felt pain as it snapped behind my neck. Saveah's eyes were on the ring. Pulling it off the cord, she dropped the leather and hurried into the kitchen.

"Did a Mole have this?" she demanded. "How are they getting our signets?"

"No!" I gasped. "That was my mother's ring."

But I was chasing my sign die as it rolled across the floor. That thing meant so much to me. It was proof I was a Dragon. I couldn't lose it. I needed that!

Saveah gasped in a way that sounded more like choking. "Where the fuck did you get this!" she screamed, rage tearing through her voice.

"Saveah!" Zasen said, rushing into the room.

"What's going on?" Kanik asked, emerging from the other side of the house.

So she thrust my ring out. "It's the Serpent! It's a fucking signet. How did the Moles get it?!"

"That's my mother's ring," I insisted, clutching my Phoenix die tightly to my chest. "I wore it here!"

"That's what's been on your finger?" Zasen asked as he moved towards Saveah to see it.

She showed him the flat side. It was a small thing, barely big enough to make out any more than a little groove shaped like an S in the middle. But Zasen looked closely. He stared in silence, and then turned to press it onto the bar of soap beside the sink.

At the same time, Kanik was lighting the lanterns, adding light to the darkened house. Zasen simply lifted the soap and moved it to the end of the counter where a band of light could shine down on it.

"That's definitely a sign," Zasen breathed. "This is an old-style signet ring," he said, tilting the soap so Saveah could see.

"They stopped making those a long time ago," Kanik said.

"My father had one," Zasen told him. "When he was young was when they were phasing them out."

"It's just a ring!" I insisted.

"No," Saveah said, her voice determined. "This is not just a ring, Ayla. It's an old form of how Dragons used to use our signs!"

"It's not from a Dragon," I assured them, reaching for my mother's ring in Zasen's hand, but Saveah had more to say.

"Then where did your mother get it? Why does she have Dragon jewelry?" And then her voice turned fierce. "And why does she have my mother's ring!"

"I don't know," I admitted. "My mother always wore it on a string around her neck," I explained. "When she died, my father kept her things. Each of us - her children - was allowed to pick two items when we turned twenty. I picked that because I remembered how much she loved it."

"She loved my mother's ring?!" Saveah screeched.

Zasen clasped her shoulder, trying to calm her down, but his eyes were on me. "Ayla, this is a Dragon ring."

"No, it was my mother's," I assured him even as Saveah kept going.

"It was my mother's first!" She grabbed the small gold ring and clenched it tightly in her fist. "She was killed by Moles when I was just a baby. We never found her body! One day she was telling me stories, and that night she was just gone! Don't you get it? They stole this. They took it the way they take our people! This ring is still registered to Tiesha the Serpent! It's hers, Ayla. Hers! Not yours!"

But I felt like I couldn't breathe. My ears wanted to ring, but instead they were muffled, like there was too much pressure in my head. One thing stood out in all of that, and I shook my head in disbelief, staring at Saveah with wide eyes and my mouth hanging open.

"Tiesha?" I asked.

"That's my mother's name," Saveah snapped.

"Mine too," I breathed as my legs began to feel weak. "Tiesha Ross, married to Thadius Ross."

It wasn't a normal name. It wasn't a common one. My mother had worn that ring her entire life, refusing to give it up. I remembered it as a pendant, hanging from a cheap piece of twine around her neck, and she had never taken it off.

"Oh, shit," Kanik breathed.

I watched as Saveah's face changed to match mine. She shook her head, but for me, so many pieces were falling into place. As the tidbits of memories slammed into me, my skin went numb. My legs buckled. The pain in my hip only added to all of it.

I dropped, crashing to my rump on the floor, but I didn't even care. The tailless woman in the street had been dragged by a Mole who said he was going to save her. The women in quarantine had looked so different. One even had black hair! They'd never been allowed out.

How many people had lost loved ones to the Moles? But it wasn't just the tailed bodies they took. The guys had said that sometimes tailless women disappeared too. They were just gone, presumed dead the same way the men were.

But they weren't dead. That wasn't what the Moles were doing with them. All those stories my mother had told me growing up? They hadn't been about Heaven. They'd been about here. About a magical and amazing place called Lora, except that had been my childish brain trying to interpret her strange - Vestrian - accent on the word.

Lorsa. Lora.

"They're taking women," I breathed. "My mother was a Dragon?"

"Oh, shit," Saveah said, dropping her eyes back to the ring. "Tiesha was your mother's name?"

I nodded. "And she was not allowed to be with the other women. They said the Devil had taken her, and she wouldn't be allowed out of quarantine until she pushed off his influence."

"Did that happen often?" Zasen asked. "Ayla, did women ever come out of quarantine?"

I shook my head. "Rarely. I only remember one, and she was just a girl when she went in, or so they said. The priest said she was cured on her twentieth birthday."

"But," Saveah pressed, "Tiesha? Ayla, this is important. Your mother's name was Tiesha? Not something similar? It was that? Exactly that?"

"Yes," I breathed. "They always said her madness wouldn't pass to me, but that's because I'd never been to the surface. That is why the name of this town was so familiar! I remembered it wrong! I'd thought she'd called it Lora, but I was just a baby back then. Lorsa! The stories she told me about a place where we could one day be happy? It was here, Zasen! Right here!"

"Oh, fuck," he breathed. "Your mother was a Dragon."

My mind was still stuck on the memory of my mother, though. She'd had my older brother while in quarantine. Then me. Then two more children. She'd died in there, bleeding to death after her last child. It had all been normal in the compound, the sort of thing we took for granted, but what about those other women? What about the one in the cell beside her with the jet-black hair? What about Callah's mother? Or Tobias's?

My own mother's hair had been the darkest gold I'd ever seen, or so I'd thought. All of the Righteous were blonde. All of the Righteous had blue or grey eyes. The women in quarantine hadn't.

That was why my mother's funeral had been private. By blaming the Devil, they'd made the rest of the community scared of getting close. By talking about their madness as if contagious, they had ensured the secrecy of what they were doing, but how did they explain it away? How had I not known? Why hadn't I even suspected?

Because the Moles had lied. They'd told us one thing and then had been doing something different where the women wouldn't be able to find out. They'd kept us ignorant, beating us until we followed their traditions, and punishing anyone who dared ask questions.

They. Had. Lied.

About all of it. About God, about the Devil, about why we were even down there! My entire life had been built from lies, and I hadn't suspected a thing. None of the women had! Not even when our own mothers were part of that lie! Not even when they tried to tell us the way mine had!

"Zasen," I said, lifting my eyes to look at him, Kanik, and Saveah in turn. "You know how you wanted to know everything about the compound?"

"Ayla, it's okay," he said.

I just swallowed, the weight of this realization pressing on me so hard. "I know more than I realized. I know what they're doing. They aren't just taking Dragons to eat. They're taking Dragon women to breed! They're stealing from the surface so they never have to come aboveground and lose their power over us. Over the women!"

"And our mother?" Saveah asked timidly, her fingers gripping the ring too tight.

"She had four children," I said, refusing to let my grief into my voice. "I was the second. The fifth killed her. When my father visited, she screamed. She always screamed."

"Shit..." Kanik breathed. "Because sex hurts."

"He raped her?" Saveah asked.

I nodded. "Yes. He said it was her duty, and I didn't know any better. I sat in the hall, listening to her scream, only knowing she was going to have another baby and I'd have to leave."

"So I have three more siblings?" Saveah asked.

"Two boys. Two girls," I said. "My brother is older, then me, then another brother, and our sister was last. She looks like our mother."

Saveah reached out to grab the edge of the counter. "And Mom's gone?"

I nodded again. "I was at the internment. The dead are composted so we can grow fungus for meals."

"Which means you eat our women too, in a sick way," Zasen grumbled.

"No," Saveah said, waving that off. "Do not put that on my sister!"

Those words made me look up. Saveah met my eyes and smiled. For a long moment, the pair of us simply looked at each other, letting the weight of that sink in.

I had a big sister. This woman was my friend, and now she was even more. She was my sister - well, half-sister. All this time, she'd been helping me learn how to exist in this new and amazing world. She'd been right here, just across the street, and she was my family .

Callah and Meri had been my only family. I wasn't even allowed to spend time with my little sister. Probably because the Moles hadn't wanted us to trade stories of our mother. If they kept the children isolated from each other, surrounded by nothing but the lessons of God and the evils of the surface, we'd never hear anything to make us wonder. To make us doubt what they were doing.

Because they had lied .

"Sister?" I finally said.

Saveah nodded, pushing herself away from the counter, and crossed the space to kneel before me. "Here. Keep the ring. I have her sign die, so you deserve this, Ayla. Sisters, but this means I get to be the nosey one who butts into your business and worries about keeping you safe, ok?"

"Sisters..." I could feel my eyes stinging as she pushed my mother's ring into my palm.

I let my fingers wrap around the metal, then tossed my arms around her neck and hugged. Maybe I didn't have the words to make her understand, but the gesture would be enough. Even better, Saveah hugged me back.