2
Asta couldn’t believe how elegant the room was.
Long, silver-gray tiles glinting with flecks of mica like dragon scales covered the floors, wall to wall.
A slate-colored carpet patterned with scrolling vines marked out a sitting area by the window.
Two black leather chairs faced each other over a low, glass-topped table.
In the far corner of the room was a small kitchen area with a vase of white and red tulips on the counter.
Beside the flowers, a miniature illusion of Asta and Carmine, shimmering faintly with magic, raced in place.
The detail on the illusion was incredible.
Asta in her embroidered red suit was tucked down in the saddle; Carmine’s wings were fully extended, beating mightily, and his legs stretched out with each stride.
Any minute, Asta thought, they would leap off the edge of the counter and become airborne.
But they never did. They just ran and ran.
Gem nodded, impressed. ‘This must be how rich people live.’
Two beds with black headboards stood against the far wall. The bedding looked like it had been ironed. Asta threw down her bag and jumped on to one of the beds, face-planting in the luxurious pillows. She bounced right back up, eyes bright.
‘Gem!’
He was running his hands over the counters in the kitchen like he was thinking about buying the place. He looked up at her.
‘We’re here,’ she said in a reverent tone.
He crossed his arms, a proud smile on his face. ‘You got us here.’
Asta climbed off the bed to examine a square door mounted in the wall about eye level between the two beds. She unlatched it and swung it open. Almost before she realized what was happening, Carmine snaked his head through the opening, splaying his neck frill in satisfaction.
Asta grinned. ‘Hey, buddy!’ Carmine began his inspection. ‘Nice, huh?’
‘God, what reeks?’ Gem said.
‘Can’t handle the smell of a stable, city boy?’
‘Do we have to keep that thing open?’
‘Yes,’ Asta said. ‘I’m not leaving Carmy alone over there.’
Carmine snorted loudly at his name, a hint of smoke in the jets of his breath.
‘No fair. Two against one.’ Gem picked up his bag and set it on his bed.
‘It’s us against everyone. Isn’t that right, buddy?
’ Asta said, reaching up to tickle the feathery tuft, the color of redcurrant wine, that sprouted under Carmine’s chin.
He churred happily. ‘You like this place? All we need to do is win that prize money, and I can build us one of these to live in all the time. How about that?’
The dragon booted her shoulder playfully with his nose.
‘Okay, then you have to be a fast dragon. Can you do that? Are you so fast? Are you?’ She grabbed his curved, gleaming horns and wrestled his head back and forth.
He made a show of fighting back, though he could have tossed Asta across the room with a flick of his neck if he wanted to. ‘Yes, you are. You are so fast.’
‘You could build more than that with the prize money,’ Gem said, half to himself. ‘You could build a freaking empire.’
‘Maybe I will,’ she said. Carmine’s horns had left shiny little flakes on her palms, and she wiped them on her pant legs.
It was an unbelievable amount of money. The little purses that she and Carmine had won at their tournaments this past year had barely been enough to pay for food and lodging.
She hadn’t even been able to pay a regular crew.
Luckily, Hummer Bruce, the head of a rather infamous racing family and Asta’s unofficial mentor, had seen fit to use Asta’s pit as a training ground for whichever of his surly nieces and nephews needed some whipping into shape.
Once they got good at it, they crewed for Natalia, the star Bruce racer and Hummer’s great-niece.
Someone like Felix – who considered the Bruces the lowlifes of the racing world – would have taken treatment like that as an insult, but to Asta it felt like generosity.
It certainly wasn’t a posh arrangement, but it worked.
Hummer had brought her on as Nat’s training partner – making Asta an employee, not an official Bruce racer.
She didn’t wear their crest or get the benefit of any of their invitations to the good tournaments.
Even Torque, Asta’s crew boss and the designated wrangler of the apprentices, was on loan from Hummer.
If he was needed by the Bruces on any given weekend, Asta couldn’t race, and that was that.
Still, Asta never once complained. If it weren’t for Hummer, crass and pigheaded though he was, she wouldn’t have been able to race at all.
Asta liked Torque and he liked her, but she was done allowing him to work for her on Hummer’s dime. After this, she was going to offer him a full-time job. He could name his price. All she had to do was beat every other world-class rider who had come here dead set on beating her.
Simple.
And it did feel simple to Asta. It felt inevitable, like the prize was already hers, even though no woman had won in the Standard Western category in over fifty years.
Even though she was coming in without finishing her training at Pillar, without a sponsor or a racing house to back her.
Even though she would be taking the track at the Grand Prix in a race suit her mother had made for her when she was a teenager.
Even so, Asta knew she was going to win. She needed to.
It was perhaps the only true advantage she’d ever had over Felix.
He had a pit crew the size of a small army.
His gear was top of the line. And he was brilliant on the track.
He always had been. Everyone expected him to go home with the trophy again this year.
It was basically his birthright. The Grand Prix had been won by more Seraphins – going back six generations – than by any other racing family in the history of the tournament.
To the outside observer, it might seem like this was Felix Seraphin’s race. But Asta knew better. Felix Seraphin had every advantage a person could ask for, but he didn’t have what she had. He didn’t need to win.
‘I like your confidence,’ Gem said with something less than complete enthusiasm.
He was unfolding and refolding his clothes as he put them into the dresser.
He always got extra fussy whenever he was about to start nagging.
‘Just remember, Asta, all we really need is a sponsor for next season. Make a splash, and you’re set.
You don’t need to win the whole thing for this tournament to be a success.
’ Gem, in his capacity as her manager, had been trying to convince Asta of this fact ever since they qualified for Silverscale.
He wanted to temper her expectations, keep her grounded.
But what Gem didn’t know was that Asta didn’t have the luxury of waiting for next season.
She had spent everything she had and then some getting here.
She’d even had to borrow money from Hummer to pay for the entrance fee and the lodging.
Gem, who pestered Asta constantly over the state of her finances, had been surprised when she pulled out the wad of cash to cover the fees.
He’d questioned her about it, and Asta had snapped at him, making up some lame excuse.
‘It’s old prize money from last year that I forgot to put in the bank. Sue me. You know I suck at money.’ Asta had felt guilty about lying to her cousin, but she wasn’t about to tell him she had borrowed it from the Bruces.
It was better that he didn’t know. He didn’t need another reason to worry.
Gem had been happy when Asta told him, a few weeks after leaving Pillar, that she had gotten a job with one of the oldest racing families in the country.
But as soon as she mentioned, as casually as possible, her training partner’s name, his face had blanched.
‘Natalia Bruce. As in, those Bruces. The street racers.’ Under Hummer’s father, Old Bruce, the family had only ever been tournament racers.
Granted, even on the track they had been famous for bending the rules to the breaking point, but in street racing, there were no rules.
Hummer had made a side business out of hosting street races in Port Veracruz on the weeknights between tournaments.
Street racing wasn’t a strictly legal pastime, but it was lucrative.
Especially once Hummer got the bookies involved.
Asta had tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Yeah, those Bruces. So what?’
‘Aren’t they dangerous?’
‘Don’t be such a goober. They just say that for the headlines.’
Asta hadn’t been frightened by the reports like Gem was.
It wasn’t like street racing was that much more dangerous than track racing.
The newspapers loved to run stories about the casualties littering the streets after each race – riders crushed against walls, gored by spikes, or killed by a fall – but the body counts at tournaments could be just as high.
People apparently found whisking the dead and injured off the track in little white ambulances a tidier, more comfortable prospect than scraping them off the sidewalk in the dead of night.
As soon as the sun went down, Port Veracruz police began patrolling the streets, hunting for Hummer’s races.
Every now and then, by dumb luck, they would stumble on one and make some arrests.
Somehow, there was never enough evidence to charge the Bruces with anything, and no one spent more than a night in jail after a roundup.
The Bruce family kept racing the tournaments, but since taking to the streets, they had become outcasts among the other old racing houses, who had never cared for them in the first place.
Hummer wore their scorn as a badge of honor.
Her first week in Port Veracruz, Asta had asked around about the street races. She wanted to see one for herself. But no one seemed to know anything – or else they wouldn’t say.
In the end, it was Hummer who had found her, not the other way around. He walked up to her on the street as she was leaving Gem’s apartment building one day and just introduced himself.
Like most dragon riders, he wasn’t a tall man.
The years had hunched his athlete’s posture, and his face was blotchy from sun exposure.
He’d worn a shapeless green bucket hat and a few days of unshaven scruff.
Until he said his name, she’d thought he was a street vendor selling umbrellas or something.
It was a dumb way to get his attention, he’d told her, asking questions all over town.
But lucky for her, he’d recognized her name from that little incident at Pillar.
Asta had blushed, hot with shame, but he’d said it almost admiringly.
His niece, Natalia, needed someone to train with, someone with a little college learning.
Would she be interested? He could pay her some, but more importantly, he would teach her how to win.
So, swapping Pillar’s sprawling training grounds for the back alleys and abandoned warehouses of Port Veracruz, Asta’s training had started again.
For a change of scenery, sometimes Hummer would take them down to the piers at midnight to train, leaving tomorrow’s fishermen to wonder about the talon scratches in the wood.
Instead of Dr. Isley’s classroom lectures on the history of the sport, or Mr. Carle’s mnemonics for perfect riding posture, Asta had Hummer and his sister Tru shouting foul-mouthed instructions at her and Natalia as they flew straight off the end of the pier, over the jetty, to splash-land in the ocean.
Nat and Asta were friends almost immediately, but the competition that emerged between the two dragons bordered on animosity.
The only time Asta ever saw them play together was in the ocean.
It was hard, some nights, to convince them to come back out of the water, but as soon as they hit solid ground, Carmine and Vulture returned to their usual sniping.
Asta had started training with the Bruces over three years ago now.
Hummer Bruce was a hard man, but Asta know how much she owed him.
If he hadn’t taken a risk on her, a heartbroken kid who had tanked her one chance at a real racing career, and trained her right alongside his own niece, Asta never would have gotten to Silverscale.
In a way, Asta was glad she had borrowed the money from Hummer to pay for this tournament.
She was glad to have something that she could actually pay back.
But in order to do that, she had to win. She had to.