Chapter 24
Pyrok and Roan trail me across the courtyard, following my dimpled track through the crunching snow, exchanging verbal jabs I barely hear over the pattering fall.
I move up the stout stairway of the green wing, into the cool luminosity of a light orb hanging from the ornate eave, drop my bag, and crouch to gather some snow.
Use it to clean off the blood and filth that’s all but calloused to my palms, not wanting to sully Mah’s place with the lives I’ve taken.
My hands are long since clean before I shore myself enough to push up and turn the handle …
nudging the door open to the shrill tune of its creaking hinges.
Heart in my throat, I grab my bag and step into the foyer, breathing stale air only faintly sweetened by the distant smell of Mah’s lullberry scent.
Guess the walls are finally forgetting her. Something that hurts more than these fucking pins in my back.
I clear my throat and set my bag on the ground, looking around, the layout akin to the house I asked Bulder to craft Mah closer to the plains. Copied from this, of course, because I wanted it to feel like home whenever she came.
Like her real home.
I smile at the memory of her stepping through that door for the first time, casting her eyes across my wonky counterfeit.
At the memory of her growling at me when I begged to straighten the walls once my stuttering finally stopped, like getting threatened by a huggin.
Endearing, given all they’re really capable of is cuddling you to death.
She loved that house. Doesn’t change the fact that mine’s a steaming pile of dragon shit compared to this; impeccably sung.
I crouch, Rygun’s flame still roaring through my veins as I brush my hand across the chiseled patterns on the ground—a vista of dragons, flowers, and vines. A perfect ode to Mah’s soft and loving heart, etched by her well before she bound to the monster who sired me.
My smile falls as I trace the shape of a bloom cradling a Sabersythe …
Her absence is louder within these walls so scored in her na?vety. The gentle, nurturing soul who thought she could wear down Pah’s sharp edges—irrevocably drawn to him despite their moral differences. But I wonder …
Had she known the carnage their offspring would inflict on the world—myself included—would she have taken the same path? Refused his hand? Stayed here amongst these mountains she loved so much?
Lived?
I stuff the thoughts down and straighten, rest my hand against the wall, and begin wedging off my boots just as Pyrok and Roan jostle through the doorway like it’s about to close in on them—elbows out, still bickering beneath their breaths.
Finally making it through, Roan easily lifts his feet from Pyrok’s spare boots and moves past the low seater toward the kitchen counter. He begins unloading supplies from the scoop of his robe, looking more coiled than a spring. “You, ahh … think she’s taken off with the book?”
“Probably,” Pyrok mutters, blindly kicking off his boots while rooting through his basket’s contents—enough bottles of spirits to comatose an army.
He ambles to the seater and flops down, still jiggling through his options.
“She had this look in her eyes as she came down the stairs. Like she was bolting from something.”
Correct.
Even the most experienced blue bead can’t do what Raeve did in the anthe den and not cop some degree of whiplash. The fact that she held it together for so long is a fucking miracle.
One of these daes, she’ll let me see her cracks. Until then, I’ll gorge on the hitched breaths and pinched brows. The slight widening of her eyes before she shuts her features down. The heavy silence that tightens the air whenever her mind turns.
“So yes, I think she’s gone. Along with your precious book,” Pyrok continues, pops the cork on a bottle, and tosses back a swig, his next words hissed. “That’ll teach you for being such a shit thief and getting condemned.”
I stifle a sigh as Roan drudges out a teeth-clenched groan. “For the last time, I wasn’t trying to steal it. Just look at it. Something I doubt you’d appreciate since I’m not even sure you can read.”
“I can read just fine. I just don’t see the point in hinging my existence off the scrawled words of dusty old fucks who spend their downtime crunching through shards of dragon bloodstone in order to extend their gluttonous lives,” Pyrok drawls before he downs another mouthful, swallows.
“And I trust you about as much as I trust the contents of this bottle.” He closes one eye and peers down the nozzle. “Tastes like dragon piss.”
Fuck me, it’s going to be a long few daes.
“She’ll be back,” I murmur, hanging my robe on a wall hook. “With the book. She knows how important it is, given the protection it could offer from the coming falls.”
Silence stews while Roan tinkers with his mending station, nicking looks at his brother. Still needing to fire the fine-tipped prongs, prepare tinctures and balms, and sanitize his filthy hands.
All things that take time.
There’s no honor in continuing to accept Rygun’s strength now that I’m safe, but if I shut him out while I wait to be plucked and etched, I’m almost certain I’ll have to trust Pyrok to drag me up the stairs to slumber.
I look at him now playing with a ball of fire, still sipping from the bottle. One wrong word away from turning himself into a torch.
Bruised and beaten enough as it is, I move past the brothers, grab my bag, and make for the stairway, stifling Rygun’s flame and fortitude and everything else he’s been stuffing me with the moment my foot hits the top landing.
Then I slam a wall down, using almost every bit of my remaining strength to bolster it.
He roars so loud the windows shudder, filling the gorge with his rage, like a nearby volcano just blew its peak.
‘Dath doon ah,’ I convey internally, despite losing my footing and my grip on the bag, wobbling so much my shoulder barges into the wall. ‘Dath doon ah, Rygun.’
We’re okay.
Darkness pulls at the edge of my vision, fatigue hitting me like a plank of wood to the head. Fatigue that somehow trumps the painful punctures in my flesh and bone, the pins that grind every time I pull breath.
“Fucking blood-rune,” I mutter, moving down the hall and into the main suite, filled with colorful shards of light cutting through the window. The large four-poster pallet pressed against the back wall calls my name, but the moment I hit those thick tawny furs, I’ll probably slip into a coma.
Rygun roars again, his rage blasting my internal wall as I instead stagger toward the large bay window. The stone table and chairs beneath it are so ornamental, I’m nervous to break them, relieved when one of the seats accepts my weight without crumbling.
Time blurs in unison with my fading vision, shadows of a thousand snowflakes hypnotizing me into a mindless trance.
My chin strikes my chest twice before Roan limps into the room with Pyrok’s basket, now filled with mending supplies. Pyrok follows with my bag slung over his shoulder, three bottles in one arm and a mug in the other. “Moving the party in here, are we?”
I grunt, barely able to keep my eyes open as he flops my bag by the pallet, drops into the adjacent chair, and begins cluttering the table with his shit.
“You look like ass.”
Makes sense. I feel like ass.
Pyrok digs a piece of dried meat from his pocket and waves it in my face. I mine the energy to bat it away, nowhere near hungry enough to consume anything that’s been in there.
“Your loss,” he says, ripping into it with his teeth, one-handedly working to jiggle the cork from a bottle.
“Beg to differ.”
Roan spreads out his supplies, then moves to the washroom, filling a bowl with water he sets beside me—far too composed for someone who got fire-lashed this dae.
“Deal with your wounds first, Roan. You’ll need your strength if you’re going to etch me.”
He waves a strip of something brown, flat, withered, and a little furry under my nose that smells like rotten eggs and almost makes me gag, snapping me to full consciousness as effectively as a punch to the nose.
“I’ve been voiding my pain since I climbed on the back of Maell,” he says, squinting at me through his cracked spectacles.
Like he’s checking to see there’s still recognition in my eyes.
“She’s as erratic as a parchment lark. I almost passed out twice. ”
“Ungrateful bastard,” Pyrok drones through his mouthful, filling his mug. “Next time, you can catch a ride in her digestive tract.”
Roan flicks his hair from his eyes and looks back over his shoulder, the thing in his hand almost bumping against my mouth. “Honestly, it’d be more enjoyable. Perhaps if you flew sober every once in a while, you’d be able to ease her into a smoother rhythm.”
Pyrok thumps the bottle on the table, corks it, then stamps it down with his fist. “Perhaps you should take your advice, parcel it, then shove it up your shitter.”
I sigh, nudging Roan’s hand away. “If you two are going to kick off again, you can fuck off to the blue wing. I’ll find someone else to cut out the pins.”
Or just … sleep. Forget—for a moment—that I just stirred a war with the Tri-Council.
Forget the moonfalls threatening the kingdom I’d never considered ruling until I stood in Pah’s office with his head hanging from my hand.
Forget the hard truths I have to lump on Raeve and hope they don’t tip her over the bloodlusting edge. Then there’s my sister. Kyzari. Grihm—
“Eat this.” Roan shoves something in my face that looks suspiciously like a rodent dropping.
“No.”
He rolls his eyes. “Jitung berry. Partially dehydrated. It’ll give you an energy spike. Unless you want to pass out while I’m pulling out the pins. In that case, climb on the pallet and I’ll get started.”
I arch a brow.
Not the worst proposition …