4. Eradin
CHAPTER FOUR
ERADIN
Late that day, I left work with dragon claw oil staining my fingers and a plan forming that would probably get me killed.
The descent path to Shaleside Village carved through three switchbacks, past the old boundary marker where the cobbles gave way to shale. The queen’s castle glowered from the highest peak above, all pale stone and glass, overlooking the ruin we commons called home.
Two alleys from my family cottage, I stopped and pulled the ties from my hair, letting it fall loose below my shoulders. I shook it out, wishing I could shake out the day along with it.
The lanes narrowed as I walked, carved into the shale centuries ago by people who’d had no choice but to make homes in the valley’s unwanted spaces.
Iron dust lined the gutters, a never-ending rust-red grit that worked its way into the seams of my boots and clothing and stayed there.
Laundry lines crisscrossed overhead, shirts and trousers and bedsheets snapping in the wind.
On clear days you could tip your head back and catch the fortress’s lower turrets through the laundry lines.
The stove smoke that hazed the air smelled of beet mash and old fat, nothing like the aerie’s coal-fed braziers.
Somewhere below, the mine lift clanged, hauling people down or ore up in the rhythm Shaleside lived by. A notice nailed by the lift listed last week’s fall-dead. By noon the names always smudged.
Three children crouched in a doorway, drawing dragon silhouettes on slate scraps. Their dragon wings were too big and the necks too short. Everyone in Shaleside knew what dragons looked like, but unless we were hired to work with them, we couldn’t get close.
A poster from the last Scorching flapped above the children’s heads, all sun-bleached and torn edges. The faded rider on the poster stared into the distance from the back of an onyx dragon, both frozen mid-flight. Both long gone.
Father said the race used to launch from the fortress’s high platforms, a drop so steep your stomach fell twice before the wind caught up. I wouldn’t know. It had been twenty-three years since the last Scorching, and my memory was only vague around the event.
I didn’t stop long to look at the poster. Stopping meant wanting, and wanting made the ground under your feet give way.
The communal water barrel sat at the intersection of three lanes, fed by a pipe that ran down from the higher district’s runoff. The water was clean enough if you didn’t think too hard about where it came from. I set my bundles on the barrel’s edge and plunged my hands into the water.
A stamped tin notice above the barrel read: RATION SCHEDULE ENFORCED. WASTE IS THEFT. THEFT IS TREASON. Someone had scratched a laughing mouth under the words, and someone else had scrubbed it off to a blur.
The cold shocked through me. I scrubbed, working under my nails, checking for blood I’d already checked for twice. My palms stung where I’d touched the wild dragon’s scales, a heat that had only recently started to fade.
After splashing my face, I dried my hands on my pants and picked up my bundles. One for us. One for Silvie.
Outside our door, I stopped and made myself breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way my mother had taught me when I was small.
The door on the cottage to the left of ours opened before I could open our own.
Silvie stepped out, a knitted wrap around her frail shoulders, her pale blue eyes sweeping across the alley.
She tucked her wrap tighter around her neck, the purple-black stains on her fingers standing out starkly in the dimming light.
She sold dyed things at the market seven days a week, and the stains would never come out.
Hos, her orange cat, wound between our ankles, purring loud enough to make his chest rattle.
I bent and scratched behind his ears, and he butted his head against my palm. Silvie called him her best friend. I called him a too-sweet menace with good timing.
“You’re late, little bird,” Silvie said, her voice gone raspy over the years, worn away by the air down here. “The wind’s got teeth today. How’s our boy?”
“Counting his breaths and my nags,” I said.
Her soft laugh bubbled up while her gaze moved over me, taking in the scratch on my forearm.
I held out one of the bundles. “For you.”
Her face creased. “Eradin, no.”
“Take it before Hos steals it.”
The cat stood on his hind legs and batted at the paper. Silvie caught the bundle before he could claw through it, her mouth pulling into a frown.
“You don’t need to feed me,” she said.
“I’m not. I’m feeding Hos. You’re just the middleman.”
She unwrapped the paper enough to see the thin slice of meat inside, then wrapped it again and held it to her chest.
“I heard him last night,” she said quietly. “Through the wall. His cough turned.”
I nodded as a dull ache spread under my skin.
“Here.” Silvie disappeared into her cottage and came back with a small jar. “Boiled onion with honey. It’ll help.”
I took it and slipped it into my pocket. “Thank you.”
She waved me off. “Just keep him warm. And yourself too. You look half-frozen.”
“I will.”
I stepped inside our three-room cottage, heeled off my boots and settled them on the mat, then hung my jacket on the peg by the door.
The first room was the largest, a kitchen and living area combined.
Curtains hung across the doorways to tiny bedrooms on the opposite side.
The whitewash Mother had used on the living area walls had thinned, but I didn’t have the heart to cover over what she’d done.
The table had been worn smooth by use and oiled enough to make the wood gleam dark gold.
A shelf ran along the far-right wall, lined with jars Mother had labeled in careful script. Thyme. Willowbark. Chamomile. Feverfew. The silverleaf and graymallow jars sat bone-dry, their glass catching the light from the kitchen window.
My mother’s paintings hung above the shelf, wildflowers in frames my father had made from scrap wood. She’d studied art once, before she fell in love with a castle guard and her family disowned her for it.
She rarely talked about her past, but she’d kept painting, small bright things that would make you stop and stare and smile.
Tolross had inherited her gift. He painted suns on clay cups and drew birds in the margins of his poems. I’d inherited her hands, the ones that knew how to coax a wound closed and a fever down, the ones that carried the thing we didn’t name.
I set the remaining bundle on the table and assessed what I had.
Barley in the clay jar, enough for two pots if I stretched it.
I poured half into our big pan and covered it with water.
Carrots in the bin, still good. An onion.
Half a loaf of bread. I could crumble some of it into the stew to thicken it.
The meat would go in first, sizzled fast so the delicious smell would fill the room.
I counted the coal in the bin by the stove. Enough for tonight and tomorrow if we were careful. Four stubby candles sat on the shelf, each one burned down to almost nothing.
Counting was the math of survival, the numbers that decided whether we ate or froze or had light to see by.
A cough rattled from beside the heat stove.
I strode over and stooped down beside my thirteen-year-old brother, Tolross, resting on his pallet, an open book lying across his frail chest. He’d been pretending to read, the way he always did when he didn’t want anyone to know he’d been sleeping.
At my touch on his shoulder, he tried to sit up, the movement too fast. A cough seized him again.
He pressed a hand to his mouth, his shoulders shaking, his breath catching and catching and not letting go.
I rubbed his arm. “Easy. Don’t fight it.”
He couldn’t answer. The cough owned him. When it finally released him, he slumped back, his face pale and slick with sweat.
I’d seen the bruises before, but they were worse now, peppering his neck and forearms.
His wrists were too thin. The tendons stood out as he turned the page of his book, looking brittle enough to snap if he twisted too hard.
Like I’d done a thousand times before, I touched his chest, willing my gift to come.
Trying to make this curse the elite saw as a blessing do something good for a change.
It had worked for a dying dragon in the forest, yet it still slept for my brother.
My mother had never explained why it answered for some and not others.
Maybe she hadn’t known either. Or maybe she’d known, and the answer was too cruel to speak aloud.
Tolross didn’t sleep in the second bedroom any longer, too tired now to walk the short distance. He hated that. His body had betrayed him, and he couldn’t do the things he used to.
He squinted at me, his mouth pulling into a smirk that didn’t quite land. “You smell like a drowned forge.”
“You smell like a poet who lost a fight with a dustbin.”
His grin widened, but his brown eyes, like mine, stayed sharp. He’d studied me while I’d studied him, noting the scratch on my arm and the too-casual voice I’d used. He saw more than I wanted him to. He always had.
I grabbed the small pillow from Father’s chair and tucked it behind my brother’s back. He suffered my help, his lips tight.
“Thanks,” he said it like a grown man would. Like me, he also hated feeling small.
I straightened and took the kettle from the top of the stove. “I’ll make you something.”
In the kitchen, I pulled the jar Silvie had given me from my pocket and set it on the table before gathering thyme, a pinch of dried chamomile, and a few shavings of willowbark. I crushed them the way Mother had taught me until they released their oils.
I poured hot water over the herbs and added a spoonful of Silvie’s onion-honey. The smell rose sharp and sweet, coating the air.
“You shouldn’t use honey on me,” he said. “It’s too expensive.”
“Silvie sent it. It’s free.”
“Nothing’s free.”
I walked over and handed him the cup. “Drink it anyway.”