4. Eradin #2
He took slow sips that made his throat work. He tried to keep the cup steady but couldn’t. I hooked my finger through the handle with him. When he’d finished half, he set the cup on the small table nearby and reached under his book, pulling out a folded scrap of paper.
“I wrote this earlier today.” His voice had gone shy, the way it did when he showed me his work.
He unfolded the paper and read.
Today I put the sun in my pocket
to spend when the weather forgets me.
I counted how many breaths fit in a laugh:
seven, if you do it right.
I wrote my name on the wind
and it answered with the scent of flowers and herbs.
If the road is short, I’ll walk it loud,
boots like drums, heart like dragon fire.
And when the dark creeps in, I’ll lean back
and borrow your hum for my light.
To hide my tears, I fussed with a wrinkle in his bedding, smoothing it flat.
“It’s good,” I said.
“You’re not looking at me.”
“I’m looking at your terrible bedding arrangement.”
He snorted and held the poem out to me. “Keep it.”
“It’s yours.”
“I’m giving it to you.”
I took it and folded it carefully, tucking it on the narrow ledge above the stove where we kept things that mattered.
The front door opened, and Father entered, hunched under the weight of the day. The iron stink of the mines rode along with him, and even though he would’ve washed in the village square, gray dust still lingered on his face, hands, and clothing.
His pass token clinked as he hung it on a peg.
His gaze shot to Tolross and the tight lines by his mouth loosened. “How’s my boy?”
“Still breathing,” Tolross said. “Still annoying Eradin.”
Father’s mouth pulled into a smile, and he crossed to the basin. I’d set the water to warm earlier, and he scrubbed his hands and face in silence. Clean skin showed in pale stripes where his goggles had sat until he washed the dirt away.
Entering his bedroom, he tucked the curtain closed and changed into a clean shirt and pants. After shaking his work clothes outside, he hung them on the hook by the door to wear again tomorrow.
His gaze flicked to the herb shelf and then quickly away.
I continued preparing our meal. After adding some herbs, I tossed in a pinch of salt. The smell filled the room and made it feel like we had more than we did.
Father asked me about work, and I gave him the safe version. Heartsbrim was fussy. Lady Severine wanted shine. I didn’t mention the hunt or the trap or the wild dragon whose blood I’d scrubbed from underneath my nails.
I didn’t mention the prince either, or the way he’d taken the hunt in a different direction and stepped in when Overseer Nuant would’ve disciplined me.
Protection from people like the prince always came with strings. My mother had taught me that the same way she’d taught me to use herbs. An elite didn’t intervene without reason.
But his jaw had been tight when Nuant called me “this one.”
And the look on his face when I’d challenged him about the hatchling, when he’d caught himself, kept surfacing in my mind when I didn’t want it to.
He’d looked lost.
I couldn’t let it matter.
Kindness to his dragon didn’t mean kindness to anything else. The prince could just be good at maintaining his tools. What he felt or didn’t feel didn’t change the numbers. Tolross’s breathing. The empty jars. Almost no food in the kitchen.
That was the only math that mattered.
“You’re humming,” Tolross said. “Are you trying to call in all the feral cats or thinking about Daveed three lanes over?”
“I’m not interested in Daveed.” Though I had been at one time. Enough to share kisses and fumbles in the dark that had satisfied him but left me craving something he wasn’t capable of giving.
“You should be,” Tolross said. “He has a good job in the mine. He’ll watch out for you when I’m—” His words were captured by the rattling cough that shook his entire frame.
I rushed over and rubbed his back. “Take a slow breath in. Steady breath out. Again. You’ll be alright.”
But he wouldn’t.
Not without the herbs I’d wasted on a wild dragon.
Outside our cottage, someone shouted, “The race. The race!”
“You want to die?” a man asked as he strode past our open window.
“I’m dying already,” a woman said. “We all are.”
“There’s the truth now isn’t it?”
Father frowned and rose to shut the window.
“They’d be fools to enter the Scorching,” he said as he retook his seat.
Would they?
I pushed the words aside, not wanting to voice them and give hope a mouth I couldn’t feed. Hope ate what it was given and always demanded more.
The Scorching’s prize was a wish granted by the Oracle. Healing, wealth, land, or even a way to escape Shaleside. If I won, I could heal my brother. He’d have years instead of weeks. The thought unfurled its wings inside my chest and took flight before I could stop it.
I clamped down on my excitement. Commons didn’t win the Scorching. We didn’t have dragons to ride, and we died before the first trial finished.
Wanting things I couldn’t have would break me from the inside out.
I ladled stew into bowls and added hunks of bread, setting two on the table and bringing the third over to my brother, topping it with the thickest slice of the remaining bread.
Father and I sat at the table and ate. When we’d finished, he took our bowls to the sink. After pouring the last three servings of stew into clean containers for our meals tomorrow, he washed everything, leaving the dishes on a cloth beside the basin to dry.
He dragged his chair closer to the stove and smoothed Tolross’s hair from his face. My brother leaned into the touch the way he used to when he was small. Father’s hand trembled. He steadied it and kept stroking.
I looked away before the burning in my throat could turn into something I couldn’t swallow back.
While Tolross wrote in his journal, Father mended a tunic with tired stitches I’d redo later when he wasn’t looking.
In no time, my brother was nodding off. Rising, I tucked the blankets up around his shoulders. I hummed my mother’s tune.
“Borrowing it,” Tolross whispered, half-asleep.
“It’s always been yours.”
I stayed beside him until his breathing evened out, then settled again in my chair with some of my own mending.
My brother’s cough hit an hour later, wet and tearing. It ripped through the quiet like something breaking. Tolross sat up fast, his hands scrabbling at the blanket. I was there before he could panic, rubbing his back, the cup with tonic in my other hand.
“Breathe,” I said. Please breathe.
He couldn’t. The cough kept dragging him under, shaking him until he folded in half. When it finally let go, he spat into a cloth. Pink stained the fabric.
Mother’s cough had started with pink too. By the end it had gone red, then nearly black. She’d drowned in it while I held her hand and couldn’t do anything but watch.
Father stood in the doorway to his bedroom, his hands hanging empty at his sides. The helplessness on his face was its own kind of terror.
He came over to join us, his movements slow, a man aged too fast walking through water. He put his hand over Tolross’s, the one still clutching the cloth.
“It’s getting worse,” he whispered.
I nodded because my throat would choke on the word.
A castle guard, he’d been trained to protect. Now he spent his days underground breaking his body for coins that weren’t enough, while his son bled out on the surface.
“We’ll find a way,” he said.
He couldn’t fix this and neither could I. We were drowning together and calling it staying afloat.
I made Tolross drink the rest of the tonic and waited until he’d fallen asleep before leaving his side. In my bedroom, I pulled my coin purse from the drawer and emptied it into my palm.
Three coppers and a dull half-mark.
Not enough.
Never enough.
Tiptoeing back into the living area, I tucked Tolross’s poem into my pocket and sat in my chair by the stove. I counted each rise and fall of my little brother’s chest until dawn started graying the sky.
By the first lift bell, Father had left for work, and I’d chosen the worst idea. When the midday break bell rang, I’d go back into the elite woods. I’d take what Tolross needed, and I’d do it without pausing to help anyone else.
If they caught me this time, there’d be no prince to turn the hunt away.
But Tolross was coughing up pink, and the apothecary wouldn’t extend credit, and we were out of options.
I pulled on my boots in the early-morning twilight and secured my gathering knife and bag to my belt.
After refilling Tolross’s water and placing his lunch within reach, I slipped out the front door.
The air bit cold enough to sting, and somewhere above, beyond the laundry lines and the smoke, the fortress’s bonewailer sat silent.
For now.