9. Eradin #2
He stood and pulled a wooden box down from a shelf, his movements slower than they needed to be.
He opened the box and stared at the stamp inside for a long time.
I couldn’t get air past my teeth.
“My son should’ve lived instead of dying for a dream.” His mouth pulled tight. “He had the same look in his eyes that you do now. Determined. Scared underneath but too stubborn to show it.” He looked at me then, really looked. “You won’t listen either, will you?”
“No.”
“Figured. I’ll sign yours, but I need you to know that when you don’t come back, I’ll remember I helped you die.”
I was asking him to relive his son’s death. To watch a person who reminded him of his son walk into the same fire.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t apologize. Chase that dream if you have to, but find a way to live.”
“I will.”
He lifted the stamp with a dragon-hand seal from the box. After staring down at it longer than necessary, he slanted me a look. “You’re sure?”
“Either you do it, or I’ll find someone else.”
His grunt rang out, but he pressed it down on a small piece of parchment. He didn’t meet my eyes as he held it out to me.
“Things there hook deep,” he said in a craggy voice. “And retired mounts remember being hurt.”
I took the waiver. “I suspected as much.”
He pulled a second piece of parchment from the box and wrote on it in cramped script. “Pen locations.” He handed it over. “Don’t let them rush you during familiarization. Take your time reading the dragon they assign you, even if the handler says it’s pointless.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
I left him and strode past the aerie and around the eastern wall of the fortress, using the servants’ path to reach the courtyard in front. The lower ward hall had been built into the right side of the fortress, squat stone, with two entrances. One gilded. One not.
Elites filed through the pretty one with silk drapes framing the doorway and musicians playing something light and forgettable inside.
A peek through the entrance showed servants holding trays of wine.
Finger treats. Laughter spilled out into the courtyard where the rest of us queued in the sun, waiting for our turn at the second entrance.
I stepped up to the back of the line.
Ahead of me, a man shifted his weight, his face sunburned and weathered. A woman coming over to stand behind me clutched a waiver in both hands, her knuckles white.
Each time someone exited the hall from the commons line, a bell tolled. A counter on the wall ticked upward.
Five had signed up so far.
Prince Fenian walked past, his hunting leathers traded for dark formal wear that made his shoulders look broader. He paused mid-stride, his head turning slightly in my direction.
My pulse flew.
Something about seeing him here, in the space between elite and commons, made every instinct I owned bare its teeth. He didn’t belong in my world. I didn’t belong in his. But we kept ending up in the same places anyway.
His jaw tightened, that tell I’d seen before that meant he must be biting back words. He strode forward again, disappearing through the silk-draped doorway for the elite.
My line moved, and I stepped up until there was no one ahead and only the woman behind.
“Next,” a man called from inside a short time later.
I entered the dark, cool interior.
A clerk sat behind a desk, not looking up as I approached. He held a quill over a fresh, clean application. “Name.”
“Eradin Carver.”
“Entry type.”
“Service waiver.” I held the two slips of paper toward him.
He grunted and wrote the information down before lifting a stained short blade from the table and thrusting it my way. “The hazard writ requires a bloodmark. Slice your thumb and press it here.”
I poked my thumb and smeared a print into the square. The cut stung.
My blood soaked into the paper, spreading in a dark bloom. A puff of smoke coiled away, followed by a flash. When the smoke cleared, my bloodmark had turned blue.
“Next of kin.”
This was it. The moment when Tolross became part of my choice instead of the reason for it.
“Welmore Carver.” My father’s name came out steady. I’d made it steady.
The clerk tapped the bottom of the form. Words appeared, ink bleeding up through the parchment in a thready bruise. He spun the paper my way.
“I’m going to read this part out loud,” he said, pointing to lines on the bottom. “Pay attention.” His gaze narrowed on the paper. “Failure to complete the trial results in a wage levy until the entry cost is recovered. That means you will pay one way or the other.”
“I understand.”
“No refunds. No exceptions. Do you understand that as well?”
“Yes.”
He grunted and turned the form back his way, stamping it with a heavy thud, affixing a crown seal to the paper.
A bell tolled outside, and the tally rose to seven.
The clerk held out his hand, demonstrating. “Palm down. Trial mark.”
I didn’t flinch as he laid a rod across the back of my hand, pressing and holding it to the count of three.
Heat punched through my skin, metal-hot, the kind that kept burning after you pulled away.
The smell hit me, my own flesh cooking. I ground my teeth together hard enough my jaw creaked and thought of the look I’d find on Tolross’s face when he realized what I’d done. His pain would be worse than this.
The clerk’s face stayed bored. He could’ve watched a hundred of us bite back screams already today.
I didn’t give him mine.
When he pulled the rod away, a thin black stripe marked my hand from knuckle to wrist. The skin around it had already started to swell. The mark throbbed. I flexed my fingers and the skin pulled, the stripe catching the light. Everyone who saw this would know what I’d done.
There was no hiding now that the magic had seen me.
The clerk handed me a slate token, with a number etched deep into it. “Mount assignment: Lykor, Pen C-3. Familiarization today at dusk. The trial begins at dawn in three days. Make sure you’re in the fortress courtyard on time.”
I pocketed the token, and it clinked against the scale.
In another part of the fortress, behind silk and music, I assumed Prince Fenian was signing his name with wine in hand and no blood required.
If I made it through the commons trials, we’d be racing against each other.
A sharp, bright feeling flared in my chest.
I hoped I made it into the Scorching. Not because I thought I could win. I wasn’t that foolish. But because someone like the prince needed to see that we didn’t break quietly. That we fought even when the odds were against us from the start.
Maybe especially then.
I turned and walked back out into the sun.
The man who’d been ahead me in line leaned against the wall, staring at his marked hand. His shoulders shook.
I kept going.
If I stopped and let myself feel what I’d done, I wouldn’t make it home.