11. Eradin
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ERADIN
The talon-blade buzzed against my thigh, a sound only I could hear. Everything about it felt wrong. Servants didn’t carry weapons. We carried water buckets and the ability to disappear.
I sat on my bed in the dark. Two days ago, the blacksmith had tested the talon’s edge with his thumb. Blood welled before he’d even pressed down.
His warning still rang in my ears. Mind how you hold it, or you’ll take your own hand off.
The sheath he’d given me had seen better decades, but now it was mine.
“Sharp enough for stabbing,” he’d said. “Deadly enough for slashing.”
I had no idea how to do either.
Now it lay heavy against my thigh, curved like the claw it had been, balanced differently compared to Father’s blade, the one he’d shown me how to use twice, maybe three times, back when I was young enough to think knowing how to fight meant something.
I got up and tightened the belt around my waist. The leather sat at an angle on my hips, too heavy on one side.
As I paced my room, the blade kept catching on my bed frame, the table edge, and my own elbow when I reached for something.
I’d spent my whole life learning to move without being seen.
Now every step announced itself with the tap against my leg.
This was what being armed felt like. Clumsy. Obvious. Lethal to myself before I could be lethal to anything else.
Through the wall, Tolross coughed, the wet, rattling kind that didn’t stop when you wanted it to.
I counted the seconds between breaths. Four. Five. Six.
He’d make it to seven. He always did.
Eight.
My hand tightened on the blade’s hilt until the curve bit into my palm.
Nine.
His breathing evened out, and my own breath released along with it.
Seven coins in my purse. One week of herbs at best. Nine hours until the trial.
I settled my hand on the blade’s hilt.
The talon shard buzzed under my palm, and the buzz became a pull. Not the slow creep of a vision this time. This was sharp, insistent, a hook buried in my spine. Yanking.
Its hunger had become mine. Cold stone under scales. Waiting. Soon.
The heat in my palms flared, the fine red lines glowing in the dark. I flattened my hands against my thighs, reminding myself I was here, in my room in Shaleside, not wherever the pull wanted to drag me.
It didn’t stop.
I tugged on my jacket. Out in the main room, I stuffed my feet into my boots and laced them fast. My sweep of the room took in Tolross, asleep on his bed by the stove. His journal lay open beside his pillow, charcoal smudged across one page. The curve of a wing. Another dragon drawing.
I could wake him. Tell him where I was going. Why.
My hand lifted toward him, and but I made it stop.
I wasn’t sure I could look into his brown eyes that saw too much and listen while he told me not to die for him.
I dropped my hand and left the cottage.
Shaleside was dark and quiet. People were either sleeping or wishing they were. Above, the fortress blazed like a star that had fallen and gotten stuck on the mountain’s second peak.
The castle’s windows glowed above the fortress. The crown prince was up there somewhere, sleeping the easy sleep of a man bred to win. Or he wasn’t, and the shadows I’d seen under his eyes were being carved deeper by the hour.
It made no difference to me which. I told myself that twice, which was once too many, and kept climbing.
When I reached the top and the fortress, the land leveled out.
Banners strung between the turrets snapped in the wind, silk catching moonlight.
Music sifted and swirled around me, strings and laughter. The sound of people who’d never counted coins.
A new posting on the message board announced the Race Eve Festivities in gilded script. Below it, someone had scratched half rations tomorrow into the wood.
The talon-blade tapped my thigh with every step.
A drunk stumbled past me, his formal tunic unbuttoned at the throat. The lord didn’t see me. They rarely did.
I kept my head down and slipped through the servant’s gate, taking the path weaving across the backside of the mountain.
Muffled silence ruled the retired dragon pens, the handlers gone to wherever they went when the nobles weren’t watching and the dragons were asleep. The air smelled of old straw and dragon dung, underlaid with medicine and the rot of wounds that had never quite healed.
Halfway to the tack room, a voice drifted from one of the far stalls.
Low. Male. Coming from Lykor’s pen.
My hand found the talon-blade’s hilt before my brain caught up, and that was the problem. A commons woman, armed, creeping through the pens at midnight. If anyone found me now, no story I told would matter.
I eased into the gap between the feed bins and the wall, folded myself low, and peered through a gap in the boards, into Lykor’s stall.
Moonlight fell through the high vents in gray stripes. Prince Fenian stood beside the dragon, one hand working the hinge of the dragon’s jaw in slow circles, exactly where the tension gathered.
I’d watched him soothe Aristus that way in the meadow while bonewailers circled above me. Someone had taught him this.
The old dragon leaned into his knuckles.
“They should’ve left you in peace,” the prince said.
A low rumble rose up Lykor’s throat.
“I read the lists. After everything, they’re flying you again.” The scratching stopped but started again. “I couldn’t get you pulled. I want you to know I tried.”
A prince, apologizing for failing to a dragon the kingdom had thrown away.
The quiet stretched. Lykor’s tail dragged through the sand.
“Aristus’s breathing caught again this morning. The healers say he needs to rest. They smile when they say it. He gets worse, and they keep smiling.”
I tightened my grip on the bin’s lip, the rough wood biting into the pads of my fingers. The crown prince, who could summon every healer in the realm by lifting one hand, sounded like me standing at the apothecary’s counter with three coppers when I needed five.
“Did you get worse too?” he asked the dragon. “Before? Did he notice?”
He?
“They tell me he was weak.” His hand stilled on the dragon’s jaw. “You’re the only one I’ve never asked.” A rough sound shot out of him, almost a laugh. “I used to come down here to do it. Then I’d remember that dragons don’t lie, and I’d leave.”
Lykor’s head lifted and swung toward where I hid beside the feed bins. The old dragon’s nostrils flared, and the prince turned to follow his gaze.
I’d hidden from this man before, kneeling in blackthorn with the hunters hunting me. Only ten feet and a feed bin between us now.
Lykor huffed and dropped his head back to the sand.
If the prince saw me, his face never said so. He gave the dragon’s jaw another scratch.
“Rest,” he said. “Tomorrow will ask enough of you.”
He walked out of the pen, secured the gate, and was gone.
I counted to a hundred. Then a hundred more.
When I straightened behind the bin, my knees cracked and my fingers had gone numb.
I collected my saddle and harness from the shelves and let myself into Lykor’s stall like I’d done last night and the night before.
The dragon watched me drop the saddle and approach. His breath came slow, smoke-sweet-ash, the hitch on exhale more pronounced in the quiet. I slipped closer, my boots scuffing across the sand.
His eyes tracked me, but he didn’t move.
I lifted the tack, the leather cool and stiff under my hands. My fingers knew the motions. Years of prepping dragons had taught me how to buckle, adjust, and tighten until everything sat perfect.
But this was different. I had to make it fit right for me.
The noseband still sat too tight. I loosened it, Euan’s voice in my head, Don’t let them rush you.
The runes sparked when I touched them, a nerve-jarring sensation that made my skin want to peel itself off. Lykor flinched when I buckled the throat latch, his body going rigid.
I hummed, and his breathing smoothed.
I went around to his side, placing a hand on his leg, and realized I’d never done what would follow before. I’d only practiced saddling him the two nights before. But I gave the cue I’d seen a hundred times, the one that told a dragon to drop to its belly for a rider to mount.
A commons rider tonight.
Lykor sank down, taking his time, groaning at the pain in his joints.
I brought a crate into the pen and climbed, my boots slipping on scales worn smooth by the ages. I grabbed at the saddle, at anything, hauling myself up like I was climbing a wall that could decide to move at any time.
When I finally threw my leg over and settled into the saddle, my lungs burned. My thighs screamed. The ground was so far away it looked like another realm.
Lykor’s heat radiated through my legs, his ribs rising and falling in a tide I had no control over.
My hands found the saddle horn and locked there, my knuckles whitening.
This was almost like flying, a thing I’d signed up to do at speed, through a dangerous trial with nobles betting on whether my neck would break during my first fall.
I didn’t belong here. We both knew it.
Lykor shifted his weight, testing my seat.
I tightened my grip on the saddle horn, my pulse thudding in my ears.
He didn’t buck or rear. Just lay there, tolerating me the way he’d probably did everything else this world had done to him.
I dismounted, clumsy and too fast, nearly falling on my ass when I reached the sand-strewn floor.
Lykor curved his head around and sniffed me.
“Tomorrow,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t answer. Dragons never did.
I stayed with one hand on his leg until my breathing evened out and the tug in my chest urged me toward the gate.
After removing the tack, cleaning it, and returning it to its bag, I stepped out into the dark hallway.
The talon-blade felt heavier now.
I started up the moonlit path toward the fortress. The cold bit through my jacket, sharper at this height, and my breath fogged in front of me.
Moonlight sliced through the clouds, slanting across the ground, and I came to an abrupt stop.
The wild dragon stood on the path twenty feet ahead of me, scales the color of fresh bruises, the pale stripe on its snout standing out starkly. Its eyes reflected back at me with intelligence.
My hand went to the talon-blade, and the dragon’s nostrils flared, scenting it. Scenting me.
A low sound rolled from its chest, not quite a growl.
It knew the blade had come from it, that I was carrying part of it strapped to my hip.
I took a step forward, and the dragon didn’t move.
Another step.
I was close enough now I could see the scars webbing its hide, old injuries from battles with other dragons or prey that had fought back. Close enough to smell sweet-smoke and stone, the scent that had clung to my clothes after I’d freed it from the trap.
“I could try to ride you,” I whispered. “Right now. No officials, no rules, and no one to stop me but you.”
But wild dragons were only good for the hunt, and I was a commons, only good for heavy labor. Without a saddle or harness or the restrictions placed on elite dragons, I’d be thrown, burned, or both.
The dragon watched me think it through, its pupils wide and dark.
If I sat on its back, we could fly. Just me and this creature that had come back when it didn’t have to. Freedom looked like this. Like stone-gray wings and smoke that smelled of cinnamon instead of death.
My chest ached with wanting.
The dragon huffed, a sound of agreement or impatience. Its gaze held mine, and for a breath I felt the pull, the certainty that it wanted something from me.
But wanting and having were different things.
Its muscles bunched, and it launched skyward, its wings beating hard, the downdraft nearly knocking me over. I stumbled backward, my hand flying to the talon-blade to keep it from smacking me in the side.
It circled once, a shadow blocking the stars, before swooping low over the retired dragon aerie. It continued over the distant ridge and was gone.
I pressed my hand against my pocket where the scale sat quiet now. No more pull or demand.
The dragon wanted me to follow it. But where? Every time the tug came, it felt like an invitation I didn’t know how to accept.
Maybe it was hurt worse than I’d thought and whatever I’d done in the clearing hadn’t been enough. Or maybe it wanted something I didn’t have a name for yet.
I stood there alone, the choice sharp in my chest and the tug from it fading to a dull throb before I turned and started for home. The talon-blade bumped my thigh, a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.
Tolross was still asleep when I slipped back inside our cottage.
I sat at the kitchen table in the dark, the coin purse heavy in my hand.
Four coppers. Three half-marks.
I counted them twice. Once for what they were. Once for what they’d buy. Bread for three days. Maybe four if Father stretched it. Coal if they needed heat more than food.
I set them on the table where Father would see them first thing. Where he’d know I’d thought about this. Planned for it.
Where he’d know I might not be coming back.
The herb jars on the shelf sat in a neat row. My father could follow my recipe for the tonic, though I’d made enough for the next five days.
I studied Tolross sleeping on his pallet, his chest rising and falling in the rhythm I’d memorized. I didn’t wake him. He needed rest more than I needed to voice my fear.
I touched the trial mark on the back of my hand, black and raised, a brand that said I’d signed up to die. And I ran my fingertip along the red lines on my palms, still warm from whatever the dragon had woken inside me.
Entering my room, I undressed in the dark and wearing one of Father’s old tunics, lay on top of the blankets.
The talon-blade rested beside me in its worn sheath.
I tried to imagine tomorrow. Lykor’s wings catching air. The trial blurring past. Wind that would rip me from the saddle if I wasn’t careful.
I couldn’t picture past the mounting.
My hand found the blade’s hilt and held on.
Four hours until dawn.
Then I’d find out if a commons could ride a broken dragon without dying.