12. Eradin
CHAPTER TWELVE
ERADIN
I’d imagined this moment a hundred times since I signed the waiver. In none of those versions did my hands stay steady.
The kettle hissed on the stove, steam curling toward the low ceiling.
Father poured tea into three clay cups, the ones Tolross had painted with flowers two years ago when his hands didn’t shake. The liquid was pale. Too much water and not enough leaves. But it was hot, and it soothed my soul.
We sat at the table, the silence pressing down like a big rock on my chest.
Tolross’s face had gone the color of old parchment, bruises shadowing the hollows under his eyes. But he was trying to smile, his mouth pulling up at one corner, putting on a show for me.
“You look terrible,” I said.
“You look worse.”
Father’s cup rattled on the table when he set it down.
I wrapped both hands around my cup and let the heat soak into my palms. The red lines were still there, faintly visible in the early light.
Father had seen them years ago. I was sure he saw them now.
But like then, he didn’t comment. I was my mother’s daughter, with her skills, and he’d accepted that easier than I had.
Tolross reached under his blanket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, holding it out to me.
“For when you feel like giving up,” he said.
I went to him and took it. “That means I won’t be reading it.”
His brown eyes met mine, and his gaze held all the things we couldn’t speak aloud.
I nodded and tucked the poem into my pocket with the dragon scale.
He took my hand, his fingers cold and too thin around mine.
“You’re freezing,” I said.
“I’m always freezing.”
I rubbed his hand between mine, trying to push warmth into him the way I’d tried a hundred times before. Heat stirred in my palms, a useless flicker that woke for injured dragons but never for him.
“Do you remember when I was five, and I tried to climb the quarry wall?” he asked.
“You fell and broke your wrist in two places.”
“You carried me home. I was screaming the whole way, and you just kept telling me to count the steps. Count the breaths. You made me count to eight hundred before we got to the door.”
I’d made him count so he wouldn’t pass out from the pain.
“I’m counting now,” he said quietly.
My vision went hot at the edges.
“Good,” I said. “Keep doing it.”
I glanced at my father, now standing at the window with his back to us, one hand braced on the ledge, his shoulders locked.
“Keep Father out of the cold,” I whispered to Tolross.
“I will.”
“And take your tonic even when it tastes like boot leather.”
“I will.”
“And—” My voice cracked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Stay alive? I couldn’t name what we both already knew.
His lower lip trembled. “I will.”
My fingers didn’t want to open. I had to peel them away from his hand one at a time.
“I’m coming back,” I said softly.
He closed his eyes and nodded.
“I have to be at the fortress before dawn,” I said, taking in the darkness outside, light only a hint on the horizon. “I should leave.”
“Very well,” Father said, turning back from the window.
We walked to the door together.
He stopped with his hand on the latch. His shoulders rose and fell once. Twice. He gripped my arm, his callused hand both heavy and warm. His thumb found my forehead, stroking the way he had when I was small and afraid of the dark.
I still was.
His mouth opened, but the words he needed to say got stuck, the ones that meant don’t go and I can’t lose you too and your mother would never forgive me for letting this happen.
But we both knew none of those words would change anything.
His hand dropped away.
I stepped outside, closing the door behind me.
I found Silvie in front of her cottage, her dyeing supplies waiting in a small cart nearby. She wore her wrap pulled tight to keep out the chilly morning air.
Hos sat beside her, blinking my way.
Silvie opened her arms, and I stepped into them.
She smelled of vinegar and the herbs she used to fix colors. Her embrace was fiercer than I’d expected from such a frail body. My friend was stronger than she looked.
“Love you, little bird,” she said in a croaky voice.
I couldn’t answer. My throat had cinched tight.
She pulled back and cupped my face in her purple-black hands. “You hear me?”
Her fingertips brushed my cheekbone, the way my mother used to, the movement so small I almost missed it. But the ache still jerked through my chest.
“I hear you.”
Hos meowed, pawing at my boot.
I bent and scratched behind his ears, then straightened and started down the lane without looking back.
The city was waking. Smoke rose from chimneys, and the lift bell clanged in the distance, calling the morning shift down into the mines.
Old Merra hung laundry across the lane. She nodded once, her mouth pressed so thin it disappeared.
Beside the water barrel, Jalak the tinker touched two fingers to his forehead, the gesture miners used for good luck.
Across the way, Tessine pulled her daughter inside before the girl could finish pointing at the trial mark on my hand.
Cob the baker stepped from his doorway as I passed. “Grain and stars keep you,” he said the old blessing. He handed me a roll still warm from the oven.
He’d fed us rolls like this after my mother had died and we had nothing.
I passed the roll back into his hands. “For Tolross. If I don’t come back.”
His weathered face crumpled. “Eradin.”
“Please.”
He closed his fingers around the roll, and I kept walking before he could argue.
My jaw ached from clenching it. If I opened my mouth, I’d fall apart in the middle of the lane, and they’d all see it. Better to be the woman who walked to her death quietly than the one who sobbed her way there.
By the time I’d reached the top of the path, my legs quivered and the fortress loomed ahead, banners lying limply against their poles.
My legs wanted to stop. To turn around. To run back down the mountain and crawl into my bed where I could pretend I’d never been foolish enough to think I could do this. Instead, I made them keep moving. One step, then another, the talon-blade tapping against my thigh in a countdown.
They’d gathered in the fortress courtyard, seven others like me waiting in the looming dawn. I recognized the sunburned man from the sign-up line. He caught my eye and nodded. Scared but trying not to show it.
A wiry man leaned against the stone wall, studying the rest of us like livestock he was considering buying. When his flat gaze reached me, it turned hostile. I didn’t know him and didn’t care to.
A woman four or five years older than me stood alone, her eyes wide. She looked vaguely familiar with her long blonde hair, though I couldn’t place her. Her hands twisted together as she studied the ground.
Blonde hair. A few years older than me. Something about the way she held herself…
The path to the quarry road. This was the woman with the heavy bag I’d bumped into. She’d been holding books. She wasn’t holding them now.
As if she felt me watching, her head came up. Our eyes met.
Recognition flickered across her face, followed by a bright, empty smile unlike the sweet one she’d given me on the path.
She lifted her hand in a small wave, and I returned the gesture.
Four others filled in the gaps. A man about my age with red hair, his trial mark still raw.
A gray-bearded man whose hands shook so badly, he nearly dropped the cap he held in his hands.
A woman with a miner’s build met my eyes once and jerked up her chin, the gesture saying, we’re in this together, even if we’re not. Chalk dust still grayed her knuckles.
“Marda,” she said, like a name was worth spending on a stranger. “Third shift, east seam.”
The last was an older woman standing apart from us all, staring toward the path to Shaleside, her lips moving. Names. She was saying names.
I’d forget their faces the moment this began. Or I’d remember forever, depending on which of us survived.
Someone has to see them, my mother would say, so I made myself look.
The priestess left the fortress entrance and strode over to the center of the courtyard, her silver robes swishing across her bare feet.
She raised her hands, palms up. “Form a circle around me.”
We shuffled into position. The sunburned man stood to my left and the scared woman to my right, her breathing too fast.
The priestess chanted words in a language I couldn’t understand and the ground beneath my feet rumbled, the vibration clawing up through my bones.
My belly tightened, and the courtyard plunged away.
The world didn’t tear; it unraveled. Like the careful seams Mother had taught me to sew, pulled out thread by thread, except the threads were my bones and the pulling happened all at once.
My tea tried to come up, but there was nowhere for it to go in the between-space where nothing was solid, not even my body or the scream locked behind teeth that might not exist anymore.
The ground jolted through my boots all at once.
I staggered. The sunburned man dropped to his knees, coiled forward, retching. Marda clutched her belly, her face green.
I pressed my hand to my mouth and breathed through my nose until the nausea passed. Sweat slicked my palms. I locked my knees to keep them from folding.
The sun poked its head above the horizon, outlining our new location.
We stood in a stone arena carved into a mountainside, the walls rising steeply around us.
Beyond the far edge, a narrow canyon opened in a jagged scar that dropped into shadows.
The entrance to the commons trials? Another opening on my left could be an exit, assuming any of us made it through to the end.
Viewing stands had been built into the arena’s walls, already filling with well-dressed spectators. Their voices carried, full of bright chatter.
Musicians tuned instruments on a platform nearby, and servants moved through the stands with trays of drinks and food.