2. Eradin
CHAPTER TWO
ERADIN
If I didn’t get rid of the dragon’s scent, the bonewailers would track me.
A stream cut through the forest a short distance from the meadow, fast-moving and frigid with snowmelt. I raced to it and fell to my knees in the water.
The cold hit like a fist. My bones ached right away, and my fingers went clumsy while I scraped at blood that had already started to dry in the creases of my palms. The water was so cold it burned, and I couldn’t tell if I was shaking from fear or freezing or both.
I scrubbed my hands, arms, and clothing, the muddy blood spiraling downstream.
Most of it came off. Only dark crescents under my nails and a few clothing stains remained.
The sweet-smoke of the dragon’s breath still clung to me, though. I scooped a double handful of black mud from the bank and smeared it over my forearms, my throat, and the front of my tunic. The stink of wet rot crawled up my nose. Better rot than wild-smoke. Better anything than wild-smoke.
Laughter and the furious rush of dragon wings rang out as the hunters dropped down, aiming for the clearing.
The forest’s edge was too far away. I’d never make it back without being seen.
A thicket of blackthorn grew along the stream’s far bank, dense enough to hide in. I rose and forced myself into the tangle, ignoring the thorns raking my clothing and skin. Finding a spot where I could crouch, I focused on breathing quietly.
A thorn pressed into my side with each breath, but I couldn’t shift without rustling. I couldn’t swallow the panic climbing my throat.
I kept picturing how Tolross had looked this morning, his lips tinged blue. If they caught me, who would steal herbs for him? My brother would die because I’d saved a dragon. Father may never know what happened to me.
The hunting party came into view through the canopy, five riders on sleek dragons with polished scales in black and ruby, the distinctive colors of elite bonded dragons. Above them, bloodseekers strained against their leashes, their feral keening biting through my bones.
Shit. These weren’t just any old riders.
The Queen’s Council. Lord Francis Holmen with his sharp gaze and gray hair.
Lady Gabriella Chambers, dressed in pants and an ornate tunic.
And Lord Ulrich Andra, a foppish man with an equally sharp gaze, his blond hair gleaming in the sunlight.
Another lady rode with him, but I didn’t know her name.
No queen among them, but I’d heard she didn’t enjoy bloodsports. Rather ironic considering the laws she made and their impact on commons like me.
My gaze caught on the final rider mounted on a dragon as black as a dark night with silver-star undertones. Only one person possessed a dragon that stunning. I’d seen the crown prince before, though from a distance. Everyone working at the aerie had.
Prince Fenian Balmaris Lancifer. The kingdom’s golden son and its most celebrated rider.
Up close, he was cruelly gorgeous in the way a weapon was.
Bred to be lethal and for display. Tall and broad-shouldered, and with ink-black hair shoved back from his face, he moved with his dragon like they shared the same breath.
His kind of handsome made people stop and stare. It opened doors and bent wills.
My belly tightened.
I hated how beauty could do that even when you knew what it concealed. My body didn’t care that he hunted for sport. It only knew he was a pretty, dangerous thing.
The party landed their dragons in the meadow and dismounted, their voices rising in confusion.
Lady Chambers strode over to where the dragon had been pinned to the ground. She studied the trap before her gaze swept the vicinity. “The dragon did not get away on its own.”
“There’s no blood trail,” Lord Andra snarled from beside her. “The bloodseekers won’t find a damn thing.”
The bloodseekers jerked against their leashes, their dull brown bodies twisting in the air, snapping fangs at each other, flapping their leathery wings.
Horns curved forward from their skulls, sharp-tipped and yellowed.
Their spiked tails lashed behind them, and their keening grew more frantic as they searched for a scent that wasn’t there.
The lady huffed. “The wild one didn’t free itself, that’s for sure.”
Lord Andra leaned forward to check the trap himself, waving his hand to cast a spell over it. Seeking… “The release bar’s been sprung. Not chewed through. Hands did this.” He spat into the mud. “We’ve got a traitor in our midst.”
“Find them,” the lady snapped, her gaze sweeping the area. She nudged her chin toward her dragon, and it shot fire into the brush to my right, setting it ablaze. Smoke jetted around me, thick and choking. It was all I could do not to bolt. All I could do to breathe.
I crouched lower in the wet vegetation, grateful it had recently rained.
The fire sputtered out as the riders searched the disturbed ground and the woods opposite from where I hid. The unknown lady found bits of my crushed herbs and held them up.
“Graymallow,” she said, after taking a sniff. “And silverleaf. Someone actually treated the beast.”
Prince Fenian stayed apart from the others, one hand resting on his dragon, Aristus’s left flank. Even those who didn’t work in the castle aerie like me knew the beast’s name.
There was something in the prince’s expression I couldn’t name.
A tightness around his mouth, the fact that he hung back rather than join the search with the others.
Aristus curled his head around and nudged Fenian with his snout.
The prince scratched the dragon’s jaw hinge.
Not the brow spines. That makes them spark.
Stroking the jaw hinge soothed. Someone had taught him this, or he’d paid attention.
He studied the clearing.
“They couldn’t have gone far.” He sounded so sneeringly cultured and assured.
He was close enough that I could see the gray of his eyes and the small scar cutting above his left eyebrow.
My teeth ached from clenching.
His gaze tracked across the meadow and locked onto the tangle of blackthorn hiding me.
My lungs stopped working.
His jaw tightened, that thing people did before they spoke. I dug my fingers into the mud beneath me. If I ran, they’d hear.
“Release the bonewailers,” Lady Chambers growled. “Let them hunt the traitor.”
“A fantastic idea,” one of the lords said, striding toward his dragon.
“We’re too close to the royal gardens,” the prince said.
The lord shrugged. “Your Highness, it might be fun to watch the workers scatter.”
“I said no.”
The lord blinked at the prince before turning away. “Very well, Sire.”
Lady Chambers released a heavy sigh. “We’ll have to hunt down another quarry then.”
“I don’t want to take my dragon into the caves,” the other woman said. “It’s too close to the Scorching. I need her well-rested and uninjured.”
They were going to hold a Scorching? A knot formed low in my throat.
“The race is why we’re hunting,” Lady Chambers snapped. “Wild dragons are getting bolder. Prince Fenian needs—”
“Prince Fenian does not need more dead dragons,” he said in a biting tone. “One more living wild one won’t change a thing.”
There was something unguarded about the way his throat moved when he spoke, that pale strip of skin between his collar and his jaw. It was the only part of him that didn’t remind me of a weapon.
The prince climbed onto Aristus’s spine and settled in the saddle, using a burst of magic to scatter the flies that had gathered to feast on the blood.
“Mount up,” he said. “We can scout the western ridge. The wild one was wounded. Even if someone treated it, it may not have gotten far.”
They left the way they’d come, dragon wings beating hard enough to blast leaves and sticks my way. Their bloodseekers keened as they flew west, the sound of their passage fading into the distance.
I stayed hidden in the thicket, counting to a hundred, then a hundred more. When I finally moved, I stumbled on numb legs. My hands had gone blue with cold. Neither mattered if I was late returning to work.
I quickly washed off the mud and hurried toward the boundary marker, my limbs quivering.
What I’d done started to sink in. I’d risked theft to get those herbs, and I’d used them on a wild dragon I’d never see again.
The climb back to the fortress felt twice as long as the walk down.
I checked my hands, arms, and clothing compulsively.
Most of the dragon blood was gone, but there were stains I couldn’t explain if someone looked too closely.
A scratch on my forearm from the thorns could be dismissed.
The smears on my knees could’ve come from falling on the rain-soaked ground.
My story built itself, and I practiced it with each step.
The fortress rose from the mountain’s first peak like a crown of stone and dragon-bone.
I slipped around the outer perimeter and into the dragon aerie entrance, keeping my head down.
As I hurried down the hallway of the cool, sand-scented building, the shuffle of dragon feet echoed from inside their stalls on the right.
“Eradin.”
I came to a halt, squinting.
Overseer Nuant stood farther down the corridor. Broad and balding, his type of cruelty came from having enough power to make everyone around him miserable.
“What took you so long?” he asked. “I sent you for herbs in the royal garden half an hour ago.”
“The moonvetch was sparse. It needs replanting.” I lifted the cluster of leaves I’d stuffed into my pocket on my way back.
His eyes moved over me, taking in the mud. The scratch on my arm. The wet hair plastered to my skull from dunking my face in the water.
“You look like you went swimming,” he said.
“I slipped and fell into the stream.” He strode closer and leaned in, his nostrils flaring. “Why do you smell like wild dragon smoke?”
My heart leaped into my throat. “Do I?”
“Where have you been?”
I forced myself to meet his eyes. Servants who stared at the ground looked guilty.
“I passed the far forge on my way back.” My voice came out steady. How, I didn’t know. “The…um…wind shifted.”
He studied me, each second stretching until I thought my tendons would snap.
His hand landed on my shoulder, and he squeezed hard enough to grind my bones together before letting go.
“Heartsbrim needs tending,” he said. “Lady Severine’s been complaining that the dragon’s scales aren’t bright enough.
” His tone made it clear what he thought of her complaint, but he’d delivered it anyway.
It was his job to pass down the elite’s demands and our job to make sure they were met. “Take care of it.”
I dipped my head. “I will.”
He walked back the way he’d come.
I hurried to the water bucket and scrubbed my arms, face, and hands again. When I’d finished, the smoke tinge was gone and my palms still tingled where I’d touched the wild one’s scales.
I flexed my hands, and the skin across my palms pulled and stung. Fine red lines had risen. I closed them to fists until the tremor stopped.
Heartsbrim’s stall sat in the southern wing. The ruby dragon had the over-bred look of all elite bloodlines. He tolerated my presence as I ran the polishing cloth over his scales, suffering the attention with the patience of a creature that had learned compliance long ago.
A sound at the gate sent me spinning. Lady Vella Severine entered the stall, dressed in a silk gown the color of wine, her reddish-blonde hair coiled on the top of her head and adorned with tiny pins shaped like dragons.
Their wings fluttered, enhanced by her magic.
About a year older than me, twenty-eight or nine, she moved through the world like it owed her.
Her family controlled half the grain mills in the eastern provinces, so maybe it did.
“Do a good job. Don’t be sloppy,” she said, though she didn’t sound angry, just stating a fact. Her time mattered. Mine didn’t. “I want Heartsbrim’s scales to shine.”
“Yes, my lady.”
She stepped closer, examining her dragon as one would property. “You’re the woman who’s good with them, aren’t you? People say the dragons actually like you.”
I kept my eyes down. “I do my job, my lady.”
“Hmm.” She ran one finger along Heartsbrim’s front leg. “See that you do it well. I won’t have my dragon looking dull for the exhibitions.”
She left without another word.
As I buffed scales, I thought about the wild dragon and the way it had looked at me. The heat of its hide. The intelligence in its eyes. And the way it had flown, jagged and labored, leaving no blood trail for the hunters to follow.
My mouth found the same low hum, my mother’s tune working its way through my teeth. Heartsbrim’s breath hitched once before evening out.
I pressed the cloth harder, working on the same spot until it gleamed. My hands knew the rhythm. My body knew its purpose. Make yourself useful enough to keep and unassuming enough to ignore.
The spot I’d polished reflected my face back at me, showing a small, useful person. A woman the elite would never see.
The wild dragon hadn’t kept its head down. It had looked at me in a way no beast at the aerie ever did. And I’d sent it back to the sky while Tolross lay in our home, getting sicker.
The cloth stilled in my hand.
I hadn’t chosen a stranger over my brother. I’d chosen the scream I could stop over the one I couldn’t. That didn’t make what I’d done noble. It only made it true.
I finished with Heartsbrim in silence, packed away the supplies, and slipped out of the aerie without looking up at the sky beyond the stable doors, where something wild had flown free.
Inside the fortress, I walked quickly and quietly toward the records room.
The Scorching.
If I could get inside, I could read the requirements. Pausing at the door, I reached for the knob.
“Eradin.”
I spun with my heart clawing up my throat.
Narlene from the kitchens stood at the end of the corridor, a basket of potatoes propped on her hip. The silver threading her dark braid caught the muted sunlight coming through the window to her right.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she whispered, glancing back down the hall.
“I got turned around.”
Her gaze flew from me to the records room door. “My Dorresk works these rooms. I know who belongs in this wing. You don’t.” Her voice dropped. “Whatever you’re thinking—don’t. If someone caught you… Well, we can’t let that happen.”
After giving me a long look, she strode away.
I rushed back to the aerie before the overseer could miss me.
My hands still burned. My brother was still dying. And soon, the elite would hold their favorite culling.
Few of us commons dared enter the Scorching.
But I’d freed a wild dragon today.
Maybe that meant I could do the impossible twice.