8. Eradin
CHAPTER EIGHT
ERADIN
The evening the trumpets echoed through the village square started soft.
Father sat at the table with his mending kit, working on a belt that had given up twice already. He’d re-stitch it next week. The week after that. Holding things together past when they should break. That was what we did. The belt. The cottage. Ourselves.
It was the only thing we knew how to do.
Tolross lay on his pallet, sketching dragons. His charcoal moved in quick strokes, capturing wings and flames with skill.
“This one’s going to eat the sun,” he said, holding up the page to show me his progress.
“That’s ambitious.”
“Better than eating stew for the fifth day running.”
“How was the shift?” Tolross asked, smudging a wing with his thumb.
“Long.” Father threaded his needle on the third try. “They sent us a palace man this morning. Name’s Dorresk. Not a single callus on his hands. He kept asking where they’d put his spectacles.” He shook his head. “I think he worked for the crown, and now he’s hauling ore he can barely lift.”
“Why would they send someone like that to the mines?” I asked.
“You don’t ask that down there. The mine’s the answer, whatever the question was.”
The trumpet blast shattered the quiet.
My brother’s head jerked up and his eyes widened. “Ceremonial horns?”
Father scowled at the belt. “Not this time.”
A cough tore through Tolross, rattling his whole frame. I was across the room in seconds, my hand on his back, counting until he could breathe again.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
His shoulders shook. I rubbed circles on his spine, willing the fit to break.
Twelve. Thirteen.
The cough released him all at once. He gasped and collapsed, his face pale, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
I kept my hand on his back until his breathing evened out.
The trumpet bellowed again.
Father lurched from his chair and held up his hand. Blood pooled on the tip of his finger and drizzled down the side. He’d pricked it. His gaze slanted toward the window. “Nothing good comes with the horns.”
Cold slid under my ribs and plucked at them one by one. “War?”
“I’ve heard nothing.”
I unclenched my teeth that ached like I’d been chewing iron.
“What is it then?” Tolross asked, staring toward the door.
I turned away from my brother. “I’ll go find out.”
Father’s intent gaze met mine. “Be careful. Take my blade.” He unbuckled the worn sheath from his hip.
He’d once said the blade and sheath would be mine when he was gone.
“Are you sure?” I only hesitated because it was his prize possession. He’d worn it every day back when he’d worked as a castle guard. I’d watched him sharpen the blade’s edge at night, and buckle it on each morning before he walked out the door.
Now he was handing it to me.
“It’s pretty much yours already,” he said.
“Not for a very long time.” Please.
But my fingers closed around the sheath.
The drums started next, a thunder rolling across the valley. Voices rose outside, and stomping feet.
“Stay here,” I said, securing the belt around my waist in the hole Father had made twenty years ago when I was still a child. Then, the belt had slid down over my hips, and we’d laughed about it. Now it hung where it should.
“Cut the end of the strap off when I…” Father said.
I was grateful he didn’t finish. The thought of losing him tore something deep inside me. The reality would be even more painful.
The weight of it settled against my hip. I’d never needed it before. I had a feeling I might now.
My hand on the hilt, I slipped out the door and into the alley, making my way to the spiraling path that swept up to the top of the mountain behind our city, where the heart of the drums and horns lived.
The scale in my pocket banged against my thigh. I pressed my palm against it through the fabric, but it had gone quiet. Whatever had sparked it yesterday wasn’t speaking now.
Or maybe I didn’t yet know how to listen.
The fortress courtyard had been transformed. Banners whipped at the top of poles that hadn’t been there yesterday. A platform stood in the center, draped in white and gold. Heralds flanked it in formal black clothing, their voices overlapping as they repeated the same proclamation in rounds.
The elite mixed with the lower classes, though they had smiles on their faces rather than the somber expressions on those of us from Shaleside.
Their children darted through the crowd with fake wings strapped to their backs, shrieking and laughing, while children from my part of the world clung to their parents.
A woman sold ribbons from a cart, red and blue and gold, each one stamped with a dragon silhouette.
The ribbons cost more than a day’s worth of coal.
An elite child’s fist closed around two.
I pushed through the crowd until I reached the front and could understand what the crier was saying
He stood on the platform, a gilded scroll in his hands. “By decree of Her Majesty and the sanction of the Oracle, the Scorching will commence in six days’ time. A trial of bond and flight, witnessed by the realm and blessed by the very fates themselves. Sign-up will close in three days.”
The elites in the crowd cheered. A priestess in silver robes raised her hands and intoned a blessing that got lost in the noise.
The crier continued. “To the victor, a boon. One wish, granted by the Oracle herself, weighed and judged worthy.”
One wish.
The words punched through my chest and kept going.
Seven breaths between Tolross’s coughs. A week ago it had been twelve. The month before, fifteen.
The math was simple, and it was killing him.
The scale flared molten-hot against my thigh. I gasped and shifted it away from my skin. It burned deeper than touching a stove, the heat blasting from the inside out.
An odd feeling shot through me, of a wild creature recognizing a predator it had never encountered but knew in its bones.
The scale cooled as quickly as it had flared.
I made myself breathe and think past the roaring in my ears that sounded like wings and a shriek of fear and the pitch of my brother’s cough when he couldn’t stop.
Whatever the Oracle was, the wild dragon already knew. And she was afraid of it. And if a wild dragon was afraid, what did that make me for wanting to stand in front of it?
Desperate. That’s what it made me.
But there was only one wish.
Cured, Tolross would live.
Everything I’d been breaking myself to find stood right in front of me. One race. One impossible, deadly, commons-killing race.
The crier rolled up the scroll and descended from the platform. The crowd pressed forward, voices rising in excitement.
Far overhead, a black shape circled. I recognized the silver in Aristus’s scales and how he moved through the air like he was made of mist instead of muscle.
Which meant Prince Fenian was up there too, watching the crowd react to the Scorching announcement.
Watching us scramble for a chance at what he already had.
Weapons don’t slosh, Sire. Two almost-smiles, and somehow the man had taken up residence in my head without paying for the room.
I evicted him and hurried down the mountain, back to Shaleside.
Father had closed the window. He sat at the table, his mending abandoned, staring at the wall where my mother’s wildflower paintings hung.
“They’re calling the race,” I said.
Father grunted.
Tolross sat up straighter. “The Scorching, like in the stories?”
“A story is something made up as cover.” Father’s voice held no intonation.
“One wish for the winner,” I said.
Tolross’s eyes brightened. “Imagine that. What would you wish for?”
“To stop hearing trumpets,” Father said.
Tolross laughed, but it dissolved into coughing. I brought him water and waited until he’d finished drinking.
“What would you wish for, Eradin?” he asked.
I returned to my seat and picked up one of Father’s shirts, plus a threaded needle.
“I’d wish for this shirt to hold for more than one day.” The laugh I forced out didn’t take.
Tolross watched me like he was waiting for a real answer to slip past my teeth by accident. His gaze stayed on me too long, reading the lie the way he always did.
“You’d wish for me to get better,” he said quietly.
I didn’t answer.
“That’s stupid, Eradin,” he said. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m mending a shirt. That’s all I’m doing.”
“I mean the race. Don’t. Just don’t.”
Father stood and went to the stove, checking the coal bin. “We’re low. I’ll get more tomorrow.”
Too few pieces of coal left. Too many candles burnt to stubs. Everything measured against time we couldn’t buy.
He closed the coal bin and sat back down.
“Father, you saw the last race, didn’t you?” Tolross asked.
Father’s scarred hands stilled on the table. “I watched someone I knew sign up for the trial. A man from across town. He had a daughter about Eradin’s age.”
I moved the needle again, punching through the fabric.
“Did he win?” Tolross asked.
“No.”
“Did he—”
“He didn’t come back. That’s all there is to remember.”
I stopped because my hands were shaking too much to keep sewing. “Did you try to stop him?”
Father’s head shot up. “Every way I knew how. He went anyway. They always do.”
It sounded like an accusation, as if he could already see me standing in the sign-up line, and he’d be damned if he’d watch another person he cared about choose a dragon over survival.
I pulled the thread too tight. It puckered the fabric, and I had to start over.
A man from across town. A daughter my age.
That daughter would be twenty-eight now. Maybe she still lived in Shaleside, counting coal and making watery stew and watching someone she loved fade. Maybe she’d learned to live with the thing her father had tried to fix and failed. She could be better at it than I was.
“He had a choice,” Father said. “He chose wrong. That’s not the same as giving up.
It’s worse. It’s leaving the people who need you for something that was never going to save them.
” His eyes met mine again. “Don’t confuse hope with a death wish, Eradin.
One keeps you alive. The other gets you killed. ”
There was nothing I could say to that.