18. Eradin
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ERADIN
My boot peeled away from my foot in strips, taking chunks of skin along with it.
My vision went white at the edges, and I breathed through my teeth until the room stopped tilting. The rest of the boot slipped from my grip and hit the stone floor with a sound like a slab of meat hitting a block.
That’s what I was now. Meat that had survived when it shouldn’t have.
I sat on a bench in a bedroom they’d assigned me and the blonde woman, my hands braced on my thighs because if I looked at my foot again I’d see stars and hear the wet sound the wiry man had made when stone punched through his chest.
I looked at my foot instead. It throbbed. My mother had taught me healing, but I had no ointment or bandages. The best I could do was keep it clean and cushion it in my boot—or what was left of my boot. My lack of footwear was an even greater problem than the burn. How could I compete barefoot?
The trial mark on my hand had stopped screaming, but it still radiated heat. Black and raised, it was just another thing branded into my meat.
Sand had worked itself into the creases of my palms. The scent of dragon blood and burned leather clung to my clothing. Underneath it all, I caught the acrid stink of my own fear-sweat.
A dark-haired servant entered the room, her expression flat. She studied me the same way I’d look at a dragon that had rolled in its own filth.
“Stand,” she said.
“What will happen next?”
“Stand!”
I did as she asked.
She gestured toward a second doorway. “Through there.”
The bathing chamber beyond had been divided with a wooden screen that reached from the floor to the ceiling. On the other side, boots scuffed across stone, and the low murmur of male voices rang out.
Two other women waited inside the room. The wide-eyed blonde from the arena stood near a big tub, dressed in her trial clothes, sand crusting her hands and knees. A servant plucked at the woman’s clothing.
“Take everything off and be quick about it,” the dark-haired servant said by my side.
I released the belt holding the talon-blade first, setting it on a chair, the sheath still warm from riding on my thigh. While the woman twitched with impatience, I stripped down to my skin, my fingers clumsy.
Unsure what to do with the dragon scale, I slid it from my pants’ pocket and tucked it beneath the talon’s sheath.
Three more servants entered. They didn’t speak to us, though they talked with each other.
“This one’s filthy,” one said, gesturing to me.
“They all are.”
“That burn will scar.” She crinkled her nose, bending forward to examine my thigh. She prodded the edges where the scale had seared through fabric and skin, her fingers cold and clinical. “Do we cover it or leave it?”
“Leave it. No one will see it through her gown.”
They filled two tubs with water. One of them gestured for me to step into the first and I did, my burned foot screaming when it touched the water.
My skin quivered. Water closed over my ankles, and my throat tried to close along with it. Hands on my shoulders pushed me down. More hands reached for my hair, releasing it from the leather strip I’d used to bind it, then scraping a comb across my scalp.
I counted.
One. Two. Three.
Like I’d made Tolross count when he broke his wrist.
Four. Five. Six.
Keep counting until you’re focused only on that.
But I didn’t know how to find my focus anymore. Hands pulling and tugging kept yanking me back to the present. The woman inside me choked on water they poured over her head without warning.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve. I’d survived a fire maze. I could survive this.
Except the maze had let me move. Had let me choose. This was different. This was being held down while they erased every trace of who I’d been a short time ago.
They used rough cloths to scrub my arms, back, and legs.
“Turn around.”
“Ask,” I growled.
The woman closest to me blinked before meeting the gaze of one of the others.
“Turn around,” the second one snarled, smacking my shoulder.
I did as they asked.
To them, we weren’t people; we were inventory to be inspected and discarded if our flaws ran too deep.
One of them studied the red lines on my palms. “What are these?”
Another sniffed. “Dye from her work.” Her attention fell on me, and she raised her voice. “You work with the dyes, girl?” She turned away before I could answer.
“Should we cover them?” another asked.
“The high-necked dress will hide her arms well enough. It’s not like anyone will pay much attention to her.”
“She’s pretty enough. They might.”
The other woman sniffed and kept scrubbing.
My fellow commons sent me a wavering smile from where she sat in the other tub. Her face had paled even further, and goosebumps covered her exposed shoulders. A servant scraped at her back hard enough she winced.
“Too thin,” the servant said. Not to the blonde woman. To one of the other servants. “This one won’t last.”
“None of them will.”
From the other side of the screen, a man’s voice rang out.
“Name’s Reece. Reece Corros.”
The other man spoke, though quieter. “Kerrel Farnwad.”
“Good to meet you, Kerrel.” Reece’s voice held that forced steadiness fathers used when they were trying to keep children from panicking. He must be the gray-bearded man who’d made it through the initial trials. “You did well out there. Getting through the fire canyon was…something.”
Kerrel didn’t answer.
The silence stretched until the other woman broke it from our side. “I’m Lyndie.” Her voice came out bright, like she was introducing herself at a market stall. “Lyndie Smite.”
Her posture took on an odd slant, almost formal, before she slouched her shoulders forward.
“Eradin Carver,” I said.
One of the servants waved for me to stand and draped a thick cloth over my shoulders and back. “Dry yourself.”
I stepped out and did. The cloth smelled of lye and was stiff enough to leave my skin raw.
They pried the cloth from my hands and made me stand with my arms at my sides. Naked. While they checked my scalp, my ears, and behind my knees. Looking for nits, maybe. Or making sure every part of me had been sufficiently humiliated.
Water dripped from my long hair onto the stone floor, splattering my shins.
My mind wasn’t here but back in the arena with Lykor, tremors rolling through his body while I pressed my palm to his burned wing.
It was in our cottage, where Tolross was probably awake despite the late hour, struggling to breathe because that’s what he did when he was scared.
Father would be standing at the window. Or gone to bed, needing to rest before heading to the mines in the morning.
“You,” one of the servants said, snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Arms up.”
I raised my arms and breathed through their examination. Made myself be livestock. It was easier than being a person.
From the other side of the screen, Reece’s voice echoed again. “Can I ask why you entered the trial?”
“Money,” Kerrel said. “Enough to leave and go where no one knows me.”
“That’s reason enough,” Reece said.
Water sloshed, and servants moved through the other side of the room.
“I’m doing this for my granddaughter, Willa,” Reece said. “She’s six years old. Lost both her parents last winter, and she needs me and my wife. I work in the mine and… You know how long miners last.”
I wondered if Willa knew where her grandfather was. If she was scared. If his wife was sitting with her the way Silvie would with Tolross, pretending everything would be fine.
A hollow feeling opened up beneath my ribs.
I focused on the servant dragging a comb through my hair.
“Four of us made it through the trial,” Reece said. “Half is practically a miracle.”
“Why do so few make it?” Lyndie asked, her voice lifted.
“They’re not designed for us to survive,” Reece said. “I was alive for the last race. Watched it from Shaleside.”
“You watched it?” I asked.
“Yes, they put up viewing screens.”
Then Tolross, Silvie, and Father would know I was still alive. It wouldn’t be the same as me going to them, but they knew I lived.
“Three commons entered the trials that year,” Reece said. “One made it through.”
“Orla, right?” I said. “What happened to her?”
“She didn’t finish the Scorching,” he said. “They’ll assign us to teams tomorrow. We’ll probably be grouped together. The last commons were.”
The door opened, and more servants bustled in, their arms laden with fabric. In a short time, we both wore underclothing finer than anything I’d owned in my life.
A servant thrust a bundle of gray-blue cloth at me. “Put this on.”
The gown reminded me of storm clouds. The fabric was decent, better than anything I owned, though not the silk crafted for the elite. The dress had been designed in a simple fashion, with a high neck.
I tugged it over my head and slipped my arms through the long sleeves.
The dress settled around my body, swishing across my bare feet.
It felt like wearing someone else’s skin.
I smoothed my hands down the front, and the gray-blue fabric caught the light. For one moment, I looked like someone who belonged in the elite side of the fortress.
Until I saw my hands. My work-rough palms. Red lines that wouldn’t fade. The trial mark blazing black.
The gown was a costume. Underneath, I was still a commons woman who’d stolen herbs and freed a dragon and probably wouldn’t live to see next week.
Lyndie’s fingers found the back lacing of her dress, tying it off in a knot I couldn’t have managed without a mirror.
“You’ve worn gowns before,” I said. “Was your mother a seamstress?”
Her hands stilled before she finished the knot.
“She was,” she said. “She…hasn’t been able to do that for a very long time.”
“That must be tough. Is she sick?”
“Yes, sick.”
They handed me new boots, ones more for looking good than lasting through years of work, but at least I wouldn’t face the Scorching barefoot. I laced them up and stood, testing my weight on my burned foot. It hurt, but I’d live.
Lyndie wore a dress in a similar style, hers in pale green. It made her look younger than she was, like someone’s daughter playing dress-up.
Fabric rustled on the other side of the room, the men dressing too.
“Are we supposed to be grateful for this?” Reece’s voice carried over the screen, edged with bitterness.
“It’s an honor to be invited, isn’t it?” Lyndie said softly while the servants arranged her hair in a simple style.
“We weren’t invited,” I said. “We’re being brought out like cattle at market.”
She looked down at her dress, and her shoulders fell. “Oh.”
They sat me in a chair and worked on my hair.
“Did you hear about Meckard?” the first servant said to the other who was working the comb like I was a hedge to be trimmed.
“Shh.”
“He’s been with the prince since he was a boy. They marched him out the front gates a short time ago.”
“I said shh.”
“Nobody’s been told why.”
The comb ripped through a knot. “Nobody’s had to.”
They moved on to the state of my fingernails.
The prince’s aide. The one who’d made a strangled sound when I sassed his master over the buckets, who’d swayed like a dying man when I threatened the royal boots. Dismissed after the prince leaned close to his mother and bought my life with a few whispered words.
A coincidence?
They’d dismissed the protocol violation but someone else may have paid the fee.
The realization settled in my belly like spoiled meat. Every kindness the prince spent on me may come out of somebody else’s pocket. Never his. Never mine.
After our hair had been deemed suitable, the screen was pulled aside, revealing the men for the first time since the arena.
Reece looked older in clean clothes, the white in his beard standing out against the dark blue of his tunic.
His hands kept flexing at his sides, opening and closing like he was testing to make sure they still worked.
When our eyes met, his held the same look Father’s had the night Mother died, steady on the surface, drowning underneath.
Kerrel wore brown. He stared at the floor, water still dripping from his red hair, onto his shoulders. His hands hung at his sides, his fingers loose, as if someone had cut the strings holding him upright and he hadn’t fallen yet.
Reece would last longer than Kerrel. Whether that was mercy or cruelty, I couldn’t say.
Lyndie was still an unknown. She was either genuinely naive or playing at it.
As for me, I didn’t know what I was anymore.
The same tall, thin man who’d led us from the arena stepped into the room from the hall and looked us over with a twist of his mouth.
“You’ll do, I suppose,” he said with a sniff. “I’ll escort you to the ball.”
He turned and walked into the hallway.
I grabbed the still-warm scale and tucked it into my pocket, securing the sheath with the talon-blade around my waist despite the raised eyebrows of the servants.
“That’s…” Lyndie’s grin rose, a gesture unlike the fake smile she’d been giving almost everyone else. “Alright, it’s badass.” She tapped her hip where her gown lay smooth. “I wish I had a blade. I have a feeling I’ll need one.”
“It was a gift,” I said.
“It’s amazing.”
She stepped out of the room and waited for me to catch up.
We followed the thin man down a corridor, stone walls lit by floating orbs bobbing near the ceiling. Music drifted from somewhere ahead, strings and wind instruments playing a light, forgettable tune.
The corridor opened into a wider hallway. The music grew louder, punctuated by shrill laughter.
Ahead, double doors stood open. Light spilled out, golden and warm, promising things commons weren’t allowed to touch.
The thin man stopped at the threshold and turned to face us.
“You’re curiosities,” he said. “Survivors of the trials. The nobles will want to see you. Touch you, maybe, if they’ve had enough wine.
” The corners of his mouth turned downward.
“Let them. Smile if they speak to you but do not speak first. And for the love of all that’s sacred, don’t embarrass yourselves. ”
He stepped aside.
Through the doorway, I spied elite dressed in silk and jewels drifting through the room, holding crystal glasses, their laughter bright and carefree. I recognized faces from the viewing stands. A man who’d screamed for my blood. The woman who’d thrown her wine goblet.
They’d wanted me dead a short time ago. Now they wanted me to decorate their evening.
My burned foot throbbed. The scale remained hot in my pocket.
And somewhere in the crowd, Prince Fenian was waiting.