Asha woke in a cell deep below her father’s palace.
She didn’t know how much time had passed. Didn’t know how much of the city had burned in the revolt.
Didn’t know if Kozu was dead or alive.
He can’t be dead, she told herself, or the stories would be too.
Chains streamed from her wrists and food came only occasionally. She gleaned information from her guards’ whispered conversations.
The revolt started in the furrow, they said. The furrow burned and the fire caught and spread through a quarter of the city. Hundreds of slaves escaped. Hundreds more draksors were missing too. The most notable among them were Dax and Safire. Witnesses said the heir and his cousin led both skral and draksors through the streets. Together, they overtook the gate, which allowed for so many to escape.
Days passed before the soldats came for her, unlocking her shackles and marching her up through the palace. By now, the new moon had come and gone. Three slaves waited in her room, their ankles chained together. The soldats stood at the door while the slaves washed away the dirt and grime from Asha’s body. She stared straight into the mirror, wondering how she’d ever been proud of the scar marring her skin.
The oldest slave stepped in front of her, severing the sight of her reflection and holding out the first layer of her dress. The gold piece. Asha didn’t step into it.
“If you refuse,” she whispered, her eyes averting Asha’s, “we will be punished.”
So Asha stepped into the gown—which had been resewn after her last fitting, when they’d cut her out of it—and threaded her arms through the slender sleeves. When they held up the white outer piece, she stepped into that too.
Half the night slipped away as they did up the multitude of tiny buttons at the back. When they finished the arduous work, they laced up the sash, pulling it tight. Last of all, they rimmed her eyes with kohl and smeared honey across her lips.
Just before midnight the soldats led her through the palace and out the gates. Asha halted at the palace entrance, looking out. Watchers crowded the city streets. Candles illuminated their faces. Their flames were as numerous as the grains of sand scattered across the desert.
Here were the people who hated and feared her. What would they say if they found out the truth—that Asha wasn’t the one responsible for their burned homes, their dead loved ones? What would they do?
The soldats escorted Asha down the steps to the latticed litter made of fragrant thuya wood. Asha climbed onto the silk pillows. She gripped the holes in the wooden frame as the litter tipped, then righted itself while soldats hoisted it onto their shoulders.
Marching footsteps rang through the streets. The wind scuttled across the rooftops. Asha watched the sea of faces through the latticework as they passed.
She thought of Elorma waiting in the temple—like Jarek waited now—while his bride made her way to him through the streets. Willa might have died too young, but she’d found her place. She’d been loved and esteemed.
If Asha were to die tonight, how would her story get told?
The streets bordering the temple were packed wall to wall with draksors holding candles. Soldats lined the temple steps. The doors of the front archway were swung wide, keeping the symbol of the Old One out of view.
The soldats carved through the crowd and lowered the litter. A hush fell as Asha climbed out. The cut stones were cold against her slippered feet. The night air was even colder.
They took her into the temple corridor—lit by candles perched in alcoves, lined with soldats. When they marched her through the doors of the central chamber, Asha halted.
It had been years since she set foot here.
The chamber floors were laid with slabs of marble hewn from the mountains of the Rift. Columns rose ever upward, supporting the domed roof. Not so long ago, draksors would have knelt in this chamber, singing prayers or exultations, facing the low altar where hundreds of half-burned candles dribbled wax onto the floor. Asha remembered hearing their voices all the way from the market. Asha remembered joining them.
No candles burned now. No voices whispered.
Instead, huge red banners hung down the walls, all bearing her father’s emblem: the dragon with the sword through its heart. Behind the banners, Asha knew, were dazzling scenes from the old stories cut out of colored glass: the First Dragon, hatching from his embers; the sacred flame, burning bright in the night for Elorma to find; the building of Firgaard and the raising of the temple.
The central window held the likeness of the Old One—a black dragon with a heart of flame—and was itself as wide as a dragon. It too was blotted out by her father’s banners.
In the middle of the chamber, a ring of torches burned. Inside the firelit circle stood Jarek, the dragon king, and a robed temple guardian. Outside the circle, stationed along each column, stood a ring of six more guardians, there to bear witness.
In a ceremonial white tunic with gold embroidery, Jarek matched his betrothed. The flames of the torches caught in the hollows beneath his eyes and, despite lines of exhaustion bordering his mouth, desire flickered across his face as his gaze ran up and down Asha.
The dragon king stood a little beyond the commandant, shimmering in a golden robe. At the sight of him, all the hurt buried inside Asha swarmed to the surface.
“Why?” she demanded. “First, you turn me into a killer. And now, you’ll give me to someone I hate. Someone you yourself fear. Why are you doing this?”
Jarek looked to the king, confused. “Someone you fear?”
She turned to her betrothed. “He knows what you’re planning.”
Jarek frowned at her, his confusion deepening. “What am I planning?”
Her father stepped into the light of the torches. “That you intend to take my army and rise against me.”
Jarek shook his head. “Why would I rise against the man I owe everything to?”
What?
Her voice shook as she said, “Your parents are dead because of him!”
Jarek reached for her, his fingers clamping around her arm. Asha didn’t even try to twist free. Where would she go? Soldats lurked down every hallway. And beyond them was a city full of people who reviled her.
“My mother loved my father more than she ever loved me,” Jarek explained. “And my father loved his army more than both of us combined. I was an afterthought, if I was that much.” Jarek brought her hand to his mouth, kissing her palm. Asha shivered. “Were their deaths a terrible accident? Yes. But look at me, Asha. I wouldn’t be where I am today if they were alive. Their death was my glory.”
Asha stared at him.
Was everything she knew a lie?
And if Jarek wasn’t really a threat to her father, why would he offer to cancel the wedding?
“You never intended to cancel the wedding,” she realized aloud, hardly daring to believe it, wanting him to refute it. It was so twisted. So cruel. “You only told me that so I would kill Kozu.”
And in doing so, destroy the old stories. And with the stories went all trace of the Old One. Any resistance to her father’s reign would die off.
“Look at you, Asha. Look at your brother. What am I supposed to do with a fool for a son and a disgrace for a daughter? How could either of you rule a kingdom?” He shook his head at the disappointing sight of her. For so long, she’d craved this man’s approval that, in spite of everything, she still felt shamed by that look. “Jarek is the heir I always wanted. He’s the heir I shall have.”
Her father motioned for the temple guardian to begin. The young woman trembled at the closeness of the Iskari—the death bringer. What her father had turned her into.
“Tomorrow morning, once your marriage is consummated, I will revoke Dax’s birthright. As an enemy of Firgaard, he will forfeit any claim to my throne. Instead, Jarek will be king after me.”
In his eyes Asha saw only cold, honed hate.
“Guardians!” The young guardian’s voice rose up, a little shakily, to replace the dragon king’s. “We gather here tonight to bear witness. To bind this couple together for life. What is bound here tonight can never be unbound.”
Asha looked from the young woman to the silent, robed guardians beyond. Their hoods were pushed back. Asha glanced at each of them, until she came to the last one: Maya, the guardian who hid Torwin in the room with the scrolls.
Their gazes met and held.
“By the power given to me by the dragon king himself . . .”
Those weren’t the binding words. The power to bind a pair together came from the Old One, not the king.
Maybe her father didn’t need Kozu’s death to usher in his new era. Maybe he could simply seize it for himself.
“I weave these lives together as one! Only death can break my threads and tear them asunder!”
Normally the bride and groom refuted this last line by reciting vows taken from Willa’s story. Because the line was wrong. Willa had proven that Death couldn’t break the bond between her and her beloved. Love was stronger than death.
“Only Death himself,” Jarek recited, “can tear this bond asunder.”
Those weren’t the vows. They were butchering Willa’s words.
She stared at the guardian, wanting her to protest. But the young woman simply stood there, waiting for Asha to repeat the words.
Jarek reached for Asha’s arm and drew her in close. His grip tightened. Always tightened. “What do you think will happen to you if you don’t say the words, Asha?”
My father will give me to you anyway. It was the worst punishment she could think of.
“Say them.”
She never would. Not to Jarek. The words belonged to Willa. Saying them to Jarek was a desecration. A mockery of Willa’s fierce, unyielding love.
Asha looked to the guardians beyond the circle of flame. Six sets of eyes looked back at her, watching. As if she were nothing more than a slave being sold and locked in a collar.
She thought of the people gathered outside. Thought of how, before her mother died, she could hear the chant of prayers all the way from the market.
Asha didn’t have any prayers. But she had something else.
“Once there was a king, rotting from the inside out!” Asha threw her voice so hard and so high, she imagined it reaching beyond the stained-glass windows hidden behind her father’s banners. Imagined it reaching all the way to the sky. “He tricked his own daughter into betraying the First Dragon! He turned Kozu against her, letting her burn, all so he could use her! So he could twist her into a tool for his own dark purposes!”
Beyond the circle of flames, the guardians exchanged startled glances.
“The dragon king convinced his daughter it was her fault; she burned because she was the rotten one. He showered on her false kindnesses, to make her feel indebted to him. To use her to usher in a new era—one without dissent.”
“Silence!” her father commanded.
Jarek squeezed, crushing her bones.
But Asha didn’t stop.
“She believed the lies he told. She hunted down monsters because he asked her to, never realizing the most wicked monster of all stood right behind her.”
From outside, Asha thought she heard murmurs turn to shouts. Thought she heard the crash of lanterns dropped on the stones.
“Bind them,” commanded the dragon king.
“But, my king, she hasn’t said the—”
“BIND THEM!”
The temple guardian stepped forward, her hands trembling as she did. She took the white silk and, as Jarek laced his fingers with Asha’s, tied it around their wrists.
“Your worst fear has come true, Father.” Asha stared down the dragon king. “I am corrupted. The Old One owns your Iskari. You have nothing left to use against her, nothing to make her do what you want.”
The guardian said the binding words. A moment later, Jarek ripped off the silk. It fluttered to the stones at their feet. He grabbed Asha and yanked her out of the circle of torches.
The sound of shattered glass erupted from above.
A thousand colored shards rained down on them.
Jarek let go. Asha raised her arms over her head, protecting herself from the falling pieces. She looked up, watching her father’s torn banner flutter to the floor.
A fierce wind howled through the broken window—or maybe that was the dragon.
With outstretched wings, the dust-red dragon swooped, circling downward, as out in the street, the screaming started. Asha could hear people pushing and shoving, running for cover.
Shadow landed clumsily on the stone floor before Asha. Gasps rose from the guardians behind her. Two of them fell to their knees.
Righting himself, Shadow’s pale slitted eyes flickered over her, checking for injury, before narrowing on the commandant and the king at her back. Shadow roared, and the temple shook with the sound. As if the Old One himself had woken from a too-long slumber, angry, ready to take back what belonged to him.
Atop Shadow sat Torwin, a bow slung over his shoulder and a knife tucked into his boot. Steely eyes met Asha’s. He wore a strange fitted coat and gloves, with a dark green sandskarf pulled up over his face, covering his nose and mouth.
You’re supposed to be gone, she thought. You’re supposed to be safe.
And yet her hope ignited at the sight of him.
Shadow hissed. Jarek stepped back, out of the circle of fire and away from Asha, his hands raised.
Her father yelled for the soldats. But the doors to the chamber were shut tight. Maya and a few of the other temple guardians were shoved up against them.
With Shadow’s gaze pinning Jarek in place, Torwin held one hand down to Asha. She rose and seized it, letting him pull her up. Asha hiked up the hem of her dress to straddle Shadow’s back. Torwin’s arm slid around her waist, keeping her tight against him. He clicked to Shadow, who hissed another warning and stretched his wings wide.
“Are you ready?”
Her heart thudded at the sound of his voice at her ear, slightly muffled by the fabric of the sandskarf. He smelled like dragonfire and smoke.
“I’ve never been more ready,” she said.
His eyes crinkled. She knew beneath the sandskarf he was smiling the smile she loved best. One that involved his whole mouth.
“Hold on.” His arm tightened as Shadow beat his wings, shifting from foot to foot.
Asha’s stomach lurched as they sprang into the air.
In his leap for the window, Shadow knocked over a torch and her father’s crumpled banner caught fire. As they rose toward the window, Asha looked back to the flames, past Jarek, to the dragon king. Smoke twisted around him.
His eyes raged at her. But underneath the surface, Asha thought she saw the seed of a great fear.
Be afraid, Father. I’ll make you regret everything you’ve ever done to me.
Shadow soared out through the broken window and into the night.
Asha laughed—softly at first. And then deliriously.
She’d just escaped her own wedding on the back of a dragon.
They soared over rooftops, then over the wall. Asha turned and looked back, watching the city fall away, marveling at how different the streets and rooftops looked from so high up. Like a winding web. Shadow sailed higher, beyond the wall and out into the Rift.
The higher they rose, though, the colder it got. Soon Asha’s teeth chattered. Torwin pulled her closer, trying to use his heat to stave off her chill.
Asha curled into him. With the lower half of her face pressed into his shoulder, she watched her home shrink into the distance before turning her eyes to the sky.
The stars shone like crystals above them and the moon had bled out. It was waxing instead of waning now.
It would be pale and slivered and new.