Asha took her cousin to Dax. As Safire explained everything that had happened, Dax stood there listening, silent and still, his brown eyes hardening under his darkening brow.
Roa wasn’t with him.
Good, Asha thought. She hoped her brother had come to his senses and was keeping the scrublanders far away from the king.
While Dax kept watch over their cousin, Asha sharpened her jeweled axe and waited for the sun to set. Beneath the cover of darkness, she’d have a better chance of not being seen by Jarek’s soldats. The moment the golden orb slipped below the shoulder of the mountain, she climbed into her arched window, threw her helmet onto the roof, and swung herself up after it.
Asha took the rooftops to the palace orchards, which were abandoned at dusk. The flowering trees filled the air with the sweet scent of blossoms, and the fruit bats’ fluttering shapes skimmed the branches. She lowered herself over the palace’s outermost wall and dropped to the street below.
Asha zigzagged through the city, away from the singing and drumming of the night market and the coaxing calls of its merchants. She took narrow streets where soldats were least likely to roam, until she arrived at the temple doors and quietly stepped inside.
With her helmet tucked beneath her arm, Asha stood at the cedar door, raised her fist, and knocked.
“Iskari?” The slave boy opened the door, letting her inside. She pushed her way past him. “Are you all right?”
Asha headed for the twin black blades resting on the cot, thinking of Kozu’s head dripping blood as she dragged it through Firgaard’s streets. Thinking of the look on Jarek’s face as the thing he wanted most was taken from him.
“What happened?”
Asha thought about Safire’s bruised and battered face.
“I wish I knew how to make him afraid,” she said.
A strange silence filled the space between them. Asha looked up to find the slave staring at her. Seeing everything, somehow. Hearing every word she didn’t say.
She looked away, her gaze settling on the shelves full of scrolls.
Something flickered in her then. A memory. Her brother in this very room, pulling scrolls off this shelf. Scrolls full of uneven handwriting and misspelled words.
Asha pulled a scroll from the shelf and unrolled it, staring at the shaky letters scrawled across its crisp, white surface. Recently done.
She remembered long-ago lessons with Dax, remembered their tutors’ frustration when he couldn’t read the words. Remembered the things they muttered under their breath when they thought he couldn’t hear.
Stupid. Useless. Worthless.
Everyone assumed Dax had never learned to write.
Unless he did, thought Asha, and no one noticed.
She thought of Dax’s trembling. Of the lost weight. Of the light that usually shone in his eyes, sapped from him. Asha thought backward. Her mother’s symptoms started when she began telling Asha the old stories at night.
What if Dax was writing the old stories on these scrolls?
And if he was, what if writing them down had the same effect as telling them?
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Iskari.”
Asha glanced up into the slave’s eyes.
“It’s my brother,” she said. “I think he might be sick.”
She thought back to her mother. What came after the shaking?
Coughing.
She would be alert, watching for the symptom—after she took care of Kozu.
The slave wore Jarek’s crimson mantle. With the hood up and the tassels securing it around his throat and shoulders, he was unrecognizable. Not that there was much need for disguise, because as the Iskari led Jarek’s slave through the stairways deep below the temple, they didn’t pass a single guardian.
“Tell me about those blades strapped to your back,” he said.
“Tell me why a house slave knows so much about hunting laws.” Now that they were in the crypt, Asha lit the lamp. The orange glow flickered over the rock walls. It cast shadows into long, narrow alcoves, revealing rows upon rows of sacred jars. Jars full of her ancestors’ remains.
“Greta was a hunting slave before my master purchased her,” he explained.
Greta. The elderly slave. Her name sank inside Asha like a stone. He didn’t know Greta was dead, she realized. He had been convalescing here in the temple. In his mind, Greta was safe and sound in the furrow.
“Everything I know about hunting and dragons, Greta taught me.” His fingers trailed along the damp, glistening walls, as if caught in memories. “Everything I know about anything, I know because of her. Greta raised me.”
Asha thought of that night in Jarek’s home. Of the tears in Greta’s eyes as she opened the door. She should have been in the furrow, but she’d stayed behind. Because she loved this slave, Asha realized now.
She swallowed. Someone had to tell him.
“Greta is dead.”
His footsteps faltered and an icy chill slipped beneath Asha’s skin. He was outside the glow of her lamp now and she couldn’t see him.
“What?” It was more of a breath than a word.
Asha stood still. “I—I watched her die.”
Silence seeped out of the darkness. And then a muffled cry echoed through the crypt as a fist struck stone. Asha’s throat constricted at the sound. Very slowly, she walked until her lamplight found him. He’d sunk to the ground with his elbows on his knees and his palms pressed hard into his eyes.
Asha couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. She didn’t know what to say to him. But saying nothing felt wrong. Like her rib cage was suddenly too small and getting tighter around her heart.
“The tunnel is there,” she said when the silence started to claw at her. Lifting the lantern, she illuminated the slit in the rock. “Now you know. You can escape into the Rift. You don’t ever have to return. You’re free.”
And now Asha could add liberating a slave to her list of criminal activities.
He didn’t say a word. Didn’t even lift his head.
Asha, not knowing what else to do, left him there. She needed to find her shadow dragon. And then she needed to hunt down Kozu. She had only four more days.
She’d done what she’d promised. She showed him the tunnel. It was his own fault if he got caught there, sobbing like a child.
But the higher she climbed, the more she thought. Even if the skral managed to make his way up into the Rift, there were wild creatures, the elements, and of course, Jarek’s hunters. What if they caught him?
So Asha turned around and went back.