Asha lunged.
Right before impact, a shadow darted between them, intercepting Asha’s killing blow. Her axe edge hit horns instead of flesh and something growled low—but it wasn’t Kozu. Asha found herself staring up into pale slitted eyes. Two of them.
She stumbled away.
A second dragon?
The shadow hissed and forced her backward, keeping her from Kozu. Through the darkness, Asha saw its forked tail lashing angrily back and forth.
Red-hot rage flowed through her veins. How dare it come between her and her prey!
Her grip tightened on her axe, but she felt light-headed. The ground dipped and rose. Asha looked down. The right side of her body glistened in the darkness.
The quick, chattering sound of dragon speech echoed through the night. They were talking to each other, Kozu and this shadow dragon. Planning their next move.
Quickly, Asha found her sleeping roll and tore off a wide strip. Gritting her teeth, she wound it around her torso, wrapping that hideous gash in her side. She tied it so tight, the pain made breathing difficult.
A roar made Asha look up, expecting to find both dragons bearing down on her.
Instead, she found them . . . fighting.
Each other.
The shadow dragon was smaller and younger than Kozu, but twice as fast. When Kozu lunged, the younger dragon dodged, circling back to keep itself between the First Dragon and the Iskari. Kozu’s tail dripped blood. He swatted and made himself vulnerable. The younger dragon ducked and charged, running circles around the bigger dragon, as if it were a game, as if its plan was to tire the First Dragon out.
If she weren’t weak from the blood loss, Asha would have taken advantage of this. She would have struck while the two dragons were occupied.
But she could feel herself losing consciousness. She wanted to put her head down. Needed to close her eyes. . . .
No. Stay awake.
If she didn’t get back to the city, if she collapsed right here in the Rift, she would bleed out and die.
Unless a dragon got her first.
Her hands shook as she buckled on her slayers. She left everything she didn’t need, including her axe. Asha had plenty of other axes.
Kozu kept charging, trying to get at her, trying to finish what he’d started all those years ago. The shadow dragon blocked, gaining ground, driving Kozu into the trees. Clicking and chattering. Teasing and taunting. It wore the First Dragon down.
Finally, Kozu stopped advancing. Asha felt his slitted gaze on her as she stumbled through the darkness, moving farther away.
A low keening sound split the night, surprising Asha. A mourning call. Usually reserved for a dead mate or slain young, the sound was an expression of sadness or grief.
It made Asha shiver. She looked back, following the direction of the sound, but Kozu had disappeared.
The shadow dragon had not.
“Come near me,” she growled at it, “and I’ll carve out your heart.”
The dragon watched her, head cocked, tail thrashing. When she walked, it walked. When she stopped, it stopped. Like a stray pup following her home.
Asha saw Kozu’s scar in her mind. Heard the beat of his horrible heart. A moment more and Asha would have dealt a killing blow. This dragon prevented her. The moment it came close enough, she was going to kill it.
But as her rage boiled ever hotter, a voice echoed through her mind:
The Old One bestows his second gift tonight.
Asha stopped walking.
She fixed her gaze on the shadow in the trees.
You must keep it from harm.
This—this dragon—was her second gift?
“No. . . .”
As realization sank in, Asha screamed her rage—at Elorma, at the Old One, and at the bloodred moon waning above her. And when she was done screaming, the shadow dragon remained. Head tilted. Eyes fixed on her. As if to say: Where are you going? Can I come too?
Fourteen
Asha dragged herself through the temple, then up the dark and dusty stairway. Leaving the flamelit corridors below, her feet tripped on the steps. The slowing thud of her pulse echoed in her ears. Her legs dragged, heavy as chains.
Stay conscious. Just a little longer.
It felt like years passing before she fell against the door, breathing in the sweet cedar. Asha pressed her forehead against the flower carved into the wood, willing it to hold her up.
“Skral!”
Silence answered her. She slammed her palm against the door.
“Please. . . .”
A match struck on the other side. A lock clicked. The door swung in, creaking as it did, and an illuminated face came out of the darkness. Freckled. Sleep smudged.
With her support swinging away from her, Asha struggled to stand and found she couldn’t.
“Iskari?”
He caught her, pulling her into him.
“What have you done to yourself?”
But no words formed on Asha’s tongue. The skral set down the lantern. He hoisted her up into his arms and kicked the door shut behind them.
Asha woke in the night to a low-burning lamp and the skral bent over her. Someone had changed the yellowing bandages wrapped around his torso. These looked white and fresh.
A sharp pain pricked her side and Asha bolted upright, gasping as the sting flickered through her ribs.
“Hold still,” he said, grabbing her shoulder with a warm hand and pushing her back down. His other hand held a needle. It glinted in the lantern light. “I’m almost finished.”
She tensed against his touch, but did as he said. He let go of her shoulder. Hunching like a hawk, he frowned in concentration as he gently stitched up her wound—which bled now from the sudden movement.
“Who washed me?” Her blood-soaked tunic was gone and her hair was wet and braided tightly over one shoulder. But that wasn’t the worst thing.
She wore a slave’s shirt. The linen was thin and plain and rough against Asha’s skin.
His shirt, she realized.
She wore his shirt and nothing else.
In order to stitch up the gash in her side, he’d pushed the fabric up to her chest and thrown a wool blanket over her waist and legs for modesty. Her entire torso was visible, including her burn scar, which ran down the length of her side, creeping toward her navel.
He met her horrified gaze, saying nothing. He didn’t need to. Asha knew in that moment who had washed the blood from her body.
He’s just a slave. He’s been undressing and bathing his masters all his life. It doesn’t matter.
Except it did matter. He’d seen everything. The full extent of her hideousness.
For the first time in a long time, Asha didn’t feel proud of her scar.
She felt ashamed of it.
Falling still against the cot, she turned her face away from him.
“Here,” he said, lifting a tray from the floor and setting it on her lap. A small plate of olives glistened next to a loaf of bread and olive oil. “You lost a lot of blood. You need to eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Iskari.”
Asha looked up into his face.
“Please.”
Gritting her teeth, Asha propped herself up. She tore off a piece of bread, soaking it in oil before putting it in her mouth.
“What happened?” he asked when the needle went in again.
Asha winced and swallowed the bread. “I found him. Or rather, he found me.”
“The dragon you were hunting?”
Asha nodded, tearing off another hunk of bread and dipping it into the olive oil. “This”—she pointed to the gash he was stitching—“is from his tail.”
The slave’s stitching stopped. “Did you kill him?”
She put the bread in her mouth and shook her head, thinking of the shadow in the trees. The swish of a forked tail.
This is the first time I’ve come back from a hunt empty-handed.
T
he fist of her left hand tightened at the thought.
When she remained silent, the slave went back to work. He started humming the tune of a song only to stop, rearrange the notes, then sing them again in a different order. He did this over and over. Like he was testing the song and it kept failing him.
Asha lay back, letting his voice distract her from the teeth-grinding pain of his needle sewing her up.
A story rose to mind, unbidden.
Rayan strode through his mother’s orange grove and stopped sharp. Someone was singing. Someone with the voice of a nightingale.
Asha shook the story away. “Can I ask you something, skral?”
The tune halted. Keeping his face tilted toward his work, he raised his eyebrows, peering up at her with just his eyes, making his forehead crinkle.
“Do you believe in the Old One?”
Deciding this only warranted half of his attention, he went back to work. “I have no use for your gods.”
“But do you think he’s real,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows to look at him better. The movement sent a sharp pain through her side and she winced. He narrowed his eyes in disapproval.
“He’s real to a lot of draksors.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
Sighing, he slid the thread out of the needle and tied off the stitching. “Why are you asking?” Gently, he ran his fingers across the scarred skin of her side, inspecting his work.
At his touch, a strange warmth bloomed in her belly.
Asha studied him in the orange glow of the lamplight. The silver collar around his throat cast shadows in the hollows of his collarbone. He was a fugitive slave whose life was forfeit. She could tell him everything if she wanted to, and it wouldn’t matter.
When she didn’t answer, he washed her blood from his fingers in the basin of water on the floor. “I believe in one god,” he said, shaking his hands dry. “Death, the Merciful.”
She sat up to face him and the linen shirt fell down over her torso, hiding her scar.
He nodded toward her wound, white linen bandages already in his hands. “I still need to wrap it.”
“Death is a thief,” she said, thinking of an old story. One about Elorma, whose true love was stolen by Death on their wedding night.
The slave took the empty tray off her lap and set it back on the floor. Asha pulled her shirt up again to reveal the freshly stitched gash in her side.
“Maybe for you,” he said as he began to bandage her, winding the strips of white around and around her rib cage. More than once, his fingers brushed against her skin. “For some of us, Death is a deliverer.”
Asha’s gaze lifted. He leaned in so close, she could feel the warmth of him. Like the heat off a fire. When he leaned in farther, to pass the linen from one hand to the other behind her back, his cheek brushed her ear.
Asha’s pulse thrummed. He paused and started to turn his face toward her. But something stopped him and his chin straightened. Asha felt him strain to keep his cheek parallel to hers as he continued wrapping, around and around, binding her up.
Asha let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
A windowless room made telling the time of day impossible. So it might have been morning when Asha woke next, or it might have been midnight. But either way, sleep fled, leaving her to stare at shelves full of scrolls in the dim light of the lantern. Her ribs ached when she tried to move, so she didn’t move for a long time. When she couldn’t take being still anymore, she carefully turned on her side and found someone sleeping on the floor by her cot.
Jarek’s slave.
Asleep, he looked like a moonflower whose petals unfurled only at night, rare and beautiful in the starlight. Asha reached down and turned up the lamp so she could better watch the fluttering shadows cast by his eyelashes. She traced the hard, bony lines of him with her eyes. His hair reminded her of the sea in Darmoor: tossed and unruly, full of waves.
She thought of Rayan watching Lillian in the orange grove, then quickly turned on her back, staring up at the ceiling, willing the thoughts in her head to scatter. When they didn’t, she pulled the collar of the shirt she wore up over her nose and mouth, breathing in. His smell was there in the linen. A salt musk that made her stomach flutter.
She quickly tugged the shirt down and turned to the shelves full of scrolls on the other side of the cot, trying to distract herself. She touched their wooden handles, running her fingers along the smooth oiled wood. They were new, freshly carved. Asha could tell by the strong smell of thuya wood.
The next thing she knew, she was sitting, fully covered by the slave’s shirt. She pulled a scroll down into her lap, ignoring the pain flaring up in her side. It was too dark to see, so she reached for the lamp, bringing it onto the cot with her and turning up the flame.
The moment she started to read was the very same moment she stopped.
It was one of the old stories. The one about the third Namsara, a man who designed the city’s aqueducts during a yearlong drought. And just like the handles, the parchment was fresh and crisp. The black ink was bright and gleaming . . . but there was something odd about the strokes. They were shaky and unsure. And some of the words were misspelled.
Asha raised her eyes to the shelf, where hundreds more scrolls were carefully piled. She pulled more down, unrolling them to discover just what she feared: more stories. Each and every one of them forbidden. Stories of the Namsaras—seven of them in total—who rose to defend their people from danger, chasing out enemies and dethroning imposter kings. Stories of the First Dragon, the companion to each Namsara and the living link between the Old One and his people.
Asha pulled scroll after scroll down to her lap, reading one, only to drop it to the floor and reach for another. This was beyond criminal. The old stories had been banished and burned long before Asha was born. Transcribing them and keeping them here was treason.
When she unrolled the next scroll, though, she didn’t drop it. Instead, her grip on the handles tightened.
“What does it say?”
Asha glanced up. The slave on the floor yawned and ran his hands through his hair. She looked from him to the wobbly handwriting scrawled across the parchment.
“It’s Willa’s story,” she said. Her mother’s voice rose up within her. Or rather, the echo of her mother’s voice. Despite the years that passed, despite what her mother had done, the memory of her set something glowing in Asha, right beneath her breastbone.
The cot sank in and when Asha looked up again, the slave peered down at the scroll unrolled across her lap. His thigh rested precariously close to her knee, which peeked out from beneath the hem of his shirt. Asha almost told him to move away. But after everything—after he’d bathed her, dressed her wounds—it seemed unnecessary.
“When I was younger,” she said, “I had nightmares every night.” She hadn’t spoken of this in years. “My mother called them terrors because even when I opened my eyes, I saw them.”
She traced each of the misspelled words on the parchment.
“My mother consulted every physician in the city and they all prescribed something different. Some gave me warm goat’s milk before bed. Others hung roots and herbs from my bedposts. One even put the tooth of a dragon beneath my pillow.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Did it work?”
Asha shook her head. “The nightmares grew worse. So my mother tried her own remedy.” It didn’t matter if she told him. Everyone knew, anyway, because the slaves had stayed to listen at the door. The slaves were the ones who spread the rumor after her death: the dragon queen had told her daughter the old stories to save her, and it was the reason she died so young.
“When she woke to my screaming night after night, my mother left her bed, banished the slaves from my room, and locked herself in with me.” Asha glanced up to find him watching her. “She told me the stories until her voice went hoarse and the sun crept in through the windows. They were the only thing t
hat chased the nightmares away.”
That was when all the symptoms started: the thinning hair, the lost weight, the shaking and coughing.
And finally, the dying.
Asha rolled up the scroll. She didn’t want to talk about this anymore. When she went to drop it with the others, though, she couldn’t let go.
“I have nightmares too.”
Asha looked to find him staring down at his hands, which were lying palm up in his lap. She had the strangest urge to touch them. To trace his large palms. To run her fingers along his calluses.
“Ever since I can remember, I’ve dreamed the same thing, night after night.”
“You have the same nightmare every night?”
He nodded. “It didn’t start out as a nightmare. When I was small, I used to love going to sleep, just so I could see her.”
“Her?”
His shoulders rose and fell with the breath he took.
“Yes,” he said softly. “Her.”
He took the scroll from Asha, unrolling it, then rolling it up again. Like his hands needed something to do.
“I used to think she was some kind of goddess. I used to think she was choosing me for some great destiny.” His hands tightened on the scroll. When he realized it, he handed it back. “Stupid boy that I was.” He forced a crooked smile, one void of lightness. He avoided Asha’s eyes as he said, “Now she’s a nightmare I can’t escape.”
His thigh touched her knee. Asha held her breath and looked down, staring at the place where their bodies connected, waiting for him to flinch away.
He didn’t.
“Your brother’s right, you know. You shouldn’t hunt alone.”
Those words shattered everything.
Kozu.
Asha didn’t know what time of day it was, but she knew one thing for certain: the red moon was thinner than when she’d fallen asleep. Time was slipping away from her.
“I have to go. . . .”
Asha stood. Scrolls clattered to her feet. The white linen shirt she wore fell midway to her knees, leaving her bare legs—one scarred, one smooth—peeking out from beneath the hem.
“Wait,” said the slave, pushing off the cot and retrieving something from the floor. “You can’t leave like that. Put this on.” He handed Asha another plain kaftan made of rough, scratchy fabric. “Maya brought it while you slept.”
The Last Namsara Page 10