He grabbed her arm, squeezing until it hurt, showing just how easily he could overcome her, Iskari or not. He would overcome her, once they were bound. Once there was no one to stop him.
She couldn’t let that happen.
He leaned in close. “It’s my duty to keep you out of danger, Iskari.”
Asha’s eyes filled with fire. The fire filled up her vision, turning everything red-hot.
Didn’t he understand?
“I am the danger!” she said.
Jarek nodded to a nearby soldat.
Bristling, Asha watched the soldat slide a ring of keys out of his pocket. Watched him step through a door in the wall. It led up to the ramparts, she knew. Jarek kept a few small cells there, for suspicious travelers seeking passage through the gate.
When the soldat emerged, he had Asha’s cousin in tow.
The hood of Safire’s mantle crumpled around her shoulders. Her left eye was swollen shut, ringed by a purplish-black bruise, and her lower lip was split down the middle. The hem of her clothing was stained red, and from the way she kept her arm tucked against her hip, it hurt her badly.
The sight of Safire beaten was a knife in Asha’s heart.
This was what happened when you didn’t give Jarek what he wanted.
The dragon beyond the walls would have to wait.
Sixteen
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.
Seventeen
They hadn’t spoken a
word since they made their way to the end of the tunnel. Which was fine with Asha. She didn’t need to talk.
When they stepped out into the moonlight, the soft whoo of an owl greeted them. Asha breathed in the cool night air just as the slave abruptly stopped. His arm shot out and Asha walked right into it. She was about to push it away when, in the cedar forest ahead, she saw what made him stop: two pale, slitted eyes peered at them through the darkness.
Asha let out a shaky breath.
Shadow dragon. So the hunters hadn’t found it.
“Keep walking,” she told him.
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
Asha moved into the cedars. Out of sight, the dragon crept along beside them. Above the hush of the wind, Asha could hear its bulk brushing against the leaves. Could hear the soft click of its scales rippling as it moved. Asha kept walking until the trees grew thicker and closer together, following the sound of trickling water. At the small stream, Asha stopped. It smelled like wet earth. Crouching down into the grass, she peered into the trees where the dragon stalked, staring back at her, wondering what in all the skies she was supposed to do now.
The slave sat down next to her, his eyes wide, his body shivering.
“I said you can leave,” she told him, sitting too and curling her arms around her knees. “I’m not going to stop you.”
“Do you know what the punishment is for freeing a slave?”
Asha knew.
“The loss of a hand,” he said, in case she didn’t.
Asha shrugged. They’d have to prove it was she who did it.
And she needed only one hand to kill Kozu.
“Steer clear of the hunting paths,” she told him. “They start here, in the lower Rift, and go west, toward the breeding grounds. If you stay east, you might make it to Darmoor.” But that was a very long walk on foot. And the Rift was a wild, dangerous place. The chances of his making it, alone, were slim.
He must have known this, because he said, “I think I’ll stay right here for now.”
Asha looked at him.
He reached for a long strand of esparto grass, twisting it around his fingers. “There’s a dragon in there.” He nodded toward the trees up ahead while plucking two more grass strands. He wove these together, fashioning a kind of braid. “And since you happen to be a dragon hunter, I plan to stick with you until it’s either dead or gone.”
“Unfortunately for us both,” Asha muttered, “neither of those outcomes is forthcoming.”
“What?” He looked into the trees where the dragon crouched, then back at Asha. “Why not?”
She sighed. The air heaved out of her in a rush and she fell back into the grass, looking up at the moon: a mere sliver of red in a black sky.
“I can’t kill it,” she whispered. “I wish I could. But I—” She shot him an embarrassed look. “I’m supposed to protect it.”
The slave peered down at her, blocking the sliver of moon. “But you’re the Iskari. The king’s dragon hunter.”
“If it dies,” she said, looking up into his face, “the Old One will punish me.”
“The Old One . . . ?” He raised an eyebrow. There was a hint of mockery in it. “Iskari, you’ve killed hundreds of dragons. Did he punish you for any of those?” He planted one hand just above her head, leaning in closer.
Too close.
Asha’s pulse quickened. She ducked out from under him and rose to her feet. Putting all her focus back on the dragon in the trees, she sloshed through the spring. If she could catch it, maybe she could tame it. And if she could tame it, maybe she could teach it not to follow her into the city.
She felt it in the trees, crouched and ready to spring away. She approached slowly. Cautiously. When she was mere steps away, she slowed even more. Clicking gently, she mimicked the noises dragons made in an attempt to coax it to her.
The dragon vanished into the darkness.
“Great! Go!” she shouted, picking up rocks from the spring bed and, one after another, chucking them into the trees. “I hate the sight of you!”
When she ran out of rocks, she said, without looking at the slave across the stream, “It followed me all the way to the palace, but doesn’t let me come closer than that.” Turning, she thrashed through the shallow water, kicking her helmet on her way back to the slave. “So how am I supposed to keep it from harm?”
His gaze ran up and down her.
“Honestly? If I were a dragon, I wouldn’t come anywhere near you either.”
Asha looked where he was looking: from her armor to her boots to the helmet at her feet. She picked up the helmet, studying it. Everything she wore was made from the skins of dragons.
The slave reached for her helmet. Asha’s grip on it tightened.
He tugged the helmet out of her hands anyway. “Trust me.”
Fear rippled through her as she remembered how it felt as a child to stand armorless before Kozu.
The fire rushing toward her.
The screams trapped in her throat.
Her flesh burning away.
With her helmet tucked under his arm now, he stepped in close. Close enough to reach for the buckles of her breastplate. Holding her gaze, he began to undo them.
Asha’s heart raced and her breath came quick.
“Definitely not,” she said, stepping away.
“Fine.” He set down the helmet at her feet. Taking off his sandals and rolling his pants up to his knees, he sat next to the stream and slid his bare feet into the water. “Maybe by morning you’ll have scared it away entirely and I can be safely on my way.”
He kicked at the water with his feet while his hands remained planted on the bank.
Asha stood alone in the moonlight, staring down at herself.
What was she afraid of? If the dragon wanted to kill her, it would have done so already. Wouldn’t it?
Asha started undoing buckles and taking off pieces of armor. The burn on her axe hand hurt as much as ever. She unbuckled the slayers from her back, then shrugged them off and dropped them next to her armor. The night air rushed up her hunting shirt and across her bare arms. Crouching low, Asha began unlacing her boots. One by one, she slid them off.
In her bare feet, with the esparto grass brushing against her knees, Asha felt . . . unsheathed. The wind tugged at her hair. The night air kissed her scarred skin. She’d thought standing armorless before a watching dragon would make her feel vulnerable and exposed. And she did feel those things. But she felt something else too.
Unfettered.
Wild.
Free.
Without a single thing to protect her, she moved past the slave, through the stream, and back into the trees—toward those slitted eyes. She heard the anxious swish of a forked tail as she approached.
Three steps. Then two. Then . . .
The dragon fled.
Balling her hands into fists, Asha growled. “It didn’t work!”
The slave’s dark silhouette moved toward her. But Asha walked right past him, back through the cold water of the stream, shivering in the night. What a mistake this had been.
When she stood over her pile of armor, though, she no longer recognized it. It looked more like the discarded skin of a lizard and she couldn’t bring herself to buckle any of it back on.
“I’m wasting time,” she said, thinking of Kozu prowling the Rift somewhere. She should be hunting him down, not trying to tame this senseless beast. There were only four more days until her binding night. Four more days before Jarek took her to his bed.
Her eyes stung at the thought. Asha pressed her palms against her forehead and crouched down in the grass.
A shadow fell across her. “He’s a wild creature, Iskari. And you’re a hunter. You can’t expect him to come when you call. You have to earn his trust.”
Asha looked up at the slave’s silhouette. “So what do I do?”
“You wait,” he said. “You let him come to you.”
The moon was waning. A
sha couldn’t wait.
But maybe she didn’t have to. How many times in the past year had she lured a dragon to her? Too many times. The thought of it made her stomach clench. If she lured this one to her, the slave would know she’d been using the old stories. She was still the same corrupted girl who’d brought disaster upon her people.
But then, who cared what the slave knew?
Sinking back on her palms, Asha took a deep breath and began.
Willa’s Story
Willa was a farmer’s daughter. She was a problem for her parents, who couldn’t marry her off, because no one wanted a wife who needed to stop and rest in the middle of a harvest. No one wanted a wife who might not last through childbirth.
Willa had a weak heart and it made her a burden—until the day she went to graze the sheep and never came back.
The Old One appeared to her out in the sand hills. He’d set her apart for his first Namsara. She was to be Elorma’s hika—a sacred companion, a perfect match, fashioned for him like the sky fitted the earth. The Old One told her to leave her family behind and seek Elorma out. Willa, who had always been devout, did as she was bidden.
She set out across the desert; and when she arrived in Firgaard weeks later, stepping through the temple doors, Elorma—who’d never seen her before in his life—knew exactly who she was.
It was nine moons before they could marry, though, because Willa was not yet eighteen. In that time, Elorma taught her to read and write so she could help him in the temple. He explained Firgaard customs and taught her the ways of city dwellers, and he never minded, not once, when she needed to stop and rest because of the weakness in her heart. In fact, with every day that passed, Elorma fell a little bit more in love with her.
But Willa did not love him back. She would do as she was bidden, but the Old One could not make her love a man. Elorma tried to win her affection. He brought her gifts, and when they didn’t work, he wrote her poems, which didn’t work either. So Elorma went to the Old One for guidance, but the Old One kept silent.
One day, the city was set upon by enemies from the west. Elorma himself was captured and held hostage while the invaders established themselves as rulers over the city. It was Willa who herded the people of Firgaard and led them in a revolt. It was Willa who stood before the imposter king with a thousand fists at her back, demanding he hand over her betrothed.
The Last Namsara Page 12