In the silence that followed, Safire’s knife flashed as she tossed it one final time, then sheathed it in her boot. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s settled.”
To aid him in his plan, Asha told Dax about her secret tunnel beneath the temple. They decided the scrublander army would wait outside the city wall with Roa while Dax, Jas, Safire, and a few other Haveners—what Dax called his group of rogues—took the tunnel into the city, then ran to the north gate. There they would hold the gate open long enough to let the army in. Roa’s hawk, Essie, was the signal. Dax would take the bird into the city and, once the gate opened, let her fly.
After the city was secured, the dragon king imprisoned, and Dax sat on the throne as regent, things would begin to change. His union with Roa would fix what was broken and bring peace back to draksors and scrublanders. The skral would be free to choose. They could remain in Firgaard or seek out new lives elsewhere.
When the meeting ended and Asha went to follow Safire out of the tent, Dax halted his conversation with a scrublander girl and called for Asha to wait.
The tent emptied, and Dax leaned against a map of Firgaard unrolled across the table. His hands cupped the edge of the rough wood as he looked his sister up and down.
“You disappear with him last night and then reappear wearing his clothes?” He motioned to the shirt and trousers she wore. “Think about how that looks.”
Asha crossed her arms over Torwin’s shirt and raised her chin. “Would you prefer I still be standing in my binding dress?”
He made a frustrated sound. “You’re the daughter of the dragon king.” He pushed himself off the table. “And Torwin is . . .”
Beneath me. Forbidden.
“A skral. And while most draksors in this camp are friendly with skral, there are many who aren’t. And there are just as many skral who won’t think twice about hurting him simply because of the way he looks at you.”
Asha’s arms fell to her sides.
“In this camp and beyond it, if people think you care about him, they’ll use him to hurt you. To make you do things you don’t want to do.”
“I fell in the lake,” she said. “Torwin gave me dry clothes. He was just being kind.”
“Asha,” Dax said. As if he were the adult here and she were the child. As if he’d just caught her in a lie.
Asha scowled. “What.”
“You—you of all people—know how these stories end. I don’t want either of you getting hurt.”
Unable to look Dax in the eye, Asha stared over his shoulder at the canvas walls of the tent, lit up by the morning sun.
“Lillian wouldn’t have died if Rayan hadn’t pursued her,” Dax said. “If he’d put her safety first, above his own selfishness, they’d both be alive today.”
And Safire wouldn’t exist.
The mere thought of it broke her heart.
Dax stepped toward her. “If you want to keep him safe, you must keep him at a distance.”
Asha dropped her gaze to her bare feet. Her slippers were probably washed up on the shore by now.
“I know,” she whispered. “I’m trying.”
Dax sighed. He reached for Asha’s shoulder and gently squeezed, making her look up into his face.
Whatever his affliction had been, it was receding, if not gone altogether. His eyes were starry again and he was putting weight back on, easing those sharp edges he’d developed. He was almost back to his regular handsome self.
But there was something still tugging at Asha. This plan of his was a sound one: getting into the city, seizing it with the help of the scrublanders—it could work. But as for the throne . . . as long as their father lived, no one would consider Dax the dragon king. Dax could lock their father in a prison for the rest of his life, but as long as the true king lived, he was the rightful ruler of Firgaard. Not Dax.
Their father had to die. And Dax wouldn’t leave a task as dire as this to someone else. He would consider it his responsibility.
Yet the ancient law against regicide was unbendable. If Dax killed the king, Dax too would die. And if that happened, who would rule Firgaard?
Roa was a scrublander. No draksor would submit to her solitary rule.
Asha was the former Iskari, hated and feared by her people.
Safire was half skral and an abomination in the eyes of Firgaard.
That left . . . no one.
Dax couldn’t die. He needed to rule. But if he couldn’t die, then he couldn’t kill the king.
Which meant someone else had to.
Thirty-Nine
Asha spent the days before the weapons caravan arrived calling dragons. Torwin found her a dozen riders—mostly draksors and scrublanders, along with two skral. Asha raised an eyebrow when he brought the skral boys forward and Torwin shrugged. “You asked for riders. I found you the best.”
Asha told the old stories aloud and out of earshot, high above the tree line. She didn’t want them poisoning those in the camp, the way they poisoned her brother and her mother.
More than this, ever since the night of her binding, she’d noticed Torwin’s hands shaking. He was thinner than he had been, and there were dark half-moons under his eyes. When she asked him about it, he attributed it to exhaustion.
But Asha couldn’t shake the feeling that it was more than that.
So she called dragons alone, keeping the stories far away from Torwin and the camp, then passed the dragons off.
Torwin paired dragons to riders, showing them how to seal their links in flight. He recruited Asha’s former seamstress, the skral girl whose name was Callie. Her task was to sew coats, gloves, and skarves to protect the riders from the elements. But it was a lot of sewing, and if she was going to finish in time, she needed help.
At dusk on the third day, Asha found Torwin alone in the riders’ tent they’d erected high in the valley. He sat hunched in the light of a lamp, sewing the sleeve of a coat. It was still strange to see him without his collar. Her eyes often caught on the scars across his collarbone, hinting at where it used to rest.
But Asha did as Dax suggested. She kept her distance.
There was so much work to do and such limited time to do it in, it made avoiding Torwin easy. Despite spending the day in close proximity, they rarely spoke. And at the end of the day, when Torwin waited to walk her into camp, she shook her head and told him to go on without her. She still had work to do.
At meetings, she wedged herself between Safire and Dax. When Torwin sought her out at dinner, she fell into a conversation with Jas, who was endlessly curious and easy to talk to. When Torwin inserted himself into these conversations and it became clear that Jas valued his opinion, Asha sought out someone—anyone—else.
Sometimes, in the middle of the day, she felt him watching her. Sometimes, when she turned her back on him at dinner, she caught a glimpse of the hurt in his eyes. Like he knew what she was doing, and he was going to make it easy on her.
And why wouldn’t he? He was leaving.
Soon he stopped waiting for her. He stopped trying to sit next to her. He stopped seeking her out.
It hurt Asha’s heart.
So when no one was looking, she started watching him. From a distance, she saw his hands move with gentle reverence over dragon flanks, showing the riders how to calm their mounts and conquer their fears. He taught them various combinations of clicks that could make a dragon launch or turn or drop on command. He taught them everything he knew, until the spaces beneath his eyes grew even more hollow.
She watched him with Callie, the seamstress, as the two skral bent over her designs. Watched the way Torwin motioned with his hands, pointing out what he thought wouldn’t work or what might work better. Whenever he smiled his crooked smile at Callie, something in Asha broke a little more. She found herself comparing Callie’s smooth face to her own. The girl was pretty as a desert dawn. She was a skral, just like he was. Maybe Torwin would take Callie with him across the sea instead.
Back at camp, Ca
llie and Torwin played music together with a handful of others. Asha didn’t dare follow them, but sometimes she lingered out of sight, sharpening her already sharp axe while she listened to the sounds of Torwin’s lute weaving with the sounds of Callie’s reed pipe and a scrublander’s hand drum, waiting for his unfinished song . . . only it never came.
If you want to keep him safe, you must keep him at a distance.
But now, after days of avoiding him, here she stood, alone with him in the riders’ tent.
Taking a deep breath, Asha crossed to the desk piled high with cut leather and carded wool. It was Callie’s desk. Her tools—knives, needles, charcoal, thread—were arranged in neat little rows. Beside the desk, on a rough-hewn chair, hung Asha’s wool mantle.
“Where’s Callie?” she asked, keeping her voice steady as she lifted the mantle and swung it over her shoulders. The walk back to camp was a cold one.
He didn’t look up from his work. “That’s the first time you’ve spoken to me in two days.”
Asha’s fingers paused on her tassels. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Asha.” He glanced up at her. The lamplight caught in his hair, making it gleam. “We both know you’re avoiding me.”
That might be true. But Asha had watched him introduce Callie to Shadow, showing her where the dragon liked to be scratched—right below the chin. She’d watched Callie linger at the tent entrance two days in a row now, waiting to walk him back to camp, and he always went with her.
“What about you?” she whispered.
He lowered the needle to his lap. “What about me?”
You’re giving up on me.
It was ridiculous, of course. She needed him to give up.
Asha tied the tassels around her throat. “Never mind.”
As she made for the tent entrance, she heard him say, “Safire’s right. You’re stubborn as a rock.”
Asha halted and looked back. Safire was talking about her? To Torwin?
That stung.
“Safire can eat sand.”
His mouth quirked up.
She shouldn’t have looked. If she hadn’t, she might have left.
But if she’d left, she wouldn’t have noticed the hunch of his thinning shoulders or the way his hands shook a little too hard as he worked. He looked wasted, there in the lamplight, with a half-sewn coat spread out across his lap and extra needles and thread on the rug beside him. He looked the way her brother had, before the revolt.
Fear gnawed at her insides.
But I’ve been so careful. Why is this happening?
Asha loosened the tassels around her throat. She stepped back into the tent, letting the mantle fall from her shoulders as she sank down next to him on the woven grass rug. Leaning across his lap, she grabbed a needle and thread, taking stock of his symptoms and trying to match them with her mother’s.
Rapid weight loss, unnatural exhaustion, tremors . . .
Maybe she should keep him away from the dragons entirely. Dragons told stories too, in their own silent way. Maybe, somehow, they were the cause. . . .
“Do you even know how to use that?”
His question startled her out of her thoughts. It was the same question she’d asked herself about him and the arrows, down in the pit. Asha met his gaze with a glare.
“How do you think I made all my armor?” she said, threading the needle and setting to work on the other sleeve.
When his knee fell against hers, she looked up to find him smiling. Something sparked inside her. She shouldn’t have, but she let her leg relax against his. Just this once.
They worked in weary silence. When they finished attaching the sleeves of one coat, they moved on to the next one. Halfway through, Torwin started humming that mysterious tune. But by then, Asha was having trouble keeping her eyes open.
When Torwin noticed, he took the needle from her. “Time to sleep, fiercest of dragon hunters.”
Asha was too tired to correct him: she didn’t hunt dragons anymore.
She didn’t want to be the Iskari anymore.
Asha pressed her palms to the rug, about to rise and make the long trek back through the woods, to the tent she shared with Safire, when Torwyn touched her hand.
“Stay.”
She shook her head, avoiding his gaze. “I can’t.”
“Asha.”
Her name tugged at her. She looked up to find his eyes warm and feverish. He looked so fragile tonight. It worried her.
She looked away. “Fine. I’ll stay until you finish the coat.”
A small smile tugged at his mouth.
“Wake me when you’re done,” she said, curling up on the rug beside him and closing her eyes. A heartbeat later, he pulled her mantle over her. A heartbeat after that, a dream rose up to claim her. A dream about her namesake, the goddess Iskari.
Much later, Torwyn set aside his needle and thread and stretched out beside her. Asha woke. She turned to find him on his back, elbows crooked, hands cradling his head as he stared up at the canvas tent ceiling.
With her dream echoing in her mind, she forgot about the danger.
“Torwin?” she whispered.
He turned his face toward her.
“Do you think the goddess Iskari hated herself?”
It wasn’t the question he expected. She could tell by the way he sucked in a breath, like she’d elbowed him in the stomach.
“I think . . . ,” he said after a stretched-out moment, his gaze intent on her face, “I think the goddess Iskari was forced to be something she didn’t want to be.”
That wasn’t any kind of answer. Asha was about to say so when he went on.
“Iskari let others define her because she thought she didn’t have a choice. Because she thought she was alone and unloved.”
He turned on his side, propping himself on his elbow and looking down at her.
“The first time I heard them call you Iskari, I hunted down her story. I didn’t care about the danger or the law. I found an old beggar in the market who was willing to tell it to me. And, Asha, when I heard it, it didn’t sound like a tragedy to me.”
“Of course it’s a tragedy.” Asha frowned up at him. “She dies at the end. She dies all alone.”
“But is that the end?” His mouth turned up at the side and Asha felt herself soften beneath him. “I don’t think it is. What of Namsara? He goes looking for her. The sky changes seven times before he finds her. And then, when he does find her, he falls to his knees and he weeps. Because he loves her. Because she was never as alone as she thought she was. She was never just life taker. To him, she was sister. She was precious. It’s a love story, Asha. A tragic one, to be sure. But a love story, still.”
Asha studied his much-thinner face above her. The line of his jaw. The curve of his mouth.
“Does Iskari hate herself?” His voice shifted into something tender. “Of course she does.” He said this like he was only just realizing it. Like Asha’s question had forced the realization. “I used to get angry with Namsara for letting it all happen. I used to get angry with Iskari too for living out the role she’d been forced into. For never once trying to be something else.”
Torwin brushed aside a strand of Asha’s hair, tucking it behind her scarred ear.
“I got angry with Iskari for never looking around her. To the ones who loved her. To the ones who could save her.”
“But no one can save her.”
“How do you know? She never lets anyone try.”
That night, Asha had a nightmare.
She dreamed she stood in the shadows of the dungeon and before her loomed an iron door. Horrible sounds came from behind it. Sounds of the shaxa tearing at someone’s back. Sounds of bones being snapped. Sounds of a body contorting in terrible ways.
And through it all, she heard a voice, begging.
No . . . please, no. . . .
When the begging turned to screaming, she realized that she knew the owner of the voice. And because she knew him, she th
rew herself against the door. She pounded it with her fists. She searched for the key—only there wasn’t a keyhole. There was no way to get in.
She couldn’t save him. Couldn’t free him.
Could only listen while they killed him.
Asha woke in a sweat, breathing hard. Someone stood over her, silhouetted by the sun shining behind him. With the nightmare lingering on the backs of her eyelids, she bolted upright. Panic flared through her. Jarek. Jarek was here. She turned to find the carpet empty beside her. Torwin was gone.
“Asha.”
Asha scrambled up and away. Her back hit the makeshift desk full of Callie’s tools, which scattered and fell. She ran trembling hands along the floor, searching for something to use as a weapon.
“Asha.”
That voice.
It made her stop. Her breath scraped out of her lungs, loud and ragged. She looked up. Squinting through the sunlight, she found her brother crouching beside her.
“You’re all right. You’re safe.”
Her surroundings shifted, no longer tainted by the nightmare. Her brother’s voice brought clarity and vision. Dax stared down at her, cloaked in a gray mantle with a mud-stained hem. His dark brows drew together over eyes full of concern. Beyond him, the canvas walls were bright with morning sunlight. The still-burning lamp sat on the rug next to a half-finished flight coat.
“Where’s Torwin?”
Very carefully, Dax said, “Being tended.”
Asha’s heart jolted. “Tended?”
“A group of draksors and skral saw you come in here with him.”
Asha’s mouth went dry.
She remembered when Torwin had first brought her to New Haven, the way the Haveners looked at him when he said her name aloud . . . as if he didn’t have the right.
She remembered the warning Dax had given her: There are just as many skral who won’t think twice about hurting him simply because of the way he looks at you.
She struggled to her feet. Cold morning air rushed against her skin, making her shiver.
“Where is he?”
Dax looked as if the sight of her pained him. “I told you this would happen. I told you to keep your distance.”
The Last Namsara Page 24