Page 133 of House of Ashes

The healer returned with a pot of hot water, still steaming from the massive cauldron boiling over the hearth. She had silvery-gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, her dress was stained with earth and herbs, and the bangle on her wrist was fully encircled with malachites.

“Good thing you stayed,” she said grimly. “You’re going to help me, and he’s going to need his mate to pull through this. It’s going to hurt, and the last thing I need is an uncontrollable dragon on my hands.”

She thrust a clean linen into my hands, instructed me to begin wiping the blood away, and I obeyed, feeling sick the whole time.

I wasn’t really his mate. I was just a fake. No matter how much I wished I could, I could really do nothing for him in any way that mattered.

The only reason he’d gone after Kalros alone was because of me—avenging me for what Kalros had tried to do.

I was no help to him at all…just the reason he’d nearly been killed.

Chapter

Twenty-Nine

Day became night, and I didn’t notice. It all passed in a haze of blood and worry.

I sponged blood from Rhylan, the healer wielded a needle and thread like she was born to it, and hours later my dragon was sewn up.

My fingers hovered over a line of stitches across his stomach. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, to cause him more pain—until the healer shoved a jar in my hands.

I looked up at her, surprised that she was still there. When she’d vanished from my view, she had ceased to exist.

“Put that over the stitching, and do it carefully,” she instructed me. “Gods only know what that red son of bitch had on his claws. This’ll keep the wounds from going septic.”

Dark circles had formed under her eyes, and a smear of dried blood had been streaked across her forehead, but she didn’t seem to notice or care.

“You hear me?” she barked, and I realized I was staring at her. Gods, I was tired.

“I heard you,” I muttered, and unscrewed the lid from the jar. The salve smelled familiar…exactly the one Kirana had used on my cheek, the same sharp herbal tinge. “Did you learn this from Kirana?”

The healer gave me a look of sheer disbelief. “No, she learned it from me.”

“You’re Cryla.” The name came to me suddenly, a vaguely-remembered conversation as Kirana told me about her contacts…Cryla was an herbalist. One of her teachers in the healing arts. “Kirana’s tutor.”

“So you’ve heard about me.” Cryla smirked, but the expression quickly faded. “Get to it, draga. I’ve got too many other patients who need me now.”

She looked exhausted again. I listened to the moans of pain from outside, a few agonized cries…and went to dip my finger in the salve.

I stopped, staring at it. My hands were covered with dried, brown blood, flaking off the backs of my hands in sheets.

“Fuck.” I couldn’t contaminate this, not when others would need it, too.

I left the jar by Rhylan and found a wyvern watering-trough to wash my hands in, scrubbing as quickly as I could without leaving a single speck behind.

A short, slim form leaned against the wall as I washed. It was the wyvern-rider girl, her dark, doe-like eyes brimming with curiosity. “Is he still alive?”

“Yes,” I answered, more shortly than I intended to. I was fighting back a jaw-cracking yawn, but I couldn’t sleep now. It was just the killing that had caught up to me. I could push past it.

“Can I come with you?” she asked eagerly, and I forced myself to really look at her.

No more than fourteen, wearing a wyvern-rider’s leathers…she was brown-skinned, her tight, dark curls reaching her shoulders, a look of sheer puppy-like eagerness all over her face.

But the signs were there. The glimmer of mulberry scales on her cheekbones, metallic strands of the same shade spiraling through her coiled curls. Her nails were thick, strong claws, kept tidy and clean, and the scales extended down the exposed backs of her hands.

The girl was a scion of a House—likely an ancient one, given how many physical markers she possessed—and she was out here riding a wyvern.

Utterly criminal. She should be in the Training Grounds now, practicing for a proper dragon, preparing for the future that was owed to her bloodline.

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