Page 67 of House of Ashes

My mother had wanted a daughter who would be Dragonesse, someone who prized the bigger picture over the smaller pieces, someone who could look at an eyrie…and sentence everyone within it, because they had never been close to me.

Someone cold without cruelty, someone who could hold everyone else at a distance.

I had succeeded spectacularly on that front.

My peers in the Training Grounds—Kirana, Maristela, Elinor—knew me only by sight and reputation. My first week in the Training Grounds, they’d made efforts to invite me to their group, to join them for training and tea and visits to the local wyvern-rider outpost, where we could earn free passes to visit.

Those invitations had dried up within days. I’d made it clear I was there to train, not to bond.

In fact, I’d never even been to the outpost. My free passes had languished in favor of more time spent in the training yards.

Perfect Serafina. It was less a moniker than a mockery.

And as much as I despised it…I had earned it.

Even now, staring into the flames, sitting on the terrace of my overgrown, empty eyrie, I wondered if I’d deserved Mistward. If no one had spoken up for me, because I’d never bothered to speak up for them.

“You’re brooding.” Rhylan turned the other haunch on the makeshift spit. “You make this specific face when you brood, you know. Like this.”

I looked up from the fire just in time to watch him grotesquely pull the corners of his mouth down, nostrils flared and eyes crossed. “I do not look like that!”

He laughed, but it was short-lived and pensive. “Fine, you don’t, but you really do have a brooding face.”

“Hmm.” I sorted through a pack, finding a little bag stuffed full of herbs. Viros had provisioned us like he expected us to be trapped here for months, and there was no shortage of seasoning packets or soup-balls or tea.

I tore the herb bag open and sprinkled it over the venison. To Rhylan it would probably taste about as good as a mouthful of ashes, but to me, well…it beat a scrawny raw rabbit any day.

“‘Hmm’? That’s it?” He adjusted the spit against and leaned back on his bedroll. “You’re not going to elaborate on your broodiness?”

I raised my brows. “You want to listen to me whine?”

“Sure, why not?” Rhylan crossed his arms behind his head to make a pillow and grinned at me. “Passes the time as well as anything else.”

Myst crunched a deer bone across the fire, lifting her pale head to stare at us.

“Oh, no,” she said, talking between uncomfortably crunchy chewing. “We have much more pressing matters to discuss.”

I sat up straighter. “Yes, Myst?”

It was more than a little strange to be talking to my Ascendant—the creator of my bloodline, the architect of this eyrie, a ten thousand-year-old dragon—while she was smaller than I was, but Myst had rarely taken full form during my life here.

Vague memories of a time in the Koressis Royal Court tugged at me—I had been only six at the time, visiting my father, and Myst had braved leaving her eyrie to accompany me. She had been in her full size, and to six-year-old me, she had been a mountain, towering a thousand miles overhead.

Rhylan also sat up, resting his elbows on his knees as he watched my Ascendant cock her head and consider me.

“Something is not right,” she finally pronounced, silver-fire eyes focused on my face. “You’ve been gone for years, leaving me to languish and starve. I smell no mate bond between you and it’s well past time for such things. And I want to know exactly why you’re here with the son of Obsidian Flame.”

Rhylan looked rather taken aback at that, but he wasn’t going to mouth off to an Ascendant, no matter how small and vulnerable she appeared at this moment.

I took a deep breath, steeling myself to explain to my Ascendant that I was breaking her parents’ Laws for personal gain, but of course my false mate beat me to it, in a much less roundabout fashion than I would’ve used.

“We’re pretending to be mate bonded so we can gain the throne, and Sera has been recovering from her exile in my eyrie. Once we’ve secured the support of the other Great Houses, she receives Yura’s head, I receive Tidas’s head, she becomes the next Dragonesse, and I will abdicate as Drakkon once her right to might is sealed.”

I froze, my mouth open, as Myst’s gaze swung from him back to me.

“Breaking the Law,” she mused, taking another speculative bite of bone and slurping out the marrow. “Plotting murder. Deceiving your allies…”

My lungs did not want to work. My Ascendant had every right to throw me out of her House for such audacity. I’d planned to present our case in a much less incriminating light…if that were even possible.

---