Page 152 of House of Ashes

I had seen this before.

My heart was racing, slamming quick and heavy against my ribs. That night in the Training Grounds unspooled in my mind, a memory I had mostly shut out—or repressed for my own sanity.

Seeing Yura here, pale as death in the moonlight, brought it all back with screaming clarity.

A night in the forests around Koressis. Every draga was blindfolded and abandoned, left to their own devices in the wilderness. Left to fend for themselves in a training exercise designed to teach us how to survive without a dragon. We were meant to chart our course, to find our way back to the training masters’ encampment.

I had scraped my way through thick underbrush and under briar hedges. Without clothes, without protection against the sharp thorns, I had left a trail behind me from a thousand oozing scratches.

Yura had found me that night.

Following the scent of my blood, snuffling at the ground like a dog.

In those early, pitch-black hours, I had come to realize that I was the prey, and she was the hunter. The encampment didn’t matter. The training masters’ instructions had ceased to exist.

I had been alone in the forest, and there was something in it that wanted to devour me.

Yura had come from the darkness like an animal, prowling on all fours. Laying claws into my back, driving me into stony soil. Her teeth snapping at my throat as she tore away flesh, swallowing it, my blood gleaming on her lips.

But she hadn’t killed me. I had dragged myself back to the encampment as the first rays of dawn touched the sky, my body painted red with blood.

The training masters had thought it was wild animals. In the light of day, the horror of being hunted had been replaced with flickers of memory, until I no longer remembered what was real, and what was imagined in the extremity of terror.

I had agreed with them. I had shut my mind.

Later, all I remembered was Yura. Her teeth, her claws.

Now I remembered that she had eaten my flesh. Drank my blood.

“Oh, had you forgotten?” Yura’s smile widened now, her teeth gleaming. “Yes, elder sister, I held your life in my hands. I felt your heart racing, racing…the frantic beat of a rabbit running to ground, knowing it was outmatched.”

“You…ate…parts of me.” Unbidden, my hand rose to my throat, touching the marbled scar that blended into my pale skin. The healers had fixed it, though it had taken years for those mottled pink patches to fade to silver.

Yura touched a rock with her toe, nudging it into the water. Ripples spread over the still surface of the tarn, turning the moon’s reflection into streaks of light. “When you consume a thing, you consume its power. But you were not more than a mouthful, then. I wanted to eat your fire, not the pathetic, smoldering embers you held.”

My lip curled, the sneer not quite hiding the nausea I felt, as I remembered Yura’s animalistic noises as she tore at my throat—and wished the memory had remained in the recesses of my mind. “I wonder how long your alliances would last, were the other Houses to know you’re a flesh-eater.”

Her foot twitched as she brought it back beneath her. “Oh, please, Sera. It is your word against mine. I am sure I will be shocked and appalled at such an accusation…and they will look at you as unbalanced.” She raised her chin, staring me down. “A mentally unstable liar, bearing tales just like her mother.”

The sickness churned in my guts. She was right.

The Gilded Skies were an old House. A highly respected House, despite my peers’ dislike of Yura.

If I walked into the Second Claim and accused my half-sister, the second child of Drakkon Nasir, of…of cannibalism, the other Houses would recoil.

And when they went home to their eyries, they would whisper about me. About murderous mothers. About made-up stories.

About lies.

And I would be turned away from their eyries. My letters would go unanswered. Slowly but surely, I would be driven from Akalla’s society.

As with the Obsidian Flames and Tidas, who still walked free after what he had done, I did not hold enough burden of proof to make anyone listen. That scar on my throat…it could have come from anything.

I wanted to touch Rhylan, to even look at him, just for a moment of clarity and comfort. But I dared not take my eyes off this cannibalistic thing for even a moment.

I had always hated her because there was something terribly wrong with her, and I had always known it. The eating of a dragonblood’s flesh was explicitly forbidden by the Law, because that was the province of much darker things.

Things that Larivor and Naimah forbade from walking the earth.

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