Page 39 of House of Ashes

Kalros was not here. Rhylan was, and he might not be my true mate, but he would defend me.

I was safe. I was as secure as I would ever be.

My chest was tight at first, but as I focused on counting my breaths, my muscles slowly relaxed. From a distance, I heard Rhylan, and then Nilsa; I tensed again when someone entered the room, but the spill of dark hair and the flash of gold revealed the slight figure to be Kirana.

She whispered to someone, and the crystals in the room flared brightly, illuminating a large table in the center and the high walls. It was not a small room at all, but a library, the shelves rising high into darkness.

I drifted forward to the table, finding that having something to focus on was a little more calming than cowering in the chair.

The surface of the table was a massive map of Akalla, with wooden mountains and hills rising from its surface. Ivory tokens carved to look like towers peppered the map, and I realized they marked the eyries.

I rose to my feet, one hand pressed to my cramping stomach, to inspect the ivory token of Varyamar, sitting at the southeastern edge of the map.

It came up easily, unconnected to the wood of the table surface. The entire token was the length of my palm; I held it up to a light crystal, inspecting the tiny crenellations and carved dragon in the light.

Unlike the Jhazra Eyrie token, an arm’s length away, the ivory of my token was worn, rubbed shiny in places from frequent handling.

I frowned at it, and replaced the Varyamar token carefully in its place, nestling it among painted representations of the lakes near my home, Aurae’s Tears.

“Rhylan thought it might be time to refresh you on the Houses,” Kirana said softly, standing on the other side of the table. She fiddled absently with an eyrie token. “Many things have changed in the last few years. They’ve only grown worse since it became clear the Drakkon was deathly ill.”

She wore riding leathers, soft and broken-in from regular use, free of any embellishment. The only ornamentation on her was the healer’s bangle, and the golden rings woven into her braided hair.

Kirana looked down at herself when she saw my questioning look, one side of her mouth quirking up in a smile.

“I ride a wyvern,” she said. “It’s much like the Bloodless ride horses, but with a series of vocal commands as well. My Garnet was trained by one of the Mourning Fangs, and she’s as sweet as sugar to anyone in our family.”

“I’ve never ridden a wyvern,” I said truthfully. My voice wasn’t as shaky as I’d feared it would be. Even my pulse had begun to slow.

“They’re easier to manage than dragons. They don’t have many thoughts of their own, besides food.” Kirana laughed softly. “And of course, our harnesses are much more intricate. Viros is actually fashioning your new saddle based on wyvern harnessing. But a wyvern will always run from battle, and a dragon will always fly towards it. I’ll take a wyvern over a bloodthirsty show-off any day.”

“When did you decide you didn’t want a dragon?” It was a foreign concept to me. A draga without a dragon was like a bird without wings. Wyverns were typically reserved for those brave Bloodless who chose the swiftness of air travel over safer—but much slower—horses.

Kirana circled the table slowly, looking at the map with her brows furrowed. She picked up a tiny golden pawn, moving it towards another ivory eyrie token, where a silver pawn rested.

“I suppose it was while we were in the Training Grounds,” she finally said. “Our parents were…progressive. I mean, they did find each other in a rather unconventional way, after all, and Father wasn’t even part of a House. But after that, our mother decided that her children should have the right to choose their own mates as well, even though we’re of ancient royal blood. The Drakkon was apparently furious, but she refused to back down.” Her eyes flicked up to me for a moment.

“We were all free to pursue who we wanted.” Kirana’s smile was sour. “And none of us got who we wanted. It was a bad time for our family. I decided to become a healer rather than a rider.”

I couldn’t bring myself to ask who she’d wanted as her dragon. It was too personal a question, one that would cut to the bone for any spurned draga.

But her story stoked the fires of curiosity in me. It was almost unheard-of for a royal dragonblood to enter the Training Grounds without already knowing who their mate would be.

My arrangement with Tidas had been a common occurrence. Even Yura had been arranged to form a mate bond with a dragon from the Iron Shards. How she’d broken that arrangement without fomenting bad blood between their Houses, I didn’t know—but if Doric and Elinor’s intelligence was true, then she’d somehow managed to offer something worth losing a bond in the House of Gilded Skies.

I wondered if Kirana’s bitterness—the dragon she hadn’t gotten—was why she, and her entire House, hated Yura so deeply.

“Your mother didn’t argue against you leaving the Training Grounds?” I held my breath after asking the question. Now that I knew the history between our Houses, the subject of Anjali was fraught with peril—and I had asked a terrible question. Kirana had left after I’d been exiled…which meant Anjali had been dead by the time she left.

But Kirana simply shook her head. “She always gave me her love and support. Anything we chose to do, she championed. I thought she would understand.”

“That was kind of her. My mother would have dragged me back by my hair if I’d tried to leave.” I said it without thinking, although it was true.

Still, it made me feel oddly disloyal to her memory, as though I slandered her.

Nerezza had been a draga of exacting standards. If someone else in the Training yards got higher marks, I was expected to eat, sleep, and breathe whatever I’d failed at until I could beat them all.

Never in a million years would she have permitted me to leave the Training Grounds of my own volition. It was only the Drakkon’s sentence that had ended my studies there.

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