Page 6 of Kingdom of Ashes & Bone
I burped.
Shava opened her mouth.
“You better not be about to apologize for me,” I warned her, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Her lips snapped shut as Oleria chuckled.
“Told you she was a handful,” she remarked playfully.
“This is fun and all, but some answers would be nice,” I grit out.
Zephyr smiled patiently, and sat back on his log across from us. “Answers. Wouldn’t we all like answers? I suppose it would be easiest to start with myself?”
I gestured around to the cave. “And this place. And how these Nobles got here, what’s going to happen to them, and all about the people here who don’t seem to be sick.”
Shava huffed. “So everything.”
Oleria gave her a playful shove. “Shut it.”
Zephyr gave them a tolerant look, then focused his attention on me. Seeing my mother’s eyes, Shava’s eyes, my eyes, looking back at me from his face made me feel a host of emotions: hope, fear, anxiety, and longing.
“You’re the king’s son,” I started with, feeling pretty sure about that one.
“Son is a bit of a generous term,” he began with not a small trace of bitterness in his voice. “It was an experiment to see how deep the curse went through the generations of Nobles, and whether or not a cure was in sight.”
I let that settle in my mind. “So … the king had you on purpose?” I snorted. “I bet the queen loved that.”
Zephyr leveled me with a cool stare. “I’m told it was her idea. She wanted insurance that breeding with a mud boy would give her heirs that wouldn’t share the Nobles’ curse and try to eat the staff.”
I think that was his attempt at a joke, but it fell flat with the amount of dying Nobles spread around us.
“The queen picked a Noble woman who had mud quarter descent as well as artisan quarter descent, and she was only a Noble for a generation and a half. The result was … me. And that gave the queen the confidence to have her sons. Though, I bet no one could have foreseen the curse they’d be under was so different.”
“So you know they’re twins, and you know they’re the dragon. Dragons,” I corrected, a headache blossoming at my temples.
“I’ve learned a lot over the years, being cast out and having to make my own way,” he answered, which wasn’t really much of an answer.
I raised an eyebrow, a silent question. There was a lot about him that was eerily similar to me.
He sighed. “I was allowed to be raised by my mother in the Noble court until I was five and the queen gave birth to the prince. Or princes. I didn’t find that out until much later. Even so, I was torn from my mother’s arms and sent to the Seat to train. The queen didn’t want any competition hanging around her precious little princes.”
“Oh, so just like every other boy from the mud quarter,” I quipped, not feeling too bad for him. At least he’d been able to live in the luxury of the Seat for his first five years, and not the squalor and hunger my brother and I had to deal with.
Thinking of my brother made me slightly ill, so I shook my head and moved on.
“Well, obviously you aren’t a Fireguard,” I pointed out.
Zephyr’s face darkened. “I did too well. I called attention to myself. The queen didn’t like how heavily I favored the king and her princes. So she ordered me killed a few years ago, right before I completed my Fireguard training.”
I couldn’t help the laugh that burst from my mouth. Oleria covered her mouth in shock, and Shava frowned. “Sorry,” I gasped, waving my hands around. “But it’s just … we should form a club. ‘I survived the queen trying to kill me’ or something ridiculous like that.”
Zephyr looked a tad offended. “Well, she tried to kill me by pushing me off the wall.”
I grinned. “She tried feeding me to Zariah.”
Zephyr blinked. “Is that how you tamed the dragon? You were … with the prince? Or both? Fascinating …”
The urge to defend what small scraps of honor I had left rose within me. “For your information, I didn’t give myself to him. Well not then. That came after. I mean—” I slammed my mouth shut blushing furiously. “So she pushed you off the wall and you lived?” I pushed on desperately, anxious to move on.
“Well, that’s how I found out the dragon was actually the prince. He caught me on his back and spirited me away. I’d never seen the queen so angry before. He dropped me in front of a tunnel and told me it was the best he could do and to disappear. He said he was sorry he couldn’t know me better, and wished me luck.”
