Asha faltered.
“Nightmares... about you.”
She didn’t turn back. Just stared at the tent flap, where Safire waited on the other side.
“They’re always about you,” he whispered.
The words wrapped around her heart and squeezed.
Torwin reached for her wrist, his fingers gentle. Asha let him turn her. Let him draw her in close. When she didn’t pull away, his forehead fell against her shoulder, as if Asha—only Asha—was the balm for a hidden wound.
“Over and over again, I watch them hunt you down.” He shuddered. “And I can never stop them.”
She looped her arms around his neck, holding him tight, the way her mother used to do in the face of her own nightmares.
“I’m right here,” she said, pressing her cheek to his. “I’m safe.”
Asha ran her fingers through his hair, trying to soothe him. But her fingers caught. And when they came free, a sick feeling coiled like a snake in her belly.
Very slowly, she pulled her hand away. Stepping back, out ofhis arms, she stared down at her hand.
A thick clump of his hair lay in her palm.
The past rose up before her. Asha suddenly remembered stroking her dying mother’s hair. Remembered the way her fingers caught the dark strands coming out in clumps.
Asha choked on a startled sob. She raised her eyes to Torwin’s thinning face.
“No... ,” she whispered. But Torwin only stared at her, confused.
A fierce and desperate anger swept through her.
“Are you telling the old stories?”
He frowned at her, his confusion deepening. “What?”
“The stories!” she demanded, her hand closing around his hair. “Are you telling them?”
He shook his head no. “I don’t know them well enough.”
“Then it must be the dragons.” She started to pace, tried to think. “I’ll get someone else to train the riders. You can stay in the camp....”
He reached for her. “What are you talking about?”
Asha let him take her hands in his trembling ones, stopping her pacing footsteps.
She looked down at their interlaced fingers. His were flecked with freckles, hers were hardened with scars. He still wore her mother’s ring.
The ring.
It was the same ring Asha’s mother wore on her deathbed, carved and given to her by the dragon king. The dragon king was always carving things out of bone for his wife to wear.
It should have been burned with her other possessions, but it wasn’t. Her father kept it. And then he gave it to Dax.
Dax, who shared all their mother’s symptoms...
... until he gave it to Asha.
But Asha had only worn it a day before giving it to Torwin as a promise. And Torwin had been wearing it ever since.
