Now he too was showing signs.
Father carved it out of bone, she thought.Why would... ?
A story flickered in her mind. A story about a queen who poisoned her guests with dragon bone ash. The slaves found the guests dead, their bodies like hollow shells.
The horror of it dawned on her. Asha grabbed Torwin’s wrist, needing to get the ring off.
“Ouch! Asha, you’re—”
She twisted, then pulled hard.
The ring came free.
Asha had spent eight years hunting dragons. She knew how to bring one down. Knew how to skin one. Knew what all the various parts could be used for.
And she knew one thing most of all: when someone was burned by dragonfire, the only thing strong enough to draw the toxins out was the poison of dragon bone. But used alone, in small amounts, it was just as deadly as dragonfire, slowly leaching the body of life.
As she stared down at the ring, Asha thought of the queen who had killed her enemies by putting a pinch of dragon bone ash in their food at night. The ring on Asha’s palm—the ring her father made for her mother—was made of that same deadly substance.
“He murdered her,” she realized aloud. “And then he tried to kill Dax.”
Torwin stared as if she were speaking an unknown language.
“Come with me,” she said, taking his hand in hers.
Torwin obliged, letting her lead him out of the tent.
She found Dax and handed him the ring. With Torwin looking on, Asha explained: it wasn’t the stories that killed their mother. It was the ring. And maybe more than that. Everything their father ever carved for his wife to wear, Asha was willing to bet, was made out of the poisonous dragon bone. It onlyseemedlike the stories killed her, because that’s when the symptoms started.
Thanks to the eavesdropping slaves, everyone knew the dragon queen had been telling her daughter the old stories. Everyone knew she was committing a criminal act.
“And what better way to prove the stories were wicked than with the death of a storyteller?”
Dax stared at her, his jaw hardening, his hands turning to fists. She could see the thoughts churning in his eyes. The pieces of a puzzle coming together.
“What if it wasn’t just one storyteller?” he whispered, as if to himself.
Asha frowned. “What do you mean?”
“If the old stories were never deadly,” he said, looking at her, “what killed the raconteurs?”
Or rather,whokilled them?
The question unearthed something in Asha.
She thought of a certain tapestry hanging in her father’sthrone room. Of the woman who was queen at the time of the Severing. A queen who needed to prove the Old One had turned against her people.
“You thinkour grandmotherpoisoned the storytellers?”
Dax said nothing. He didn’t need to.
The world spun.
If the stories were never poisonous, if they never killedanyone, then they were never wicked. Which meant Asha was never wicked for telling them.
Not only had the dragon king turned his daughter against Kozu, the Old One, her own self... he had killed her mother. And then he had tried to kill her brother.
He’d tried to strip Asha of everything she ever loved. Which made her new purpose sparklingly clear: she would do the same to him.
