He met her horrified gaze, saying nothing. He didn’t need to. Asha knew in that moment who had washed the blood from her body.
He’s just a slave. He’s been undressing and bathing his masters all his life. It doesn’t matter.
Except it did matter. He’d seen everything. The full extent of her hideousness.
For the first time in a long time, Asha didn’t feel proud of her scar.
She felt ashamed of it.
Falling still against the cot, she turned her face away from him.
“Here,” he said, lifting a tray from the floor and setting it on her lap. A small plate of olives glistened next to a loaf of bread and olive oil. “You lost a lot of blood. You need to eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Iskari.”
Asha looked up into his face.
“Please.”
Gritting her teeth, Asha propped herself up. She tore off a piece of bread, soaking it in oil before putting it in her mouth.
“What happened?” he asked when the needle went in again.
Asha winced and swallowed the bread. “I found him. Or rather, he found me.”
“The dragon you were hunting?”
Asha nodded, tearing off another hunk of bread and dipping it into the olive oil. “This”—she pointed to the gash he was stitching—“is from his tail.”
The slave’s stitching stopped. “Did you kill him?”
She put the bread in her mouth and shook her head, thinking of the shadow in the trees. The swish of a forked tail.
This is the first time I’ve come back from a hunt empty-handed.
The fist of her left hand tightened at the thought.
When she remained silent, the slave went back to work. He started humming the tune of a song only to stop, rearrange the notes, then sing them again in a different order. He did this over and over. Like he was testing the song and it kept failing him.
Asha lay back, letting his voice distract her from the teeth-grinding pain of his needle sewing her up.
A story rose to mind, unbidden.
Rayan strode through his mother’s orange grove and stopped sharp. Someone was singing. Someone with the voice of a nightingale.
Asha shook the story away. “Can I ask you something, skral?”
The tune halted. Keeping his face tilted toward his work, he raised his eyebrows, peering up at her with just his eyes, making his forehead crinkle.
“Do you believe in the Old One?”
Deciding this only warranted half of his attention, he went back to work. “I have no use for your gods.”
“But do you think he’sreal,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows to look at him better. The movement sent a sharppain through her side and she winced. He narrowed his eyes in disapproval.
“He’s real to a lot of draksors.”
