Asha suddenly felt like a dragon drawn into the thrall of an old story, knowing it was a trap, but drawn nonetheless.
You must take great pains to steel yourself against wickedness.
There had always been something wrong with Asha. Something easily corrupted. Her childhood addiction to the old stories—the very things that killed her mother—was the first sign. The horrible incident with Kozu was the second. And now...
This inability to say no to the skral who, for some reason, was important to her brother.
The corner of his mouth lifted, making her pulse quicken.
“I’ll be waiting, Iskari.”
A Dragon Queen’s Betrayal
A realm stood divided by a sea of sand. On one side rose Firgaard, walled and cobbled and refined. On the other sprawled the scrublands, wild and fierce and free. They were old enemies. Bitter rivals.
In the wake of his mother’s death, the dragon king wanted peace. Everyone knew it. No one thought he’d win it.
But he did.
In one of the five Great Houses across the sand sea lived Amina—a scrublander girl, and a daughter of the House of Stars. Amina would be his bridge between the old and the new, between a world of cobbled streets and a vast expanse of sand.
The dragon king bound himself to her there in the desert. He brought her home with him to the capital, thinking he was bringing home peace.
Amina was gentle and wise. It didn’t matter that she was a scrublander. The people of Firgaard loved her.
Soon, Amina gave birth to two heirs: a boy and a girl. The boy was just like his mother. But the girl was defiant and wild.
“A wicked spirit infects her,” the slaves whispered behind closed doors.
“Her scrublander blood has corrupted her,” the court said behind their hands.
Amina saw the narrowed eyes. She heard the clucked tongues. But Amina loved her daughter’s spirit. Her daughter reminded her of home.
When the nightmares started, when the girl screamed and wept for fear of them, Amina sent for the best physicians in Firgaard. They gaveher instructions. They made her remedies. But the nightmares only worsened. And soon the physicians began to look at Amina’s daughter the same way everyone else did.
Wicked,Amina saw in their eyes.Infected.
So Amina took matters into her own hands.
When the lanterns turned down and the candles were snuffed and her husband fell to snoring, Amina slipped out of bed and crept down the palace corridors and locked herself in with her daughter.
There, with no one to see her, Amina chased her daughter’s nightmares with stories. Old stories. Forbidden stories. She told them aloud, all through the night, until the girl stopped crying and slept.
But every night, as the dragon queen crawled into her daughter’s bed and spoke the ancient tales aloud, she grew a little sicker. A little weaker. The stories were poisoning her, just as they’d poisoned the raconteurs before her. The stories were deadly, which is why they were outlawed.
But even as the stories poisoned Amina, they made her daughter stronger. The girl’s nightmares stayed away. She slept more soundly than ever.
When the dragon king found out, when he realized the danger his wife had put herself in, he moved to intervene. But it was too late. The stories were draining Amina’s life away.
Before the next moon rose, Amina was dead.
It broke the dragon king’s heart.
For her treachery—for breaking his own law and putting their daughter in danger—he couldn’t give her a proper burning. He couldn’t give her the last rites. He could only watch as the guardians abandoned her body outside the gates of the city, to rot in the sun like every other traitor before her.
When the scrublands learned of Amina’s death, of her profanefuneral, they wept in sorrow and howled in rage. They declared the dragon king a monster and in their fury, took his son and heir—a boy of only twelve, a boy who was a guest in their land—and turned him into a prisoner. He was the heir of a monstrous king who would grow into a monster himself, and they treated him accordingly. In so doing, the scrublanders smashed the dragon king’s alliance, scattering its broken shards across the sand.
And Amina, the gentle queen, would never be remembered as the one who cured her daughter’s nightmares.
