She couldn’t let that happen.
He leaned in close. “It’s my duty to keep you out of danger,Iskari.”
Asha’s eyes filled with fire. The fire filled up her vision, turning everything red-hot.
Didn’t he understand?
“Iamthe danger!” she said.
Jarek nodded to a nearby soldat.
Bristling, Asha watched the soldat slide a ring of keys out of his pocket. Watched him step through a door in the wall. It led up to the ramparts, she knew. Jarek kept a few small cells there, for suspicious travelers seeking passage through the gate.
When the soldat emerged, he had Asha’s cousin in tow.
The hood of Safire’s mantle crumpled around her shoulders. Her left eye was swollen shut, ringed by a purplish-black bruise, and her lower lip was split down the middle. The hem of her clothing was stained red, and from the way she kept her arm tucked against her hip, it hurt her badly.
The sight of Safire beaten was a knife in Asha’s heart.
Thiswas what happened when you didn’t give Jarek what he wanted.
The dragon beyond the walls would have to wait.
Sixteen
Asha took her cousin to Dax. As Safire explained everything that had happened, Dax stood there listening, silent and still, his brown eyes hardening under his darkening brow.
Roa wasn’t with him.
Good,Asha thought. She hoped her brother had come to his senses and was keeping the scrublanders far away from the king.
While Dax kept watch over their cousin, Asha sharpened her jeweled axe and waited for the sun to set. Beneath the cover of darkness, she’d have a better chance of not being seen by Jarek’s soldats. The moment the golden orb slipped below the shoulder of the mountain, she climbed into her arched window, threw her helmet onto the roof, and swung herself up after it.
Asha took the rooftops to the palace orchards, which were abandoned at dusk. The flowering trees filled the air with the sweet scent of blossoms, and the fruit bats’ fluttering shapes skimmed the branches. She lowered herself over the palace’s outermost wall and dropped to the street below.
Asha zigzagged through the city, away from the singing and drumming of the night market and the coaxing calls of its merchants. She took narrow streets where soldats were least likely to roam, until she arrived at the temple doors and quietly stepped inside.
With her helmet tucked beneath her arm, Asha stood at the cedar door, raised her fist, and knocked.
“Iskari?” The slave boy opened the door, letting her inside. She pushed her way past him. “Are you all right?”
Asha headed for the twin black blades resting on the cot, thinking of Kozu’s head dripping blood as she dragged it through Firgaard’s streets. Thinking of the look on Jarek’s face as the thing he wanted most was taken from him.
“What happened?”
Asha thought about Safire’s bruised and battered face.
“I wish I knew how to make him afraid,” she said.
A strange silence filled the space between them. Asha looked up to find the slave staring at her. Seeing everything, somehow. Hearing every word she didn’t say.
She looked away, her gaze settling on the shelves full of scrolls.
Something flickered in her then. A memory. Her brother in this very room, pulling scrolls off this shelf. Scrolls full of uneven handwriting and misspelled words.
Asha pulled a scroll from the shelf and unrolled it, staring at the shaky letters scrawled across its crisp, white surface. Recently done.
She remembered long-ago lessons with Dax, remembered their tutors’ frustration when he couldn’t read the words. Remembered the things they muttered under their breath when they thought he couldn’t hear.
