Dax smiled wider. In a flash, though, the smile was gone. He glanced at her and their eyes met.
Both of them looked away.
Silence grew into the space between them, like a thick and choking weed. In it, Roa remembered the locked room. The sobs slipping through the cracks. How she’d listened at the door to the sound of him crying.
“It’s... strange being back,” he said, shattering the memory. “Everything’s changed.”
Yes,she thought.My people are destitute now. Thanks to you.
“You’ve changed,” he said softly.
Roa bristled. Her fingers curled into her palms.
“And you...” She tried to hold back the anger and grief welling up inside her but couldn’t. It came rushing forth like a river. “You actas if nothing has changed. Playing gods and monsters with my father? Climbing up onto this roof like—like it never happened? Like you don’t remember what you did?”
He turned his head abruptly to look at her.
“You think I came here because I forget?” He sounded angry and sad all at once. “I came here because I remember, Roa. I will never stop remembering.” And then, more softly: “I think about her every day.”
Roa sat up sharply. What was she thinking, coming up here? She didn’t want to talk to him. Not about Essie.
She moved to leave, crawling carefully to the roof’s edge, then sat facing the garden with her back to Dax. She had just swung her feet over, her toes seeking the ladder rung below, when he said, so quietly, she almost missed it, “You have to live with the loss of her, and that’s the worst thing. But, Roa—I have to live knowing I took her from you. That because of me... she’s gone.”
Roa paused, sitting at the edge of the roof with her bare feet on the uppermost rung of the ladder. She felt the heat of his gaze on her bare neck—like fire, burning her up.
“Maybe this is silly,” he went on. “Maybe you think I don’t have a right. But I talk to her sometimes. On the roof, back at home. And here, tonight. She was always so easy to talk to.” His next words were barely a whisper. “You were always more difficult.”
Roa didn’t turn to climb down. Instead, she sat motionless, facing the night. Tears pricked her eyes.
“Why did you come here?” she whispered, staring out over the dark-drenched garden.
She heard him sit up. Finally, she looked over her shoulder. His head was tilted back to the stars, spilled across the sky above them, andhis eyes were closed. After several heartbeats, he sucked in a breath. “I’m here to tell you that I’m going to steal my father’s throne.”
This was not at all what Roa expected.
She lifted her feet from the ladder rung and turned around.
“What?” she whispered, staring into his upturned face.
Dax opened his eyes and looked down, catching her gaze with his.
“Roa, I’ve come to ask—will you help me?”
Six
Roa looked from the site of their vanished camp to the king who thought he could cross the sand sea without proper provisions.
Roa stood over him, trembling with anger.
Just for a moment, though, instead of the dragon king covered in a layer of golden sand, another boy flickered before her eyes. Younger and shy. Like the summer she first met him.
The memory of it glimmered like a mirage.
Roa remembered him seated across the gods and monsters board, his eyes wide and curious, his ears jutting out in a way that might have been adorable if his presence in her home wasn’t such an annoying intrusion. He’d been foisted upon Roa after Essie talked her way out of entertaining him, and he’d come with one instruction:be his friend.
Roa shook off the memory.
This wasn’t that boy. This was a man too stupid not to walk straight into a sandstorm for the sake of a horse.
