The hum quieted within Roa. She looked to her twin, who’d just picked up her net. Essie kept her eyes on her fingers, working through a knot.
As Theo cursed and struggled to get his boat upright, Essie glanced up, catching Roa’s gaze and grinning triumphantly. Just for her.
Roa looked back to her own net, grinning, too.
Twelve
Roa spent her first morning back in Firgaard searching the skies and calling her sister’s name. But just like the first time, there was no sign of Essie. And when Roa called, only silence answered her.
She longed for Essie’s familiar weight perched on her shoulder. For the feel of her soul, warm and close. For the normally bright hum of their bond.
What if she didn’t come back?
What if they’d run out of time?
But beneath these questions, growing like a root in the darkness, was another: what if everything Theo said was true? What if the Skyweaver’s knife not only existed, but really was right here in Firgaard?
Ever since their conversation in the garden, Roa couldn’t stop thinking about the knife. The more days that passed, the stronger her urge was to see it. To hold it in her hands. To decide for herself if it and the stories were real.
Theo’s words had unearthed something in Roa. A yearning she thought she’d buried for good, years ago. It made her realize that, more than anything—more than her people’s freedom from tyranny—she wanted Essie back. Not as a bird. As hersister.
She wanted Essie to walk barefoot down the roads of Song again. Wanted to fight with her, and then apologize for fighting with her. Wanted to sit in the kitchen after all the dishes were put away, talking with their mother deep into the night, just like they used to do. She wanted to watch her jump from the cliffs, then watch her shake the water from her curls. Wanted her to fall in love and raise children and grow old and live a whole, full, happy life.
None of these things were possible with her soul trapped as it was. And once the Relinquishing took her for good, they would never be possible.
Which was how Roa found herself asking the question: If there really was a chance to give Essie her life back, could Roa truly say she wouldn’t take it?
A few days later, Roa sat in the Assembly hall—a huge circular room with a copper-domed roof in the heart of the city. Her ornate marble chair chilled her to the bone.
Dax sat to her right, looking half-asleep in a throne that matched his queen’s. His curls were a wild tangle and his jaw was still flecked with stubble. As if he’d rolled out of bed and come straight here.
On the other side sat Safire, Dax’s new commandant and hisclosest confidante. Her fingers drummed the arm of her chair as her blue eyes scanned and rescanned the room.
The three of them sat on a raised, semicircular dais. Before them sat the eleven members of the king’s council who were already entrenched in heated debate.
Sunlight streamed in through the tall windows on the western side of the circular Assembly. The light gleamed on the lime-washed walls, reflected off the sheen of the copper dome above, then alighted on the crowd inside the room.
Roa’s gaze skimmed the colorful silk tunics and intricately sewn kaftans of the wealthy spectators, here to watch the king’s council make or change laws in response to their grievances.
What could your grievances possibly be?she wondered as their gold bands and jewel-encrusted rings flickered in the sunlight. Roa’s mother had sold off all their gold and jewels in order to keep people fed.How many of you became wealthy while my people suffered?
And yet, instead of discussing those very injustices and how to right them, they were debating some law regulatingdragons, of all things.
After the coronation, Dax outlawed dragon hunting and sanctioned the Rift mountains as grounds for studying and training the beasts.
The council, it seemed to Roa, wanted to turn the sanctuary grounds into profit centers. If the dragons could be controlled, they argued, the beasts could be sold to the highest bidder. Dax thought it exploitative and wanted no such thing.
Roa didn’t care about dragons. She cared about people.Herpeople. Firgaard’s sanctions were still starving them. She cared, too, that conditions for the recently freed skral—who’d been slaves in Firgaard for several decades before Dax overthrew his father—did not seem to be improving.
She wanted Dax to fulfill his treaty promises.
Once he lifted the sanctions, scrublanders would be allowed to trade openly again and receive loans for food until the blight ran its course and their crops recovered. Her people would stop going hungry. They wouldn’t need to leave their homes and seek work across the sea. Families would be reunited. They could begin to thrive again.
Roa was about to interrupt the debate and turn the session to the treaty when Dax jolted to attention in his chair. Roa and Safire both glanced at him to find his gaze fixed on the councillor who’d risen from her seat. She was a tall young woman, probably close to Roa’s nineteen years of age, and draped in swaths of indigo. Her hair was bound up in an embroidered skarf, and around her throat hung a gold pendant bearing Dax’s emblem: a black dragon with a red heart of flame—the same pendant worn by all eleven of the king’s council members.
“This matter is settled. Do you have something new to put forward, my king?” the young woman asked Dax, clearly also tired of this discussion.
She didn’t once look at Roa.
