What if they were in there as it burned?
“No...”
Suddenly, she was running, dragging Eris behind her. She passed beneath the entrance, where flames had eaten the doors right off their hinges. Her heart pounded in her chest. Her stomach tightened into knots.
Eris halted just inside, forcing her to stop. “Safire.”
Safire didn’t hear her. Her gaze hastily scanned the dark interior, looking for...
Fingers dug into her shoulder. On instinct, Safire spun,drawing her stolen knife, eyes wild. Eris let go, raising her bound hands, and took a step back. Eris’s pale hair was slick against her face and her body shivered uncontrollably. Safire could see the girl’s collarbone through her shirt, soaked as she was.
“It happened a long time ago,” said Eris.
Lightning crashed above, illuminating the ruin. It was then that Safire saw the leaves, decomposing in the corners. And the fallen timbers, soft and rotted with rain and age.
Asha must have arrived, found the scrin a ruin, and left.
Unless she was still here....
Safire glanced around her. They stood in a wide room with high ceilings, its purpose unclear to her. Piles of ash and rubble gathered along one wall while several archways—their doors long since burned away—stood empty on the other.
The only unbroken window rose high on the north-facing wall. A faceless woman was cast in multiple shades of blue and purple glass while seven stars crowned her forehead. In one hand she held a loom, and in the other a spindle shining like starlight.
Safire recognized her. It was the same image woven into the tapestry on her office wall. The tapestry Eris stole.
“The Skyweaver,” Eris explained, looking where she looked. “A god who spins souls into stars and weaves them into the sky.”
Eris stepped forward, toward a statue standing beneath the window. At first glance, Safire thought it was a dog. But when she looked closer, she saw chiseled wings and a lion’s tail. Talons and a head like an eagle.
The statue was cracked, the head fallen to the floor. Erispicked up the head in both hands, almost tenderly.
Safire looked at the pile of rubble at her feet. Reaching down, she pulled out a shaft of burned wood.
What happened here?
She turned to ask Eris, but paused when she found the girl picking something else up off the floor. From where Safire stood, it looked like a small gold disk. And from the way Eris stared at it, it seemed to be important.
“What is it?”
Eris looked up, her brows stitched in a frown as she seemed to be piecing something together.
“A button,” she said, her thumb tracing its circumference. “Belonging to someone you know.”
She flicked it. The button arched toward Safire, who caught it in her free hand. When her fingers uncurled to reveal the object on her palm, Safire’s heart skipped.
She remembered that day on the dragon fields with Asha, who’d worn her new flight coat. The one Dax had made uniquely for her, his Namsara. Safire remembered the way the sun glinted off the golden buttons down the front, each one impressed with an image of a namsara flower.
The button lying on her palm was one of those same buttons.
“She’s here,” said Eris, already turning, her gaze searching the shadows. “Or was here recently.”
Safire glanced up to find Eris changed. Standing before her was no longer the drugged, drenched waif of a girl she’d climbed the stone steps with. This girl looked more like the one on Jemsin’s ship, that night in the rain. Her hair shone likestarlight and she smelled like a storm—surging,powerful.Her green eyes lit up as her gaze searched the scrin, hungry to find her prey.
The sight made Safire remember what Kor said.
Let me tell you something about Jemsin’s precious Death Dancer....
Safire remembered how Eris had been reluctant to come here. How she seemed weighed down—almost sick—the closer they came.
