Asha smiled. “I always watch my back.” Eight years of hunting dragons would do that to a girl. “Dagan lives in the yellow house on the point. You can find us there.”
“Don’t do anything reckless,” Safire said, reaching for the Namsara and pulling her into a hug.
“When have I ever?” Asha whispered, holding her tight.
“Every day of your life,” Safire whispered back.
Mounting Sorrow, Safire said good-bye, then flew through the rain to the scrin, taking Asha’s lantern with her.
She arrived just before dawn. The rain had stopped and the twilight soaked everything in blue. As Safire stepped inside, Sorrow waited at the charred entrance, watching the cavernous doorway swallow her rider.
Safire’s footsteps echoed off the walls of the empty ruin as she thought of what Dagan told her.
Whenever there were visitors, she was confined to her room—an old cellar behind the kitchens....
Safire searched the main floor of the scrin, but what the flames hadn’t eaten, years of rot and decay had destroyed, making it hard to decipher what each room was. She found a stairway leading down into the dark, though, and took it.
The floor below was damp, and it was clear the fire hadn’t burned quite so savagely here. Beneath the blackened soot, she could still see the star patterns in the tiles beneath her feet.
She opened the first door she came to and found the room inside almost completely preserved. There was a rusted woodstove to her right and a rotting wooden table before it. Copper pots and pans hung from the ceiling, and on the far side, in the corner, stood a door with peeling green paint.
Safire crossed the room and opened the door.
The inside was cool and small and smelled like old vegetables. Lifting the lantern Asha leant her, Safire saw that in the corner lay a musty pallet. It was too small for an adult but just large enough for a child. The small wooden frame of a loom leaned against the wall and on the floor beside it lay several baskets, each of them piled with dusty skeins of yarn.
Safire stepped into the room. A jar full of dried scarp thistles sat beside the pallet, and on the mattress lay a ragged cloth doll, with beads for eyes and thick yarn for hair.
Safire crouched down and picked up the doll.
“This was your room,” she whispered, pulling the doll to her chest.
From behind her, a soft voice answered, “Aye, princess.”
Thirty-Three
The sight of Safire standing in her childhood bedroom, clutching her doll to her chest, made Eris go silent and still.
“I’m so sorry,” Safire burst out.
Eris heard the words, but she no longer saw the girl before her, only the room she’d left behind. It was exactly as she’d left it, untouched by the fire. Her bed. Her loom. The wool she’d dyed and spun herself.
The smell of it made her think of happier times. Of when she had a place to call home and people to call family.
“I should have believed you.” The words trembled, as if Safire was about to cry.
Safire came back into sharp focus. She was drenched from the storm. Her long black lashes clustered like stars and the blue dress clung to her frame.
“I never should have called the guards.” Her forehead crinkled in a severe frown. “And those things I said...”
“Like telling the empress you’d kill me on sight?”
Safire looked sharply away, her shoulders sagging with shame. She looked wretched and small and not at all like the proud, brave girl Eris so admired.
Eris couldn’t help but go to her.
“Hey,” she said softly, watching a warm tear spill down Safire’s cheek, wanting to brush it away but not quite daring to. Why was she crying over this? OverEris? “I wouldn’t have believed me either.”
She reached for the doll in Safire’s hand—a doll Day had brought back from the market one summer. A doll she’d simply calledDoll, because she thought it was clever.She pressed her face into the doll’s dress, breathing in. But it smelled only of dust and damp, and nothing of her life before this one. So she set it back down where Safire found it.
