I pulled out the knife I kept tucked into my hides. Dahes only let me have one during my hunts. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d have to clean it afterward…
“With your hands, Magnolia.”
I stilled. I finally looked past Kip to the glowing white eyes staring at me from the throne. He was smiling—coy, smug, amused.
This was why I kept myself numb, why I tried to hide my feelings around him. Dahes always exploited them, always made me do the very things that ate away at my conscience.
I couldn’t refuse. It was an order. I could only stall, but I felt my body already walking toward Kip, felt the tip of the dagger resheath back into my clothes.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale.
I wasn’t myself. I was far, far away. I didn’t hear his screams, didn’t register the texture of his eye as it squished between my fingers. I tried not to look, tried not to think about how easily it came out of his skull.
My stomach roiled. I wanted to vomit.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale.
I looked up at Dahes, trying not to think about what was in my hand. Kip was screaming, his voice echoing across the throne room in bloodcurdling wails.
Dahes entered my mind, whispering, “Good girl,” before he turned toward the sisters and ordered, “Begin.”
Chapter Four
Hael
MAGNOLIA
“What vision of the future do you want to see?”
I was starting to think the sister I carried on my back was older, even if it was only by seconds or minutes, she acted like it. She was the only one who spoke as the other two siblings held hands, angled slightly behind her.
“I want to know if I will defeat King Elion,” Dahes’ voice echoed off the stone.
The girls’ green eyes widened at the request, but they quickly recovered before they started chanting, their voices lowering a few octaves. I immediately passed them the eye, and even though I kept rubbing my hand on my hides, I couldn’t wipe away the slimy texture coating them.
They paused, their eyes flicking up to Dahes. “No,” they replied in unison. “Not as things stand now.”
“What do I need to do?”
More creepy chanting, and then, “What exactly do you want? His death? His kingdom? The more specific you are, the better we can find the answers you’re looking for. The future is always turning, always tipping, so the more details you provide, the more accurate the reading.”
I knew immediately the girls weren’t going back on the streets. If Dahes was asking them this kind of question, no one in the throne room would be free. I glanced down at Kip. His knees had slammed against the stone the moment the sentries dropped him. Blood pooled around his hand from clutching the socket where his eye had been. His screams dimmed to more of a labored wail, but it still felt just as deafening to my ears. His remaining eye—the one I didn’t rip out of his skull—narrowed on me. There was a promise there.
I turned away from him and focused my attention on Dahes.
Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale.
I kept wiping my hand, kept trying to get it clean.
“I want the drakins back,” Dahes said after a moment. I knew it was probably killing him to admit his plans out loud. He never did. I could never predict his next move, could never understand his motives. The only constant about Dahes was that he wasunpredictable. “I would prefer if Elion was alive long enough to see it, but ultimately I want him dead.”
The triplets nodded. My focus fixed on the older one. Her throat bobbed once before re-clutching her sisters’ hands and the chanting began again. Long seconds passed as their low-tone musical incanting echoed off the stone, swallowing up Kip’s mumbled cries.
“There is a path to defeat him,” they said in unison, “to return dragons and their drakin riders back to you.” Dahes leaned forward on his throne, so subtle that I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been staring at him.
Our history claimed that Dahes gifted the drakins to King Elion as a symbol of peace to end the war between them. Dahes possessed monsters and beasts—dragons included—and Elion possessed magic and Wielders, but beyond the outcome, no one really knew the details of what occurred during the war or how it ended. Despite our thousand-year Staying Age, no one was alive today that witnessed it.
It had my mind spinning. Was it not really a gift to end theWar of Two Kingsthousands of millennia ago? Were the drakins not given willingly?
