Page 128 of Turncloak

When the house on Goldendawn Avenue came into view, Nissa let out an emphatic whistle. “Wow. You kept your tremendous wealth quiet.”

Auria, who had always been a bit embarrassed of it, tilted her chin high as she knocked on the pastel pink front door. “My mother is a Royal Wardholder. King Quintan rewards her handsomely.”

“You know it’s all funded by the Joribali, right? The wards, most of our defenses. We’re in immense amounts of debt.”

The thought of Vallin’s empty coffers always rattled Auria. Their nation was showing all the classic signs of decadence, the hedonism of pleasure-induced magic, the materialism of fine things for the sake of fine things, the faithlessness of vast swathes of the population, the immorality festering among the scarlets and the whites and everyone trapped in-between. She hoped she didn’t live to see the downfall of the society she had dedicated her life to protecting and upholding, but she suspected that once the Jade Bank of Joribal decided enough was enough and they’d recoup their debt—through war if necessary—it would all come crumbling down.

Lulí answered the front door in a lavender silk nightgown, her round face bare of makeup, her close-cropped ginger hair frizzy and somehow oranger than ever. She smiled and made the sign of the Saints, hands balled into fists and knuckles slotted together.

“Joyous Sancsari, Mømi,” Auria said. “This is my colleague Nissa—she’ll be joining us today.”

Lulí’s smiled broadened. “Joyous Sancsari, dærlin. Joyous Sancsari, Ni—”

“—Nissa isn’t a patron.”

“No matter.” Lulí shrugged and gestured for them to come inside. “We’re not all that zealous here either. I mostly celebrate the gifts and the truly excellent honey roast lamb.”

Hedonism, materialism, faithlessness.

Auria smacked down her irksome education with the blunt side of a shovel.

As they walked through the lavishly decorated hallway—Nissa staring bemusedly at all the intricate paintings—Lulí looked at Auria’s drab work satchel, clearly stuffed with notes and not gifts, and frowned. “Sweet child of mine, I do hope you haven’t come empty-handed.”

Auria laughed. “I stashed your gifts here last time I visited—though I have to admire that you don’t even pretend it’s my company you cherish on this holy day.”

“Can’t a mage want both?”

Victaria was already awake and pottering around the kitchen. Her eyes were a little pink and raw, as though she’d been crying—it was her first Sancsari without her father, after all. Auria felt the grief echoing in her own chest, hollow and oddly afraid, a small animal inside her searching for a lost owner, that feeling of where are you, where are you, come back, I need you, where are you?

“It’s so early that you’ve beaten everyone out of bed, I’m afraid.” Victaria smiled, but it was pale. She folded a tea towel that did not strictly need to be folded—she’d always been one to keep busy, to mask the pain with doing. Auria inherited that from her, the same way she inherited the frizzy copper hair from Lulí. “By the time you catch up on your own sleep, the festivities should be in full swing. All the bedrooms are taken—your aunt and uncle came in from Carduban at the last minute, and your sister brought a friend—but we can make up a bed of couch cushions on Auria’s floor? With enough heaped blankets, it should be comfortable enough.”

“No blankets needed,” Nissa laughed, that rough, smoke-laced sound. “I run hot.”

Lulí piled several pots of fresh cønnafyr on the table, along with two plates of coffee cream puffs covered with edible gold—it was Sancsari, after all—and gestured for Nissa and Auria to take a seat.

“I didn’t want to bring it up myself, but since you mentioned running hot…I must say that your eyes look distinctly dragonborn to my Nyrøthi eye.”

Nissa stiffened mid-pour of cønnafyr. “So I’ve heard.”

Auria silently willed her mother to cease this topic of conversation, to pick up on Nissa’s clear discomfort, but Lulí had never been especially good at registering social cues.

Stirring her own drink absently, Lulí’s voice grew soft and misty. “I grew up in Kälva, right at the foot of the Hældrekys Peaks—where the dragons sought refuge after the Dreadreign. Folktales were exchanged over bivkar like coins, and my favorites were always about the dragonborn. Many were crude, of course—mages fornicating with dragons, can you believe!—but some really captured the imagination.”

Nissa sat like a stone statue next to Auria.

“All nonsense, I’d imagine,” Auria muttered, knowing how much Nissa loathed to talk about the heritage that led to her family being chased out of Eqora by dragonseekers.

“Well, of course,” said Lulí, waving a hand. “But indulge an aging crone her myths, won’t you? Many years before I was born, there was a young immigrant boy in Kälva who was obsessed with dragons.” Lulí intentionally thickened her Nyrøthi accent for the purposes of the story. “His family were Augurest missionaries from western Bellandry—Charlet, I believe—and his parents had uprooted his life to bring him over the Nyrøthi border, so that they might spread the great word of the Augurs.

“They were not particularly well received, as you might imagine. The Nyrøthi are immensely proud of the fact we offered safe haven for the dragons in the aftermath of the Dreadreign, yet many of the staunchest Augurests believed the dragons should be destroyed, so that the Timeweavers may never return to power. And so the boy was raised as an outcast, the ridicule of the schoolyard and the high street alike, and a Ludder, to boot. Poor kid.

“Could anyone blame him, then, when he developed a fascination with the very dragons his parents preached against? In secret he read and researched and questioned, but when his mother found out about his heretical hobby, she beat him senseless. At the ripe old age of twelve, the boy left home alone in the dark of night, bruised and bloody, and made for the Hældrekys Peaks, where the dragons had been biding their time for many generations.”

Auria could’ve sworn she heard the frantic patter of Nissa’s heart.

Lulí took a sip of her cønnafyr, completely oblivious to the tension around the table. “After many months, perhaps years, it’s rumored that the boy found the dragons, entered their mountain lair, and underwent an arcane ritual—one that nobody in this world knows anything about—to become dragonborn. He returned to Kälva many years later, gold of eye, fire in his blood, the wielding ability manifested seemingly from nowhere.”

Victaria frowned over her cup. “But why would a Ludder be worthy of the dragonblood ritual?”