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Great. I press my palm against the rough stone behind me, supporting myself. Just in case.
“The Historian had left part of your record blank,” Doshir says. “He hadn’t filled in the line for your father’s name.”
I huff out a breath. So I’m a bastard. That’s no surprise. Doshir catches my eye again, only this time I don’t see an apology. I only see pity.
“Someone else filled it in,” he continues. “It looked like my mother’s handwriting.”
I swallow hard. My throat feels like it’s been packed with wet sand, and something heavy settles in my gut.
“And?” I ask. “My father?”
Doshir glances at the floor, then back at me. He’s holding my gaze when he speaks again.
“Rensivar,” he says.
“Shit.”
The word slips out of me, and then I’m sliding down the stone wall, sinking to the floor. My vision blurs as I wrap my trembling arms around my chest; my mind is a great, screaming emptiness. I open my mouth to laugh at the utter absurdity of what Doshir just said, but what comes out instead is more like a choking sob. I pull my knees to my chest and let my head fall into my arms. I’m too exhausted to fight this, to try to rationalize all the reasons why it can’t possibly be true.
No. I can’t lie to myself. It was bad enough to discover the dragon Rensivar had been posing as King Donovan’s human advisor for my entire life, wearing the royal signet ring and issuing proclamations, running the of Valgros from the shadows. But this?
Another choked sob slips through the fortress of my teeth, and I raise my head. Doshir has settled on the hard stone as well, and the golden candle flickers between us. I half expect him to remind me that we’re here for a reason, and that we have precious little time to alert the dragons of the Iron Mountains before Rensivar tries to do whatever it is he’s going to do.
Rensivar. My father.
The mountain feels like it’s falling away beneath me. He must have been the one who stole me from my mother. His strange assistant Varitan must have placed the curse on me, the one that scarred my hand and hid my true nature, and then Rensivar must have dumped me in the Valgros orphanage until I was old enough to move to the Royal Barracks for training.
He raised me to become a weapon. My father’s weapon, sharp and hard and with no purpose other than destruction.
“Shit,” I say again, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “You know, I used to dream about what it would be like to have a family. Who my father might have been.” I shake my head, then glance up toward the hidden stars. “This, this is—”
My voice cracks, then fades away. This is too much. It’s too big to capture in words. Doshir makes a small sound, almost like he’s clearing his throat.
“We could start a club,” he says, and his voice is almost a whisper. “A very small, very exclusive club. For dragons with terrible fathers.”
The shy little smile Doshir gives me is so beautiful it makes me feel like something deep inside is cracking apart. Tears flood my vision once again, hot and sharp, but this time I laugh. It’s a strange, broken sound, too sharp and too loud, but Doshir doesn’t flinch, and some of the shock reverberating through my skull like the tolling of a great brass bell finally ebbs. In its place comes the rest of Doshir’s revelation. I hug my knees closer to my chest.
“Not to mention terrible hatching prophecies,” I mutter.
My head drops back into the protective circle of my arms, and I breathe until the beat of my own heart is no longer quite so deafening. She will destroy the Throne of Claws. That’s my hatching prophecy. No wonder my father tried to turn me into a weapon, something cruel and deadly to point at the soft, tender places in his enemies. Apparently, I was born to destroy.
I lift my head and stare at Doshir. Tears have softened my vision, and the golden glow of the little candle makes him look almost otherworldly, like something too soft and beautiful to survive in these mountains. For a heartbeat, he reminds me of the little flowers that would sometimes try to grow between paving stones in the Royal Barracks, their tiny violet faces almost painfully out of place but smiling at the sun just as brightly as their wild cousins in the sheep meadows.
And I don’t want to be a weapon.
The sudden realization feels like it comes from somewhere else, somewhere outside of my own head. It’s like falling into cold water, or the sweet, blinding crest of an orgasm.
I don’t want to be a weapon.
My entire life, no one has ever asked me what I want. Did I want to move from the orphanage to the Royal Barracks to train as a soldier? It didn’t matter; one day, Torold appeared at the orphanage with two men in uniform and took me away. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.
Did I want to enter King Donovan’s chambers at night in a flimsy dressing gown a serving woman handed me hours before, with a knowing wince that I wouldn’t understand until I took off the same gown hours later and saw the crimson streaks of blood down its skirt? Had I even wanted to go to Cairncliff with Eadberh to complete a secret mission to murder a dragon?
I sit up straighter. My insides feel like I’ve just leapt off a cliff, like I’m waiting for the wind to catch my wings and carry me.
No. I never wanted to be a weapon, to be sharp and merciless, to be aimed at the underside of someone else’s enemy. I wanted softness instead, sweetness and light. I wanted frost wine and laughter. I wanted to see the Towers of the Silver City and to tease Eadberh about his latest romantic conquests over a huge breakfast of steaming sausages and fluffy hotcakes.
I’ve spent my entire life training to be a soldier, but I never wanted to break things apart. I just never had a choice.
