Page 25 of House of Ashes
The Ascendant extended a claw, and I reached out and wrapped my hand around it. A sapphire the size of a bird’s egg glinted on a claw ring as it caught the firelight.
“A pleasure,” Erebos said, preening.
“No, the pleasure is all mine.” I released his claw, folding my hands in my lap.
Erebos carefully adjusted a necklace of medallions, smoothing them over his chest. “You did not tell me she was polite, Rhylan. In fact, I believe the words you used were haughty, rude, and snobbish.”
My resolve to make nice immediately shattered.
A brief and awkward silence fell throughout the room. I stared daggers at Rhylan, who at least had the decency to meet my eyes.
“Snobbish?” I asked sweetly.
He raked a hand through his dark hair. “Yes, I once called you snobbish. Five years ago.”
My eyebrows rose. “You thought I was snobbish five years ago?”
That would have been while we were both matriculating in the Koressis Training Grounds.
He’d thought…I was snobbish?
Gods, I’d been so terrified that he would think me clumsy and ill-bred that I’d barely been able to speak in his presence.
I’d had a tendency to drop things and forget how gravity worked when he was around, likely a self-fulfilling prophecy brought on by my own lanky adolescent self-consciousness. Even worse, I’d known that speaking to him, or watching him in the flight-training vale, would make me that much more bitter about my promised arrangement with Tidas.
But why had he been speaking of me to his Ascendant five years ago? Had I made that poor of an impression in the Training Grounds?
“My apologies for what I thought when I was sixteen,” he growled.
Erebos let out a sigh, then curled his head down, to all appearances going to sleep. Perhaps the arguments of his descendants bored him; he’d lived to see centuries of them come and go.
On the other hand, his first snore sounded rather manufactured.
I waved a hand magnanimously, tamping down my anger. “It’s all flames within the coals now. We have other problems. I spoke to Kirana about…about what happened.”
I refused to say the words. I did not believe that my mother was responsible for Anjali’s death, no matter what Rhylan believed he witnessed.
She had proclaimed her innocence all the way to her grave and never given me a reason to believe otherwise.
“Oh?” Rhylan raised one brow, watching me as intently as he had watched the fire.
“Believe what you want, but you must understand that I had nothing to do with any of it,” I said. “I didn’t know your House was involved in our Judgment until this very morning. And as long as you hate me, this will never work.”
I waved back and forth between us, with no reservations about speaking openly in front of his Ascendant. What Rhylan planned, the ancient dragon would already know.
Rhylan wore his cold, aloof mask, but flames glittered in his eyes. The dark patches of scales on his biceps began to creep downwards to his forearms.
He was losing his temper, the dragon shift only a snap of rage away.
“I told you it wasn’t the whole story. Do you want to know the truth?” he asked, eyes flashing. “I asked the Drakkon not to send you away. I did not believe you were responsible, only Nerezza. I wanted her, and only her, to pay.”
“You…you did not,” I said weakly.
Rhylan had spoken on my behalf? I didn’t believe it. Not when he so clearly despised everything I was.
But if he had…that meant my father had genuinely hated me. He had known I was innocent, and sent me to the prison island regardless of the truth.
It had blindsided me, how Nasir had cared for me—or pretended to—until the day he’d sentenced us to Mistward, and hadn’t even had the decency to look in my face when he made the pronouncement.