Page 64 of House of Ashes
Immediately I wanted to sew my own mouth shut. He was loosening up again, and there I went, jabbing sarcastic needles at his attempts to play.
“You wouldn’t last longer than six hours,” he scoffed.
Silently, I thanked the gods that he hadn’t taken my sarcasm as a sign to back off. “Give me some credit. Twelve.”
“Actually, six is too long. I’d come back in three to find you woefully lamenting the lack of dragons in your life.”
He flashed me a grin over his shoulder as we reached the end of the hall, where another set of ash doors led to the spiral that descended through the direct center of my eyrie.
Where Rhylan’s eyrie reminded me of a warren at times, sprawled throughout the width of a broad mountain, my eyrie made me think of a nautilus shell, the staircase a spine supporting each tier that flared further outward the closer they got to the ground.
I rolled my eyes skyward as I touched the doors, opening them with ease. “Yes, in three hours I would pine away from the lack of you. Every minute we spend apart, I simply sit there and think, this moment is completely wasted without Rhylan here to strip for me.”
The spiral stairs led down into darkness. Since that first flicker on the outer doors, I hadn’t managed to get a single crystal to light up. Perhaps Myst was in the Dreamlands, and I was too late to awaken her…
“Oh, so you were ogling me,” Rhylan purred in my ear. He held an arm out, taking the first few steps down the stairs like he was expecting an attack from around the curve.
“Ogling makes it sound so…undignified. I prefer ‘studiously inspecting’. Only the strongest, most intimidating dragons for me, thank you very much.”
“You can ‘studiously inspect’ me anytime you’d like, darling. I’m the strongest one around.”
We exited onto the next tier, where the open terraces wrapped all around the exterior of the spire. The hall leading to the rooms here was so short, and yet so familiar.
Being here again choked down the acerbic reply I was already preparing for that comment. I still remembered the last time I’d walked this corridor, arms loaded with textbooks, wearing my training leathers…completely unaware of how drastically my life was about to change.
“My bedroom is down here.” I drifted down the corridor in a dream, retracing my exact footsteps. The ash door was cracked ever so slightly, and I pushed it all the way open.
It was almost exactly as I’d left it. Dead leaves from the climbing jasmine had piled in drifts below my open windows, and the sheer curtains were a little tattered, but my bed was still in place, dust heaped on the fluffy bedding. My Training Grounds medals were still pinned to the walls, tarnished now, the colors of the ribbons no longer distinguishable.
Rhylan prowled past me, taking in every facet of the room. “So this is where Perfect Serafina lived.” He examined a few of the medals, an unreadable expression on his handsome face.
I shot a sharp look at him, looking up from the treasure box I’d opened on my dresser. It contained pretty stones I’d collected from summer days spent on the banks of Aurae’s Tears, feathers that had gotten caught in the jasmine, bits and pieces of childhood treasures…all of it meaningless now. “‘Perfect Serafina’? What do you mean by that?”
I didn’t mean in the literal sense; my mother had pushed me to be the best. I had been perfect. I’d earned every one of those stupid, meaningless medals with blood, sweat, and tears. I’d outshone every other draga by the skin of my teeth, exhausted and weary, knowing it was all for show—after all, I’d been promised to Tidas at the time. The Razored Cinders would not have broken our agreement simply because I came in second place at archery in the Training Grounds.
But I’d never heard of such a nickname.
“Everyone called you that when you weren’t listening. You had to have top marks at everything,” Rhyland said distantly, his gaze roving to the pile of textbooks on a desk, sitting precisely where I’d left them four years ago. He twitched a bit of parchment from between the pages, filled with my tidy handwriting. “I remember going out for a flight one night, and you were out there in the training yard. At three in the morning. All the other draga were sleeping, and you were hacking away at one of those dummies with a sword like it had personally insulted you.”
I watched him put the notes aside and run a finger down the spines of the books.
There’d been so many nights like that in the Training Grounds, I couldn’t remember that one in particular. I’d had no idea Rhylan had even seen me during one of my nighttime extracurricular sessions.
“So I watched for a bit. You went at it for a solid hour, then you sat down and cried.”
My back stiffened. No, I did remember that particular night, when I’d thought my body would break down from sheer exhaustion, not knowing at the time what exhaustion really was.
My mother had not been pleased when Elinor of Shadowed Stars had outshone me at swordplay. Her next letter had been stern and worded in no uncertain terms: I could come home when Silvered Embers could face the other Houses without shame.
And thus had begun a nightly tradition of losing precious sleep.
“My House maintained high standards,” I said stiffly. “Excellence is expected in all we do.”
It was like he didn’t hear me. “I thought a lot about you, back then. Tidas liked to remind everyone about your arrangement. I thought it was interesting that you had an ironclad agreement between your Houses, and you were still out there breaking yourself to pieces to impress him.”
My lips twisted in a sour smile. Impress Tidas? I’d stopped remembering his existence the first time I saw Rhylan in the dragon yard.
“Is that what made you think I was snobbish?” That still prickled a little.