Page 65 of House of Ashes
“No.” Rhylan picked up an ornament, set it back down. He was examining my room in a way that made me a little uncomfortable, like he was reading a subtext I didn’t quite see for myself. “It was that I once asked you to spot me in the training yards, and you just stared at me, your eyes like silver ice, and walked away without a word. At the time, I figured you thought you were too good to be bothered. You already had Tidas waiting.”
Funny, how two people could remember something so differently.
I remembered Rhylan walking up to me, a giant in ebony scales, my lungs suddenly clenching with hope and terror and the awful fear I’d make a fool of myself, and he’d asked me to spot him…and I’d realized that if I spoke to him, something so much worse than sounding like an idiot would occur.
I would feed that flame of useless hope inside me, and when I graduated the Training Grounds and mate bonded with Tidas it would be extinguished, and I would be dead inside forever after.
Better to walk away. Better to stay on the straight and narrow, where hopes could not be crushed and mothers with exacting standards wouldn’t be disappointed.
“It wasn’t that I thought I was too good for you.” My voice came out gruffly and I cleared my throat, staring out the window. “I…didn’t think that at all.”
Was that when he’d returned home and told his Ascendant about the haughty draga, who couldn’t be bothered to say a simple yes or no?
I really had turned out to be a fool, after all.
“Anyway, I started coming out at night, watching you train. I saw all your little screw ups; you’re still a little weak on your left side when it comes to swords. I even thought about giving you some pointers, but I figured if I showed myself, you’d either ignore me, or you’d stop coming out at all.”
I stared at him as he picked up a framed portrait of the Drakkon from my bookshelf.
I hadn’t had the slightest clue that he’d been watching me that whole time. Gods, if I’d known then…I would’ve died of mortal embarrassment.
Rhylan put the portrait back on the shelf, examining the history books behind it. “It gave a different dimension to Perfect Serafina, you see. During the day you were so polished, so flawless, so…untouchable, like a statue of a draga come to life. It was almost unnatural, how you were the best in everything. But at night you cried and bled and fell down. I saw you push yourself to the breaking point over and over again, and when the scores went up, of course you were on top. Perfect Serafina. Nobody else saw you work yourself sick to make it there. Every time those marks came out and the others grumbled that you were on top again, I silently cheered you on. I saw how much it took for you to get there.”
I took a breath, holding it and counting to five before I exhaled. “That wasn’t the breaking point. Not even close.”
“At the time it was. What would you have done if I’d come over while you were sobbing on the ground in front of a fucking training dummy?” Rhylan laughed, bitterness suffusing the sound. “You would’ve hated that.”
I would have, but for completely different reasons than he thought. “I don’t know. I have no idea what I would have done.”
I would have begged Larivor to tear open the earth and swallow me whole. And then I never would have been able to look at Rhylan again.
He took a medal down from the wall, turning it over between his fingers. “The room says a lot about you. Or about ‘Perfect Serafina’, at least. There’s not much in here that’s actually yours, is there? Besides that.” He nodded at the treasure box. “It’s all medals and classwork. No notes from friends, no love letters from Tidas, no—”
“Why does it matter?” I asked sharply, hating this sudden turn, that Rhylan had known far more about me than I’d ever suspected. It made me feel…naked. The façade I’d worked so hard to maintain my whole life, now exposed. The old, familiar vitriol came pouring out of me in an unstoppable rush. “I didn’t need friends at the time. I couldn’t have friends, because they were my competition. Tidas didn’t have to write me love letters because our parents had decided we were going to mate bond one way or another, and they didn't give much of a damn how I felt about it. And who cares if I trained at night and cried and bled or puked or whatever? I had to do something to uphold my mother’s standards. Nobody becomes the best by sleeping through it.”
Rhylan looked up from the medal, his eyes meeting mine across a gap that was only ten feet and yet felt like a thousand miles, those dark flames burning in them.
“It matters because I was out there with you,” he said slowly. “You didn’t know it, but I was with you. And Tidas wasn’t.”
My feet remained frozen in place. I couldn’t even blink, seeing those flames, taking in what he was saying. My heart thumped unevenly against my ribs, so loud its beat seemed to fill the room.
My mouth opened, closed, opened. What could I say? Nothing made sense anymore, the universe and all my preconceptions turned upside down and inside out.
The words were finally on my lips—Would you have taken his place? In your heart, was I yours, too?—and I braced myself to shatter the frozen moment, to give voice to something that both thrilled and terrified me to hear the answer to, but something else broke the taut silence first.
A long, drawn-out wail, heartbroken and piteous, from the depths of the eyrie.
Rhylan was at the door in an instant, shielding me with his body as he checked the corridor, but I pushed him into the hall. “It’s Myst! She’s not in the Dreamlands!”
Grabbing his hand, I practically dragged him to the spiral staircase, vaulting down several levels so fast we smashed into several walls.
The House vault was much further down, where the needle-like aspect of the eyrie began to widen. Unlike the floors above, there were no open-air terraces here; this was not only the eyrie’s most guarded floor, but the personal domain of our Ascendant.
I dragged Rhylan out of the staircase and into the small vestibule of the vault. These doors were not white ash, but solid, banded iron; they would open only to the touch of the Ascendant, or a scion of this House.
Another gut-wrenching wail, from behind the door; Rhylan’s fingers tightened around mine. “She sounds like she’s injured. Be ready for anything, Sera.”
My stomach dropped to the floor at the thought of my Ascendant injured, possibly locked in and so weak she was unable to escape; with Rhylan blocking me, preparing to be my shield if any intruders awaited inside, I reached out and brushed my fingertips over the ice-cold iron.