Page 71 of House of Ashes
Chapter
Fifteen
Oh, gods, I have ruined this.
That was the only thought as I paced Kirana’s stillroom, watching her tie the jasmine vines and hang them from the ceiling. She had promised that it would be possible to bottle the scent of home, to give me a tiny jar I could carry everywhere with me, right next to my heart.
“You’re rather excitable for someone who just flew twelve hours,” Kirana said, in such a studiedly neutral tone of voice I couldn’t tell what she was hiding.
I forced myself to stop pacing and hold still. The closest thing to hand was a row of jars, each one stuffed to the brim with herbs, so I picked one up at random and pretended to study the chamomile inside. “It’s just the excitement of seeing home. I mean…I haven’t been there in years.”
A wince fought to cross my face. It was hard to mention such things without sounding like I was directly accusing Kirana’s family, but the words were already out.
“Mm-hmm.” Kirana tied up the last strand of jasmine and flicked it, making it gently sway. She was lovely in her own element, hair piled on top of her head and pinned in place with ivory sticks, wearing an old dress spotted with green stains, malachites gleaming around her wrist. “Surely…it has nothing to do with a full day alone with Rhylan.”
Oh, no. Kirana was the last person I would speak to about this. “He was polite.”
“Polite?” She raised a brow, looking so like her brother for a moment that it was shocking. “Doesn’t sound like the Rhylan I know, but who knows? Maybe he’s decided to change up his tactics.”
I made an unintelligible sound, suddenly regretting my choice to come see her.
Things might never not be awkward around Kirana; she held the same pain in her heart as Rhylan, the tangled history between our families, and to make it worse, she was one of the draga I’d been in the Training Grounds with.
We had never exchanged more than an impersonal conversation before this, and suddenly she was supposed to be my new family. I wondered if she was one of the ones who had called me ‘Perfect Serafina’ behind my back, mocking my obsession to be at the top.
But even if she had…it wasn’t an undeserved moniker. That shame was mine to own.
I had probably snubbed her a thousand times in the Training Grounds without once thinking about it. I deserved any scorn that she saw fit to heap on me.
But of course, the Kirana of now would not do that. Not while she was involved in this dangerous game, with her life at stake. She would continue to feed me the terrible sludge, bandage my wounds, turn the jasmine of Varyamar into perfume. Anything she had to do, as long as it ensured our victory in the end.
I owed her. I hated myself, because she would not—could not—allow her own hate to get in the way of the agreement.
And if she could not allow herself to feel it, then I would feel it for her.
Kirana drifted across the room to lift the lid on a simmering pot, and immediately the gut-wrenching scent of the sludge filled the room, making my mouth water in a distinctly unpleasant way. “I made a few new batches of the nutrient tonic while you were in Varyamar. It’ll be enough to see us through to the First Claim, but after that—” She turned and pointed the wooden spoon in my direction, jabbing it accusingly. “You must taper off. This was never meant as a long-term solution.”
“It was just to speed the process along,” I protested, but Kirana waved the spoon. I avoided it, not wanting the reek of the sludge on my skin.
“I want you to get one thing through your head,” she said sternly. “This isn’t Koressis. This isn’t the Training Grounds. There are no grades being given out for flawlessness.”
I stared at her, thinking of Rhylan shouting at me on the ice plains. That I was burning myself to ashes, and I would be no good to him. Useless.
Kirana, Viros, Erebos…everyone was reporting on me to him.
I wondered if that was why he had brought up ‘Perfect Serafina’. If he was simply trying to tell me that those days were over, and that I needed to focus on immediate needs, instead of grinding myself paper-thin across a thousand goals that would never reach perfection.
The thought that I might have completely misinterpreted his comments in the eyrie made me feel cold inside.
“I will be done,” I told her. “Promise. It’s not like I’m going to miss the taste.”
Her lips twitched in a smile. “Do you want to know something interesting? As disgusting as it is, as much as you tell yourself you won’t miss the taste—it’s addictive as hell. Do you want to know the secret ingredient?”
“Ahhh…” Frankly, no. I didn’t want to know what I’d been drinking in that sewer-stench concoction, as long as it worked.
“Dragon’s blood.” She scooped up a spoonful and let it glop back into the cauldron in thick chunks. “True dragon’s blood. In this case, Erebos’s, since we didn’t have another true dragon around until today. It took me over a year to perfect the recipe, and that was the final missing piece. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to talk him into it—drinking dragon’s blood is forbidden for a reason, but in tiny amounts…it works. There’s no more than three drops in this entire cauldron, and look at what it’s done to you. So no, you won’t miss the taste, but you’ll miss the energy. You’re walking dangerously close to the line of becoming dependent on it. If the first First Claim wasn’t so important, I would’ve put my foot down on this days ago.”
“Oh.” I grimaced, looking into the pot of congealing muck. “Honestly, I thought it’d be something worse.”