Page 80 of House of Ashes
I was at a loss. Finally, looking down at my soup as I dragged a spoon through the thick broth, I sighed. “Don’t worry, Rhylan. Everything will go well. We’ve practiced enough.”
He nodded, lightly tapping his fingers on the tabletop. In the half an hour we’d been sitting together, he’d taken maybe three bites from his plate.
I fought to crush down a vague sense of panic. He couldn’t fall apart on me now, not so close to the First Claim. “And Loralei will be there, right? As part of the Jade Leaves delegation? We never really spoke in the Training Grounds…but having her as an intermediary almost should guarantee they join our Court. So don’t worry. It’ll all be fine in the end.”
Gods, I was babbling. I forced myself to stop talking, but there was nothing else to say, nowhere else to look.
I wished he would speak.
Rhylan’s eyes flicked to the open window, and he managed one of those smiles that seemed drawn on.
“It’s just nerves,” he told me, rising from his seat. He bent forward, pressing his lips to my forehead in a chaste kiss. “We’ve got so much banking on this. I’m going to fly them off.”
After he left, I dropped my spoon in the bowl. I’d eaten like my life depended on it, but Rhylan’s unease made me feel slightly ill.
I had rather anticipated speaking with him the night before we’d fly to the outskirts of Koressis Eyrie, but with him lost in his own head…there was no way I’d be able to sleep tonight.
I pocketed the remaining pastries and slipped through the eyrie, making my way to the library. Light crystals flickered to life overhead; the map-table lit up, but it would remain untouched until after the First Claim.
I touched the Varyamar token, then turned to the comfortably overstuffed couch where I’d done most of my studying during my midnight excursions.
Stacks of books were piled on the end table. Histories, studies of draconic Law, House lineages. They were all dry material, useful to know, but utterly unhelpful when it came to trying to distract myself.
Instead, I circled the perimeter of the library’s walls, searching for something new.
Kirana’s words—her warnings about the tonic—had not quite left my mind. I had managed to shrug off my disquiet about drinking dragon’s blood in front of her, but that knowledge had provided the fear within me a new feast, a new terror to keep me awake at night.
She had been feeding me a terribly addictive substance, and I knew that no matter how many times I told myself that the tonic was disgusting, no better than sewage…that she was right. It gave me energy I had never felt before, almost a rush in my veins.
To the degree that it no longer disgusted me as much as it should have.
“Dragon’s blood,” I muttered to myself, running a finger along the spines of the books.
There were a thousand books here, maps of the Wildlands and the Western Shores—continents I had never visited before. There was a book with a black leather spine with a slightly suspicious texture to the leather that made my fingers skip right over it, and a history on the House of Jade Leaves so thick that it had been divided into twelve volumes, each large enough to brain someone with.
I needed a bestiary if I wanted to know about dragon’s blood. And as I thought that, looking around the library, a patch of smoke drifted across the upper shelves, which were well out of reach. A black claw extended from the drifting cloud, hooked a single book and pulled it out.
It fell to the ground with a heavy thud, and something unseen bumped against my back, nudging me forward.
“Try that one,” Erebos whispered from the smoky shadows, and they melted away.
“Thank you,” I murmured to the Ascendant. At least one of them was inclined to be helpful.
The book itself was unremarkable, not too thick and bound in red cloth, and it was simply titled On Naga.
I brought it back to my reading couch, curling my legs beneath me as I flipped it open. The light crystal just overhead sparkled brighter, easily illuminating the thick vellum pages.
And over the next hour, my nerves were not soothed. I knew there would be little sleep that night. There was nothing calming about the subject of dragon’s blood in the slightest, and my fingers ached from gripping the corners of the book too tightly.
Kirana had certainly not lied about the addictive effects; I would argue that she had significantly downplayed them. Now I understood why she had been so resistant to my plan of drinking two bottles of the tonic a day.
When a true dragon chose to become an Ascendant and start a House in their image, they selected a Bloodless man or woman to drink their blood, and from that day forth, they would be dragonblood, along with their descendants.
It would only happen once in a House’s history. Myst had given her blood to a Bloodless ten thousand years ago, and to this very day it ran thick in my veins.
But if a dragonblood—already thick with their Ascendant’s blood—drank the undiluted blood of yet another true dragon, they would become…something more than dragonblood.
They became Naga.