What if I’d dropped something and stepped on that?
Jessia wrote in the journal that she’d found a pouch containing three bone coins outside the flying dreg’s cage, and I’d bet anything they were mine. My pouch had contained four, but one was stolen.
No, not stolen. Reclaimed.Taken by the dreg.
The fates sure did enjoy playing games with our lives.
Since I needed to collect as many of them as I could, and Jessia had burned the ones she found, I flitted to Reyla’s room. I stood by her bed, hating to wake her.
She roused on her own, perhaps sensing me watching. We’d honed our instincts into devastatingly effective weapons, and I would’ve been surprised if she hadn’t woken up.
She sat and shoved her hair off her face, giving me a few sleepy blinks. “What do you need?”
“Do you still have your bone coins?”
“I think so. I don’t know.” She waved to a leather rider outfit lying across a chair on the other side of the room.
I crossed to the shirt and took them from the side pocket.
“Why do you need them?” Her voice stretched through a yawn.
“I think . . .” I didn’t dare name it. “They may be the secret we’ve been looking for.”
A way to restore the balance? I hoped I lived long enough to find out.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I’ll let you know later.”
With a nod, she flopped back down onto the bed and dragged the covers back up over her frame.
After sucking in a few breaths and steeling my spine, I flitted to the king’s sitting room.
Spying no one around, I walked carefully around the furniture to the king’s bedroom door. My aunt said he was advancing on the border with the dregs, but I still needed to be careful. He knew I’d stolen some of his treasure. He must realize I’d figure out the meaning of the items I’d left behind.
Had his distant relatives stolen the bone coins from the powerless? I hadn’t assembled all the pieces of this puzzle in mymind, but I suspected the coins would play a pivotal role in the upcoming battle.
The dregs thirsted for the bone coins.
The Lieges had taken them.
If there was a connection, I was going to find it.
“I should’ve taken the jug of bone coins the first time I saw them,” I whispered.
Unless the time to take them was now. The fates still played their own game of Wraithweave, and even they might not yet know the final outcome.
The closed door gave way at my touch, easing inward without making a sound, and I stepped inside his bedroom.
A suffocating tightness gripped my chest, and my every breath became a ragged struggle. I gripped the hilt of my blade; one I didn’t remember pulling. Slick sweat coated my palms. A pit opened in my stomach, its emptiness making bile roar up my throat.
Darkness cloaked the room, a heavy, cloying thing that made breathing feel as if I’d been dragged down into deep water.
Time stretched out unbearably long yet blindingly short all at once.
Don’t linger. Take what you need and get out of here.
These words came from my self-preservation dangling over a cliff by a mere thread.
