“No,” she states.
He raises his eyebrows. “No?”
“Not all the Champions can be protecting it.” Cam is many things, but he’s not a fighter. Could they have him there as a lookout, like Aldric used him? A trickle of hope runs through her. Maybe that’s what he’s doing. A lookout. There are worse things.
“That’s what the Champions do,” Zryan insists, like he is explaining something simple.
“Where is it?” she demands, changing tack. “The Heart?”
He shakes his head. “Only the rightful heir is allowed that knowledge. If you win the duel, you’ll be able to—”
“I don’t care about that,” she says impatiently.
“You don’tcare? Skylar, you could very well win this.” A hint of a shadow passes over his face, gone before she can comment. “You need to start thinking about what you’ll do if—”
“You don’t get it. A friend of mine was conscripted. He’s been taken to the Heart—and I need to get him back.” She blows out a long breath. “He was—is—my only friend,” she says quietly. She needs Zryan to understand why it’s so important.
“We were in this troupe together,” she explains. “After my mum was killed, they found me and I figured, hey, good way to stay safe, keep moving.” It’s what she’d always done, after all. “And it was miserable,” she says with a half laugh. She remembers endless nights, curled up on her roll bed, crying silently. Before she learned that crying does no one any good. Aldric gave her food, he taught her, he didn’t ever mistreat her. But he wasn’t kind. None of them were. Until Cam.
“Aldric found Cam about two years after I joined them. He’d been left on the streets with nothing by his parents. Aldric had figured out by then I was good with daggers, but I still hadn’t quite got the hang of juggling, so my hands were bandaged.” She raises her hands in front of her, showing off the tiny white scars. “I was sitting in the corner, reading a children’s book, even though I was far too old for it. It’s the only one I ever read—The Girl Who Hatched from a Dragon Egg.”
“I know it,” Zryan murmurs. “Axel’s mum used to read it to us.”
That makes her pause—thinking of Axel, telling her his mother’s name. And imagining the two boys, young, vulnerable. Before they’d grown into who they are now.
“Right, well. Cam came and sat next to me. He noticed the bandages, said nothing. And I remember hating him for being there. For being another person I had to pretend in front of. For days, I ignored him. But he’d keep coming to sit next to me in the evenings, and I started to let him read the book over my shoulder. It became this kind of ritual. He didn’t speak, he was justthere.” It’s hard to explain out loud, the comfort that brought her, the way it made her feel less alone.
“And then, one day, he sent me this image. Of the rooftops near where we were staying. And when everyone was asleep that night, we snuck out and we climbed and we sat up on the roof. It was the first time we had a conversation.” She doesn’t remember what they talked about. But for the first time since her mother died, she laughed that night.
“I’m sorry,” Zryan says quietly, “that they took him.”They.Notwe.
“?‘Sorry’ means fuck all,” she says flatly.
“I know.” He pauses. “For what it’s worth, I was planning to stop it, once I became king.”
“Well, if I become queen, then Iwillstop it.”Or I’ll burn everyone trying, she thinks. And when Kaida is fully grown, she’ll be able to do that, won’t she? For the first time, Skylar has a vision of her future self, able to take all the power she wants in the world, with the last fire dragon at her side.
“I hope that’s true.”
He might not hope it if he could hear her thoughts. But still… “I don’t get you,” she says bluntly. “The day Astrid arrived, you stopped me from helping a man. A Porter,” she explains when he just looks at her. “The guards saw him using his power and I…” She shakes her head. “Forget about it,” she mutters. “You probably don’t remember, just one man in among the chaos of that day, right?”
“I remember. I didn’t know you were there. And I wasn’t trying to stop you helping him,” he continues before she can say anything.
“Then why did you land right there?”
He sighs, sounding tired. “Maybe, Skylar, if you stopped thinking of every single person in this castle as an enemy, you’d start noticing that not everyone agrees with what my father is doing. That maybe some of us have our own ways of standing up for what is right.”
She purses her lips. He and Mjolnir landed between her and the Porter that day. Between the Dreki and the Porter. And when they’d taken off again, the Porter was gone. Had, maybe, escaped. So is that what Zryan’s saying—that he was actually trying to help?
It’s not much—it’s a small act of rebellion when he should do so much more. But it’s something.
“Skylar,” Zryan begins, and something about the change in his tone makes her tense. “About what you did, the night of the ball.” She narrows her eyes at him, daring him to go there, to lecture her, like the king did. He holds up his hands. “I’m not going to have a go at you. I would have done it, if I’d gotten there first.” A subtle edge of darkness creeps into his voice, and Skylar’s shoulders relax a little. Darkness, she can understand. “But… how did you do whatever the fuck you did? The way you killed him, I get that. But the other stuff, the way you moved, the way you…” He shakes his head, and she doesn’t know if it’s because it disgusts him or because he doesn’t know how to describe it.
“I don’t know how,” Skylar admits. “I’ve always been able to do stuff like that. Well,” she corrects, “not quite like that. But I guess it’s like I can… channel the power? I don’t always mean to, but the energy I pull in, it has to… go somewhere.”
He gives her a long look. “Ezra can’t do any of that.”
The executioner. She wonders if that’s another thing he would have done away with, had he become king. It surprises her a little that she wants to think that’s true.
