Page 19 of Feralheart

“You’re dismissed,” my mother said.

They rose and filed out. The door closed behind them with a sound too soft for the size of the room.

My mother turned to face me. Her expression didn’t change, but I’d learned to read the stillness. She was waiting for me to flounder. To apologize for “speaking out of turn”.

I said nothing.

Her mouth thinned, though not by much. She’d trained that response out of herself decades ago.

My stomach twisted. I ignored the feeling.

She rose, but before leaving through the private entrance, she stopped beside Dorresk’s desk.

“Strike everything Prince Fenian said from the record. The council’s minutes are no place for…digressions.”

Her voice held no inflection at all, and that was the point. For this moment, I did not exist. My words never had, and they would not in the record.

Dorresk’s quill stilled. His eyes flicked to me, a scribe’s apology, gone as fast as it came, and then the ink lifted off the parchment in thin gray threads and unraveled, taking my words with it, one at a time.

My mother left through the private entrance.

My voice, gone.

What else in this fortress had been erased?

After Dorresk left, I sat in the quiet, my hands tracing the wood grain on the table.

I got up and walked over to the only window in the room facing the valley. Shaleside spread below, too far down to see details other than smoke rising from chimneys. Laundry lines crisscrossing the lanes. Passing lives I’d been taught to see as necessary but distant, the way you saw the foundation of a building. Important, but not something you thought much about.

From here, the smoke looked clean. Decorative, almost. Like the faelights in the castle corridors. Contained. Purposeful. Harmless.

It smelled different down there. Up here, the air tasted like stone and protocol.

The Scorching served the realm.

The Oracle granted wishes.

And I had one wish I’d kill to see fulfilled.

The healers kept using words like degenerative and irreversible and time, and I kept nodding and dismissing them, then lying awake at night listening through the bond for the hitch on Aristus’s exhale.

If the Oracle could fix what I’d done to him over the past twenty-three years, I would burn every other thing I’d ever wanted to the ground.

I pressed my hand against the cold glass, my fingers splayed.

Somewhere down in the smoke-hazed lanes, Eradin was probably waking up. Pulling on boots. Heading to the aerie to tend creatures I was beginning to believe she understood better than their own riders.

If she was foolish enough to enter the Scorching, she’d die in the first trial.

I should hope for that. It would be cleaner.

Instead, I kept seeing the way she’d looked at the hatchling after the Unity Band closed, as if she’d watched something sacred get murdered. Grief and anger had cracked through her mask before she’d shoved it down.

I couldn’t stop wondering what else she was hiding.

My reflection stared back at me from the window.

I didn’t recognize the expression on my face.