Page 45 of House of the Iron Reaper

The corner of his mouth upticks in a smile.

“Now those are smart words,” he says. “You must have heard it from a smart man.”

“I did.” With a smile, I rest a hand on his shoulder. “You lightened the load for me today. Will you let me do the same for you?”

Ronan glances at me before blowing out a breath through pursed lips. His eye finds a spot in the distance and stays there.

“You call them doomkin. In Swordstead, they’re called fymian,” he tells me. “Monsters born when blood meets snow.”

Fymian. I commit it to memory. Ronan tears at the sweetlemon peel as he talks.

“One of them was stalking our village. Some parts of Swordstead can be remote, and our wee village was dead in the middle of a great forest. It takes a week to reach the nearest town.

“This fymian, I don’t know how it came about. All I know is, there was a beast in the woods that wouldn’t let us leave. Every winter, the outer villages make the trek to inner Swordstead, and wait until Spring to head back home. But the fymian wouldn’t let us.”

Ronan pauses, squeezing the peel in his fist. After a moment, he exhales and relaxes his hand.

“I took ill. The cold felt like it had seeped into my very bones, and I spent a week in front of the fire, just trying to get warm. My boy, he-”

Ronan’s voice breaks, and dread forms in my stomach. Oh, no. Ronan swallows hard and continues.

“I told him not to go too far into the forest, but we needed the wood. Inner Swordstead gets its coal from you, from the dragons, but the outer villages make do with the firewood we find ourselves.

“After a week of fire, I’m still shivering and shaking like I’m fresh out of the snow, and I just couldn’t seem to get warm. My boy worried himself silly, fretting and fussing over me. That’s the reason he went so deep into the forest. For me. I only… I only ever found pieces of him.”

Ronan scrubs at his eyes, sweetlemon peel discarded.

“Anyway,” he sniffs. “By the time I got better, got ready to find and hunt the damn thing down myself, your Scouts had captured it. Said they were bringing it back to Coalsburgh for the Rites. When I asked if I could come with them, if I was allowed to fight in the Rites and kill this thing, they said if I was fool enough to try, they wouldn’t stop me.”

Ronan spreads his hands.

“So, here I am. The fool.”

My heart is so laden with sorrow, I almost cannot speak.

“I’m sorry,” I say, barely above a whisper, because it is all I can think to say.

And then I remember.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat. This time, I splay and scrunch my hand into a fist against my heart, once, twice, three times.

Ronan gives me a watery smile, and wraps an arm around my shoulders, pulling me into his side.

“What was his name?” I ask tentatively.

Ronan inhales deeply, chest expanding.

“Deine,” he breathes out. “He was two-and-ten.”

“Deine,” I echo.

The name is solid, like Ronan himself, and I can almost picture what his son looked like from his name alone.

“Dragons believe our souls are ferried by Reapers after death,” I tell him, because I cannot think of anything of comfort.

“Reapers.” Ronan’s brow furrows. “That’s what everyone calls you.”

“The mask I wear, it’s what the dragons of old would wear for funerals—sometimes even now, if they want to follow tradition. It reminds them of death, so they call me a Reaper,” I explain. “But Reapers are… not kind, but soothing. They are there to ease the passage.” I pause, trying to find my words. “What I mean to say is, Deine would have known comfort, not fear, at the end.”