Chapter 3

Chapter 3

A ndrian dragged his heavy, dulled training sword back to the rack. The blisters on his palms were painful and throbbing, his seven-year-old body weighted with bruises and soreness and exhaustion.

“May I go, Master Borus?” he asked, voice shaking with weariness.

The Antoris master-at-arms didn’t answer immediately, instead taking the training blade from Andrian’s hands, setting it back against the rack.

Andrian looked up at the elderly man, wrinkled face hidden behind a scraggly white beard. Something in his expression confused Andrian. It was a bit like sympathy, something Andrian had seen in so many of the castle staff’s faces, but just a little harsher.

Master Borus opened his mouth like he was about to speak but then glanced over Andrian’s shoulder and closed his mouth with a firm snap. Andrian turned, following the master-at-arms’s stare.

He just barely caught the disappearing shape of his father, the Lord of Antoris, stalking back towards the main gates of the keep. Even through his exhaustion, the sting of disappointment and rejection hit him like a dulled blade.

He’d tried; he really had. He’d only been on the training pitch for a year, and the swords still didn’t fit in his hands. But Father had told him to be perfect. It hurt Andrian that he wasn’t.

Shoulder’s slumping, he turned back to the master-at-arms. “Master Borus?”

The older man dropped his gaze back to Andrian, lips turned down and dark eyes tired. “Yes, my boy. My apologies. Of course, you are dismissed. I will see you again tomorrow.”

Andrian dipped his head before trudging toward the main keep of Antoris, the same way his father had gone.

Inside, it was warm; the permeating northern cold chased away by a roaring hearth in the great hall. Andrian’s father was nowhere to be seen, but Andrian didn’t mind. He marched, as best he could with his aching muscles, straight to the blazing fire. He stuck his numb hands out to the flames, not even feeling the blood and blisters coating his palms.

After all, these weren’t his first blisters. Those had come last year when he’d turned six.

A flurry of movement rustled behind him, just before gentle hands gripped his shoulders and whirled him away from the flames. Andrian blinked heavily, exhaustion weighing his eyelids as he met his mother’s shimmering amethyst eyes.

“Oh, my sweet Andrian. Look at your hands.” She tsked, kneeling in front of him. Her movement was slow, awkward, her balance upset by her massive belly.

She’d let him touch her swollen stomach once when the baby inside her was moving and kicking. Andrian hadn’t quite understood what it all meant—how was a baby in her stomach? Had she eaten it? And why was it growing?—but he’d kept his questions to himself, content to share his mother’s excitement and the joy that lit up her lovely, cherished face.

It was so rare that Andrian saw her happy and smiling. Most of the time, she was so quiet, so empty-looking.

But she came alive in these moments when she was alone with him, her entire demeanor shifting into something vibrant and joyous.

She clucked her tongue, inspecting his palms. “These won’t do. Come with me, and I’ll fix you right up.” She heaved back to her feet, dropping Andrian’s hands before ushering him away from the fire, murmuring lilting words after him.

Andrian loved the way she talked. It was so different from his father or from anyone else in the keep. He’d heard someone call it an accent, a way of speaking she’d kept from her homeland of Leuxrith. It was cadenced and soothing as if she were singing every word she uttered.

She pushed him down the halls, and even though he was so, so tired, he managed to take each step towards his rooms. They arrived at his bathing chamber, a cozy room with a fire already burning in one corner and a great claw-foot tub fed by allume -heated water. His mother turned on the faucet, the basin beginning to fill, giving him another glowing smile before leaving him to his bath.

Once he was bathed and changed, his mother led him into his sleeping chamber, sitting him in front of yet another fire. She laid out various healing tools and materials, pulling them from a basket woven through with black and gold threads. A healer stepped into the room at one point, offering to take over for the lady of the keep, but his mother shooed her away.

“Thank you for the offer, but I will be the one to care for my son, as I always have.” She turned her amethyst eyes to Andrian. “As I always will.”

Andrian couldn’t stop the warmth that spread through his chest. He loved the idea of staying here, in this room, with her, forever.

As she set to work on his hands, he made a simple request, one of his favorites.

“Can you tell me a story?”

Something unreadable flickered in his mother’s purple eyes.

“I will tell you something better than a story, my love. I will tell you an old folktale from my people.” Her hands stilled. “Do you know what a folktale is, Andrian?”

He shook his head. He knew what a tale was, but a folktale? That was not something he’d read in his history books.

His mother smiled before resuming her work. “They are stories, passed down from generation to generation, but never written. It is said they tell us certain truths, things that explain the unexplainable, and they are made better by each new generation who tell them. They are meant to bring us closer—both to the world we share and to each other.”

Andrian thought about her words, watching her delicate fingers deftly clean and bind the wounds on his palms before nodding. “Yes. I understand. Can you tell me a folktale, then?”

His mother flashed him a brilliant smile. “Of course, my love. There are many that my people still share, but this one … this one is about the dragons.”

Andrian’s eyes widened. Of all the things he’d read about in his books, it was the dragons that intrigued him the most.

“My people— your people—still whisper that the dragons are not gone, as many in Onita believe,” his mother continued. “They say the dragons simply exist now in a form we cannot see but are still very much alive.

“It is promised that one day, the dragons will return. On the day we need them most, they will crack forth from the earth and the sky and join us again to defeat all evil and set the world back upon the path of light.”

Andrian listened in rapt fascination as his mother continued with her story of dragons and magic and darkness and victory, the pain and exhaustion in his body and hands forgotten.

A quiet, deadly voice snaked out of the void of darkness, a prison crafted by invisible black and gold shackles.

“ Your mother was a very smart woman ,” the voice whispered. “ She knew more than most and was so committed to seeing a world freed from darkness. ”

Andrian sank deeper into the abyss, lost to time and memories and pain and sadness.

“ It is such a shame she is dead. ”