Chapter 1

The High Healer had already given me his final verdict. In three days, my dragonfire would gutter out completely, and my soul would splinter with it.

For the Dragon Lord who had never believed me and the family Cecilia had fooled for seven years, my death might be the only truth they couldn’t argue away.

The Oath Hall’s bronze doors slammed open.

“Evelyn!”

Cassian’s roar made every brazier along the walls flare. I turned to find him striding toward me in black-and-gold battle armor, his dark red dragon eyes burning with fury.

Cecilia hurried in behind him, still wearing the silver-blue cloak of the newly appointed Captain of the Dragonwing Guard. She was slightly out of breath, but the concern on her face had already been arranged to perfection.

“You had to drag this into the Oath Hall today?” Cassian stopped inches from me. “Cecilia just received the Dragonwing Medal. The entire Court is waiting to celebrate her promotion, and you pick this moment to stage some grand departure?”

Before I could answer, his palm cracked across my face.

The blow sent me into a stone pillar. My ears rang, and blood flooded my mouth.

It took me a moment to remember what day it was.

Cassian had postponed his inspection of the northern rift to attend Cecilia’s ceremony. Last night, while my dragonfire was dying inside me, I had reached for him through our bond and begged for help.

His only response had been: [Stop abusing the bond for attention.]

I braced myself against the pillar and tried to explain, but a brutal cough tore through my chest first. Dark blood spattered the black floor like crushed pomegranate seeds.

“Cassian, I’m not lying. My dragonfire really is—”

His gaze snagged on the blood, and for half a heartbeat, his brow tightened.

Then Cecilia spoke softly. “Evelyn, the Dragon Lord left my ceremony the moment he heard you were here. How can you say he doesn’t care about you?”

My mother’s voice came through the message crystal at Cecilia’s belt. “I told you to leave her alone until she calmed down. Evelyn has made a spectacle of every hurt feeling since she was a child.”

“She can’t stand seeing Cecilia succeed. Of course she’d find a way to steal the room on a day like this.”

Whatever doubt had crossed Cassian’s face disappeared. He grabbed the front of my dress. “So you ruined her ceremony and arranged to cough up blood for good measure?”

Cecilia caught his arm, tears already shining in her eyes. “Please don’t blame her. I shouldn’t have accepted the captaincy. If she’ll come home, I’ll return the medal and resign from the Guard. I don’t want everyone fighting because of me.”

That was how she did it.

She wrapped every barb in surrender and dressed every trap as forgiveness until I became the monster forcing her to sacrifice.

My mother’s voice softened at once. “Sweetheart, this isn’t your fault. You earned that honor. No one has the right to make you give it up.”

She used to soothe me that way.

She once sat beside my bed through every fever and kissed my forehead the first time I summoned dragonfire. Later, all that tenderness went to her other daughter. Whenever I opened my mouth, I got the same answer: [Stop going after Cecilia.]

I didn’t have enough strength left to be jealous.

More blood rose in my throat. I held out the healer’s crystal tablet, the diagnosis glowing across its surface. Cassian barely glanced at it before he laughed without humor.

“Dragonfire collapse?”

His fingers closed. The tablet shattered into blue-white sparks in his palm.

“You couldn’t even be bothered to invent a decent lie.”

His gaze swept over my pale face. For one foolish second, I remembered my awakening ceremony at eighteen. His eyes had glowed like molten gold as he held my hand and promised that once the northern war was over, he would place the Dragon Queen’s crown on my head himself.

Now those same eyes held nothing but exhaustion and disgust.

I turned back to the clerk. “Please continue. If my soul dissolves in three days, I don’t want my petition gathering dust because no one finished the paperwork.”

Cassian went rigid, then seized my wrist hard enough to grind bone. “You even dragged an Oath clerk into this little performance? Enough, Evelyn. Go back to the Keep and stop humiliating House Ashton and my Court.”

He put an arm around Cecilia’s shoulders and led her away.

The bronze doors closed behind them.

He never looked back.

I stared at the bruises rising beneath Cassian’s fingerprints and let out a small, empty laugh.

He had never believed me. Why had I expected one final exception?

I completed the renunciation alone and pressed my blood seal into the bond scroll.

In three days, the formal dissolution would be delivered to Cassian. By then, I probably wouldn’t be able to feel it.

I returned to Obsidian Keep only to collect my things.

When I reached the lowest floor of the east tower, I realized how little I had left. My old bedroom had been turned into a storage room for moth-eaten linens and broken candlesticks.

A yellowing cloth covered my mirror. My books and enchanted portraits had been tossed into crates. The bed remained, but someone had replaced the sheets with rough sacking fit for a temporary servant.

An old lacquered box sat in the corner. Inside was the only birthday gift Cassian had ever given me—a plain brass bangle.

I wiped the dust from the desk and picked up a small moving portrait.

I was eighteen in the image, dressed in ivory with my first steady flame burning gold above my palm. Cassian stood behind me, looking at me as if there were no one else in the world.

The woman holding the portrait now was all sharp bones and hollow eyes.

Cecilia’s cloak room was several times larger than this. The tower suite once reserved for the Dragon Queen had become her private armory two years ago, stocked with the finest weapons and armor in the Court.

I had been left in a windowless linen room.

The scrying mirror on the desk glowed white.

A woman in funeral gray appeared within the glass. “Starrest Memorial Gardens. Lady Ashton, are you still interested in the amber soul-casket you viewed? If you pay the deposit today, we can hold the woodland crypt until the next new moon.”

I had asked about it a month ago.

The casket was crafted from ancient starwood and amber, then placed in a forest chamber surrounded by floating lights. People said a dragonkin laid to rest there would be spared from having her broken soul swallowed by the dark.

It cost six hundred gold crowns.

I counted the eleven silver pieces in my purse. “No, thank you. Please offer it to someone else.”

A woman who couldn’t afford the elixirs keeping her alive had no business shopping for a beautiful death.

The mirror had barely gone dark when the door opened.

Cassian stood on the threshold, irritation carved into every line of his face.

This room used to smell faintly of white roses and struck flint—the scent of my dragon soul. Cassian once told me it could calm him even after the worst battle.

Now there was only damp wood and dust.

His gaze moved around the room as though searching for something before he crushed the impulse. “What was that about a soul-casket? What morbid stunt are you planning now?”

I no longer wanted to explain, but old habits spoke for me. “I was only—”

“Only what?” He cut me off. “Was today’s spectacle not enough? Cecilia just earned her position. Don’t even think about taking what belongs to her.”

“Some things were never yours.”

A tear slipped down my cheek.

Did he mean the medal? The title of Dragon Queen? My family’s love?

When had every promise once made to me quietly become Cecilia’s birthright?

I lifted my head. “Cassian, I have one question.”

“Do you remember my eighteenth awakening ceremony?”