25

Faelen joined them not long after, she dropped her bow down and stretched her arms overhead.

They fell in with the others soon enough, and the whole group set off along the riverbank at an easy pace. By the time they circled back to where their gear waited, the morning chill had burned off into something more manageable, they took up their bows and started stringing, checking fletching, finding their stance along the same stretch of bank where the targets had been set. Faelen nocked first and the three of them began to shoot, they corrected each other's stance between shots the way old habit and new friendship both seemed to allow.

Maendon dropped down beside Ryska while she rested, and followed her gaze without much subtlety toward where Valere was working through another set. "Valere's talented, no?"

"Aye," she said. "He is."

"He was always like this," said Maendon. "Since we were seven, we went to Lashke primary university together," he glanced at her, hoping that might open something.

She just nodded and didn't offer anything back.

Maendon sat with that a moment, casting around for something else to say, some thread that might pull the conversation further along, and came up with nothing.

They packed up as the sun climbed higher, took stairs back to Abbys and when Ryska turned left, Valere found himself walking two steps backward before he caught it, he ran a hand through his hair and turned toward his own dorm.

Rhovyn headed back from the training grounds and bathed off the morning's dust before making his way to the library and he'd barely crossed past the first row of shelves when he spotted her.

Ryska sat by the window seat near the far wall, she was reading with focus, her finger moved along her eyes on lines. He stood there a moment, oddly reluctant to be the thing that broke that focus.

Go to her, some part of him said. Don't, another part answered just as quickly, she was reading and he had no real reason to interrupt beyond wanting to. He stayed rooted between the two thoughts long enough that his own hesitation started to embarrass him.

His heart picked up its pace regardless, his feet carried him across the space between the shelves and the window seat. He sat down beside her anyway, the decision made somewhere below thought, and only once he was seated did he realize he hadn't planned a single word to say.

"It is morning," he said.

He heard himself say it and immediately wished he hadn't.

Ryska looked up from her page and glanced at him and whispered, "Good morning," before turning back to her book.

His shoulders relaxed at that, she hadn't looked at him like he'd said something foolish, hadn't so much as blinked at the awkwardness of it. Whatever he'd feared she'd think of him for it, it hadn't happened.

"Good morning," he whispered back, and held out his hand. "Rhovyn Aestlae."

He winced the second the words left his mouth, cursing under his breath. "You've already introduced yourself," he wanted the library floor to open up beneath him.

"I'm Ryska Aen," she took his hand as she whispered.

She doesn't even look like she's judging me, he thought, and something in his chest gave an unruly little lurch at the plainness of that, no smirk, no raised brow, nothing that said you are absolute fool. Just her hand in his like his stumbling hadn't registered as anything worth remarking on at all.

Oh, Ryska!

He looked at her and some foolish, helpless part of him was already certain, with the sudden clarity of a boy who'd never once been struck like this before, that he'd found something in this library he wasn't ever going to stop looking for again.

It was only a beat after it caught up to him. Aen, he thought, the imperial house name of Viana, an empire that had stood older than any kingdom of Myris and had fallen only two months past. He'd heard the news the way everyone in Myris had, secondhanded by the time it reached Ashenvale, an empire that had outlasted a dozen others reduced to nothing anyone could point to on a map anymore.

This wasn't merely a Draconian girl with golden eyes and scales that caught the light, she was the oldest blood left living in the world.

Then the rest of it caught up to him, what he actually knew of Viana's fall was that it hadn't been the city first and the family after, the way the common retelling always had it. It had been the other way around, the family taken first, the city was left standing just long enough to grieve them before it too was burned to nothing.

He thought of what that must have meant, waking to a home still standing around the wreckage of everyone who'd made it a home at all, walking through halls and groves that hadn't yet caught fire, knowing already that none of it would matter, that the flames were only a formality left to catch up with what had already been lost.

He'd heard the stories the way everyone had, whispered more than spoken outright, the parts of the account that hadn't been about fire at all, but about what had been done to Draconians in that war, the things whispered even more quietly than the rest, things soldiers didn't repeat in front of women or children, things he himself had only ever heard in fragments before someone thought better of continuing.

If that was the account, if that was even a fraction of what her family, her people, had been made to suffer, then how does a princess survive the fire that took everyone else in her bloodline?

"Princess," he said, quieter than he meant to.

"Ryska," she pulled her hand back.

"I won't pretend to know what that cost you," he said finally. "I just know you're still standing here."

She looked at him a moment, and then a small smile found its way onto her face, one she didn't seem to have decided to give him.

No grief-heavy apologies, no careful, rehearsed sympathy that always made her feel like she owed someone comfort in return for their discomfort at her pain.

Rhovyn looked at that smile, and he thought of her hand a moment ago, the memory of her fingers against his palm with a real smile she'd gave him felt suddenly like something worth holding onto.

Oh, he thought, distantly bewildered by his own reaction. That's inconvenient.

He didn't say any of it out loud and for a moment, he let himself actually look.

Her hair caught the early light in threads of pale gold, a few strands played at her temple and her eyes, gold too, though warmer than her hair, and he found himself thinking, foolishly, that he'd never quite noticed how gold could look like that, her eyes suited her. Vertical-pupiled, gold as the book had always claimed, and now that he'd actually seen them up close, he found he couldn't picture them any other way.

Oh, he thought again, more distantly bewildered than before. That's really quite inconvenient.