My mouth opened. I spoke because I had to, because a cauldron of flame waited behind those teeth. “The tooth. The dagger. Was it yours?”
The words floated into the air, small and feathery. They’d nearly gotten caught in my dry throat.
Silence. Death hovered before me with unblinking eyes, my entire future dependent on the whim of a creature with teeth as large as me. The mouth didn’t move, but words came.
“Impudent sack of flesh and veins.” The hiss was so sharp, my ears rang. “All the blood in your body would slake my thirst for but a moment.”
I longed to step back. I didn’t dare.
In this moment, any bravery I possessed was tied to Dorian’s arm across my body. Warm, unmoving—living armor.
The maw came closer, until it nearly touched my chest. “I look upon you, and I see the viscera of your neck. I see your death—your head on my tongue, your blue eye cleft in twain by a single canine.”
As it spoke, I saw it. My head distended from my neck, the canine sliding right through my eye into my skull and brains. Everything I was, sliced in two. Gone because of an impulse.
The nostrils moved, widened. The current jerked my braid once more past my shoulder, toward the waiting teeth.
“I recognize your scent.” The eyes blinked, crushed ice disappearing and reappearing. “Girl of dirt. Child of my curse. Your skin will always stink. You may live forever, and you will carry it on you like the imprint of my tooth on your protector’s breast.”
The stink—meaning the acid. It smelled the acid on me. Perhapsit was a lie, a bluff, or perhaps itdidsmell twenty years of acid rain on me. Just like the creases of my mother’s hands, always tinged with flour. “I?—”
The nostrils blew out, obscuring my voice. “But your blood—your blood. That belongs to me. Every day of your life, you’ve belonged to me. And the blood of the bitch that bore you, and she before her, all the way back toher.”
Her?
“Carys. A waste of a tooth, was she. What makes you any likelier to succeed?”
Through the thick murk of my fear, my gaze settled on one thing: one of the creature’s front incisors was broken—sheared off halfway up.
I understood.
She before her, all the way back toher. Herwas Carys.
The story was real. The dagger was real. The daggerwasa tooth.
“Yougaveit to Carys,” I said, the realization arriving even as I spoke. “You gave her one of your teeth.”
A hiss erupted, so loud I dropped the key and clamped my hands to my ears. Dorian’s hand, however, didn’t move from where it lay across my chest.
“Gave?Gave, you say. A dragon does notgive. Foolish children live in the realm ofgive.There is only take. Take, and take, and take.”
Not give, take.
Behind my closed eyes, beneath my hands tight over my ears, beyond the frantic beating of my heart, I had begun to develop a hunch.
If this dragon had meant to kill us, it would have done so by now.
It had told me its truth almost right away: all my blood would satisfy it for a moment. Dorian’s blood might offer two moments. And then it would be alone again. Alone for a year or a hundred years or however long dragons lived.
Which meant…
This dragon wanted something from us.
I opened my eyes and lowered my hands. The creature had not moved; the eyes still hovered like two blue suns only paces away.
I breathed in, out. Then: “What would you take?”
“Now that”—a soft exhale from its nostrils—“is the first wise thing you’ve said, child of dirt.”