“There’s lots to be learned from rolling in the dirt.” I pinched the hangnail off. “For one, how to avoid sunburn.”
She picked up her hand towel, began wiping the flour off her fingers. “All right. And what else?”
“How to overtake a boy.”
Her faint eyebrows rose in the green light. “You’ve been fighting again?”
“If you consider wrestling with Theo fighting.”
“Oh, my girl.” She whipped the towel at me. “Sponge yourself off before you eat. I can smell you from here.”
I grabbed at the towel, missed. “I don’t stink.”
“Of course, and bread doesn’t rise. Go, before the rain really starts.”
I’d only just gotten my boots on and stepped out the front door when Jo the busybody pointed at me through her window across the street. “Where’s your guard uniform, Eury?”
“It’s being pressed.” I ducked around the side of the building, keeping under the overhang. “Can’t have wrinkles, you know.”
She burst into laughter and pulled her window shut.
Beneath the overhang in the alley, the old bucket was half-full of gray water. Not acid, at least. I pulled off my overshirt, grabbed up the cloth, and dunked it into the bucket. Cold, cold water.
I had long ago mastered the art of a three-minute bath.
Three minutes later, I dressed and came out of the alley. Dinner waited—the fattest pork hind end in the Dip. I came up onto the stoop, stood before the old door with the sun painted on its face.
Already I smelled the flour; already I felt her fingers in my hair. I set my hand to the knob, turned it, and pushed in.
“Mama.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Dorian
She stood in the flames,unburnt—unreachable. The glare off them drove my hand up to shade my eyes; the heat kept me far away. Her clothes had long ago disintegrated, and her hair had crisped to ash and floated to the ground.
Beyond the flames, the dragon watched on. His clubbed tail flicked like a cat’s.
And Eury—Eury was trapped.
A dragon’s bind. A genius trap.
I had seen the understanding in her eyes as soon as Caustrix had presented the offer. A moment inside her mind wasn’t just a moment. Time didn’t pass inside us the way it did here in this cavern; it was subjective, contracting and expanding. A flash of memory could be eternity. Years could be compressedinto a second.
But Eury had taken the offer anyway, as I had known she would. As to whether she would escape…
If she failed, Caustrix would get a fine show. If she succeeded, I didn’t know who would emerge from those flames.
I dropped to a seat. I watched. I waited.
Caustrix’s serpentine eyes flicked to me. “It’s torture for you, isn’t it,veyre?”
I didn’t take my eyes off her. “You would know about torture.”
“Oh?”
“A thousand years stuck below the earth. I can’t imagine a more spiteful heart than yours.”