But even Sofia felt the hesitation in those words—the doubt that Chalia felt saying them. Fox had access to the entire records of Dragonborn in the city. If her parents weren’t on it and there were no records of them being sent to the labor farms, they were dead.
So much blood on her hands, and they only seemed to grow redder by the day. She dreamed of the blood staining her, stuck beneath her nails, no matter how hard she scrubbed. Mina had been the first life she’d taken, but she hadn’t been the last.
No.
Sofia didn’t kill alone. It was Harlow in the end who wielded the blade. If she could only end him, perhaps she could endthis. Would the trail of dead bodies finally stop following her when he was gone?
She thought of his face as Chalia had flown them over the wall, the way his black eyes had met hers, full of malice. She would look him in the eyes when she killed him. Something akin to hope swelled in her chest as she imagined the life draining from his face, his sallow skin going pale as he realized she was the one taking it all from him.
She felt the time pass as the sun inched across her skin, shadow into sun and back into shadow. She might have lain there longer, eyes closed as the forest sang around her, birds, wind, and insects. But the sounds changed, and her body tensed at the footsteps approaching.
“I told them where to find you,”Chalia said before Sofia could jump up in defense.
She didn’t need to speak or even think any words for Chalia to sense her grumpiness. The dragon only sent back a sharp poke that felt like something akin toget over it.
Javi and Flor broke through the trees a moment later, Javi’s face pinched in unspoken reprimand. Flor opened her mouth, and Sofia braced herself for anger, but Javi’s hand on her arm stopped her. Amoment later, Sofia was wrapped in their embrace.
“Lumi told us,” Javi said, lips against her temple.
“They might still be alive,” Sofia said, as if saying the words might bring the hope she needed. But they felt hollow, and Flor only tightened her embrace.
“You’ve opened a potential new avenue for us to enter the city by bringing Lumi and the others to our side,” Flor said. “We’re going to get in there and we’re going to burn that city to the ground.”
“What does any of it matter if everyone dies anyway? I haven’t saved anyone.”
Flor’s voice was rough and low. “You are not responsible for the lives the general and chief commander took. It may not seem like much, but every life you’ve saved has mattered. If it were up to them, we’d all be dead now.”
“I just feel like the more I try, the more trouble I bring.”
“Then do it,” Flor pushed Sofia away, holding her at arm’s length, eyes wild as she stared her down. “Bring trouble. Bring that shit straight to the chief commander’s doorstep.”
Chalia rumbled from behind them.“I go where you go.”
Sofia took a deep breath, the rage and grief dancing within her like a storm. She closed her eyes, focusing on the rage, letting the grief sink under, somewhere dark and safe. She’d give it space later to breathe and break.
But not today. Today was for rage.
“Okay,” Sofia said. “We keep reading and researching. We find the rest of the dragons before they do. And then we bring the wrath of the true gods down on their heads.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOFIA
Sofia’s eyes burned and her head ached as she stared down at the map she’d been studying for two days straight, as if an answer to her burning questions might magically appear.
She’d pulled her hair back into two braids that morning, but now curls were springing out in every direction, and she could practically feel the dark circles throbbing under her eyes.
“You need to get outside,” Javi said for the fourth time in as many hours. He’d been helping peruse the various tomes, but even he’d given up. They’d made their way through every book she’d stolen from the chief commander two times over, and they were no closer to finding what they needed.
“Granmadria Springs,” she said. “They have to be somewhere.”
It was the only thing they’d found in all their readings. A single line about a haven for the dragons—the Granmadria Springs nestled beneath Quelia’s Wings. Sofia had practically brought the entire cenote to her when she’d found it, screaming her head off, only to find that the springs didn’t exist on a single map and, less to her surprise, neither did Quelia’s Wings.
Javi had suggested studying the star maps that Clarita had, assuming that Quelia’s Wings referred to a star formation of the greatdragon mother, but Clarita noted any constellation would move across the sky by the day and season, making tracking the springs nestled beneath it impossible.
Now Sofia had taken to marking every hot spring labeled on the four different maps she possessed, which may have felt more helpful if there weren’t over fifty already. And that was assuming any of the maps drawn by the king’s men were truly accurate. There hadn’t been a single map drawn by the Dragonborn among the chief commander’s stash, and even Clarita owned nothing beyond a handful of small-scale charts of the area directly around them—though they were so useless they didn’t even have their current cenote marked.
“Are you trying to divine where the springs might be?” Lumi’s voice broke the silence.