“What in the Creators do you think I am? Some sort of filthy animal who goes around putting her muddy feet on cute, oddly shaped butcher blocks?”
He frowns. “You think it’s oddly shaped?”
I shrug. “Lil bit.”
“Huh,” he says, scanning it, a deep line still etched between his thick brows.
“That only adds to the cuteness, in my humble opinion. Wish I had one just like it.”
Guess I could, except I can’t shape stone well to save myself. The flipside of blocking Bulder out so much I can only wield a few roughly-hewn words, and none of them very well.
That, and I don’t have a home anymore to put one in.
Ouch.
Kaan clears his throat and slaps his hand on the top. “Foot, Raeve. Before the soup burns.”
Bossy and a bad listener …
Definitely needs to die.
“I’m not putting my filthy foot on your mah’s butcher block, King Kaan Vaegor. End of story.”
His head cocks to the side. “And I’m not kneeling before you for fear of being kicked in the head hard enough to knock me out cold so you can steal a blade from the drawer, slit my throat, and escape.”
Valid concern, honestly.
“Foot. Unless you want to keep your pretty anklets on?” he goads, and I kick the damn thing up on the stool beside me instead, tarnishing the surface with a smear of dirt.
He glares at me.
I flash him a smile.
“You’re very stubborn,” he says, moving around to crouch by the stool.
“So nice of you to say. I sharpen that weapon daily.”
“I can tell,” he mutters, tapping the cuff free of one chafed ankle, then the other. When he’s done, he tucks the tools in the pouch and rolls it up, stuffing it in his satchel, a waft of cold air blowing back at me from within the packed hollow.
Frowning, I catch a glimpse of something silver and shimmery inside. Something that stills my heart, my next words cut with a serrated blade. “What else is in there?”
“None of your business.”
“Your precious moonshard?”
He strikes me with a stare that chills me to the bone, then flips the satchel’s flap. Giving me his back, he strides toward the stove, lifts the lid on the pot, and stirs the soup.
I blow a wisp of dried hair from my face, gaze shifting from the satchel to Kaan, back again. Scratching at the skin beside my nail, I tap my foot against the ground, drawing a breath so big I’m certain it’ll shift this heaviness from my chest.
It doesn’t.
Moonshards come in all different hues, depending on which fallen beast they split from. Most are dug up by those who work in the mines—from long-ago moonfalls from long-forgotten times.
There’s only been three documented moonfalls since folk began scribing our history onto scrolls, and each occurred somewhat recently.
An adolescent Sabersythe barely three phases old that fell within the Boltanic Plains. A Moltenmaw large enough to destroy a chunk of the wall, littering the sky with a cloud of dust and sand that could be seen all the way from Gore. And a Moonplume … the first to fall in more than a million phases. Perhaps longer.
That beast was not small, and it did not fall lightly.
It did not plummet without aftershocks of carnage.
Silver as the aurora ribbons, that beast shone with the light of a thousand moons before gravity lost its grip on the thing. Before it fell, bursting into a litter of shards that blasted a crater within The Shade so large a city could dwell within its dimpled depth.
Or so I’m told.
I’ve seen shards of it before, in a place where I was remade more times than I could count—those glorious shards one of the only forms of luster that didn’t cause me some sort of pain.
I don’t know why Kaan’s collecting bits of the fallen Moonplume that ripped from the sky more than twenty phases ago, but my gut tells me that’s a secret best kept stuffed in his leather satchel.
For that reason alone, I let silence have its crown.
Standing over the other side of the butcher block, Kaan splits his focus between stirring the soup and crafting one of Rygun’s scales into a blade, chipping off bite-sized crescents with a round-mouthed tool.
It must be handy to have a ready supply of Sabersythe scales, given most dragonscale blades maintain their slitting edge forever. They’re also lighter than any metal and hardier when shaped correctly—the very reason I have so many despite their steep price tag in The Fade.
Had.
Fucking had.
Rekk probably has most of them now, the fuck. Can’t wait to stuff one so far down his throat he chokes on it.