Page 40 of Fire to the Stars

I reeled. This woman may have been an outfitter, but she wasa member of the Slayers Guild, same as me. No sane member insulted the industry.

“It’s a great honor. Protecting Florent is—” I froze, realizing she already had half of my wound stitched up. “Are you trying to distract me?”

“See?” Lyle called out. “I told you he was too smart for his own good.”

“Iseewhy your mentor says you have too many opinions,” she sniped at him. “If you’re done cleaning, make yourself useful and bring us thattea.”

Their bickering threw me. Not because they were so open and free about it, but because they smiled despite it.

If I didn’t live up to the Estellio name, I was ignored at best, scolded at worst. The Metekus tended to my wounds first and didn’t fixate on my failures.

With Madame Afi, I felt safe enough to confide Micah’s conflict with my parents. Micah didn’t like weapons. He preferred to wrestle Lucy into scraps of dragon hide, rambling about how heroic tinderfoxes would look if they wore armor, too. Madame Afi listened to my woes while she finished my bandage, then finally went to work on my uniform. Lyle waited with me while I drank the tea to the dregs, suddenly exhausted from confessing my vulnerabilities for the first time.

When I finished, Madame Afi said simply, “Tell your parents to send Micah to me.”

“Or send him tome,” Lyle interjected.

“An apprentice can’t take an apprentice.”

“I’ll graduate soon enough. And smithing is more fun.”

Again they bickered. This time over my brother. They wantedhim as he was, not as the slayer my parents insisted he was born to be.

The Metekus were arealfamily. I wanted to give that to Micah.

Now I wear his corpse.

The carriage jostles us hard, knocking my helmet around. I steady it beneath the seat with my leg. Madame Afi’s handiwork is all over it—the precise stitches in the padding, the smooth bone of the interior. It protected me in Ravinfort. I just wish there had been a god willing to protect her before she got abducted.

“What happened to make you lose your faith?” I ask Claire.

She laughs. “Besides the destruction of my entire life?”

“Many people struggle to rebuild their life in the wake of a dragon attack, but they cling to the solace that Diu’s curse exists as a course correction toward the greater good,” I explain. “It must’ve taken something deeper than grief for you to hate Diu instead of the dragon.”

“I lost my faith because I recognized the lie.”

“The lie?”

“When a dragon turns, people don’t learn anything. Theysuffer.” She scratches Lucy, matter-of-fact. “Now that I’ve experienced it, I don’t see Diu’s curse as a ‘lesson’ anymore. It’s just plain cruel. I want to stop the Sellecastel dragon, yes, but the purpose of my revenge is to end more suffering brought by Diu, not to blame the human he cursed.”

“You don’t believe dragons deserve their fate?”

“Do you?”

My fingers tighten on Hanna’s notes. “Not always,” I admit out loud for the very first time.

That’swhat has bothered me about the day Micah turned: The punishment didn’t fit the crime. If anything, I was the one who encouraged Micah to apprentice with Madame Afi. If Diu thought it greedy to disrupt the family legacy, then he shouldn’t have chosen my brother to turn.

He should’ve chosen me.

In fact, my greed started years before that. The longer a dragon evaded death, the higher the bounty became. I, Hanna, and the rest of the slayers—when we saw numbers like that, we didn’t consider the destruction and sorrow that made them possible. Wesalivated.

If even a thief like Claire can show compassion to a dragon in her quest for revenge, then she has the moral high ground over me.

I need to rethink my approach to slaying.

Hanna’s chicken-scratch handwriting paints an unflattering picture of my target.Human name: Gérard Dupont. The spendthrift heir to a fairly successful jewelry company. Odds are this dragonisfrequenting Jardincourt’s taverns and brothels. Her research has scarcely ever been wrong. At the same time, there might be more to Gérard than the worst of his avarice.