Eona - Alison Goodman [153]
“No.”
“Probably a good thing,” she said grimly. “He said he’d provide for all of us—you, me, your brother, even Charra—but when things got hard, he said he would not keep another man’s useless daughter. It was enough, he said, to raise another man’s son. He sold you to a bondsman.”
“Why did you let him?” The question came out too harshly.
“‘Let him’?” She frowned, puzzled. “He was my husband. How could I gainsay him?”
“Did you even try?”
I would have fought for my daughter. I would have fought as hard as possible.
She turned her head away from the veiled accusation. “I begged the bondsman to sell you into house service.” Her voice dropped into a whisper. “Did he?”
“Yes.” It was partly true—I did start off in the salt farmer’s house as one of the kitchen drudges—but what would be the use of telling her the whole story? The farmer’s wife who eventually sent us all to the salt when her husband noticed us, and the choking misery of the long days, and the nights spent with breaths held, listening for the tread of the whipmaster.
“What happened to my brother?” I asked.
In an instant, her face aged, the sweet tilt of her mouth lost in bitterness. “He took up soldiering a year ago and died in the Trang Dein raids.”
I felt a cold, unexpected plunge of loss, although in truth this woman and her son were strangers to me. Yet there it was—an ache for the lost chance of a family. Or maybe it was the stark sorrow on my mother’s face.
She looked up and forced a smile, touching my arm hesitantly. “I thought I had no one left. Until Master Tozay’s men came.”
“You know why you are here, don’t you?”
She shook her head. “Master Tozay said that I could be used against you—although I do not see how. I am nothing.”
“You are the Mirror Dragoneye’s mother,” I said, watching her closely. “And you may be awed by the rank, but you are not shocked by a female Dragoneye like everyone else, are you?” I smiled, trying to take the edge out of my words. “Can you see the dragons too, Mother?”
Her eyes were steady on mine. “Daughter, until a few weeks ago, women who claimed to see dragons found themselves either chained to other madwomen or dead.”
I clasped her shoulder. “Did you know I could see them?”
“All the women in our family can see them. It is our secret.”
“What can you tell me about Kinra?” She stepped back, breaking my hold, but I followed her retreat. “Please, tell me what you know. It is more important than you think.”
She licked her lips. “I gave you the plaque. I taught you the rhyme.”
“What rhyme?”
She leaned closer. “The rhyme that is passed from mother to daughter.
“Rat turns, Dragon learns, Empire burns.
Rat takes, Dragon breaks, Empire wakes.”
I froze. I did know it, or at least the first part of it: I remembered sitting opposite my master in his study, before the approach ceremony, and hearing its simple rhythm in my head. I had thought it was something I’d read in one of his history scrolls.
“We used to say the rhyme together—when we walked along the beach where no one could hear,” my mother added.
Kinra had tried two ways to send her message across time: a rhyme passed through generations, and a portent written in code in a Dragoneye’s journal. I wished that she had not hidden her meaning so well, but I knew why; to protect the Mirror Dragoneye bloodline, exiled by her attempt on the Imperial Pearl.
“What does the rhyme mean?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I was told by Charra that it came from the same Kinra whose plaque had to be handed down from mother to daughter. It was our duty to pass along three things.” She counted them off on her fingers. “The plaque, the rhyme, and the riddle—which, frankly, is not a true riddle, and does not bring any honor to her name.”
I stared at her; I had no recollection of a riddle. Was this the missing piece of the puzzle?
I caught her arm. “What riddle?”
Startled, she looked down at my tight hold. “Her daughter had two fathers, but only one bloodline. Two into one is doubled.”
“Two into one is doubled?” I echoed.
The words rang no