In the past, when dragons found their mates and both parties finally gave into each other, a mark would appear on the female. I knew I was irrevocably the princes’, and they were mine. But that mark never appeared on me. We were something else.
“How did the witches experience the same thing?” I asked.
“Some witches, hiding from the first queen’s rule, had experimented with black magic in their communities. They eventually grew mad and had to be put down. They took the risk anyway. They thought using the dark art would be highly beneficial to their society.”
“And? I don’t see how that has anything to do with the mate bond.”
“Among the witches, there were those who were strong with black magic. Needless to say, there were those also naturally good at normal magic. Those two kinds of people maintained some level of attraction, which they described as feeling similar to a mate bond.”
“So what does that mean?” I asked. “Between us?”
“It could be that we’re something similar,” Gaius said. “You are Aereala’s essence, and we’re . . . something else. Honestly? I don’t know.”
We don’t know—that pretty much summed us up. We had no answers to anything, but that was why we headed to Gaia, the land of the humans. To find out more.
Chapter Seventeen
Gaius flew me out on his dragon’s back, over the golden fields I had brought to life. The sunset today was a bloody red. The crimson was the deepest closer to the horizon and spread upward. It bled through the sky, with little patches of pink splotching through the endless canvas and threatening to swallow the clouds. Birds often decorated the sky of Constanria, but they hid today.
We’d decided to summon the portal at the cliffs of Gaean’s pit. It took thirty minutes to get there on dragon’s back. Nobody lived in the pits, so the chances of opening the portal being catastrophic would be less.
Gaius flew down the cliffs, descending past the jutting rocks and to a leveled plateau stuck out from the bottom. He landed smoothly, first hitting the ground with his hind legs. The force of his landing vibrated through me. The winds were stale and unmoving down here, since the cliffs surrounding us gave no opportunity for them to pass through.
I slipped off his back easily, accustomed to riding dragons after spending more than a year with the princes, and strode toward the gathering of people who waited for us. They were mostly robed officials—many of them old drerkyns and draerins. Were they here to support us? Their expressions bore no friendliness.
I frowned. The gathering was much larger than I’d expected it to be. At least a hundred strong.
Micah greeted me and led me forward, keeping his hand on the small of my back. “Silent dissenters,” he said. “Here to watch. Here to judge.”
“They’re not going to change Rylan’s mind,” I replied. If anything, Rylan had showed his power as king with the beheading of Elder Salvar. Salvar came from a long, noble line of hidraes, even if he was born a drerkyn, and yet Rylan didn’t care.
Gazes from the crowd burned into my back, sending unease through me.
Micah nodded. “But they’re here to stand for what they think is right, under the guise of support. If they don’t say anything to offend Rylan, then we can’t bloody well arrest them, can we? It’ll look too terrible to the courts.”
“Rylan doesn’t care what the courts think anymore.”
“And that makes them think worse of him.”
“He’s a good king.”
“Not a likable one. Especially after increasing taxes three months ago to almost fifty percent. I’d warned him about it. It leads to this.” Micah darted a quick, tense look at the dissenters.
“You went through the numbers yourself. We needed it, otherwise we wouldn’t have enough soul magic and manpower to keep the people fed.”
Micah sighed. “I know. But maybe we could have played a softer hand at it.”
“Harsh times call for harsh ruling.”
Rylan waited for us from opposite the crowd. He stood beneath a spiked, jagged protrusion. It didn’t seem safe—the protrusion might cave under its weight and fall on him.
“What are you looking at?” I asked him, referring to the papers he held in his hands.
Rylan turned to me, and immediately, his features softened. “Micah deciphered the spell for us.” He passed the papers to me, and I glanced down to study the neat print.
“It was easier after figuring out that ancient witch tongue is related to ancient dragon tongue,” Micah said.
“Can you read this?” Rylan asked.
I nodded. “I can.” I flipped through the papers. “This is longer than the spell that was used to create dragons.”
“The mass migration was a massive undertaking,” Gaius said, catching up to us after shifting back into his human form. He had a satchel swung over his bodice, just like the rest of the princes. It was strange seeing them with more than their weapons. Princes didn’t like to lug things around. “The spell the Dragon Mother had used for portals was invigorated by black magic. Since that was banned during the time, the witches had to figure out a way to replicate what black magic could do, but using natural art instead.”
I bit my cheek. “I wonder why Aereala hadn’t come up with an easier spell for us to use. She had given me the one for the crops.”
“You did say she was weakened,” Micah suggested. “Perhaps her memory is failing, too.”
I shook my head. “She is sharp of mind.” Hesitation crept to my chest, then I recalled the vision the goddess had given me earlier—what was it she had said? About not trusting anything? I’d been trying to talk to her and she ignored me, so I assumed traveling to Gaia was fine.
Rylan tugged me closer to him by my waist. “This is good for us, Sera. So that you don’t have to give your body up—”
I nodded, then glanced at the dissenters. There were so many of them. What if they were right?
“Where’s Kael?” I asked. “Is he not coming?”
Gaius shrugged. “He asked us to wait for him. He’s busy with something.”
A dragon’s roar shook from above us. I turned my head upward, peering at the sky which was about to turn dark. I met the sight of Kael’s majestic dragon form, wings spread out. He landed where Gaius had a moment ago, but he was not alone. Fastened to his talons were three cages, bearing ingorias.
My ingorias.
He tossed the cages unceremoniously, letting one topple to its side. Aura shrieked and snapped her jaws up. She growled at Kael.
I kicked into a brisk walk. “What is he up to now?” Kael shifted back quickly, almost blinding me with the light his shifting emanated, and when I reached him, he sat on the ground, sliding on his pants. I must have been fuming because Kael often laughed when I looked mad.
A playful grin teased at the corners of his lips. “You have no idea how difficult it was to get them in those cages. I put giant draeoxes in them, and all they could think to do was fight. I deserve a medal for all the trouble I went through.”
I rested my hands on my hips. “And why did you go through that trouble in the first place?”
“To bring them here.”
I blew an annoyed breath. “Of course.”
Kael sniffed. “I thought it’d be fun. You have three ingorias who have been nothing but cooped up all day. They’re canines, not dynfowls. They need an opportunity to stretch their legs, and where better than new frontiers?”
Kael’s reasoning didn’t make sense. I scratched my head, unable to keep up with his logic, but Kael liked to do what felt right to him, not caring for the logical option. “Very well,” I said, waving my hand in defeat. “Let them out.”
Kael hummed. “Are you sure? They might start—”
“You were the one who brought them here. What did you expect out of it? Were you thinking to drag them around in those giant cages?” The cages were twice my height to accommodate the size of the ingorias. I crinkled my nose in annoyance. “They’ll listen to me
.”
Kael widened his grin. He leapt to his feet in a swift motion, not needing to push himself up like normal people did, and unlatched the mechanism at the front of the cages. The huge locks fell to the ground and cracked a rough sound against the rocks.
“Now the two of you,” I said to Mayhem and Grunt, who snarled at each other like twats who wouldn’t grow up, “If one of you bites the other, regardless of whether you’re play-fighting or not, I’ll leave you both in Gaia. You won’t ever see home again. I won’t care who started i, because you’re in this together. Am I clear?”
Sometimes I questioned how the ingorias understood me, but they did, and quite easily, too. They whimpered, understanding me, and Grunt tucked his head toward the ground to lick a paw. Aura was the last to be released by Kael. She strutted out of her cage like a queen and paid no mind to her brothers. She did, however, flash Kael a dirty look, and he responded with a thumbs up.
Micah ambled up to me, holding the papers. “Are you ready to start the spell, Sera?”
The warning of danger flashed through my thoughts. Should we really be doing this? But it was better to know than to never try at all, right?
I accepted the papers from Micah and nodded.
“S-sorry, excuse me . . .”
The voice was gratingly familiar.
Bianca crashed toward our gathering. She carried her own backpack. Her wings, a leathery olive color, fanned out from behind her. Her landing was rougher than the princes, and she stumbled so hard I thought she might fall on her chin. “I-I’m here,” she stuttered.
I narrowed my eyes at her. Why was she here to invade our party? Even Frederick had decided to sit out because he’d decided Gaia wasn’t a place for someone like him. He preferred the safety of four walls around him.
She looked at the ground as she spoke, “F-father . . . told me of what happened with you. He said I should try and make amends . . . join the expedition.”
I resisted the urge to jab a finger at her chest. Instead, I summoned all the patience I’d gathered in my past experience in the council—since they could behave like children so often—and pretended I cared. “Bianca, sister. It’ll be dangerous. The tome itself warned of it.”
“It’s all right. It’s okay if I get to spend time with you.”
My smile faltered, if only for a moment. What did she mean it was all right? It was all right if she’d accidentally gotten killed? Did she want to risk her life just to make amends? She’d never risked anything for me when we were younger. No, she just let me take all the verbal insults and hardship while she got to sketch in her litter corner, leaving me to lug the bucketloads of shit that belonged to our terrible neighbors. What did this girl have planned? She couldn’t be all altruistic so suddenly.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, it really isn’t. It’s for your safety, Bianca. Guards? Can you make sure my sister doesn’t do anything silly?”
I waved at the leader of the king’s guard, who stood next to the dissenters as a precaution. He strutted over, following my directions. He hovered over Bianca, watching her like a hawk.
The princes and I walked from the group of people, leaving my sister behind. My ingorias followed obediently, even though I sensed the tension between Mayhem and Grunt, who I knew wanted nothing better than to rip each other’s throats out. They couldn’t when I was around because then I’d have their throats. Not in the literal sense of course—I wouldn’t hurt my babies. But they feared me since they still saw me as a parent figure.
We ushered ourselves to a spot Rylan had picked out. As we did, the dissenters followed. They were being awfully creepy and stalkerish. But they weren’t actually saying anything, so what harm could they do? We stopped in the middle of a circular arrangement of boulders. A few members of Rylan’s guard in human, drerkyn, and draerin forms perched on the boulders.
It was then I noticed another group of men and women. They were dressed in plain garbs, unlike the glistening robes of the dissenters, and bore grungy hairstyles in need of a good combing.
“Who are the others?” I asked.
Rylan kneaded his brow. “I almost decided against this.”
Gaius tried to hide the disgust on his face but failed. “Supporters of the Dragon Mother Sect. They tried to breed the stronger magic bloodlines, even though those are uncommon among dragon-kind. They agreed to help because they want to see the realm of the humans, too.”
A lady with bushy eyebrows tipped one of them at Gaius, having heard him clearly. Gaius snorted, not caring he had offended one of them.
“We need them?” I asked. Their company was disconcerting.
“They won’t be coming with us, but I thought it’d be easier and waste less magic if we had more magic users when casting the spell.”
An eagle cawed above the pits. They liked making nests around here, and the sounds they emitted always added to the foreboding atmosphere of these rocky cliffs. Along with the silent dissenters, and my gratingly beautiful sister’s face beside me, this whole venture of ours wasn’t starting out right. Even the back of my robe was getting clammy due to the humid, warm air of Constanria. I hated the sticky sensation it gave me.
Two hidraes from Rylan’s guard came over with a heap of soul beads. They poured it at the empty space before us, and one of the beads rolled to my feet. The mass of them all amounted to ten of those large orbs at the Temple of Ashes—a fortune.
Kael whistled. “Thank you, Vanjar.” When I showed him my puzzlement, he answered, “She donated some from Beyestirya.”
Micah cleared his throat. “Let’s waste no more time, then.” He began reading from his script. “Nas veo tempir peri vorten peri atonacuae . . .” His voice spun like a song when he read. Velvety. Smooth. Strong.
I had trouble keeping up, but I managed, despite hearing some of the sect warlocks and witches fumble over their own words. The rest of the princes joined in, and the way they spoke, even though it was a simple matter, shadowed the articulations of the others and mine. Their voices mingled and blended with each other, forming vibrations that enraptured my attention.
We were halfway through the spell when doubt fastened into my chest. The soul beads hadn’t drained like I expected them to. Was this not going to work? What if we failed?
In that case, the dissenters would have a good laugh and our hopes would be entirely dashed. We’d been counting on this magic to give us a lifeline, and if this attempt was unsuccessful, it’d be far worse than having icy water doused over faces.
It was akin to the tightening of death’s noose around my neck.
Just when hope began to dim, the soul beads flashed. The souls in them misted away as soon as the spell took effect. It was working! My chest bubbled with excitement, but it was quickly subdued by the fatigue that took over. The goddess’s power inside me was being used, like when I’d restored the fields.
Magical smoke flew from the beads and twirled, weaving itself into a bright gateway that hurt my eyes when I looked at it. It pulsed and shone like a star. Did we have to step through that?
“It’s time to go,” Micah said, pushing me forward. I circled my fingers around the straps on my backpack and held tight. This was it. We were going to leave the Drae Lands. No one had done this in thousands of years, not since the first king ordered the migration. Gaia was supposed to be a land belonging to tales of the old, not an actual place we could visit.
I squinted at the brightness of the portal when I stepped through, imagining searing pain through my mind. I’d heard stories of screaming and anguish when the ancients had traveled through portals. The pain was merely a dull ache at the left side of my forehead that disappeared as soon as it came.
I was on the other side in mere seconds.
Grass. That was all I saw. An endless stretch of brown grass escaping toward the horizon. A blue sky greeted me with not a cloud in it. I’d imagined more—not this empty expanse. A cold, hollow gust of wind whooshed past me, as if to punctuate the silence of the landscape.
Where were the humans? The people like me? I thought I’d find an entire continent of beings with not a drop of dragon blood in them, who I could touch without them screaming in pain. I took out my leather gloves and put my hand out to the winds.
“Looks like an endless stretch of shit,” Kael said, after stepping through the portal. He rested his hands on the hilts of his daggers. The rest of his brothers, my ingorias, and some servants, joined him soon after. Aura nuzzled up to Kael—had she forgiven him so quickly? The servants carried a huge trunks of items with them. Some of them were the princes’ belongings; most were the remaining soul beads we needed to get back.
“I wouldn’t put it that harshly,” I said.
“Fine,” Kael replied. “It’s an endless stretch of shit accompanied by a pretty sky. How about that?”
I rolled my eyes and walked onward. “Maybe there’s more to see somewhere—”
A crashing sound interrupted me, so I spun around to look what caused it.
“Your guards are trained well,” Bianca said. “They wouldn’t let me go.” She sat right on top of Gaius, whom she had crashed into and forced toward the ground. With a daft look, she rubbed the back of her neck.
I glowered. “Bianca! You shouldn’t be here. Head back at—”
The portal snapped shut right before I could finish, silencing whatever I had to say.
Chapter Eighteen
We took a week to prepare for this expedition and had brought a huge band of people with us to explore Gaia.
Even then, we might have needed to pack more supplies.
I clutched Micah’s dragon form tightly as we soared through the empty skies. Everything about this place was empty—barren grass, fields, dried ground, and deserts. I wouldn’t be surprised if no rain had fallen in Gaia for years.
Fall of Dragons (Sera's Curse Book 3) Page 15
