The Dragon's Storm

by Andi Lawrencovna

A knock sounded at her door, surprising in the lack of propriety and decorum that she’d been shown so far in this hell.

  Havence scrambled to hide the dragon’s scale under her pillow.

  The door pushed open, no lock to keep it closed, and her mother –

  “I was so worried about you!” Ven jumped from the bed to wrap Shara in her arms, bury her face in the old woman’s neck. She leaned back only far enough to look down into her mother’s face, the lines that had deepened over the past days, the sorrow that oozed from the woman’s pores. “What’s happened?”

  “There has been talk of you, child.”

  “You said there would be. A new witch has come to the citadel. What else would happen?” Ven eased her mother into the room, sat her on the edge of the bed. She knelt at Shara’s feet, taking Shara’s hands in her own, folding them over, staring at the cracks in the skin.

  The aloe and yogurt paste would help ease the dry skin too.

  Ven’s burn was already healing. She wouldn’t need much more of the ointment for herself and best to use it than let it go to waste.

  She flinched when she reached for the jar resting beneath the covers of her cot.

  Shara touched her shoulder, and Ven shrugged away.

  “He marked you out of sight.”

  Ven’s lips curled but it was not in a pleasant smile. “He said he wished me for a bride for the phai. He would not want one so disfigured wed into his line.” She emphasized the word. Her mother’s brand anything but a disfigurement to her, but Ven had heard it called the same in increasing frequency over the past days, those who looked for her marking, those who remembered her mother’s.

  She removed the lid of the pot, dipped her longest finger into the unguent, withdrew the meagerest of amounts.

  Shara sighed when Ven began to massage the liniment into her stiff fingers.

  They sat in silence while she worked, stroking over the scarred and scratched hands.

  “There has been talk that you performed magic in the baths, that you were overcome by some spirit and raised above the waters.”

  Ven stopped, raised her gaze to her mother, fought not to look towards the scale in the corner. “I didn’t do anything. I slipped…I think. It must have just looked odd when I drew back up. Mother,” she spread her arms, not knowing what to say, ignoring that she’d not spoken the truth thus far. A truth she didn’t understand herself. “All that water…I’ve never seen so much, touched so much in all my life! So much waste.”

  “Enough, Havence. The city is,” Shara paused, shook her head. “The people here do not understand so well the ways of the rest of the world. They pretend it is balmy. They pretend there is abundance. Only the khan knows the truth of how perilously close we are to dying from drought.”

  “But still he keeps the pools and demands women wash and—”

  “He is the king.” She hesitated, and Ven wondered at what her mother wasn’t saying. “The water is not wasted, Ven. What is polluted the worst is let out of the ducts. The poorest of the city’s folk collect it, survive off of it. The khan and his nobles laugh at the way they scrounge, but it is their way. To try and influence change is,” this hesitation Ven knew the meaning behind, “unwise.”

  She knew too the meaning of “unwise.”

  Her fingers reached to the mark on her breast, pressed against the still tender skin and the form of the dragon, all too real to her now, that would forever bind her.

  “Let me see.”

  Shara raised her hands and gently parted Ven’s robe, looked over the brand. “It is healing well, far better than mine did.”

  “I used the same lotion for your hands. Aloe and yogurt, all I could find here in the city and from our stores.”

  “Lucky you found that.” Shara pressed the skin around the marking, the red having faded as though overnight, despite it being only two days old. Even the scabbing was greatly reduced, the puffiness and ache more memory than truth. “You’ve always had a way with ointments, love. A true witch, it would seem, a throwback to your grandmother.”

  Of all the compliments, or insults, her mother could have made, that was the worst.

  To be compared to Amece was both threat and honor.

  And Havence knew that to be so named here, in the city where Amece had once been revered, where their people had sheltered against the dragon’s storms and her grandmother had begun the spell to bind the beast, being named the woman’s successor heralded only dread.

  “They say it was magic, Hava. Real magic, not healing potions or the slight of hand we’ve become known for performing.”

  Ven’s mouth opened but she had no words to offer in response, her hands wide to the unknown.

  “The khan has made murmurings of wanting to see you perform more.”

  “I don’t know what, if, I did anything the first time. Truly, Mother. I don’t know.”

  Shara swallowed, the gesture oddly loud in the silence between them. “Learn, Ven, because I cannot stop what is coming for you now. Too many people have said it was something for it to be anything else.”

  “I just make potions. An herbalist. Isn’t that what you said I should call myself?”

  The breath Shara released was filled with pain, with disbelief. She shook her head, and Ven knew her mother no more believed Ven’s story of whatever happened in the baths being a fluke than the khan would. “We’re Blood Djinn, Havence.”

  Ven sucked her bottom lip between her teeth, the name the curse she had been taught to avoid her whole life.

  “They will not let us forget it here, and they will not hesitate to thrash us for the same, no matter what we profess to know or not.” Tears gathered at the corners of Shara’s eyes.

  So precious, to waste water that the khan seemed to spill without thinking.

  But her mother knew better, knew the cost of a single tear to sadness or pain.

  Never cry. Never squander.

  A drop fell across Shara’s cheek.

  “If you do not perform for their desires, they will beat you first. And if you still fail to act, they will flay you. And what comes after is not something that you will rise from intact. Not even for one they would wed into their line. Better a broken doll than someone they cannot control, someone’s magic they cannot control.”

  Scars that crisscrossed with memories of agony.

  That was the landscape of her mother’s back. Punishment, Shara had said, for her transgression with an outsider.

  What else had her mother failed at that she would be so afraid?

  Ven didn’t need any more reason to fear.

  She forced herself not to look at the scale beneath her pillow, the red tinted edge stained with her blood just visible beneath the fold of beige fabric.

  And when the khan found out that her magic was that of the dragon…

  Her throat tightened, stomach roiled. “I will try.”

  Chapter Eight

  Ouros dreamed.

  It had been a very long time since he’d allowed himself to escape to the realms of fantasy when he closed his eyes. The hopes and the prayers that became reality there left only raw marks on his sanity when he woke from his slumber, pain that his life was locked away, forgotten, forbidden.

  But tonight, he dreamed, wondered what it was he would find if he followed the thread of his magic, the speck of his spirit bound into his scale that she’d carried far from him, to the woman and her place of sands and sun. He wondered if she would bring him to the great fields beyond the mountains if he asked. What would it take to convince her to show him all that he’d been denied for time untold?

  He knew the color of sand. Even so deep beneath the waters, his eyes could see the golden particles that rose like clouds stirred up by pools of fish in the waves.

  The kelp forests that grew closer to shore, too far for him to touch, were not nearly as vibrant as the hills on the land, flowering with green and violets and pinks beneath the noonday sun.

  Gain her trust, bedevil her wit
h kindness and compassion, draw her to him, and maybe she would take him into the trees, maybe she would take him home, to his cave so very much longed for and nearly forgotten.

  Would moss still grow to cover his rock bed? The carved grooves in the walls where she would sit, whittling away at her arrows, the bowl she’d carved because humans did not eat from the spit. There had been logs put aside for the fires he would light with a huff of a breath from his snout to give her warmth when the summer suns faded to fall, and snows covered the ground.

  He would burn the pile of cushions he’d gathered for Amece when she’d said she would be his!

  This girl was not the woman he remembered.

  He could not treat her to the same fate he’d imagined for Amece over countless sleepless nights.

  Not yet.

  Humans were nothing more than upright ants waiting to be pulverized.

  And yet…

  Summer Storms, but he’d loved her.

  And she’d betrayed him.

  He would not fall for the same with her ancestor. He would be the one to betray, to rend and tear and mock the supposed gift she offered before he took her life for the life her centuries dead ancestor had stolen from him.

  A girl…whose name he didn’t even know.

  Who didn’t even know him.

  The great white shark passed near his flank, the denticles of its scales not nearly sharp enough to cause Ouros injury when it brushed his side.

  So easy, to grab the creature by its tail, turn it to its back, slice open its belly with a nail and feast on the meat within.

  Not tonight.

  Ouros raised his tail, slapped at the stupid monster which fled in response.

  He closed his eyes.

  Chapter Nine

  She felt the touch, a brush of a hand against her cheek, and jerked from her dreams to sit alone in her empty cell.

  Her fingers were wrapped around the scale, a weapon she didn’t know what to do with should she be attacked, yet she held it still, and stared into the blackness, seeking out her accoster.

  It was there.

  A faint thrumming that brushed against her mind, too far distant to touch.

  Too deep in the sea to hear.

  She breathed in, looked out her window at the starless night overhead, and dashed her palm against the scalloped edge of teal.

  Chapter Ten

  Human.

  He blinked open eyes that were not his eyes into a world of colors far from the sea.

  Not as many colors as he would have preferred.

  The people of her time seemed to care little for the reds and blues that the humans of his youth had enjoyed. Here, he was assaulted with yellow and gold in all their infinite shades, until he looked up and met her gaze.

  This blue he was enamored of, so distant and different and unknowable, shifting, like his seas and unlike at the same.

  He took a breath, careful, holding back the feeling of water filling his mouth, washing through his chest cavity, heating to steam when it touched the fire stone safe behind his ribs, the rush of the same through his gills bringing him air.

  She parted her lips, and he almost wished he could hear her sigh in response.

  Ouros took care not to roll his eyes when she spoke, and he remained in the silence of the deep.

  Her head shook in memory, the hand she pressed above her eye laughable, though he held back the hiss he would have shed were he not pretending consideration.

  “Apologies. This is not natural to me, trying to think my thoughts to another.”

  No, I imagine it is not the norm for your species.

  She let her gaze roam over him, and he wondered what it was she saw when she stared.

  In his natural form, his head would have filled the room to bursting, not even to consider the rest of his body or wings and tail.

  How diminutive did he appear to her?

  He could feel her bedding as though it were his own beneath his whole body, and yet he would never fit on the same.

  His head turned, snout rising closer to the image of her before him, and she flinched back. The ridges of his brow scales rose on his crest. He flicked his tongue, the brine of the sea and the stale of dry air washed over his senses.

  “Apologies.”

  For flinching?

  Interesting.

  Even when her predecessor had betrayed him, had stumbled upon him unawares, had set her enchanted arrows to strike his hide, Amece had never begged forgiveness.

  Yet the word came easily to this mortal’s tongue.

  “I…”

  To hear a stutter in another mind—

  Ouros could not contain his hiss this time, the laughter steaming around him in the seas, a smoky mist that ghosted before the girl where he dreamed her.

  Her heartbeat raced.

  Her eyes went sapphire except for the starburst of her pupil, the spark of black all that remained to stare at him, hands raised before her to shield against his breath.

  The red of blood on her palm glowed.

  For a moment, a single tick in the spinning of the world, all hint of his watery prison was erased in the light of her spell, a creature of land and sea and so much more.

  Winter Winds, but Amece had been a powerful sorcerous, even if the woman had not known it herself when first they met.

  Ouros had felt the energies thrumming in the human’s veins, barely tapped.

  It had been his own hubris that taught Amece to access her powers.

  A source of life like he and his brethren.

  But this girl…

  “Don’t hurt me!”

  The shield she wove wrapped around him in seconds. Its power was such that from one blink to another he was surrounded, not just blocked, but frozen, her magic sinking into his flesh, coiled around his power, the fire stone in his breast, his very being, and everything stopped.

  His eyes went as wide as hers.

  Deep in his chest, where his strength and will lived, he caved.

  Magic is a thing of will, and his will had been strong, but never strong enough to break the bonds that Amece had made for him, always enslaved because his heart could not sever completely from the woman he’d loved.

  This magic, this girl’s untried power, eclipsed all.

  In that moment, if she’d willed his bonds broken, they would have broken.

  He could feel that.

  It was the last thing he felt.

  Her shield sucked the last dregs of energy from him. Where he had sat upon her bed in a place far from his watery prison, he barely managed to blink, and he was upon the sands once more, weak like a babe fresh from his shell, weaker.

  He couldn’t lift his head from his sand-dune pillow. His gills labored to sift oxygen from the watery depths. His heart of fire which had offered him little solace in the cold doom of the ocean, sat like a coal banked and forgotten within his chest, stuttering to find a flame too easily extinguished.

  Ouros remembered this feeling, when his own strength had been stolen from him, leached to be used in the bindings that had formed around his wrists and pierced his wings.

  Amece had pulled his power, called it with her blood, and used it to weave the spell that anchored him to the sea.

  But not to this extent.

  Amece, whether by cruelty or inability, had not intended to kill him with the taking, had not managed to take all of him with her spell, left him with enough magic and majesty that he had survived his banishment, had shifted his form to survive beneath the waves.

  This heir of hers was not as kind.

  She left him with nothing.

  His heartbeat stuttered.

  The flash of the white shark’s scales glinted in the rising dawn light slowly sinking into the ocean.

  Chapter Eleven

  The steam touched her fingers, and the world exploded around her.

  Not exploded, exactly, but the world she’d called her own for the past twenty odd years dissolved around her into the tiniest
of particles, each element of sand and molecule of air divided until she sat in a whirlwind of energy that cocooned her, danced with her, a storm waiting for her command to destroy or build.

  She could feel the very foundations of the citadel beneath her knees where she sat on her bed.

  If she so desired, she could reshape its walls into something more appealing, the high turrets overhead reformed into sloping roofs on rounded columns in support.

  Her consciousness sank into the earth, deep under the ground where a wellspring of water lingered, trapped beneath the layers of dirt, unpolluted, untouched, crisp and clear and waiting to offer a drink. How simple it would be to sink her hand into the water, raise the pool to the surface of the land, let it flow into the dry riverbeds and sand covered hills—

  And dry up in the heat of the desert sun.

  Wasted. Destroyed.

  The last hope of her people gone in a matter of seconds to ill-thought and the unknown.

  Ven curled her fingers into her palm. The water, reaching out to touch her at her thoughts, sank away, back into its well.

  She drew back, forced herself away, hesitated only a moment more when her eyes spied the vibrant greens and corals and pinks of grass and flowers lining the oasis.

  Not today. You cannot touch them today.

  She didn’t know what would happen if she tried.

  But the energy swirling around her wanted to do. It needed to do something, burning her fingertips, her skin, wanting to be used, threatening to unmake, or was it remake, her if she didn’t put it to work.

  Her mind turned towards the bathing chamber of the citadel.

  They say it was magic, Hava. Real magic. Learn. Try.

  She’d started this mess there, in that pool, the arms of a dragon reaching towards her.

  Ven looked at her hands, imagined the claws that had retracted before touching her, the heavy scales that protected his fingers but could rend flesh and rock with ease.

  Easy enough to rip a hole in the citadel wall. Forge a path through the temple to the city streets beyond.

  No need for claws when the walls turned to dust with a thought and the tiles in the floor shifted position to create a path to the source of water that would quench the thirst of the masses.