Smoke and Shadow: An Epic Fantasy Progression Series (The Dragon Thief Book 3)

by D. K. Holmberg

  After having left Zara’s place, he hadn’t seen any sign of the soldiers, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still out there. They had tracked him into the market, and he suspected that they had some way of following him. And if they did, then he needed to move carefully and quickly so that he could avoid them. Even worrying that the Dragon Touched were still working with Roson James, and having soldiers—or Dragon Touched—following him did little to make him feel anything differently. They might even be part of the Order, this group that Roson had working on his behalf, hunting for Ty with their dragon-bone crossbows and the dangerous shadow magic that they had used on him.

  So he had to be careful. He had to hide, navigating as carefully as he could, and find a way to avoid letting them apprehend him.

  Ty hated the strange nagging irritation he felt, the annoyance that suggested somebody was out there following him. He turned a corner and started sprinting. He reached the end of the street, turned a corner, and then waited. There was no other movement.

  He stayed hidden, pressed against the building, watching the street, knowing that if there was someone here he would have to be careful and make sure that he wasn’t still pursued.

  He didn’t need somebody following him back to the tavern. At the same time, he didn’t know if going back the tavern was going to be safe at all. Maybe he needed to wait.

  Ty didn’t see any other movement, and finally he started off again. He hadn’t gone very far when he started to feel a sense of somebody trailing after him again.

  He ducked around another corner and waited again. He had to start acting like the thief he was. He had to start acting in ways that would allow him to move carefully, to hide, and to ensure that he was safe.

  Too often, he let himself get trapped into a different mindset here in the capital. It was almost as if the unfamiliarity of everything here had changed things for him, changing the ways in which he would react and his habits.

  Ty had to stay the person he had always been. He had to remain the thief.

  And there were other ways to move.

  Find a crowd, blend into it, and then disappear.

  He had done that with the soldiers, but he had allowed himself to get befuddled by everything else. Now he had to try something different. He darted forward and rounded a corner as he heard a noise in the distance.

  And then he slowed. As before, he believed there was somebody following him. Ty turned carefully, and he made a decision. If somebody wanted to find him, then perhaps he should let them. Stand his ground, figure out who was after him, and then force them to tell him where Roson James and the others had gone.

  In Zarinth, he was a thief. In the capital, he was something else. He wasn’t a Tecal quite yet, he was heading in that direction. He had to force the dragon to help him. So far, it seemed as if it did so when he was in danger, at least sometimes.

  He stepped forward.

  Ty could feel the strange fluttering of the smoke dragon deep inside him, the power it called out to, and the energy he knew was there. All he needed was to use that understanding and find a way to call the power of the smoke dragon out, to use that power if he were to be attacked, and then he could stand his ground.

  He could be a Tecal.

  There came a shadowy movement at one end of the street.

  Strangely, there was nobody else on the street with him. Had he really backed himself up to a street where he would be caught all by himself? That was an ignorant mistake.

  Maybe if he were trying to avoid detection during a theft, it would be the sensible course of action, but when he was trying to avoid somebody trailing him, getting caught on a street like this was simply dangerous.

  He felt for the energy of the smoke dragon. “What do you need from me?” he whispered. The dragon didn’t react.

  He grabbed for his dragon-bone dagger.

  He might not be able to summon the power of the smoke dragon, but that didn’t mean that he was helpless.

  Darkness approached. The false Order of the Flame.

  He grabbed for the dragon-bone crossbow and loaded a bolt onto it. He worked as fast as he could, leveraging it. He had already seen how the false Order of the Flame could deflect the bolts once he’d shot them.

  He stood his ground. The darkness swirled again.

  There was only a faint stirring coming from the smoke dragon. A faint burning. Not enough for him to use it. He really had to find something from it, but he didn’t know what it was. Then the darkness started to part. Ty braced himself for the false Order of the Flame.

  That wasn’t what he saw.

  “Gayal?” The shadow dragon swirled around her, making it difficult to make out her features, though he saw a worried look in her eyes.

  She frowned, cocking her head to the side. “Where are you, Ty?”

  He was right in front of her. How come she couldn’t see him?

  “I’m right here.”

  A bruise on one cheek had swelled and a wound on the other cheek looked to be healing, though perhaps more slowly. She had been hurt.

  Ty had been feeling the strange fluttering inside of his belly that suggested the smoke dragon was awake, but it didn’t seem like that was hiding his presence. He was summoning the shadows.

  He had pulled on the small orb he’d taken from the false Order of the Flame.

  Ty hadn’t even been aware he’d been doing anything with it, only that he was clutching it. While one hand was on the crossbow, the other was in his pocket, holding onto that orb and ready for the possibility of an attack. He hadn’t expected he would have used the strange shadow energy from the orb.

  He released it, and then Gayal relaxed.

  “How did you do that?” she asked, stepping toward him. She glanced along the street, her gaze darting from place to place, and a deep frown etched on her brow. “You were holding onto the shadows like the Order of the Flame.”

  “Because I stole something from them.” He pulled the orb out of his pocket, held it in his palm, and as soon as he did he started to notice the shadows streaking away. It seemed like it was only activated when he held onto it.

  Gayal held her hand above it but didn’t touch it. “That is odd. Something like this would explain why the Order managed to evade us for as long as they did. How they evaded me,” she whispered. Her cloak fluttered slightly. She had shadows, but whatever was in this strange orb controlled something different. Maybe similar, but it might not be.

  “I wasn’t expecting to come back to the city so quickly.”

  “I was following Roson James and lost him,” she said.

  “And you came back?”

  “When Dorian sent word.”

  “How did he send word?”

  She frowned, tilting her head to the side slightly in the strange manner that she had. He was left wondering if that was her or her dragon that did that. “Through the wind, of course.”

  That was interesting. Dorian could use his dragon to send messages. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by that.

  “My brother is gone as well. Along with everything that was in his warehouse. He had dragon relics. Many of them.”

  “That wasn’t the arrangement,” Gayal said.

  Ty laughed softly. “I’m not sure that trying to let somebody be known as the Dragon Thief and controlling what they stole was going to work out the way you thought. Besides, he was still a priest. He still served the Flame.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. I went to his wife—”

  “His wife?”

  The way that Gayal said it left Ty frowning. There was a hint to her tone that made him question whether Gayal might have been interested in his brother. Perhaps she had been. They would’ve worked together, and perhaps they had bonded enough that she might have thought there was more of a connection between the two of them.

  “A healer named Zara. She didn’t tell me where he went.”

  “How long ago did he disappear?”
/>
  “I don’t know. I didn’t keep track of him. I just know that he’s gone.”

  “As is Dorian. So it worries me that your brother, the Dragon Thief, is now missing as well. It makes me question whether your brother went after Dorian.”

  “Or if Dorian went after my brother.”

  “That is possible.”

  “Would Dorian have sent word?”

  “He may not have.”

  Ty squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. He had a feeling about what was going to happen, he wasn’t sure if she would permit him to do what he wanted.

  “I would go with you. At least, if you would permit it.”

  “You have had a tendency to get yourself involved in things that would otherwise not have been possible were you not somehow connected to all of this. Whether that’s the connection you have to them, or whether it is simply because of your family, I don’t know, and I don’t know if I care. At this point, all I want to do is ensure the kingdom is protected, and I suspect you want the same.”

  Ty looked over to Gayal. She was petite, but there was a sense of danger to her that he had felt since he had met her that first time in Zarinth. Now he still saw her as dangerous, but there was something else as well, an aspect to her that he felt as if he should understand.

  “What if I don’t want the same? At least, I don’t want the same for the kingdom.”

  “Then why would you go?”

  “The dragons,” he said. “Well, that and my brother. I’m still frustrated with him for hiding all of this from me.”

  “That’s not a good reason to get involved, Tydornen.”

  “Then what is your reason to get involved?”

  She watched him for a long moment, finally shaking her head. “I told you that I was young what I came to learn about my connection to the dragon. It latched onto me, connecting to me, and when they discovered what I was—”

  “They being the Tecal, or someone else?”

  “The Tecal. They were able to find my connection. Had I not been there when you formed yours, others would have learned. Dragons put off a distinct signature, especially to other dragons.”

  “And Dorian wants me to control it. The same way that you want me to control it, but I don’t know that it is meant to be controlled. I don’t know if there is a control. Why don’t you just work with dragons?”

  “Control is necessary so that all involved are safe, Tydornen. If you don’t have your own control, you won’t to know what is necessary to help the dragon.”

  “Which is why you threatened to take it away from me.”

  “Only because the same threat had been made to me.”

  Gayal looked over, smiling and shaking her head. “It is an empty threat. He cannot force the dragons”—she lowered her voice as she said the word dragons—“to do anything they would choose not to do.”

  “What about the dragons that he has taken from others?”

  “He told you that as well?” She chuckled. “Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, such a thing is not possible. Now, there are those who have connected to dragons who can’t maintain that connection and don’t want to, either. In those cases, another must be found who is willing to have that connection.”

  “Not just willing,” he said.

  “Not just willing. They must be able to. It takes a certain strength of will to hold onto that connection, to forge a bond with the dragons. Certain people have a readiness, and…” Gayal pressed her mouth together in a tight frown, as if struggling to come up with a way of describing it. “It takes more than what most understand.”

  “You’re saying Dorian appreciates the dragons far more than he lets on because he’s helped them. And he went after the dragons that the false Order of the Flame took…”

  “Because he fears for them,” she said softly.

  “Why wouldn’t he have told me that?”

  “Because that’s how he teaches,” she said. “He’s accustomed to working with children. When he finds somebody a little older—which, admittedly, is rare—he doesn’t know how to work, but I thought that he might be the best to help draw that connection out of you.” She smiled sadly. “He is one of the greatest of our kind the kingdom has ever known, and he has suffered much. This isn’t the first time someone like Roson James—someone working on behalf of Lothinal—has targeted the kingdom’s dragons. And I fear, unless we stop them, it won’t be the last.”

  “It’s more than just targeting the dragons, though,” Ty said, frowning. “Somehow, whatever Albion collected has something to do with it.”

  And it had something to do with Roson James and whatever he had been after. They needed to find the dragons. They needed to find Albion. And they needed to find whatever Albion had stolen.

  What was more, Ty suspected they didn’t have too much time in order to do so.

  As he looked over at Gayal, he noticed the way she clenched her jaw and the slight fluttering of her shadow dragon cloak.

  She felt the same way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  As they returned to the tavern, Ty realized he was tired. Gayal remained silent. She walked alongside him, her dark cloak fluttering every so often, though with not nearly as much activity as it had when she had first joined him. She wore a look of concern on her face, from the way the lines etched in the corners of her eyes to the occasional tension in her jaw. He recognized that something troubled her, and it had to do with the missing dragons, and what they would have to do in order to find them.

  Ty traced his hand over his dragon-bone dagger, hoping that it might provide him with a moment of reassurance, but unfortunately it did not. “When do you intend to leave?”

  “We cannot wait too long.”

  Ty was ready. “I suppose I should let Bingham know that I was leaving. He apparently thinks he needs to protect me.”

  She looked over to him. “Is that what he told you?”

  “He admitted that he was trying to protect me, but he hasn’t told me much more than that.”

  “That is surprising.”

  “Why?”

  “Only that I’ve been able to determine that Bingham had a more prominent role in the city previously. He was known as someone else then.”

  “Jarson. At least that’s one name.” He watched Gayal, waiting for confirmation that there might be another name that Bingham had gone by, but she didn’t show any sign of it. “I know he’s still hiding something, but then again so am I. And maybe I should share with him my truth.”

  “Some deceptions are necessary. At least until you understand the dragon.”

  Ty shrugged. He tried to feel for the smoke dragon, but his energy wasn’t active deep within him, though he thought that he could feel a bit of it. “I don’t know. Will it take that long for me to gain an understanding and ability to use this connection?”

  Gayal smiled at him. “That depends upon you, Ty.”

  “It depends upon the smoke dragon,” he said softly.

  He felt for the item Zara had given him to find his brother, but wondered if that would be enough. The Dragon Thief. That thought kept coming to him. If they knew what the Dragon Thief was after, they might be able to find answers, but until then he wasn’t sure that chasing him was the right strategy.

  “You will gain a connection to that dragon,” Gayal said, looking along the street. She started to reach for him as if he wanted to take his arm before thinking better of it and withdrawing her hand. The cloak fluttered just a little bit. It reminded him of when he had first seen her in Zarinth and the way that the cloak had moved. At the time, he had thought it was strange how the wind had caught her cloak and had no idea she was concealing a dragon beneath it or within it. And even that wasn’t entirely true. He still had no idea if it was so much that she concealed the dragon or if the cloak was the dragon.

  When it came to the smoke dragon, it felt like that power was within him, as if the dragon stayed inside him. Maybe the same thing could be said about the shadow dragon
. What about the dragons that Dorian had? Wind and light certainly could be contained within him, but what about stone?

  There was a part of him that wished he might be able to do something similar to the way that Gayal controlled the shadow dragon, using that energy so he could have the smoke dragon form some sort of a cloak.

  “Dorian was looking into the Dragon Touched to see how many might still be influenced by Roson.”

  “It’s possible,” she said. “Until we expunge his influence, we have to rely upon the Tecal.”

  “And how many are there?”

  “Less than twenty,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  Ty blinked. He couldn’t hide his surprise. He hadn’t spent much time questioning how many Tecal there might be, but given that all of them were connected to dragons, it made sense that they would be limited in numbers. There were so few dragons the way that it was. “Less than twenty? Why are there so few?”

  “The dragon gift is rare. As you’ve seen. It’s not only the connection to the dragon itself, but it’s also having an opportunity to connect to a dragon and bond to it. That does not happen very frequently.”

  Ty had known so little about the Tecal. No one did. Dragon Touched were relatively common throughout the kingdom. Ty had always been surrounded by Dragon Touched within Zarinth, to the point where he had known about their powers, and how they drew upon the trapped energy of the dragon remnants. Tecal were something else.

  He remembered the very first time he had seen her. He had known there was something different about her from the strangeness to the way that she looked at him, to the cloak that seemed like it moved on its own, to the way that she put herself against Roson James.

  “Are all of the Tecal like you?”

  She frowned at him. “Like me how?”

  “Faithful to the Flame.” Ty thought about what his brother had said to him and this Manifestation of the Flame. Could that be the reason Gayal had pursued Roson the way she had, and the reason that she had been willing to use Albion?

  “Some are, but mostly because we are connected to the Flame in ways that others are not. Even the Dragon Touched are not connected to the Flame as we are. They can feel its influence, but they can’t know it as we do. They can’t feel it as we do, knowing the dragons as we do.” She looked over to him. “You will understand.”