by Jada Fisher
It was clear now that the whole ‘book of tales’ thing was a disguise in case the book ever got into enemy hands. Which it obviously had, considering that I was reading it while in the custody of the power-hungry murderers.
The guards came too soon, but thankfully, we had all of our notes squirreled away. While I was definitely allowed to study the book each night, I didn’t want Baelfyre seeing that we had cracked the code and force me to translate everything he needed. No, we needed time and he couldn’t know any of that just yet.
I couldn’t help but yawn several times in succession, and of course, Baelfyre walked through the door in the middle of a massive one.
“Whoa, what’s wrong there? Stay up all night, partying?”
“I was trying to go through the book again and get a vision,” I said, forcing myself to cut the yawn off. “I didn’t.”
“Your gift really doesn’t seem all that great right about now, and your powers of translation are less than admirable.”
Ah, it was going to be one of those days. “Sorry. This whole being a seer for less than half a year thing has left me with a lack of understanding about the cosmic way in which my fantastical abilities work.”
Abruptly, he lunged across the table, his hand wrapping in my hair and jerking me face to face with him. My hips banged into the table, but I swallowed my grimace.
“What? Do you need appropriate motivation to care about the stakes at hand?”
“No…” I answered slowly, calmly, trying to show him that he couldn’t rattle me. “But an ice-cold glass of water wouldn’t hurt.”
His other hand came up to my mouth and his claws slid across my lip, making hairline scratches along the delicate skin there. “You know, I wonder if having a tongue is necessary for you to still be useful to the prince. I’d be more than happy to relieve you of it.”
He stared at me, his teeth growing and his eyes turning into brilliant pools of vivid color. I swallowed harshly but steeled my insides against what I was going to say.
“I don’t know. Do you wanna test it out and see what he says?”
“It’s almost cute that you try to hide how terrified you are. You, the little mouse, struggling in the grip of so many lions.” His eyes widened and his pupils narrowed down to tiny slits that looked sharp enough to cut me. Why was it so pretty when cats did it, their eyes all sea-green and—
Wait.
Wait a minute.
Dew from the split circle. Did…did it mean dragon tears?
The shock that ran through me must have been enough for him to misinterpret my expression, because he let go and sat back with satisfaction. “Much better. You finally get it.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said, doing my best to hide my cheeky grin. “I think I finally do.”
I was practically vibrating the entire seven hours that Baelfyre and I sat studying. I couldn’t really get much actual work done with him sitting right there, so I busied myself with trying to force another vision.
Naturally, that didn’t work. Instead, it left me feeling headachy and useless. I guessed that forcing them instead of letting them happen naturally was putting an extra strain on me. Which was exactly what I didn’t need.
Thankfully, Baelfyre didn’t call me on it, instead just wished me a happy sleep and giving a patronizing little wave.
Well, the joke was on him. I was halfway to figuring out how to free my sister, and he still hadn’t broken the conditional part of the language. Granted, if he did figure that out, then we were going to be in a whole lot more of a rush than I would like.
However, I had to keep my lips sealed as we arrived, because the guards all stuck around for dinner. It was rice and some hunk of mystery meat that I really hoped wasn’t human, which wasn’t exactly appetizing, and it didn’t go down easy considering that I was anxious to tell my friends what I had discovered.
I could feel it in my bones that we were almost there. Just a little bit more info and my sister would be saved, and then we could go home!
That was…if I figured out the whole going home thing. Even if we did get to the hub, we’d then have to evade the rotted dragon, and I was getting the feeling from all my visions and the other information that I had picked up that that was going to be no easy task now that he wanted something from both me and my sister.
After what seemed like an eternity, they finally left, taking the tray and the utensils with them, leaving us with nothing but each other’s company and our hidden notes.
I whipped to them once I was absolutely sure the coast was clear and then the words were rapidly tumbling out of my mouth.
“I know what the dewy split pool thing is!” I blurted. “It’s dragon tears!”
“What, really?” Mallory said, groaning as she sat up. She had a lot of her color back, but her eyes were bloodshot. It really did remind me of those terrible allergy attacks she had when we were younger and pubescent. “How emo is that?”
“What’s emo?” Mal asked, pulling out notes from a small gap in the stones of our cell wall and laying them out.
“It’s… Never mind, it’ll just get us off-track.”
“So, we know the maw, the dew, but we still need the spirit of the sighted and the rising of a star,” Bron said. “Do we have to catch a meteor? Or shooting star?”
“I doubt it. All of these have been pretty practical.” Mallory snorted, and I conceded slightly. “Fairly practical. I don’t see why they’d change that now by having us chasing comets.”
“You sure your seer powers aren’t giving you a tip?”
For possibly the third time, something said set me off, and suddenly the answer was right in my face. “Oh my gosh,” I groaned, resting my head in my hands. “It’s so obvious.”
“Care to enlighten the rest of us?” Mal said, her eyebrows knitting together.
“I’m a seer. As in I see things.” They still didn’t seem to get it, so I elaborated further. “As in, you’re all blind and I’m the sighted one. Basically, a seer is the only one who can perform this, uh, awakening, I guess you’d call it.”
“Are you kidding me?” Mallory objected. “They felt the need for that to be a riddle?”
“Apparently.”
“In that case,” Bron said, his voice quiet. “Do you think the star part could be so literal?”
“What, you think it wants us to go into space and just grab a star?”
“Not quite, but it’s not that hard to find a rising one.” His eyes flicked to the window. “I believe that’s called dawn, is it not?”
We all sat there a moment, dumbfounded by the simplicity of it, but eventually, I started laughing.
“It’s the dawn. The last part is telling us that it has to be performed by a seer at dawn, that’s it! They’re not ingredients, they’re instructions!”
The others joined in, and soon, we were all cackling like lunatics. After such a long time in captivity, maybe we had finally fallen over the edge into actual mental illness.
But even if we had, that didn’t matter to me. Finally, after everything I had been through, we had been through, we finally had all the information we needed to save my sister.
“So that does it then,” I said once I could catch a breath. “Come morning, we’re going to free my sister.”
“Um, I only have one issue with that,” Mal said, her face paling considerably.
I couldn’t imagine what it could be. “Like what?”
“What the heck are we going to do about Galvinod?”
15
Rise and Shine Sleepyhead
Needless to say, I didn’t exactly get the best sleep. My mind was full of the plans we had made and how they could possibly go wrong. If a single thing went wrong, our plan could fall to pieces, some or all of us could end up dead, and then either my sister or I would be forced to give the dragons exactly what they wanted.
By the time the very first pinpricks of pastel light caressed the velvet underbelly of the night sky, I was already up and prep
aring. We didn’t have a lot of time considering I had to perform an entire ritual, help Mal deal with Galvinod, and then escape an actual, literal castle filled with dragons.
The others were up too, waiting to play their part. We each would have a dance to do, and each of our parts was intrinsic to the final performance.
Bron began to transform, controlling enough of it until only part of his upper body was transformed. It was a bit grotesque, but his large, glittering fangs allowed him to seize the lock between his teeth and shake it until it broke in his mouth.
Then, once that was taken care of and we could slide it open and shut as we pleased, he sat back and opened his jaws wide.
“Wow,” I murmured, leaning into his mouth and looking for the scales that he had mentioned earlier. Sure enough, I found the thin, almost tentacle-like, spongy scales and plucked one off with a good tug. “Oh man, I think I’m gonna barf,” I said, holding the squiggly thing in my hand. It was still moving around, like it was a living, breathing, slimy thing, and I kinda felt like dying.
“Hold your cookies,” Mallory said, holding up my other hand. “Now ya gotta poke him in the eye.”
“What?” I objected, echoing the surprised expression on Bron’s dragonoid face.
“You need his tears, don’t you? Unless he’s got the ability to cry on spot, you’re gonna need to give him some help. So, poke him in the eye!”
I supposed we hadn’t really thought that part out. A mistake on my end, considering I was the person who had to do all of the collecting.
“Sorry, Bron,” I murmured before taking my finger and poking at the shimmering, reptilian orb that was staring at me.
The result was pretty instantaneous. He recoiled, and then soon silvery, almost sparkling tears rolled around the pebble-like scales surrounding his eye. Quick as I could, I gathered it on my fingers, then rushed out of the cage and over to my sister’s cell.
Of course it wasn’t locked, considering her and her soldiers were pretty darn stationary, so I knelt next to the form of the woman I loved the most in the entire world, and prayed this worked.
It needed my spirit, huh? Well, I would give it all I had. Reaching way down into myself, I yanked up that cool, coiling, purple energy like it was my minion instead of a strange power terrorizing my life. Holding onto the fleshy dragon scale in one hand, I wiped the tear along it, then laid it on top of my sister’s crystalline form.
“You come back to me now, alright?” I demanded, laying my hands on her and forcing the energy out of my palms. I could feel the warm rays of the sun just beginning to tickle at my back, presenting both a comfort and a warning that I didn’t have much time. Dawn was an ephemeral thing. One moment, a blazing star was leisurely swimming up the celestial ocean. The next, it was blazing in all its glory.
“Concentrate, Davie,” I hissed to myself. This was now or never, and I much preferred the now.
Slowly, far too slowly, the world began to fade and the blue, fractured crystal in front of me seemed to expand and expand until it was taking up my entire field of view. It flattened, like a mirror, and once it touched the corners of my vision, the world fell away around me.
I was floating in nothingness, suspended above the blue glass. If I hadn’t known what it was before, I really would have thought that it was a pool of water, smooth and undisturbed.
But just below the reflective surface, something began to take shape. At first, it was just disconnected wisps of smoke, but then they came together, building in on each other and intertwining, sliding against each other until they bound themselves in the shape of none other than my sister.
I tried to call out for her, but there was no sound. Yet, as impossible as it was, she seemed to hear me. Her eyes snapped open, and her hand shakily reached for me, as if fighting against a strong current. Her lips moved as if saying my name, calling to me from the void.
I had to get to her.
I fought my way downward. I didn’t really know how, considering there was nothing around me, no reality to cling to. I just forced myself to sink lower and lower, my hand reaching out for her, fingers straining to connect with hers.
The deeper I went, the more resistance I felt. It was like something was pushing me, trying to eject me back up into the light. Light that was growing that much stronger, warming my feet and beckoning me to forget this nothingness. Forget the hardship. Forget the cold.
Forget Mickey.
The voice was both cloying and rapturous, winding through my head and caressing my ear almost lovingly. Like it was a good friend who just wanted what was best for me. Like I could just listen to them and all of my problems would go away.
It was so convincing, so insidious, but it just filled me with an uncertifiable type of rage. How dare it! Didn’t they know what Mickey had done for me? How she sacrificed everything and her health to make sure I was alright? It knew nothing! It didn’t know us! It didn’t understand love!
Leave her, it murmured. Come back.
“I won’t!”
I surged forward, and my fingers finally made contact with the glassy surface. It was shockingly cold to the touch, making me freeze on the spot.
But that was only for a moment, then the surface was fracturing into a hundred different little rivulets until it finally exploded in a hail of blue shards.
They rushed past my face and body, slashing, slicing, but I didn’t care. With the barrier gone, my fingertips finally touched my sister’s, and we were finally reunited.
We gripped each other harder than I think we had ever held onto anyone in our entire lives, tears running down both of our cheeks. But before we could say a single word to each other, we were rocketing back toward the light.
I erupted from that place and back into reality, falling from my kneeling position to the floor. But I didn’t stay there long, quickly fighting to my feet to see none other than my sister lying in front of me, covered in a thin layer of dewy water.
She took a gasping breath, her eyes snapping open just like it had been in that…wherever we were, and our gazes locked on each other.
“Davie?” she asked shakily, her voice cracking slightly.
I nodded, not trusting my voice, and then we were hugging with everything we had.
“Oh my God,” I wept, nearly crushing her to my frame. “Oh my God, you’re here! You’re really here!”
“I am,” she said, just as broken up. “You did it, baby sister. You found me.”
A throat cleared beside us and my eyes flicked to one of the soldiers beside her. “As much as I appreciate how touching this moment is, what the hell happened?”
“I’d love to explain it,” I said with a sort of half-smile. “But right now, we have anywhere between half an hour to an hour before a dragon comes marching right in that door, and we need to set the scene.”
“Set the scene?” the other repeated, holding his head like he was much groggier than the soldier who had already spoke.
“Yeah,” Mallory answered, walking over. “How good are y’all at playing very dead now that you don’t have blue crystal to do it for you?”
Footsteps sounded up the old castle stairs and we rushed to our final positions. Our whole plan somewhat hinged on Galivnod being a self-absorbed idiot, and if he had a sudden moment of clarity, our rolling head-start could turn into more of a heads starting to roll situation. But I had to believe it would work, that he wouldn’t notice the broken lock, or the fact that the man in our cell looked a whole lot different than the one that had been in there previously.
“If this doesn’t work,” Mal said, seemingly reading my thoughts, “you can’t let them take me.”
“Pardon?” I asked, trying to play dumb. I knew what she was probably getting at, but it wasn’t something I wanted her to ask me.
“If this fails, and they take you on their insane campaign to rule the entire world, you can’t leave me behind in their hands. You don’t understand what it’s like. So if this fails, and I’m still alive, I�
��m asking you to do what’s needed when the time’s right.”
“I…I’m not sure I can do that.”
“Promise, or I will sabotage this so hard that they kill me right now.”
“You’d really do that?”
She looked up at me with a tired sort of expression, and I saw a depth of emotion that tore me right down to my heart. “Yeah, I really would.”
“Alright then, I promise.”
“Thanks,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “Now, sit back and enjoy a real performance.”
I sat on the ground, leaning against the soldier in the cell with us so I would hopefully obscure most of his presence. If he minded, he didn’t say, but I supposed he was still trying to comprehend how he went from his previous situation to this one. Unlike my sister, he didn’t have mystical powers to tell him what was going on or that time was passing at all.
The door opened, and my head snapped in the direction of the entrance. It was Galvinod alright, his arms full of the food tray and waterskin, already prattling about something or other. Mal gave him just enough time to set it down and turn to us before she pressed herself to the bars.
“Oh, good morning, my little bird. Usually, you just sulk in the corner.”
“I know,” she said with a lilting sort of sigh. “And I’m sorry. Look, you’ve been really nice to me since you found me. Nicer than I probably deserve, all things considered.”
“Like I said, I wanted to make a change. I realize that you are my charge, my precious little songbird, and I need to treat you as such.”
“I… I think I’d like that.” Her eyes lowered, and she looked almost bashful. If I didn’t know better, I would think that she was one hundred percent genuine. “But maybe I could pay you back a little?” Her voice wavered slightly. “Maybe you’d like a song?”
