“By what right do you appear at this Meet, Haakaramanoth?” asked the Shield Eld, her gold-lined cape flashing.
“By the same right as all the other Kairöks here.”
“And where is Paaliaq?” asked Yarlung, her voice piercing the silence.
Haakaramanoth turned to Yarlung with a slight bow. “She disappeared at the same time as Kairök Kraal.”
Rakan could feel the truth of the Old Dragon’s words, and yet something didn’t ring right. Rakan examined Haakaramanoth’s trail. It wasn’t the trail of a Kairök. He didn’t have his own rök even though it felt like he did. Rakan’s rök flickered on the edge of an uncontrolled morph. It was an illusion.
The Trailer Eld entered his mind. “How interesting that you can see that,” she said. Her voice froze his mind. “Either he tells some form of the truth or his need is great. We alone will decide. You will not speak of this.” A cold slithering ran down the base of Rakan’s skull and he knew that the Eld had set a trigger in his mind.
“There was no need,” he hissed as soon as she released his mind. But she had blocked him out already. His rök throbbed. He wanted to throw himself at her rigid back and lash into her. She had no right to penetrate his mind like that.
“If that is true, then who is Jing Mei?” Yarlung’s question caused a murmur to reverberate in the rotunda.
“Silence,” commanded the Eld in unison. “Haakaramanoth will answer.”
“She is a whelp of the Cairn,” said Haakaramanoth. A vocal round of protests erupted.
Yarlung snorted. “You lie.”
“Enough,” said the Eld. “We will examine Haakaramanoth and determine the truth of his words. You will return to your own lairs until the Meet is reconvened.” The Eld disappeared, taking Haakaramanoth with them. The Meet dissolved into mayhem as Kairöks jumped from their thrones, clamoring to make themselves heard.
Rakan stayed next to his mother’s empty throne. The Eld’s trails were unlike the other Draak even though they had one strand each. They shimmered like opals. The way June’s did.
* * *
June sat alone in the cafeteria. “Hey, what’s up?” asked Anna, as she and Lysa joined her. “Where’s Erling?”
“Gone,” June said dejectedly.
“What do you mean, gone?” Anna asked.
June picked at her lunch.
Anna looked at Lysa. “When did he leave?”
“This morning,” she said. “Erling wasn’t pleased at being summoned.”
“Why can’t he ever say no?” snapped June.
Lysa shrugged. “Could you?”
“Depends on what they asked me to do,” she said quietly.
“Perhaps,” said Lysa.
June perked up. “Verje is back.”
Anna looked around. She hadn’t felt anything. But a few moments later Verje came in and Lysa stood up. “Excuse me,” she said and walked out of the lunchroom with Verje. June pushed back her chair and raced after them. Anna followed. Something was wrong.
June stopped in the empty hallway and Anna nearly ran into her. “Where did they go?” Anna looked around. She wished she could do that.
June flopped down in the stairway. “They went in the light.”
“What’s wrong?” Anna sat next to her. “Are you worried about Erling?”
“No. About Haakon.”
“Why would you worry about Haakon?”
“Because he’s gone to Pemba’s.”
“But Pemba’s not here.” Anna’s cheeks tingled. “You mean wherever Pemba is, with Dawa?”
June nodded. “Pemba’s mother imprisoned Torsten because he freed Dawa.”
“Maybe it was because he killed someone.”
“Thank god he did. Imagine how many more deaths there would have been if he hadn’t.” June trembled like she had the other day and Anna wished Lysa hadn’t disappeared.
“It’s over now,” Anna said, wrapping an arm around June.
“No it’s not.” June leaned into her. “Haakon cut me off. I can’t feel him anymore. He said he didn’t want to risk them feeling me through him if he was attacked.” June’s pain washed over Anna.
“They won’t attack him,” Anna said, reassuring her friend. “There’s no reason to.”
June shook her head. “Pemba and Torsten are different. But the others… all they think about is revenge and power. And they’ll do anything to get it. Like Yttresken and Kariaksuq.”
“Is Kariaksuq still alive?” asked Anna, her heart sinking. She hadn’t even thought about that yet.
“Yes. But Pemba’s mother is worse,” June said quietly.
Anna gripped June. “What if she attacks you?”
“Why would she?”
“Because you’re a Draak and Erling is an Elythia.” Pain ripped through Anna and she fell forward, gasping for air. “What was that?”
But June was gone.
* * *
Rakan paced around his mother’s thermal spa. The gurgling baths made him want to morph into a water dragon.
“Would you relax?” said Yuli, not for the first time. “What’ll Yarlung think if she sees your trail crisscrossing all over the room instead of lying on the bed next to me?”
“I don’t care what she thinks.”
“Well, you should,” snapped Yuli. “I’m trying to help you but I can’t if you won’t play along.”
Rakan stopped pacing. “You’re right.” She was risking her neck for him. “Why can’t we even go outside?” He wanted to hunt for Kariaksuq.
“It’ll only be a few more days until they reconvene the Meet.”
Rakan groaned and sank to one of the beds.
“Lie down. I’ll massage you. Okay?”
Rakan nodded and lay on his stomach. He was going crazy. Yuli’s touch was firm as she kneaded his back, easing his aching muscles. Rakan groaned. They were sore from growing, not from having been used. It was a constant reminder of what had happened when he had chased Kariaksuq.
Yuli and Rakan tensed at the same time. Kariaksuq. She was nearby. He’d kill her now, injunction to stay in or not.
“She’s on the other side of Mapam Yumco,” said Yuli. It was the fresh water lake next to Yarlung’s salty one. “Yarlung’s coming,” said Yuli, quickly lying next to Rakan.
Yuli stood when Yarlung shifted into the spa.
“I want you to capture Kariaksuq,” Yarlung said to Rakan.
“We’re supposed to wait here,” Rakan said testily.
“You don’t technically belong to my Cairn. You can move freely.”
Rakan growled. He had been going crazy for no reason?
“Don’t kill her. She’ll be much more useful alive.” Yarlung turned to Yuli. “Give Rakan’dzor access to the Hold so that he can bring her in quietly.”
Yarlung disappeared. Rakan prepared to do the same but Yuli stopped him. “I thought you wanted to mate with her, not kill her.”
Rakan pulled away so that Yuli wouldn’t see the image of Anna that floated up to his mind when he thought of mating.
“But you chased her,” she said.
Rakan clenched his fist and shifted out of the room. Kariaksuq was too close to ignore. He found her kneeling in the fresh water of lake Mapam Yumco, her amber colored dress billowing out like a medusa. She turned to look at him, her pitch-black hair stuck in clumps to her back and shoulders in abandon. “Have you come to take me or to kill me?” she snarled and staggered to her feet. “I hate you,” she yelled. She lurched towards Rakan. But she never made it that far. She fell to her knees, blood oozing into the water. Her rök was spinning like crazy as she teetered on the edge of insanity. “Why don’t you kill me?” she yelled. “Kill me, you fool.” She reached out and tried to grab his ankles. “Please.” She dropped into the water. “I can’t kill myself anymore than I could join T’eng Sten. Not after everything I had done.” She thrashed in the water, willing her rök to fly free, but it wouldn’t.
Rakan felt a mix of pity and revulsion for
Kariaksuq. He hesitated. It would be so easy to kill her. But he couldn’t kill her in cold blood. It was wrong. His anger had disappeared. She had been used as a tool. Yarlung would only torture her. But his father might be able to help. He reached out to pick her up. “Let me help you.”
She dug her nails into his arms, latching on like a leech. “If you want to help me, kill me.”
“No.”
“Are you too weak?” She wrapped herself around him. “Or do you want something else first?”
He tried to fling her away, but she wouldn’t let go.
“Get angry,” she said. “Remember what I did to Anna. And know I would do it again if I had to.” Because she had had no choice. It had been the will of her Kairök. And she had never had the courage to die in rebellion. To die without her rök being released.
Rakan’s anger died as quickly as it had flared back up again. He wrapped Kariaksuq in his arms and felt what she wasn’t saying. He felt her pain and her anguish as her rök opened itself up to him. Her rök knew what it wanted: death, but not in the agonizing pain that Yttresken would have given her. T’eng Sten would’ve given her death, but she hadn’t wanted to face the shame in front of him. As he held her, kneeling in the water with her legs straddling his, he felt her rök come out of her body and hum between them. And he knew what to do. His rök reached out and welcomed her inside and in that split second he knew everything she had ever felt, everything she had ever done. And he knew it was her time to die.
“Swim free, Kariaksuq,” he said. She went limp in his arms. He willed her rök to re-manifest and sent it into the center of the earth where it wanted to go. Where it would find the burning fire of peace. “You’re free now,” he said, as Kariaksuq’s last breath shuddered through her body.
He sat there, rocking her stiffening body back and forth in the gentle waters of the lake until the sun sank below the horizon. He placed her lifeless body in the water and spread her hair out around her head. “May your body return to what it once was,” he said, gently dissolving the molecules that had been joined to form her physical being. He sat by the lake until the last of the sun’s rays slipped around the earth, staring at the grandeur of the world that made him feel small and insignificant in comparison.
He felt the stars dancing in the early spring sky. His eyes drifted to the remnants of the Red Planet that was now nothing more than a ball of gas surrounded by rings of ice and fragments of what it had once been. He felt the earth tilt and his rök expand.
When he had let Kariaksuq go, his rök had proclaimed itself. But it wasn’t until now that he was able to hear it. His name. His dragon name.
Rakan’dzor Sa’aq, bearer of the line of Aq.
Not Lung, like his mother. Not Tan like his father.
But Aq like Paaliaq.
Chapter 26
Tribulations
RAKAN STOOD STIFFLY, HIS BODY COLDER than the sands on the shore of lake Mapam Yumco. He wanted to go home. To the lair he had grown up in. He shut his eyes and shifted to the mineral hot spring just outside Khotan’s lair. He reached out and checked that his father was fine and then sank into the hot water, not yet ready to go in. The gentle gurgling of the spring soothed him, until he realized that he couldn’t feel Dvara.
Rakan climbed out of the spring and walked the short distance to the entrance of his father’s lair that couldn’t be seen by the human eye. Rakan placed a hand on the external rock and shifted through it. Khotan looked up from his workbench and smiled.
“Welcome home.”
Rakan nodded and turned away. “Is Dvara alright? I don’t feel her.”
Khotan lit a fire in the stone hearth. “It seemed better to send her back to Tromso than to keep her here.” Khotan paused. “T’eng Sten’s shields are stronger than mine.”
Rakan turned to his father. His face was set in shadow.
“Is she alone?” Rakan asked. She’d go wild.
“No. One of T’eng Sten’s old kais is with her.” Khotan stood, his back to the fire, and Rakan noticed for the first time that he was starting to lose some of his mass. “You did the right thing,” said Khotan after a long pause.
Rakan bowed his head. “Yes. I think so.” He sat in his favorite chair and watched the play of light on the stone lattice work that he had helped his father carve long ago. It seemed like another world. “But Yarlung won’t.”
“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. It matters what you know in your own rök to be true.”
“Maybe.” But Yarlung would still make his life hell. Khotan’s face flickered in the firelight, showing the passage of time. Even though Khotan was no longer in his prime, Rakan could feel his inner strength. He seemed, if anything, stronger than before. Rakan watched the crackling flames, zooming in on the wood as it was being consumed. Just as Kariaksuq’s body had been consumed. Through her rök he had felt the Red Planet explode and hundreds of Draak die.
“You can’t change the past,” said Khotan, putting a hand on Rakan’s shoulder. “But you can choose your future.”
Rakan felt his father’s suffering and knew that the longer he stayed, the more his father would suffer: Yarlung was punishing Khotan for sheltering him. A wave of anger rose in Rakan and he stood. “There are a few things I must take care of.” He bowed to his father. “I must return to Yarlung’s.” And then he’d go find Anna.
“Yes,” said Khotan. “I think you are ready.”
* * *
Rakan shifted to Yarlung’s lair but it was closed to him. He reached out with his mind and found Yuli, who immediately shifted to the entrance. “You shouldn’t have come,” she said.
Rakan scanned her. She was dressed in her lime-green armor and had an extra set of throwing knives. “I see my mother’s wrath has been awakened.”
Yuli’s eyes lit up momentarily and she touched Rakan. “Your rök is healing.” The contact broke abruptly and Yuli doubled over in pain. “Yarlung will see you. Now.” Yuli groaned and Rakan caught her. They shifted together into Yarlung’s inner chamber.
“Don’t touch her,” commanded Yarlung. She flung Yuli against the wall with a flick of her hand.
“You have no right to make her suffer,” said Rakan.
“Silence.” Yarlung waved a hand to freeze Rakan, but he countered it with a shield. “How dare you…” she hissed. She walked up and slapped him. “I told you not to kill her.”
“I did the right thing,” Rakan said. He turned his face back to hers without raising his voice or retaliating.
Yarlung snorted and turned away. “Leave. I don’t want to see you anymore. You’re useless,” she hissed, her rök sizzling in anger.
“As you wish,” Rakan said, preparing to shift.
Yarlung spun around, grabbed his braid and yanked him to his knees. “You will honor the blood pact,” she said, spitting each word out. “And only then will you be my son again.”
The only spot of color in her eyes was the black of her pupils.
* * *
Rakan stifled his anger. Getting back to Tromso was more important than fighting his mother. He couldn’t change the blood pact, but he could protect Dvara and Anna. He shifted into the apartment and reached out to find Dvara. She was lying, comatose, in her bed. Amarualik was hovering by her side. Rakan threw open the bedroom door. “She needs help,” he said, striding into the room. Dvara’s vermillion had faded under Amarualik’s suffocating loam-green presence.
Amarualik straightened abruptly and then looked oddly at Rakan. “Rakan? I felt a Kairök.”
“What have you been doing?” hissed Rakan. He ignored her questioning look and put a hand on Dvara’s forehead.
Dvara’s eyes fluttered open. “Rakan?”
“You shouldn’t be sleeping like that,” Rakan said. Her rök was festering.
“It’s best if she rests,” said Amarualik. “Once Kairök can take her, she’ll heal.”
“I want to sleep until he comes,” mumbled Dvara.
“No,
” Rakan said, shaking her. “Get up. Now.” He sniffed her and then grabbed Amarualik by the throat, pushing her against the wall. “What have you given her?”
“Nothing.” She quivered in Rakan’s hold. “She wanted to sleep, that’s all. Kairök said to help her.” Amarualik’s loam eyes reflected fear. But not betrayal. “So I help her sleep. That’s all.”
“She’ll die if she cuts herself off from the world,” hissed Rakan. “She needs to find the will to live. Don’t you understand that?”
“She was… helping…” mumbled Dvara.
“I did what she asked,” said Amarualik. “It’s what Kairök said to do.”
“Leave.” Rakan flung her to the ground. She was incapable of understanding.
“Kairök said—”
“This is our lair. I don’t care what T’eng Sten said. Leave.”
“But…”
Rakan hissed. His rök expanded and he prepared to banish her from their lair. But Amarualik scrambled to her feet. She shifted before he needed to.
“Ama…?” Dvara struggled to sit up. “But… why?”
“Because you need to live,” Rakan said. “Not let your rök shrivel up in a drugged-induced sleep.”
Dvara sank back down onto her pillow. “The time goes by faster.”
“You’re being selfish. T’eng Sten has more than enough problems right now.”
“If he loved me he’d be here.” Dvara turned her back to Rakan.
Rakan snatched the pillow from under her head. “Get up.”
“No,” she said, glaring at him. “I don’t want to.”
He threw the pillow at her. “Then don’t,” Rakan said. “It’s your choice. You can either wallow in pain until you die, or get up and live.” He turned and walked out of the room. “I want to live.”
* * *
Anna felt Pemba shift into the woods behind her apartment. She threw down the book she had been pretending to read and jumped off the couch. He was back. She ran down the stairs and reached out to touch him. He responded. She felt his mind-touch and it pulled her forward. “Pemba,” she said, flinging the door open and running out onto the porch. Pink light reflected off the lingering patches of snow as the early May sun sank to the edge of the horizon. He was in the woods, calling her to him. The ground oozed cold and moist under her bare feet but she didn’t care. He was back. She saw him, standing as still and majestic as if he was a nature god. She stopped. His black hair flowed down his back and his chest glistened in the last rays of the sun as if it had been oiled. His coral-colored eyes matched his Maii-a that flickered like a flame in the darkening woods. He was even more beautiful than before.
Dragon Fire Page 31
