by Riley Storm
Natasha frowned. “Yeah. These guys are way too hot to be trusted.”
Sara glanced at her in disgust. “Ew. Nat. Come on now, don’t think of them like that. They’re dragons. Aliens from another world, probably trying to take over ours. They are not hot.”
Shrugging, Natasha pointed at the one still in human form. “Really? He looks pretty hot to me,” she said, pulling her friend’s chain.
“Gross. Just go tell Loiner for me, will you?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Natasha might still be on the fence about the dragons being at Winterspell, but telling Loiner about this little secret talk would be a good way to curry favor with the Master, and if Natasha wanted to remain in Loiner’s good books, that was a necessity.
Sara quickly wrapped Natasha up in a hug, then stepped back, summoning her ride, a steed made from pure air. The witches had long ago stopped using brooms, wanting to ditch the pointy black hat and boiling cauldron stereotype.
Not even Harry Potter could save us from that fate.
“See ya,” Sara said, and leapt onto her mount, green eyes sparkling as she raced up into the sky, only belatedly pulling her goggles down, so eager was she for the patrol to begin.
Natasha waved at her friend before turning and heading back inside, making for the Masters’ offices. She wasn’t happy about playing politics like this, but one simply did not get ahead at Winterspell without a benefactor, and after years of trying to do it alone, Natasha had finally given in to that certainty.
“Come in,” the voice said almost instantly after she knocked.
“Master Loiner,” she said respectfully as she entered the office.
“What can I do for you, Natasha?” the woman sitting behind the desk asked, eyes glittering in the dimly lit room.
Those same eyes grew wider as Natasha told her of the happenings on the courtyard.
“Rane came to talk to him, you say,” Loiner said, tapping her pointy chin with one well-manicured nail.
“Yes, Master Loiner, I believe that is his name.”
“It is,” Loiner said dismissively. “Though until now, he’s not done anything to garner attention. I wonder, perhaps, if that is changing.”
Natasha just stood silently, unsure of what to say in response. Was Loiner watching all of the dragons?
“We need to find out what he’s up to.”
“Um, yes Master,” Natasha said, sensing that she was expected to respond now.
“I have an assignment for you, to help with that.”
That perked Natasha up. She had something to do now, a project that wasn’t just school. Something that would be helpful. “What is it?” she asked eagerly.
Loiner leaned back in her seat, watching Natasha as she spoke. “I need you to get close to him. Earn his trust.”
“What?” The word slipped out without her thinking. She’d been ready for a lot of things, but she didn’t really understand what Loiner meant by get close to him.
“Get close to him, Initiate Celland,” Master Loiner said, using her last name.
Natasha flinched at the rebuke.
“Find out what the dragons are up to. Get him to tell you. I have other sources at work, but none of them are paying dividends yet. Perhaps you can be the one to tell me what it is they’re planning.” Loiner leaned forward, elbows on the desk, fingers tented in front of her. “We both know they are up to something, but the question we’ve not yet gotten an answer to, is ‘what?’ You’re going to be the one to help me find that out.”
Natasha licked her lips nervously. This was more than she felt comfortable doing. Loiner was asking her to do a lot.
“We must all make sacrifices sometimes if we wish to get ahead, Initiate Celland,” Loiner said quietly. “Otherwise, we end up on the outside, looking in. You wouldn’t want that, right?”
Her stomach churned at Loiner’s thinly veiled threat. While Natasha wasn’t sure that Loiner could get her removed from Winterspell, she had no doubt the woman could stall her progress, keeping her an Initiate forever.
Natasha had bigger plans than that. She wanted to become a Master eventually. To do that though, she would need Loiner on her side. The woman was very powerful, not just at Winterspell, but in the magical community as a whole. Pissing her off was a Bad Idea.
“I understand,” she said reluctantly at last, not liking it, but at the same time not seeing any other choice. “I’ll do it. Somehow.”
Loiner grinned. “Don’t worry, I have a plan to help with that.”
Chapter Three
Natasha
This was Loiner’s plan to help?
Pulling her black robes tighter around her thick waist, Natasha glowered at the icy landscape that stretched out before her. It had been a long time since she’d climbed the steps necessary to reach the upper walls surrounding Winterspell.
Set deep in the Appalachians, far from human contact, Winterspell Academy looked more like a massive sprawling medieval castle than it did a school. Forty-foot walls surrounded the perimeter, curving in and out to follow the landscape of the mountain upon which the magic school was built.
Natasha stood upon the walls now, the ever-present wind whipping at her clothing and stinging the corners of her eyes. Down below, the wind was angled away. Much of the cold was deflected by spells as well, creating a much fairer atmosphere for those who wandered Winterspell’s grounds.
Not up here. Up here, we suffer.
Footsteps sounded up the stairs. Heavy, booted, and belonging to no witch she’d ever heard. It must be Rane.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said as his head appeared. A moment later, the rest of his body followed. Despite the cold up on the wall, he was decked out in the usual dragon attire, which included a t-shirt that was at least one size too small.
Natasha was fairly positive she could count not only his abs, but his individual veins as well despite the dark black fabric. Her eyes strayed for a few moments, ignoring the bite of the wind to admire his physique. She didn’t care what Sara had to say, Rane was hot, and she was going to admire the view.
It was certainly better than anything out there.
“Hi, I’m Rane. You must be the liaison. I was told to meet you up here. You were going to show me some things about Winterspell, about what you do here. I’m really looking forward to it. Thank you so much for the opportunity. So, what do we do first?” he asked, looking around, blue-green eyes wide and seemingly unaffected by the wind.
“You are entirely too excited for this,” she said, trying to hold back the majority of her irritation.
“Why, what’s wrong with it? This is fun. We’re doing something!” Rane said, slapping his hands together.
“We’re going to walk along the walls,” Natasha said.
“Guard duty? Excellent. I’ve never drawn guard duty before. They said I was too young to fight back…” Rane grew serious, eyes downcast. “Back home.”
Much to her surprise, Natasha felt a slight twinge of pity in her stomach.
“The last battle we ever fought on Dracia was fought from a place much like this,” Rane said, enthusiasm muted. “An ice fortress, in the very north of our world.”
Natasha hadn’t known that. In fact, she wondered if any of the witches knew that yet.
“I, I’m sorry,” she said, not sure what else was appropriate to say. “I didn’t know.”
Rane waved her off. “I didn’t mean to get so down there. That’s on me. So we’re going to patrol the walls?”
“What? Uh, yeah,” she said, still trying to figure out what the knot in her stomach was all about.
“Why is that so bad?” Rane asked, moving to the edge of the walls and peering down, then looking left and right at the rampart that moved along the inside of the wall.
“It’s a job for novices,” she said. “Second and third-year novices at that. There are two fifth or sixth-year novices per wall section, in charge of the rest. Initiates don’t do wall patrol,” she all but spat, pointing in the direc
tion they were to go.
Rane walked along the rampart, occasionally glancing to his right down into the interior of Winterspell, but mostly keeping his eyes roving over the walls to the landscape below.
Natasha followed along, bored, her eyes drilling into the back of Rane’s skull, past the short-cut hair and into his cranium, filling him with her hatred at being assigned such a menial task.
“What year are you?” Rane asked after they’d been walking for a minute or so.
“I’m in my twelfth year,” she said quietly. “Sixth as an Initiate.”
The big dragon shifter nodded slowly as she came up alongside him, the pair walking side by side. Natasha might hate what Loiner was doing to her, but she knew that if she didn’t at least make an attempt to get close to Rane, the Master would make her life a living hell.
Just suck it up. It won’t be for long.
“So then, it’s been nearly six years since you last were on the walls,” Rane deduced.
“For guard duty, yes,” she said quietly. “There are four Initiates stationed in the watchtowers.” She pointed out the four towers that marked arbitrary corners of Winterspell’s walls, evenly spaced around its perimeter. “But third year and up, Initiates graduate from wall patrol to ranged patrols.” She couldn’t dampen her enthusiasm entirely.
Rane looked at her, his eyes large and inquisitive, reading her easily it seemed. Natasha found herself wanting to bite her lip as she stared back, sucked deep into the blue-green vortex of his irises.
Who the hell is he? Why do I find him so interesting?
Natasha pushed those questions aside. It was because she didn’t care, she tried to tell herself, ignoring the other possibility as best she could.
“That explains it then,” Rane said.
“Explains what?”
‘Why you feel so demeaned right now. You think this is below you. That you’re better than this.”
“Nothing happens here,” she said bitterly. “It’s boring, there’s no action, Rane. Out on patrol, at least we occasionally run into creatures from the Abyss. It’s something to do. It’s the job I’ve trained for twelve years to do. Can you really fault me for preferring to want to do that?”
Rane shrugged. “I don’t fault you at all. I’m just trying to understand you. I’ve never come across you before, so I don’t know anything about you.”
She looked away, feeling slightly shamed at her outburst. “We’ve crossed paths before actually,” she said.
“We have?”
“Sort of. I was there yesterday, at the courtyard, when you ran up and said something secret to Damien,” she explained.
Rane laughed. “Oh, that? I was just delivering a message from Anna. I figured it would be polite not to let everyone hear it.”
Natasha watched as he talked, listening to his voice as he played off the situation. There was no hitch in his voice, no pause while his brain tried to catch up with his mouth. Even his eyes were seemingly unaffected, casually flicking between the landscape beyond and her face, his attention easily shifting from one to the other.
Either he was one of the most masterful liars she’d ever come across, or he was telling the truth.
“That was nice of you,” she said, awkwardly trying to move on.
“But you are demeaned by the job then,” Rane pushed. “Even if you’re doing it to show me what goes on here, not as an actual duty. I’m sorry that you have been put in this position.”
Natasha sighed. Now she felt shame and embarrassment. Rane was right of course. She hadn’t been assigned to walk the wall as her duty. She’d been assigned to show Rane how Winterspell operated, what the witches did there, and one of the major jobs of the younger witches was to patrol the wall.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But it’s just boring for me. I figured it would be for you too, but you seem eager and happy. I don’t understand.”
Rane smiled. “Well that’s easy. Two reasons. One, it’s something new for me, something that’s educating me on the people that have graciously taken us in.”
Natasha felt a twinge of irritation mixed with guilt at his obvious appreciation for what the witches had done for his people, sheltering them, providing them a place to regroup and live in safety while they brought in the scattered remnants of their people. She couldn’t begin to imagine the horrors these people had seen and dealt with.
Only two hundred or so left from an entire planet…
She shivered.
“The second is that this is something for me to do, Natasha.”
Her shoulders straightened at hearing him say her name. It sounded good. Her spine tingled slightly.
Get it together. He’s just eye candy; remember that underneath that, he’s a dragon. You don’t like dragons.
“Something for you to do?”
He nodded. “By dragon standards, I’m young, just barely come into my full powers.”
Frowning, she looked him up and down. “How old are you?” she asked. “I thought you several years older than me.”
“We’ve calculated it out, that I’m somewhere around twenty-eight of your years.”
“That’s young?” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Here, you would be a witch entering her prime, perhaps as an Apprentice. They handle the most dangerous assignments, unless a full Master is needed.”
“Dragons age similar to witches, it seems,” Rane told her, pausing to look down over the battlements at the brilliant snow-covered hills and trees below. “We grow more powerful the older we get. So someone my age isn’t very powerful compared to a dragon ten years older. Or twenty.”
She considered that fact for a long second, wondering if Loiner knew that. That the longer the dragons lived at Winterspell, the more powerful they were going to get, regardless of their numbers.
“I see.”
Rane nodded. “Because of that, it wasn’t until the end of the war that I could really help. I fought a few times here or there, but never on the frontlines, never anything important.”
She could hear the frustration in his tone, the desire to prove himself. It was easy to hear, because she heard the same desires in herself, in the way she talked about her schooling. They both wanted to be better, to prove to their superiors that they were capable of more.
“I understand,” she said softly.
Rane glanced over at her, taking in her expression. “Yes, I believe you do. And there’s a third reason I’m okay with doing this.”
She lifted her eyebrows, inviting him to continue.
“Maybe this will help us build rapport with you. The more we know about each other, the less the haters have to use against us,” he said, his stare returning out to the snowy mountain. “So many of the other witches dislike us, Natasha, and we don’t know why. We don’t understand what we did. Perhaps by doing things with each other, we can begin to eliminate that.”
Biting her tongue, Natasha stayed quiet. It bothered her to know that Rane believed her to be one of the dragons’ friends. As if she’d volunteered for this assignment ahead of time because she wanted to be friends with them.
She didn’t like lying, but now she was stuck in one, and the only option that didn’t doom her career was to forge ahead.
“Yeah,” she said tightly. “I get that.”
This was not going at all according to her plan. Rane wasn’t supposed to have a brain, a mind that thought about things deeply, that had real emotions. He was just supposed to be a walking billboard for her dreams. Nothing more.
“Shall we continue on?” she asked, eager to have the subject change.
Now that she knew there was more to him than met the eye, Natasha found that she wasn’t as unhappy about being up on the wall. As long as she kept the subject to something of her liking, she could handle spending time with Rane.
She just wouldn’t think about what was to come after that.
Chapter Four
Rane
“Question.”
Natasha glanced at him, waiting for him to continue.
“Why do you patrol the wall?”
The question had been nagging at him since he’d reported to Natasha the day before for their first patrol. She’d made the patrol out to be boring, yet they had crossed paths with so many of the youngest witches, the novices, that he’d come to realize there was quite a strong force of magic users assigned to the wall.
“To protect Winterspell of course,” Natasha said, looking at him like he’d grown a second head.
Before he could explain, the dark clouds that had been threatening all morning finally opened up. Snow swirled in fast and heavy, flicking at Natasha’s robes and seeping into his shirt.
“Well that sucks,” he said, pinching the material and pulling it off his skin. The cold didn’t bother him, not like this at least. It was nothing compared to the deep freeze of a frost dragon’s breath. Now that was painfully cold.
“Maybe it’ll teach you to wear proper clothing,” Natasha said with a laugh. “It is winter time after all.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, smiling along, glad that they were feeling more comfortable with one another to actually engage in banter. “Don’t count on it.”
“I’m not.”
“But my question. You said yesterday that wall patrol is extremely boring. That nothing actually happens here. That it’s the ranged patrols that actually get the action.”
“It is,” she said. “I was exaggerating. Things happen here. The walls come under attack. Almost with surprising frequency.”
He frowned. “Clearly, I’m missing something then.”
“Do you know why Winterspell is here? What our mission, our purpose is?” she asked, pausing to face him.
“Um. To train more witches? You’re a school, aren’t you?” Rane glanced back into the interior of Winterspell, making sure he wasn’t missing anything in his assessment.
“But why do we train them?” she pushed. “What is our purpose? Why train them here, right here?”
