Infinity tcon-3

by Andria Buchanan

  Winston shifted again, toward the mountains this time, and flew lower, both of us staring down at the nightmare below. The closer we moved to the mountains, the more damage we saw: whole swaths of forest gone, the trunks of trees black with a gruesome orange glow emanating from them. It was like looking down at every horror movie I’d never been allowed to see as a kid but had snuck off to watch anyway all combined together in one big nightmare of flames.

  My heart was pounding, and I had to fight the urge to gag from the mixture of smoke and fear. Whoever had done this had turned the entire forest into a blazing inferno, destroying everything in its path. Somewhere down there was my best friend, and I didn’t know how to get to her.

  Someone had attacked one of my settlements. No, not just someone. My aunt. It had to be her. We’d been at peace for less than a week, and already she’d broken our treaty. She’d waited until we thought we were safe, that things were going to go back to normal, and then she’d attacked.

  Winston had been right. I’d pushed her too far, demanded too much, and now she was making my people pay for it. She was making Mercedes pay for it.

  There was a muffled pop, and I whipped my head around, my eyes widening as a tree to our left exploded, bits of bark shooting toward us like tiny daggers. Something stung the side of my neck, and I swiped at it with my right hand while clutching Winston tightly with the left. My palm started to burn as I beat it against the places on my green cotton tunic where bits of flaming bark had hit me and burned holes in my clothes. I flicked off the last of it from my still-smoldering trousers and turned back to Winston, dropping lower against his body to protect myself from more exploding trees.

  Then I saw it, a gap in the trees where nothing was burning. Not a very large gap but dead center of what would have been the fire, what should have been the hottest part of the blaze, and there was no smoke, no fire. A great big hole of nothing.

  “There!” I said, pointing to the target. “Look!”

  Winston nodded his head up and down once before he shifted his weight, turning us toward the empty spot where I was sure the dryads would be—where they had to be, since there was nowhere else they could have run.

  Winston dropped lower on his next pass, and I craned my head over his shoulder, still clinging to his neck. There, around the edges of the circle, were shapes. We flew lower so I could see them better in the smoke. The dryads I’d sent out to Sorcastia—it was definitely them. The only problem was they were scattered around, lying on their backs on the ground, and none of them were moving.

  Winston must have recognized them, too, because before I could say anything, he took another pass, going lower this time, before circling again and arching upward, letting himself hover over the space in a graceful descent.

  He dropped his front legs to the ground, and then I slipped off his back, dangling for a second before letting go and landing in a heap underneath him. Not bothering to worry about the fact that I was going to have a bruise the size of Connecticut on my butt, I pulled myself to my feet and looked around quickly, trying to find someone, anyone, as I unsheathed my sword and held it in trembling fingers.

  Winston roared, and I turned to see him standing on his back legs, beating his wings as he scanned the forest. He dropped forward onto his front legs and began to stalk around the outside edge of the clearing, searching for enemies in the inferno.

  What had happened here? The fire hadn’t touched anything inside the circle, so it hadn’t been what caused the dryads to collapse. Had it? Could the smoke have knocked them all unconscious? Was there some sort of poison in the air? I brought my arm up in front of my face, trying to cover my mouth and nose with the material from my shirtsleeve.

  I hurried over to the closest woman and knelt beside her, reaching for her shoulder to turn her over rather than keeping my makeshift fire mask up. When my hand landed on her back, I felt the sticky wetness of blood and pulled away for a second, looking at my now-red hand before I dropped my sword.

  “Win!” I held my hand up for him to see the blood on it.

  “Your Majesty?” I heard a faint croak, and my heart clenched even as I started to look around. “Your Majesty?”

  “Darinda? Darinda! Where are you?” I coughed, gagging on the smoke as I brought my hand back up in front of my face to block the smoke. I tried to scan the clearing through the haze and snatched up my sword again.

  “Here, I’m here, Queen Allie,” Darinda called out from somewhere inside the smoky cloud.

  I saw a flutter of movement on the other side of the clearing and sprinted toward her, trying my best to avoid the burning branches that were starting to crash down around us. I bolted across the space, my head tucked to avoid the flames, and dropped to my knees beside the green, heavily muscled head of the Dryad Order. The gnarled tree branch she used as a walking stick was clutched in her right hand.

  “What happened? Where are you hurt? Where’s Mercedes?” I coughed again.

  “She’s gone.” Darinda shook her head, her tight-cropped silver curls brushing against the leaves around her, making a low, quiet, crinkling noise that I could barely hear over the roar of the fire around us.

  “I told the Sapling to run. I told her to run, to go to—” Darinda coughed, her entire chest shaking from the force of the air coming from her lungs. “We stayed to fight them, the soldiers. We stayed to give her a chance to escape. I don’t know if she made it, though. There were soldiers…so many soldiers. So much iron.”

  Dryads like my best friend were allergic to the common metal. The merest touch of iron against a dryad’s skin would cause her to break out in blistering burns. The smallest wound made by iron would cause her to sicken and die within minutes. Whoever had come after them had been planning to murder an entire race of magical beings. To kill my best friend…

  “We’ll find her.” I wrapped my arm around Darinda’s shoulders to help her sit up, my hands trembling, but I didn’t meet her eyes, knowing she’d see just how worried I was.

  “What about you?” I asked quickly, my voice high pitched and panicky. “What happened to you and the other dryads? Who sent the soldiers with the iron into the forest? Was it my aunt? Was it her soldiers that came here? That did this?”

  “Yes,” she said, hissing in pain, and I quit trying to maneuver her to a seated position, just letting her head lay in my lap instead. “The soldiers were wearing the broken crown of Bathune on their shields and armor.”

  “Crap,” I groused. “Why would she do this? Why sign a peace treaty and then do this less than a week later? Didn’t she know I would send troops to her border again?”

  There was no answer, and I looked down to find Darinda’s eyes empty, the silver doing nothing more than reflecting my own image back at me.

  “Win!” I shrieked, panic clawing at me. “Win!”

  The fire around us crackled, and I watched as sparks dropped across the trench the dryads had managed to carve out before they’d been attacked. Another branch fell into their circle, and the leaves of the tree to my left started to smolder.

  Chapter Four

  The fire roared around me, smoking branches crashing to the ground as the forest burned, flames licking the grass near my feet. I sprinted for Winston, who was still stalking the perimeter, standing guard in his dragon form. Once I reached him, he dropped his head onto the grass so that I could clamber up onto his back, and I quickly sheathed my sword so that I didn’t accidentally stab him as we made our escape from the burning forest.

  The minute my butt landed on his shoulders, he launched himself in a vertical lift that left me scrambling to keep hold of his neck. He roared in rage as we flew heavenward, flames pouring from his snout.

  “Mercedes is still out there somewhere!” I yelled in his ear, in case he hadn’t heard Darinda. “Soldiers as well. Bavasama’s army. We need to find Mercedes before they do.”

  God and the Pleiades and anyone else who might be listening, I pleaded in my head. Please let us find my best
friend before my crazy aunt’s army does. Please let us find her before they kill her. She’s only stuck here because of me. Because I didn’t find her a way home. I failed her then. Please don’t let me fail her again now.

  We broke through the top of the tree canopy, and Winston immediately leveled out, turning toward the mountains and swooping low enough that we’d be able to see without taking the chance of being burned by a random spark. I leaned over as far as I could and peered over his outstretched wings, searching for my best friend. She had to be here somewhere. The others had stayed to give her time to escape. She had to have gotten away. She had to.

  Now, we just had to find her. It would help if I’d known which way she’d run or how long she’d been out there. There had to be some way to track her.

  We reached the foot of the mountains and soared over them, giving me my first glimpse of the notorious Borderlands where my army had laid siege to Bathune for nine long months. It was desolate and cold. A land of rocks and snow and general nothingness.

  This far north, the Borderlands was nothing but a hostile range of snow-covered mountains known for trapping any man and beast caught by an early freeze or drowning them in a sudden flood brought on by melting snow. Farther south, near Dramera where the dragons lived, it was said that the Borderlands was a parched, barren desert where the Sea of Gallindor had once stood.

  Winston circled, skimming over the top of the mountain range and flying farther north, where we could see Bavasama’s men in their snow-white coverings, their shields with my aunt’s silver crest—a broken crown—worked into the center. If it weren’t for the sunlight reflecting off the metal, they would have blended in perfectly with their surroundings. Completely disguised as they scurried over the mountains like cockroaches, trying to get away from the fire they’d set. To get away before someone realized that they’d murdered an entire race.

  “Look at them.” I balled up one of my fists and hit Winston in the back of his shoulder. “Just look at them.”

  Winston snorted as he dipped into a sharp dive. We swooped over them, and Winston let out a long, steady stream of fire, scoring a long line of flame into the earth in front of them, blocking off their retreat. Then he climbed again and dropped into another dive-bomb, blowing more fire into the path behind them. He went high again, and this time circled twice before lining himself up parallel to the column full of screaming men and made for them, his mouth closed this time as he dived low enough that he could touch the tops of their heads with his claws but not cause damage.

  “Enough.” I beat on his shoulder as I searched the group of soldiers, looking for a green young woman among them. The flames had forced all of the soldiers to clump together as the snow crackled and hissed around them. If she was with the soldiers, we’d have seen her when they huddled together.

  She wasn’t there, though. There was no dark brown hair, no green skin. No sign that my best friend had ever been with them, which meant she hadn’t been taken prisoner. “Winston, enough.”

  He roared angrily as he jerked himself back up, still beating his wings in a furious display.

  “She’s not here. Mercedes isn’t here,” I yelled. Which meant, while we were harassing my aunt’s troops, our friend was still out there, possibly still fighting her way out of that fire.

  “They didn’t take her prisoner. Forget about my aunt’s soldiers for now—we have to find Mercedes. Let’s go back to the forest and search toward Neris. If she wasn’t captured, she’d have tried to get herself back to the forest road. That’s the fastest way for her to get help. Settlements, people who would take her in.”

  Winston snorted and then turned left, back toward Neris, gliding as close as he could to the trees without the two of us getting burned. Once we reached the now-burning clearing where Darinda and the rest of the dryads had been, he looped north for the city.

  I craned forward, looking over his shoulder as he dropped closer to the road, staying just above the flames. I scanned the surrounding forest, searching for my best friend. I couldn’t imagine that she would risk the forest fire when the road was mostly clear, but maybe she was trying to hide from any soldiers that might still be in the forest.

  But, for whatever reason, Mercedes wasn’t on the road. Or in the flaming forest. There was nothing there—no dryad, no spot where she could have gone to ground, no funny bit of residual magic floating in the breeze that told us if she’d managed to find a portal tree or whether or not she’d had the chance to use it before the fire had reached her. All I could see was smoldering trees, smoke, and an empty road.

  My heart started to pound, and my palms were covered in sweat. My best friend was inside a forest fire, and there was nothing I could do to save her. Queen of a stupid country and all I could do was fly around on a dragon’s back, trying to play the dryad version of Where’s Waldo. The problem was my Waldo was refusing to be found. It was like she wasn’t really…

  “Where is she?” I asked as I looked around. “Where did she go?”

  Please let her be all right, I thought to myself. Please. Please don’t let her still be inside those flames, trying to save a bunch of trees all on her own.

  When I get back to my palace…

  I tightened my grip on Winston’s scales in rage. When I got back, I was going to raise an army so big that it would fill the horizon, enough dragons to block out the sun, and then I was going to take them across the border to teach my aunt a lesson. I was going to burn her country to the ground all the way from the White Mountains to the Palace of Night. And when I got there? When I got there, I was going to cram that peace treaty we just signed down her throat so she knew never to hurt one of my friends ever again.

  “If anything’s happened to Mercedes…” My hands started to tremble. I swallowed and had to fight to keep from vomiting as my stomach clenched at the idea of my best friend lying somewhere in the woods below, staring at the burning trees with empty eyes.

  No, I couldn’t think like that. She had found a way out. She had to have found a way out. She wouldn’t have stayed and tried to save the forest. She was a smart girl, and Darinda had told her to run for help, which meant as soon as she could, she would have found a rune portal and used it to get back to the palace. Wouldn’t she?

  We broke free of the burning forest, and I watched as the land around us turned to empty fields, stripped of their crops for the winter. I tried to scan the flat ground beneath us, looking to my left and my right, desperate to see some smudge of movement along the landscape, but there was nothing—just cheery green fields and tidy, white stone cottages and little bits of smoke rising into the air from people’s chimneys.

  The plains below turned to more trees as the royal forest came into view, and I dug my heels into Winston’s sides again, silently urging him to move faster. She had to be here. I knew it in my bones. Mercedes had to be somewhere down there.

  Winston dropped low, scanning the trees, and I kept my eyes peeled, too, looking from side to side for some signs of life. To my right I watched as a tree began to shake back and forth, as though it had been struck my something very, very big.

  I leaned down, prepared to point out the shaking tree to Winston, but there was an earsplitting roar and then all the trees near the one I’d noticed began to shake, as well. Winston curved to the side in a tight turn and started toward the rustling trees, smoke curling out of his nostrils as he prepared to dive.

  “Win!” I watched as a short, female figure broke from the trees, running as fast as her green legs could move while two ogres chased her. “Mercedes. There she is!”

  I felt him growl underneath me, and the smoke that had been curling was now joined by tiny licks of flame along the side of his mouth. He shifted his weight, and his entire body vibrated with tension as he peeled away from Mercedes and started to climb toward the sun.

  “Winston, what are you doing?” I yelped just as his wings faltered, and he let himself tip forward, his snout falling as his wings and tail canted hi
gher into the air. Then I knew exactly what he was doing the minute he started to drop like a very large, very heavy stone.

  “Please don’t crash,” I said as we continued to fall, perfectly angled to collide with the larger of the two monsters chasing Mercedes and swinging a club. “Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasedon’tletuscrash!”

  Winston’s neck began to tense, and he lifted his head—pulling his body upright but still falling—and like a gigantic reptilian seesaw, his claws came down and slammed into the ogre’s back, knocking him forward into an undignified heap. Winston snapped one of his wings out, and I watched, stunned, as the other ogre ran into it, moving too fast to stop at the last minute even though it meant he’d ended up with a face full of very tough dragon wing.

  “Mercedes!” I held my arm out toward her as Winston dropped close beside her, gliding now and letting his claws skim across the ground. “Take my hand.”

  “Gladly.” She grabbed for me as Winston slid to a stop, and I clasped my fingers around her wrist, grateful for the knowledge that besides being scared out of her mind, she was safe.

  “Come on.” I tried to pull as she scrabbled onto Winston’s back. When she’d gotten halfway on—one leg and one arm were up along his back and the rest of her body dangled off the side—I let go of her hand, grabbed her knee and her elbow, and hauled her up behind me onto Win’s back.

  “Those guys were going to eat me for lunch,” she said as Winston started to flap his wings again, picking up speed as he flew us toward the castle.

  “I know.” I wrapped my arms around her neck and clung to her, relieved that she was alive—and whole—inside my arms.

  “I was coming to tell you that the Forest of Ananth is on fire. Bavasama’s army—”

  “I know. We saw them in the mountains trying to escape.”

  “What about Darinda and the rest of the Order? What happened to them? Did you see them?”

  I pulled her closer and didn’t meet her eyes. I didn’t want to think about that right now. She was safe, and that was all that mattered. We’d deal with the rest of it when we got back to the palace.