Minutes later we’re all in the Valkyrie and rising up above the dark forest. There’s a faint pinkish haze on the eastern edge of the world, but dawn is still more than an hour away, at least. So while Rajani takes us up toward the sheer cliff of the shattered mountain, Xiang hastily explains that Moa Taka is rumored to be the only remaining part of the lost city of Yas Yagaroth, which is why the island is so popular with treasure hunters and pirates, because every few months some digger or diver finds a cache of ancient gold or silver somewhere around the island.
“But where did the rest of Yas Yagaroth go?” Rajani asks.
Xiang shrugs. “Well, that’s the mystery, sweetheart. Legend says the island and the city just sank one night. Earthquake, volcano, dragon fire, constipated unicorns, who can say?”
“And what exactly is the Yagari Gate?” Amara asks. “I’ve never heard of such a thing before.”
“A ruin. It’s nothing, really. It’s been picked over a hundred times. Nothing there but broken stones and a couple creepy pillars, like the leftover bits of a temple,” Xiang says. “Trust me, if there was ever anything there, it got scooped up a long time ago.”
“Indeed?” Amara frowns and stares up at the mountain.
‘So what’s your interest?” Xiang asks. “You look like a gal who isn’t hurting for money, what with your hair being full of gold, and your guns being covered in gold, and your fingers dripping with gold.”
“I seek the lost city itself,” the princess says airily. “My reasons are my own, but rest assured, I have no interest in your petty coins or jewels. I am a princess of Oyera, after all.”
The treasure hunter nods. “Princess, eh? Good to know.” And he claps the princess heavily on the shoulder as if they were old drinking buddies. “Very good to know.”
When we reach the lip of the dead volcano, a strange scene emerges from the shadows before us. The ground itself is a haphazard collection of ancient ash and burned rock, with dusty paths winding around the jagged spears of basalt and diorite, glinting with flecks of obsidian. But there are also the ruins, pale stone blocks and pillars stamped across the small plateau in rows and lying in pieces in the dust. Greatest among the ruins is a raised platform about ten steps high, lined with strange twisting pillars, that extends right to the edge of the cliff and ends in a broken line, as though some grand temple shattered and fell from here along with the rest of the missing mountain.
“Wow. That is one bad wreck,” Rajani says softly.
I follow her gaze and see, with some small shock, that the jagged shape on the east side of the ruins is not a ruin at all but the shattered hull and sails of a crystal ship lying in an unsalvageable heap of broken jeweled spears.
“The crystal shards… It doesn’t look like enough pieces to make a boat, even a small one,” Rajani says.
“There were more,” Nahina says. “But the pirates grabbed all that they could before the woman fought them off. Are the shards worth much?”
Rajani raises an eyebrow. “Well, each shard can grow a whole new flying ship, so… yeah. Gosh. If those thieves ever figure out what they’ve got their hands on, I’d say we’re less than five years away from a world run amok with sky pirates. Can you imagine? Dashing men in black masks swinging down from the clouds to steal your jewels, and a kiss?”
Nahina glances at me. “Quite the starry-eyed romantic, isn’t she?”
I snort. “You have no idea.”
As the sun continues to rise on our right, the pale light illuminates a bit more of the strange battlefield below. There are burned out torches, barrels, crates, and what looks like discarded clothing, all signs of people who once lived here but left in a hurry.
“And there she is,” Amara says quietly, pointing to the far side of the temple steps.
Lozen is sprawled across the bottom of the ancient stone stairs, sleeping, I suppose. Two open barrels reveal some of the stolen rum that Xiang mentioned, and a dozen broken tankards dot the steps around her.
“There she is.” I nod and sigh. “Hooray.”
“Be careful,” Nahina says. “I’ve never seen anyone as strong as her before.”
“Yeah, I know.” I keep my eyes on the sleeping woman as the Valkyrie glides down to the dusty ground, and I grab the railing, about to jump down. “Wish me luck.”
But before I can jump, Nahina grabs my arm and holds up my spots to the first pale rays of the dawn. She peers at them closely, like a prospector inspecting some strange ore. “These marks… what kind of pattern is this?”
“Jaguar.” I try to take my arm back, but she tightens her grip.
“Jaguar? Who are you?” There’s something dark and dangerous in her voice. “Who is your mother? Names!” Her free hand is drifting down toward her belt where she has a funny sort of axe. It looks like bone, but the edge is studded with serrated teeth, and I’m betting I don’t want to get hit with it.
I yank my arm free and step back. “Genesee Marev. Thanks for asking so nicely.”
She grips her saw-tooth axe and points to my mother. “And her? Who is she?”
I know I could lie and save myself some trouble, but for some perverse reason I say, “That would be Lozen Xocolatl Marev.”
Nahina’s eyes widen and her hand shakes. “Lozen? The jaguar knight?”
“Yeah.” Crap, she hates Mother too. That’ll make this fun. “But like I said, she and I aren’t exactly best buds right now, so if we’re taking sides at this particular moment, I’m with you. Okay?”
But Nahina isn’t glaring at me anymore. She’s staring at Lozen. Staring, and gripping that axe of hers.
“Look, just… just wait here while I deal with her,” I say.
Nahina jumps to the ground and starts marching toward my mother.
“What part of ‘wait here’ sounded like ‘go get her’ to you?” I leap over the railing and run after her, catching up easily and shoving her back. “I’ll deal with her. If you go anywhere near her, you’ll end up in small dead pieces, or worse. Just back off.”
Nahina stops. The axe hangs by her side and I see the tears shining in her eyes. She wipes her cheek with the heel of her hand and nods, her eyes never leaving Lozen. “Just make it quick.”
I pause to make sure she’s really going to stay there, and then I jog across the volcanic plateau toward my drunken, sleeping, bloody-handed Mother sprawled across the steps of some ancient temple. It’s not exactly the scene I thought I’d find her in, but it doesn’t look like I get a say in the matter. I stand over her, glance back to make sure the others are staying back, and look down at her again. “Mother?”
“Nnn,” she grunts.
“Mother, wake up.” I squat down. “We need to talk.”
“Nnn.” She waves me away.
“Yeah, we don’t have time for this.” I pick up one of the half-empty barrels of rum and dump it out all over her. The dark liquor pours and pours, and she jerks upright, wincing and glaring as I mutter, “Rise and shine.”
She coughs and spits.
“Well, you look like drowned garbage, and you smell worse.” I toss the barrel aside. “How’s your head?”
She lunges up at me, spraying rum everywhere, and I feel her bury a furry fist in my gut right before I go flying back across the ashen plain. I’m flying long enough to feel the wind in my hair and shirt, but not long enough to appreciate my view of the sky, and then I hit the ground, but some whisper of instinct has me rolling over my shoulder and pushing back up to my feet all in one smooth motion. Nothing broken, apparently. My belly hurts, but it’s nothing I can’t walk off.
“And you wonder why people don’t like you,” I mutter as I wave my friends to stay back by the ship and I limp back toward the steps. Then I call out, “Mother, it’s time for an uncomfortable talk, so get the crap out of your ears and start listening. It’s been about two months since our last chat. I’ve traveled a bit. Made some friends that I’m not very fond of. Met a certain queen, sorry, empress that you might know. And oh y
eah, I got my face melted off by a dragon.”
Lozen rises on her unsteady legs and squints at me with bleary eyes through a curtain of rum-soaked hair.
“Don’t worry, I got better. Sort of.” I stride toward her. “So, we need to talk. Now. Can you talk? Do you remember how to talk?”
“You spilled my rum.” Her voice is like a stone being dragged across the bottom of a drowned quarry. She wipes her hair out of her face and tries to wring some of the rum out of her clothes. “If you weren’t my daughter, I’d kill you for that.”
“If I weren’t your daughter, I wouldn’t be here, genius.” I stand in front of her, wondering abstractly how quickly she could kill me if she really wanted to. Yeah, I’m scared. But look at her. She’s a mess, and I’m starting to remember how truly and viciously angry I was at her, all those nights, lying in bed as I listened to Necalli coughing and Dad crying. “I’ll keep this simple, Mother. I don’t care about the ship you stole and wrecked. I don’t care about the pirates, or Yagaroth, or whatever else you’ve been up to. I just want to know one thing. How do I get rid of the jaguar curse?”
She stumbles back up the steps and falls on her butt. She sniffles and hunches down with her arms on her knees, glaring at the ground. “I don’t know.”
“Not good enough.”
“I know it’s not good enough!” she snaps.
“You know?” I frown at her. “What do you know? You left. You don’t know shit. You don’t know that Andrei died clutching his chest because his heart was pounding so hard it burst. You don’t know that Necalli was coughing up blood when he sailed east, and that he couldn’t take ten steps without gasping for air. As for me, I get these headaches, dizzy spells, blackouts. Who knows how long I have left?”
“I KNOW!”
Five obsidian claws dig into my chest so hard and so fast that not even my keen eyes see it coming, and then she yanks me forward into the air. I go flying across the ancient temple steps and slam headfirst into a cracked stone pillar, which cracks and crumbles a bit more as I fall to the ground, struggling to breathe, one arm dangling over the edge of the cliff so I can stare down half a league of sheer volcano at the sea surging against the rocks far below.
I shiver.
It takes me a moment to stagger to my feet, and wave to the others at the ship that I’m okay. They don’t look convinced, but they stay where they are.
I limp back over and sit down hard on the steps beside Lozen, this time well out of arm’s reach, and massage my chest. “I think you scratched my boob.”
She turns her head slightly to look at me, and then she turns all the way and for a moment her eyes seem to clear and focus. “Gen, what the hell happened to your face? Your eye?” Her voice is strangely tender as she reaches out one of her deadly hands toward my scarred cheek.
“Nothing.” I look away so she can’t see it. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Who did this?” She grabs my shoulder.
I shove her back and she slides away a little. Her hand falls to her side, and she looks down at her feet. “Sorry.”
I shake my head and spit out a bit of blood.
She glances up, says nothing, and looks away. Her eyes are red, their sockets shadowed and wrinkled. Tangled mats of her hair drip, drip, drip around her feet. Her lips are thin and pale. She looks like hell.
“So… you said you know. You mean, you already know about Andrei and Necalli?” I ask, not sure that I believe her. “And about me?”
“Of course I know. I always knew. You think I couldn’t hear my own babies, their hearts, their lungs?” Lozen pushes her dripping hair back again, and I see her claws shaking. “When you were all still small, I had a Feyeri come and try to fix you, but it didn’t take. Three Feyeri, actually. And two Drogori witches. And an alchemist. But there was nothing they could do. Nothing I could do.”
“So you left us to die?” I lunge and backhand her across the arm as hard as I can. She shudders with the impact, but she doesn’t move. Damn. I lean back again, and then slide my butt a bit farther away.
“The first time Andrei fell down…” She swallows, still staring at the ash at her feet. “And I thought he was going to die, my baby boy was going to die, in my arms… I lost it. I smashed up the house, tore up whole trees, hurled canoes across the lake… People got hurt.” She gives me a guilty look, like a wounded dog, ashamed and pathetic. “And that’s why I left. Because you were all going to die, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it except hurt people, so I went back south to the border, where I could hurt all the people I wanted.”
Her face is all dark and lined, eyes squinting, lips small and curled. She looks strange, old and broken and… wrong. I look away. It’s hard to hate her looking like this.
“And then you said that thing in the woods,” she goes on. “About it having some meaning, and getting rid of it. I wondered if you were right, so I went to see Raven.” She shivers and whispers, “I went to kill Raven.”
I nod. I can believe that.
“I had a friend once, who died,” she says. “A long time ago. And we tried to find a way to bring her back. Your father and I did.”
I know this story. Dad told me all about Jenavelle Rolantir, the knight who died saving the world. They wanted to bring her back. Short version? They didn’t.
“And he found this shaman from… from Udan Mung, of all places.” Lozen leans forward, her words slurring just a bit. “And she told us… she said the dead, they… the ghosts…”
“Yeah, I know.” I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to think about Andrei’s and Necalli’s ghosts, because I know that not all ghosts sleep. Some wander, forever restless, filled with rage and sorrow.
“Raven never told me... he never said what would happen if I had a baby.” She covers her eyes.
“And you didn’t ask.” Not a question.
She shakes her head.
“So maybe there is no big meaning,” I say softly. “No answers. Maybe it’s just a disease, and they died for no reason, and I’m going to die for no reason, and Andrei’s baby...” My voice dies in my throat.
“His baby?” Her eyes widen.
“A girl, we think.” I nod. “Pretty soon, now.”
She shivers.
I look away.
“If there’s an answer, only that crazy sonofabitch Raven knows it.” Lozen sits up a little straighter and pushes her hair back behind her long spotted ears a bit more emphatically, and this time it stays back. But she’s swaying like a dazed boxer about to fall. “I followed him here, but…” she shrugs.
“Yeah.” I look around at the ruins. No sign of Raven, or Coyote, or another crystal ship. “The trail ran cold. They do that.”
“If I ever find him, I’ll try to get your answers,” she says. “Right before I kill him. For your brothers. For you. I swear it.” She stands up and takes a step, and her wobbly foot slips on the puddle of rum, sending her crashing to the ground again, face-first onto the edge of a stone stair. The fall looks painful, but she just rolls over onto her back and sighs. Her eyes flutter and then close, and a moment later she’s snoring again.
I rub my eyes and work my hands back into my hair, massaging the tops of my ears all the way out to the tips as I try to figure out what to do now.
Unfortunately, Nahina figures out what to do first.
“Lozen!” she calls out. “Lozen!”
Lozen murmurs and cracks open her eyes. “What?”
“Is it true?” Nahina starts toward her. “Is it true what you did in the desert?”
“What desert?” Lozen mumbles.
“Nahina, just stay back, please!” I yell at her.
“Is it true?” Nahina lifts the toothed axe from her belt. “Is it true what you did for Coyote?”
I stare at her. Coyote?
“What I did?” Lozen rubs her eye. “Coyote? Huh. That bastard. That was a hell of a day. I told you about him, Gen, didn’t I?”
“YOU!” Nahina com
es charging forward, axe in hand, an angry sneer on her tattooed lips. I run down the steps, yelling at her to stop, not thinking for a second that she might actually listen, and then I leap straight at her waist to tackle her… but I miss.
I land face-down in the dust, empty-handed and thoroughly baffled, half-twisted onto my side so I catch a glimpse of Nahina somersaulting through the air, and bringing her axe down on Mother’s head like a meteor.
I scream, “NO!”
And Mother jerks. I see her hand rise at the last second and she catches Nahina’s wrist, and snaps it.
Nahina shrieks as the axe falls from her fingers, and now I’m scrambling back up to save the fisher girl from the jaguar woman. I yank them apart, throwing Nahina down on her backside with her broken wrist cradled to her belly. I stand over Lozen, looking down into her gold-flecked eyes and I see her gaze wandering drunk and lost across me and the sky like we’re one and the same. I back away from her.
“Are you okay?” I ask Nahina. “Can you walk?”
But the fisher girl is sobbing and shaking, babbling to herself, “...selfish bitch, how could you, how could you do that, who gave you the right…”
I want to help her, but I don’t dare take my eyes off Lozen. “Nahina? Get up. Go back to the ship. Rajani can fix your hand. Go.”
And thankfully she staggers up and she goes, pausing only to scoop up her axe again.
“What the hell is her problem?” Lozen slurs. She’s lying on her back, eyes mostly closed.
“What’s yours?” I kick her foot.
“Hey, Gen?” Rajani calls out. “I think we’ve got a little trouble.”
“What now?” I glance at her and see Xiang helping Nahina back into the ship. I also see Amara standing tall in the prow with her two guns drawn, and beyond the ship, out at the jagged rim of the volcano, I see the tiny black figures of distant elves against the pale morning sky.
“Uhm… pirates, I guess,” Rajani says.
“Pirates indeed,” Amara calls out. The princess turns and slips down over the railing, falling to the ash-covered ground. “Mister Dae, I believe I will require your assistance, if you please.”
Elf Saga: Bloodlines (Part 1: Curse of the Jaguar) Page 10
