The Emerald Dragon (The Lost Ancients Book 3)

by Marie Andreas

  Garbage, Leaf, and the rest of this hunting party surrounded me at that point. “We train, we fight!” Garbage waved her war stick in the air and I was immediately in the middle of a faery war cry.

  If they yelled like that to the sceanra anam, the thing had been fleeing the cries more than the sticks.

  “That’s great.” I looked around; luckily the hallways were still empty. “Uncle Harlan and Alric are in Covey’s office.” I pointed to the gruesome pile of former sceanra anam on the ground. “You need to go get them and tell them to collect this; someone may be able to use it. Oh, and try to tell them where you found the thing. In detail. Give them lots of detail.”

  I smiled as I walked away. I did my good deed. They should try to see if the academics could do anything with the remains. That I’d instructed Garbage and the others to drive Alric crazy while trying to explain where “out-out-out” was, was simply a bonus.

  I stood at the edge of the campus, put my hands on my hips, and tried to figure out exactly how my finding her would help Covey in any way. There was no way I was ready to admit Alric was right about not going after her, I was still too upset about his duplicity. However, there also wasn’t anything I could do to help her. My burgeoning magic was more likely to hurt her than help her. And my weapons training hadn’t gotten much further than my magic.

  I surrendered that idea and headed for The Shimmering Dewdrop. It was technically too early in the day for drinking, just a little over two hours had passed since I’d been sitting there drinking tea, but that was my place. No matter how weird life got, that one place was always there for me. That, I could count on.

  Unless it was closed?

  I was surprised to see no one sitting outside in the café as I approached, but thought maybe folks had wised up to the superiority of a dark pub. Nope, a rarely used sign hung on the door: ‘Closed-gone to shopping’.

  “Gone to shopping?” I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, it just happened that way.

  “Aye, sorrowful, ain’t it?” The voice was so low; literally, I had to look around for the speaker. One of the daytime bar gnomes sat against the wall. He didn’t look like one of those who had joined us in the fight for the glass gargoyle, but they all sort of looked the same so it was hard to tell.

  “They be off to a wedding person.” He waved one small hand in the air and a whiff of stale booze hit me. “Disgusting.”

  I shook my head. I knew the two of them were getting married, but a wedding person? That was a new trend come down from the big city of Kenithworth a few weeks’ ride north of us. I knew it wouldn’t have been Foxy’s idea.

  I could either sit here with a drunken waste of a gnome, commiserating life’s cruelties, or go home where a repair crew finished fixing all the damage caused by Glorinal and his henchmen while they were looking for the obsidian chimera a few months ago. Going to another bar wasn’t an option, as I didn’t want to drink; I just wanted to whine a bit.

  When Amara got stressed, she climbed into a tree. Not the replacement clone of her original tree—he wasn’t big enough yet even if the seedling they used to grow him was fed magic spells along with his water every day. But any of the larger trees out near the ruins. Amara was a dryad, and being in nature, especially a tree, helped calm her down.

  Growing up, my mother had told me we had dryad somewhere in our family line. Hence my hair picking up an odd shade of green in the summer. Now was as good a time as ever to test that.

  I turned and headed off toward the trees. Ten minutes later, I found them. No idea what to do next.

  I stood in a clump of seven trees, all more or less looking the same. “Should one of you be calling to me?” I kept my voice low. Even though no one was around, I didn’t want it to get back to anyone that I stood in a clump of trees talking to them.

  The trees gave no response.

  “Fine.” I marched up to the first one, and scrambled up it with only one scratch. Not too bad since I didn’t even have memories of climbing trees as a child.

  This one seemed nice enough, even had a few branches higher up that looked relatively seat-like.

  I climbed up onto the largest and steadiest, and settled in. Nothing. Maybe I needed to touch the tree more. I leaned in so that my entire forearm touched the tree. Still nothing. I seriously wouldn’t strip to come to peace with this tree.

  Voices interrupted my musing about tree bonding.

  “I tol’ you, I ain’t paying that.” The voice was a bit whiney and high, although slurred. And familiar. Grimwold hadn’t had the same length of jail time as his boss, but I was sure he wasn’t supposed to be out yet.

  “You want out of town or ya want folks questioning why you’re out drinking in the woods instead of locked up where you should be?”

  I carefully peered down below me. I didn’t recognize the other voice, but now that I was no longer forced to bounty hunt for a living, I made it a point to avoid staying up to date on Beccia’s criminal element. The man was close to Grimwold, but his hat was too broad for me to see his face.

  Maybe if I moved closer. I froze the moment after that thought hit me. I could see them well even if I couldn’t see who the other person was. Which meant all they had to do was look up and they’d see me just as easily.

  I really needed a faery. One of their more recent new powers was the ability to make a stationary person invisible by landing on them. But since there were none about, I held my breath and prayed to any deity I could think of that neither of them would happen to look up.

  “Take this,” Grimwold shoved a small bag at the other person. “Just get me out. Now.” There was a terror in his voice I’d never heard in all the years he annoyed me. Unless the faeries were chasing him. That was a nice memory.

  “Not enough. If you want to get to Kenithworth, you are going to need triple this.” The voice was cold.

  “I can pay your people more when I get there, I promise. I need out of this place.” Funny how terror had chased away his drunken slur.

  I was caught up eavesdropping and shifted a bit without thinking. I swore as a few tree bits drifted down to the heads below. I knew I couldn’t jump out of this tree and get away from them. And climbing higher wasn’t an option. Those branches might hold Amara, but they wouldn’t hold me.

  I felt a thunk hit my head and for a second was afraid the man below had seen me and shot me. The second thunk, and a flittering of faery wings to the side of my face, told me it was my faeries.

  Just in time. Both Grimwold and the mysterious hat man looked up when my falling tree bits hit them.

  “Who’s there?” Grimwold sounded much older and more frightened than he had before going into jail.

  “No one, you idiot.” The man with the hat quickly looked back down, but he wasn’t anyone I knew. “It’s the wind. Leaves fall off.”

  Grimwold was rattled now. “We need to move, somewhere deeper in the forest.” Without waiting for the second man, he turned and stumbled deeper into the trees. Fear may have sobered his speech, but it didn’t help with his walking.

  The man with the hat looked up to where the faeries hid me one more time, swore, and then went after Grimwold. “Wait, I know another way for you to get there, a job.” The rest of their discussion was lost as they moved out of range.

  I had never been so happy to see my little flying maniacs in my life.

  Crusty and Leaf had been the two who landed on me. Garbage flew surveillance over us.

  “Thanks, girls. You have great timing.” Although I doubted they’d been annoying Alric nearly long enough if they were out prowling the forest now.

  “We hear you,” Crusty said from her perch on my head. “You call, we come. Boom.”

  Now, that was weird. I had no way of calling them, not to mention they used ‘boom’ for a lot of things, most of which were not healthy for any living being.

  I reached up with one hand, keeping the other securely on my branch, and pulled her off my hair. It was sometimes easier for Crusty
to focus if she looked right at you.

  “Honey, how did you hear me?”

  “In here, silly.” She tapped the side of her head and laughed.

  “Garbage? Leaf? You all heard me in your head?” They both nodded. “But I didn’t call you.” I was happy they’d come by, caught spying in a tree by any criminal element wasn’t a good thing. But how they did it was starting to weird me out.

  “You think us, we hear you, we come.” Garbage was obviously quite proud of her explanation and the other two faeries nodded enthusiastically.

  I thought them? “You mean when I was thinking I needed you, you heard that? Can you hear everything I’m thinking?” Weirded out factor went a few levels higher now. The idea of having those flying loons inside my head all the time? Shudder.

  Leaf looped in front of my face and landed on my hand. “No, you think us we hear we come. It always this way.”

  I almost fell out of the tree as I tried to grab her in shock. “How about we get out of this tree, then you three explain this?”

  Garbage rolled her eyes, but all three faeries lifted off me so I could scramble out of the tree.

  They flew around near the bottom until I joined them.

  “Faster if you boom.” Crusty shook her head after I finally reached the ground. Climbing down was a lot harder than going up. No wonder so many cats got stuck in trees.

  “Boom?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

  Crusty made a tiny fist, held it high, then dropped it. “Boom.” The maniacal grin on her face was disturbing.

  “Uh, yes.” I turned away from her and faced Garbage. “How long have you been able to hear me in your heads?” I waved my hands as I noticed all three about to give me a useless answer. “Without actually hearing the words come out of my mouth with your ears.” I tried thinking back to any time they’d done something like this, but while sometimes they did show up about when they might be handy, plenty of times they didn’t.

  “Always hear.” Leaf drifted down to try to communicate, since obviously I was dafter than the rock Crusty stared at. “Then we didn’t.” She frowned and shook her head. “Then we did.” Big grin on this one.

  Great. Most likely this was another one of their mysterious powers they had a long time ago, like hiding people, that was now coming back. I wasn’t sure how I felt about these powers popping up. Not to mention I was still weirded out about them being in my head. I focused hard on thinking of a huge pile of sweets next to a giant bottle of ale.

  None of the faeries even responded.

  I added them to the thought by name.

  “You give us now!” Garbage was an inch in front of my face in an instant. The other two were not far behind her.

  That was reassuring. So they could hear me in their heads, but only if I thought of them. I’d have to watch my thoughts.

  “Can you hear everybody?”

  Garbage, realizing that I wouldn’t magically supply them with sweets and booze in the midst of a bunch of trees, pulled back. “No. Was we could. Now. Boom. No.”

  “We hear you.” Leaf added.

  Clearly, that was the extent of their answers. We were back to boom. For a second I thought about running and telling Covey, but then I remembered her taking off was part of why I’d been in that tree in the first place.

  “You give us now!” Garbage wasn’t letting go of the sweets and alcohol idea. I should have made my test thought a little less appealing.

  “I can’t. The Shimmering Dewdrop is closed right now, and I don’t know if they’re done with the house yet.” The final repairs should have been finished today, but knowing the crew I had working on it, they probably took a two-hour break after the earthquakes. A repair job that should have taken about two weeks ended with almost a full, two-month-long rebuild of my entire house.

  The reasons I’d been in the tree all slammed back into place. Damn. I’d managed to push the fact that Glorinal was possibly alive and running around with a bunch of murderous rakasa out of my head.

  “Girls.” I waved all three faeries closer and lowered my voice. “Have you ever heard of the emerald dragon cult? Or of the rakasa?”

  Crusty looked studiously blank. I’d say it was an act but I wasn’t even sure she heard me. Leaf and Garbage looked worried for the merest of seconds, and then both shook their heads.

  That was something new. They were deliberately lying to me. Most times they were too vague for others to understand, but they didn’t outright lie.

  “Not cult, no.” Crusty paid attention after all. And judging from the tiny glare Garbage shot her, she told me the truth.

  “So you have heard of the emerald dragon then?”

  Crusty, suddenly realizing that she said something she shouldn’t, took a deep breath, as if she was holding it under water, and then did a backwards summersault away from me. The other two quickly followed, then flew off over the trees.

  Life was so much easier when all I had to do each day was dig through elven ruins.

  I drifted back toward the ruins. Not where the standard dig sites were, but the side near the Forgotten Plains. The plains were unnaturally created eons ago when a bunch of bad magic went horribly wrong. Or so some of the stories went. Other stories stated that the plains were natural, and the land around them had been flung five hundred feet in the air. However, no one had evidence of any disaster having caused them. Of course no one who tried to go through them ever came back out to say one way or another, so who knew what the truth was.

  Until recently, this area had been off-limits as the cliffs weren’t stable. Last month some dilettante patron had paid to have the whole area magically shored up, then vanished. Leaving a nice big mostly unexplored area for folks like me to wander about.

  The trees here weren’t as big as the gapen trees in the rest of the ruins, and there was little evidence that any big finds were out here. However, it was nice and quiet.

  I’d found a nice area and was just starting to relax and let my annoyance at Alric wander off when Covey burst into my clearing, looking like she’d just done battle with an army.

  Chapter Seven

  “Do you have any weapons?” She looked around the trees, then tossed me one of her daggers when she realized there weren’t any weapons hanging around. Her eyes were wild and her short hair stuck up in ridiculous clumps. “Come on, we have to stop them!”

  She stopped dancing around long enough for me to grab her arm. The cliffs over the Forgotten Plains were only about ten feet behind us; I didn’t want her to decide to race in that direction. It had only been about an hour since she’d taken off, but her clothes were ragged and streaks of blood ran across her face and arms.

  She’d found something.

  “You found, him?” I didn’t want to say his name out loud. I wanted Glorinal’s body to be lying dead in the dark depths of that pit in the cavern. Even though that dream was fading, I wasn’t ready to let go of it yet.

  “The sahlins are coming!” She pulled free of my arm and looked around a pair of trees.

  Sahlins? I couldn’t pinpoint where I’d heard the name, but I was sure I had. Maybe ages ago, growing up. However, I couldn’t think of what they were or why their coming would cause someone like Covey to fall apart.

  Covey froze as someone rustled the bushes to the side of us.

  “Hello? What’s all this about then?” Harlan’s voice entered the clearing a second before he did. Just in time to get a knife flung at him.

  The world slowed down as I realized Covey might be impaired, but her aim wasn’t. I immediately reached out with my magic to grab it, then threw both Covey and I to the ground as the knife spun back toward us and thunked into a tree.

  I looked up to see Harlan crouching behind a tree. “I thought you were mad at Alric, not me.”

  Covey shook her head and looked around as if just waking up. “What is going on, and why did you tackle me? I mean it, if there is a chance that bastard is still alive I need to find him.”

&
nbsp; Harlan and I looked at each other as she got to her feet. She looked far more like herself than the hysterical and raving woman she’d been moments before. Except for the fact that she didn’t act as if she knew she’d been gone for an hour.

  Harlan studied her for a few moments, then came out from behind his tree. “You left us an hour ago, looking for the rakasa and Glorinal if he’s still alive.”

  Covey shot Harlan a look that university students everywhere feared—the ‘what lies are you trying to feed me now’, look.

  Harlan was made of far sterner stuff than the average student was and glared right back. “It’s not my fault you forgot what you were doing.”

  “I didn’t forget. I was.…” Covey rocked back on her feet and really looked where she was. “We were in my office. Why are we in the ruins?”

  Harlan scowled. “She doesn’t remember anything after leaving the office.”

  Covey rolled her eyes and looked a little less rattled. “I can speak for myself you know. Moreover, I do remember a bit more, slowly bits are coming back. Leaving the campus and heading toward the Antiquities Museum.” She shook her head. “Or rather what’s left of it. You weren’t kidding that it was destroyed. I don’t recall anything after that except Taryn tackling me.”

  I really didn’t want to stay out here having this discussion. “How about we go somewhere else?”

  “Sure, Foxy and Amara should be back by now,” Harlan said as we walked out of the ruins.

  I nodded. Some serious food and a nice glass of ale would settle this day down nicely.

  Covey had been scowling at the trees around us, then aimed the scowl at us. “This is wonderful. However, I have somehow lost an hour of time, I have scrapes and cuts that I have no memory of getting, and I need answers. I’ll even go to that place, if it will get you two to talk.”