Izzy sighed. “You’re right, of course. But we can’t go in blindly just because we know that time is of the essence. It would be a suicide mission. And yet, I worry that by the time we formulate a plan, the only option is going to be sending in an army and trying to take complete control of Devil’s Melt. Our army is strong enough to win that battle, I think. But it would result in a lot of bloodshed. Of course, if Saul gets his hands on the dragon amethyst, there will be plenty of bloodshed. I’m sure of that.”
Anya watched Izzy put her head in her hands. The young wizard’s whole body was hunched over in frustration, and Anya’s heart went out to her. Anya felt guilty, too, for sitting here worrying that Izzy was going to spend the morning teasing her about Finn. What a fool Anya was for thinking that anyone here was so wrapped up in her romantic life. They might have some fun teasing her when an opportune moment arrived—like catching her in the woods with Finn. But they weren’t sitting around thinking about how to give Anya a hard time. They had much more important things on their minds.
Anya should be focusing on those important things, too. She wasn’t sure yet how, exactly, she was going to help. But sitting around brooding about Finn wasn’t doing any of them any favors. She had to get started on this mission somehow.
Anya glanced at the pile of papers surrounding Izzy. Perhaps reading up on the information they did have would help her. At least she would be on the same page as everyone else as far as knowledge of Devil’s Melt went. And besides, Izzy had made it sound like a lot of the information was in riddle form. Anya had always been good at riddles. Perhaps she could solve a few of them for this crew.
“Can I look over the records?” Anya asked, pointing toward a particularly large pile of papers that sat at Izzy’s feet. “I’m not doing anything else important right now, and who knows, maybe a fresh set of eyes will help.”
Izzy’s face brightened at the suggestion, as though she had wanted to ask Anya to do that very thing, but hadn’t known how to suggest it. “It would be great if you could look through everything,” Izzy said. “Are you sure you’re up to it, though? Finn will kill me if he thinks I’m pushing you to work instead of rest.”
Anya rolled her eyes. “It’s not like it’s that taxing to sit here and read. And besides, I’ve rested plenty. I don’t think I could sleep anymore now if I tried.”
Izzy smiled, although she still looked uncertain. “As long as you feel up to it,” she said. She started to slowly gather up some papers to hand over to Anya. “This stack of papers here is probably the best place to start. It’s a lot of background information on the stone and on its arrival in Devil’s Melt, as well as a lot of general information about the Devil’s Melt area. I know reading through all of this can feel a bit dry, but I think doing so gives you a good foundation when you start reading some of the other documents that have riddles and other less straightforward information.”
Anya nodded. “I can handle a bit of dry reading,” she said. “I did plenty of that in university, trust me.”
Izzy laughed at Anya’s little joke, but then sobered up a bit.
“Anya, are you sure you want to come with us?” Izzy asked. “Don’t get me wrong, I like you a lot and I’m happy to have you come along. But don’t you have a life back in Idaho that you want to get back to? Surely, your friends and family must be wondering where you are? And it sounds like you had a promising career in botany. What will happen to your job?”
Anya snorted. “I had a life in Idaho, but I’m not sure it’s one that I want to go back to. It was a fairly lonely life. My dad passed away, and I don’t have any other family. I work for myself, doing freelance research on plants in the Idaho area. And I don’t have a lot of close friends. To me, it makes sense to come on this mission and help as much as I can to get the dragon amethyst and keep the whole world out of danger. I know you all think that I don’t truly understand the danger I’m getting myself into, but I do understand. I know I might not make it out of this alive. But the truth is I would rather risk everything on an adventure than play it safe and keep living a normal, boring life like everyone else I know.”
Izzy grinned. “Alright, then. As long as you know what you’re getting into.”
“I like to think I know,” Anya said slowly. “Although, I have been a bit surprised by some of the wizard laws. Like threatening to wipe my memory even though I promised to protect you all. That doesn’t seem just.”
Izzy’s face darkened. “So you do know what was going on with that meeting.”
“Finn told me,” Anya said. “He doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of the wizard’s memory wiping techniques, either.”
“Nor should he be,” Izzy said, a frustrated tone filling her voice. “I’m really sorry about that. I don’t agree with the practice of memory wiping, but some of our elder wizards really hang onto it. Peter is a wise old wizard, but he likes to follow wizard law to the letter. Please try not to let it get to you. And don’t let it ruin your opinion of wizards on the whole. We’re very nice people, I promise. Even Peter himself is a wonderful man. But wizards still have a hard time sometimes knowing how to live in harmony with humans. We’ve been persecuted quite badly over the years, and we’re still trying to figure out how to reconcile the pain of the past with the reality of the present. We’re a work in progress. And trust me, if it were up to me, memory wiping would be abolished completely. But changing wizarding law is a long, long process.”
Anya smiled at Izzy. “You don’t have to apologize to me. You didn’t write the laws. And you stood up for me, at great risk to yourself.”
Izzy winked at Anya. “Yeah, so please don’t go deserting us. It would really suck if I had to be killed because I spoke up for you and then you turned out to be a traitor. Although, truth be told, I don’t think Peter would actually follow through with executing a bunch of his top shifters and wizards. Even he doesn’t follow the law that closely.”
“Well, I have no plans of deserting you or turning into a traitor, so you have nothing to worry about, anyway,” Anya said. “So, now that that’s settled, let me get down to business and start reading through this stack.”
Izzy started to hand the stack of papers over to Anya, then paused again.
“So, wait,” she asked, somewhat shyly. “Are you and Finn really a thing?”
Anya hesitated, unsure of how to answer. Part of her wanted to say yes, but she wasn’t sure if that was the correct answer. She’d been agonizing over this very question all morning, but she didn’t want to admit that to Izzy. So she just smiled coyly and shrugged.
“You’ll have to ask Finn,” Anya said. Then she grabbed the papers from Izzy’s hands and settled in to read without another word.
* * *
Several hours later, Anya looked up blearily, rubbing her eyes and realizing for the first time that she hadn’t eaten anything all day. The hunger pangs in her stomach were becoming more insistent, now, and would not be ignored. But Anya didn’t have her own bag of supplies anymore. Her things had all been left behind when Saul’s army attacked, and right now Anya was alone. She didn’t feel comfortable digging through her new friends’ backpacks, but if Izzy or the others didn’t get back soon, she might do it anyway.
Izzy had wandered off about forty-five minutes ago, saying she was going to look for a stream. She promised not to go further than the protective shield, and told Anya to yell at the top of her lungs if anything suspicious happened. But everything had been quiet and still since Izzy left. Even the air was motionless—the usual breeze that rustled the treetops was noticeably absent. It almost would have been peaceful, if not for the fact that Anya worried about how fast, exactly, Izzy would be able to get back to her if Saul’s men did attack. Anya wasn’t much of a fighter, especially not when faced with wizards shooting laser beams and fierce shifters baring their teeth. Anya quickly pushed away such thoughts. Izzy had promised to stay close by, and, besides, the rest of the crew would be back any minute now. Everything would be f
ine.
At least she hoped it would. To take her mind off her worries about being attacked with no defenses, Anya decided to get over her discomfort and start searching for food in one of the bags. Surely, no one would fault her for grabbing a small snack when she’d been left here alone in the middle of the day.
Anya opened one of the packs and started searching for something edible. The pack she had opened had a lot of clothing in it, a flashlight along with several batteries, and another folder of papers that must have been more information about the amethyst. Anya pulled out the stack of papers so that she could reach further into the bag, and her persistence was rewarded. She came across a stash of meal bars.
“Bingo,” she said, grabbing one of the bars and then carefully replacing the clothing, flashlights, and batteries. She started to put back the papers, then paused. It was only a small folder. Perhaps she should look through this one. She had been reading through a long history of the dragon amethyst, and she wouldn’t mind switching it up a bit. Anya left the folder out and closed the backpack once again, then took her meal bar and the folder over to sit on the log bench again. The fire had long since died out, and Anya stared for a moment at the charred, crumbling logs while she slowly munched. Her mind was far away though, lost in another time and place as she thought of all she had read today.
The dragon amethyst had a long, convoluted history, and reading through the information Izzy had given her made it clear to Anya that big chunks of that history were missing from the records. Enough had survived, though, to piece together a rough idea of where the mysterious stone had come from.
One of the ancient dragon shifter kings had been banished to the cold of what was now northern Alaska after his clan had been defeated by an army of evil wizards. The wizards had thought that if they locked him up in a cold prison in the snow, heavily guarded by their most powerful wizards, that they would be able to break his spirit and take his magical powers for their own. But the dragon king had known they would try this, and so, the night before they had captured him, when it was clear there was no hope of victory for his clan, he had created the dragon amethyst.
He’d needed a wizard to help him. Thankfully, one of his longtime friends and most trusted advisors was a wizard. The wizard assisted him in draining all his magical powers and storing them in the dragon amethyst, thereby preserving his clan’s greatness for all time. After the stone was created, the dragon king had sent the wizard away into the night, under a strong invisibility shield, to hide the dragon amethyst. The dragon king hoped that, one day, some surviving members of his clan might find the stone and reestablish their clan’s former glory.
The dragon king’s hope of a future uprising of his clan was never realized. The dragons were on the decline, and the age of evil wizards was rising. Over the next several centuries, shifters and wizards would battle back and forth, destroying many great clans in the process. Through it all, the legendary dragon stones, including the dragon amethyst, were nearly lost to history.
Luckily, the wizard who hid the dragon amethyst made some records of his journey, which were carefully copied by scribes and handed down through the centuries. The surviving records were found about one hundred years ago by a group of young lion shifters who, hungry for power, made fresh copies of the records and hid them across the country in inconspicuous places, such as the records of county courthouses. The lions had been killed off in another clan war, however, and the records had almost been lost to history again until Saul’s men managed to find them. But then, a dragon and wizard from Falcon Cross had managed to steal the records from Saul. The problem, though, was that even with the records, the location of the dragon amethyst was far from clear. The records were incomplete, and full of riddles that didn’t seem to make sense. According to Izzy, Anya hadn’t even gotten to the most confusing portions of the record yet. But Anya was already confused.
With a sigh, Anya put the last bite of her meal bar into her mouth, chewing slowly as she mentally reviewed everything that she had learned about the location of the stone. The wizard who had hidden it had originally taken it to what was now northern Canada, where the dragon king was to be banished. Perhaps the wizard had hoped that the king might be rescued, and then have his power restored by taking possession of the dragon stone. But the dragon king had never been rescued. Bereft of his power, he had been beaten down and quite likely killed by his enemies while in captivity, although no actual records of his death existed. The wizard who held the dragon amethyst had started taking the stone south, then. His intentions had been to take it to a dragon clan that was in the southern part of the north American continent, but he had never made it that far, either. The wizard had made it as far as Devil’s Melt, which at the time was mostly a deserted, snowy wasteland. There, the wizard had died of pneumonia, and there the records of the dragon amethyst seemed to stop.
There were a few other notes from dragon shifters who knew of the stone and had come searching for it over the centuries, but no one had ever found it. At least, there was no record of anyone ever finding it. Perhaps someone had, and had never made a record of it. Or perhaps the records had been lost to history.
Anya frowned. The more she learned about this quest, the more she thought it didn’t make sense to risk all of their lives by heading into Devil’s Melt. The records showed that many searches had been done there, thus showing all of the places that the dragon amethyst was not. But, in Anya’s opinion, the fact that the records they had left off with the dragon amethyst being hidden in Devil’s Melt was no solid indication that the stone was still there. Why was everyone convinced that it was? Was she missing something, here? Perhaps she just had not read enough of the records yet. There might be something more in the later records and riddles that proved the stone was still in Montana.
Thinking of later records reminded Anya of the folder she had pulled from one of the dragon’s backpacks. She turned to it now, opening it to glance over it and see what information this random folder might contain. When she opened it, though, she was disappointed to find that the papers in the folder were mostly handwritten notes by Raven. The notes seemed to have been taken during a meeting back in Falcon Cross, because the handwritten script across the top said, “Meeting with F.C. Advocacy Bureau re: Amethyst location.” It must have been a long meeting, because Raven had drawn several doodles along the margins of the paper, including a couple doodles of her own name. The notes from the actual meeting were haphazard and messy, and didn’t make much sense to Anya. She flipped through the pages anyway, chuckling a bit at Raven’s hand-drawn artwork and looking for any information that might stick out as important.
Nothing caught her eye though, until the last page. There, Raven had written “Dragon Claw to Forest Claw?” in bold, capital letters, and underlined it several times. Anya furrowed her brow. Something about the phrase rang a bell in the back of her mind, but she could not think why. She didn’t have long to consider it, either, before Izzy walked back into the campsite, nearly causing Anya to jump out of her skin in surprise.
“Sorry I took so long,” Izzy said. “But I found a great spot where the stream curves really close to the campsite and is deep and clean. It’s a nice place to freshen up and take a bath of sorts. The water is pretty warm, too, I guess because it pools up a bit there and the sun shines on it through the trees. You should go check it out. Relax for a bit.”
Anya laughed. “I must look like I need to relax right now. You scared me witless just now. How do all of you walk so quietly? I didn’t hear you at all until you were right beside me and started talking.”
Izzy looked sheepish. “Sorry. Habit, I guess. But really, you should go for a swim and clean up before the rest of the crew gets back and all want dibs on the stream. Speaking of which, I’m a little surprised they aren’t back yet. It must be after noon already, and I don’t think they took any food with them.”
“Yeah, speaking of which, I hope you don’t mind but I raided one of the bags for a mea
l bar. I was starving,” Anya said.
Izzy slapped her forehead. “Sheesh, I should have thought of that. Of course I don’t mind. I should have told you before I left to help yourself to whatever you wanted. I wasn’t planning on being gone so long, but still. I don’t think you even ate breakfast! I’m so sorry!”
Anya shrugged. “It’s alright. I had so much on my mind that for a long time I didn’t even realize myself that I was hungry. I’m better now, and I might take you up on a swim in the stream. My head is spinning from everything I read this morning, so I could definitely use a break.”
Izzy nodded. “It’s a lot to take in. How far did you get?”
“I read through most of what you gave me. I think I probably had about ten pages to go when I stopped for lunch. But then I got distracted by a folder of notes I found while looking for food. It looks like it was just some of Raven’s handwritten notes though.”
“Oh, right,” Izzy said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Those must have been from our meeting with the Advocacy Bureau before we left. One of the Advocates, Harlow, said that when she was spying on Saul’s soldiers in Falcon Cross they seemed to be obsessed with the phrase ‘from dragon claw to forest claw.’ I was with Saul’s soldiers for a while and never heard them say that, but Harlow was spying on the field scouts and said that they said it a lot. She thinks it’s important, but I’m honestly not sure why. It’s just one more riddle that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Hmm,” Anya said, furrowing her brow.
“Why?” Izzy asked, suddenly curious. “Do you think it sounds important, too?”
“I don’t really know,” Anya confessed. “It reminds me of something I’ve heard before but I can’t think what. And my brain is so fried right now.”
“You’ve read a lot this morning,” Izzy said, looking down at the stack of papers piled next to Anya. “You should really go and take a swim and let your mind rest. Maybe you’ll have some new insights after a break.”
Destiny and the Dragon (Redwood Dragons Book 5) Page 12
