by Jeff Wheeler
But he did, and Itziar thought she caught a smile before his expression vanished into chewing as he took a quick bite. Kirsi handed Nalu and Itziar a roll, keeping one for herself.
“I would have brought more,” she explained as she retrieved a chair from the corner and positioned it at the end of the bed, “but I didn’t know you’d be up and about today.”
Itziar shook her head as she struggled to pull herself into a sitting position, discovering several wounds that she didn’t remember and a few that she did in the process. “Don’t worry, I don’t think I’m likely to be up and about just yet.” She took a bite of her roll—it was sweet and flaky and warm.
Itziar remembered the rocks near the shore. The ocean had smashed her against them as she came in with the tide. She had barely noticed in the confusion—she was trying too hard to keep her head above water—but the rocks must have scraped her arm and her side. Her bandaged right hand ghosted over the matching bandages on her left thigh. Underneath, she felt a dull sting that echoed the one on the side of her face. Burns. She remembered getting those.
Kirsi—Itziar wasn’t sure she had paused for a breath—switched tracks. “That was a nasty burn—looked like it got infected before you were dumped in the ocean. Otherwise, the salt would have cleaned it out. Right, Mender?”
The man nodded without comment, his hands alternating between eating the roll and mending the dress, but he spared a few intent glances in Itziar’s direction.
“I make sure he doesn’t starve,” Kirsi explained as though Itziar had inquired into their relationship, “and he teaches me how to sew without making the cloth all lumpy.” She wrinkled her nose at the thought before adding wistfully, “And sometimes, he tells me of the sea.”
“Using salt water to clean wounds is hardly a riveting tale,” the mender returned dryly.
“Believe me,” Kirsi assured Itziar. “Any story is impressive when you normally have to pry more than two words out of a person.”
“Immhmmm,” Itziar responded with a noncommittal noise while trying to hide her own bemused expression. She couldn’t imagine most people would get the chance to say more than one word in a conversation with Kirsi.
“Kirsi,” the mender quietly interrupted. It took her a minute to wind down before he could ask, “What’s the news?” A shadow that hadn’t been present during their earlier banter deepened the lines around his eyes and mouth.
Kirsi’s expression sobered as well before she responded, “Not good, Mender. There have been no signs of the first two, and another has been taken since.” Kirsi’s eyes darted from Itziar to Nalu, whom Itziar had almost forgotten sat on her other side quietly munching his roll. “Now is not a good time to be an outsider in this village,” she told them quietly.
“Do they need help with the searching?” the mender asked. “I’m willing to do what I can,” he offered, gesturing to the door, but Itziar didn’t understand the reference—all she saw was a walking stick and a cloak.
“People are disappearing?” Itziar started to ask, struggling to pull herself further upright. She had forgotten about the burn on her palm, and her arm collapsed beneath her, dropping her weight on the bed and sending a spasm out from one of the wounds on her back. One jerky movement in an effort to alleviate that pain threw her off the side of the bed. Everyone in the room rushed toward her, but only Nalu was fast enough to catch her before she hit the ground. Before the sparks of pain overwhelmed her senses, she had a clear view of his handsome face and his concerned blue-green eyes.
* * *
The next time she awoke, Itziar found Nalu alone in his former position beside her bed. He gave her a quick bright smile, left the room through a door she hadn’t noticed before, and returned moments later with the mender. The mender’s gait was halting, as though one leg didn’t work properly, and he carried a steaming plate of food. Setting it on the bed, he helped Itziar sit up before resuming his seat. While she ate, he asked how her wounds were feeling, and she assured him they were much better. The pain had dulled to a background annoyance, and she no longer felt the buzz of healing magic, so she suspected that whatever it was had done its part.
When she finished eating awkwardly with her left hand, Nalu took her empty plate and disappeared through the second door. With him vanished the salt-on-skin feeling, leaving only the hair-raising crackle of nearby magic. Itziar quietly decided that both men had power, and the former belonged to Nalu, while the latter signaled that of the mender.
Itziar realized she had been staring at the mender when he asked, “How would you like to stretch your legs?”
Carefully swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, Itziar assured him, “If I can walk, I’ll be on my way. I’ve imposed on your hospitality long enough.” She added more quietly as she stood, “You don’t want the kind of destruction I bring.”
Putting a hand under her elbow, the mender steadied her before retrieving the intricately carved walking stick that stood by the door. He handed it to her with a nod of agreement and said, “Okay, let’s see how far you make it.”
She took the stick, surprised that he hadn’t protested.
“I won’t chase you,” he told her, limping toward the far corner where another, plainer, walking stick rested before adding, “but if you walk slow enough for me to keep up, I’ll help you back when your strength gives out.”
Itziar started forward, wincing at the tendrils of pain that spiderwebbed out from the burned area that ran the length of her left leg. It remained steady with each step. Itziar waited for the mender at the door in tacit agreement to his plan. As it turned out, the fastest pace she could manage was about the same as his. As they walked, she studied him and decided that whatever had caused his limp was an old wound. He had a few scars on his weather-beaten face, and they traced down into the out-of-season scarf he wore around his neck, which made her suspect there were more that she couldn’t see. As she watched the determined set of his mouth and the pain-filled creases on his face, she decided not to ask, knowing that old wounds could hurt just as much as fresh ones.
They only made it as far as the edge of the trees that day, but over the course of the next week, their walks became a daily routine. When they made it close enough to smell the sea, Itziar asked about the missing children. Three had been taken during heavy nighttime rains in the last month. The water obliterated all traces that might have remained.
“At first, they suspected me,” he explained. He didn’t tell her why he would be worthy of suspicion, and he didn’t need to—the mender might have lived here for years, but it wasn’t difficult to see that he was still an outsider among the fisherfolk. “It was easy to convince them otherwise. They know I do not have the physical strength to wrestle a child away from its home.”
“But do they know you have the power?”
She hadn’t meant the question to be accusing—she didn’t think it likely that he was stealing children—but he glanced at her sharply, pulled his mouth tight, and didn’t respond.
“Do they not know?” she asked, genuinely curious. She was fairly certain his power had helped mend her wounds. How could the fisherfolk not suspect that their mender had a little bit of healer in him? “I felt the wards around your house,” she explained. “They’re strong.”
He nodded thoughtfully, studying her a bit longer than necessary. Itziar hoped that he didn’t know which kinds of magic users could feel the power of others. “The wards are in place to keep Nalu inside the house. The village also suspects him—we found him shortly after the first child was taken. I bound him inside the house because if left to roam free, he tries to throw himself into the ocean. But now the wards serve an additional purpose. They hold, proving that it is not he who is snatching children in the night.”
Itziar chose not to tell him that she was pretty sure Nalu had the power to break through the wards, perhaps even to rework them unnoticed. She had already told him too much about herself, and she didn’t want him to guess what she was. Besi
des, Nalu had been nothing but kind and gentle toward her. She doubted that he was guilty of this.
Itziar had another reason for keeping her secrets safe. Although the mender hadn’t accused her directly, outsiders were suspects. She would be on the village’s list, and she didn’t need to make them more suspicious by revealing her other set of powers. It was better that they believed her to be a Guardian, tasked with protecting the islands.
In the evenings, the mender worked quietly on his ever-constant pile of garments. As near as Itziar could tell, Kirsi brought him the linens of the entire village to repair, but he never objected, simply applying himself to them one at a time. Itziar considered offering to help, but she didn’t know the first thing about sewing. She’d always been better at tearing things apart than putting them together.
Without work of her own, Itziar usually sat on the bed playing sea stones and glass against Nalu on a small homemade board. While Nalu didn’t speak, Itziar rarely had difficulty reading the enjoyment in his expression and his sparkling eyes as he beat her time and again. Occasionally, Kirsi joined them—the mender was apparently giving her knitting lessons—and when she did, the small room was filled with her constant stream of cheerful chatting.
On one such night after Itziar’s wounds had improved considerably, Kirsi left shortly after darkness had fallen. When she opened the door, a strong breeze swept the scent of a storm to where Itziar sat on the bed. She caught a concerned look in the mender’s eye as he closed the door behind Kirsi. He picked up his work and Nalu gathered the game pieces, before they retired to the other room.
Alone, Itziar got ready for bed, and lay down. Because she was still exhausted from her ordeal, she had not found dreams awaiting her when she slept since her initial recovery. As she drifted off, she was grateful that she didn’t have to dread what she would find.
At first, she thought the storm had blown in, and perhaps thunder had awakened her. Then she remembered the dream that had more than a passing resemblance to a memory. In it, she had felt a brief surge of unbelievable power before a scream shattered the air. At a distance, a man’s voice called, “Stop! You’re killing her!” Startled, Itziar released her grasp, and that too-still, rune-marked face collapsed to the ground. Not moving.
Itziar’s sleep-muddled mind reoriented itself, stuffing the memory back in the past where it belonged. But even as she came fully awake, power still thrummed through the air. More power than she’d ever felt from Nalu or the mender. It beckoned her like the gentle lullaby of the sea, from somewhere outside the house. She had her hand on the rough surface of the door before she had even thought about standing. A misty rain seemed to hang in the air, tasting of salt and power. Reaching her undamaged hand, without flinching, into the cold rain, she could feel the echoes, but the power wasn’t close enough for her to absorb. She needed to find the source.
Half limping, half stumbling forward, without heeding the weather, Itziar followed that call. Her walks with the mender had always been toward the sea rather than the village, but she recognized it when she arrived on the outskirts. The rain increased in intensity until Itziar could barely see an arm’s length before her face. Even if she had known her way around the town, she wouldn’t have known where she was. But she didn’t need to see; she followed the bone-deep feeling of power.
Nothing but rain stood before her when a hand clamped over her face. Power saturated the fingers, and Itziar almost didn’t stop herself from latching onto that magic with her own and trying to wrestle it away from its owner. She only hesitated because the hand wasn’t the only place she felt power. It surrounded her, more power than she’d ever sensed in one place before. Before she could decide how to proceed, a voice whispered in her ear, “This does not concern you, dragon.”
The voice, and its desire to dissuade her, gave her the last piece she needed to figure out what was happening. Now that she knew what to look for, she could feel a person-shaped space amid the thrum of power that stood before her. “Why are you taking children?” Itziar asked. She hadn’t decided if she cared about the fate of the children of this village, but she needed to buy herself time to decide her next move. Unbidden, the face that haunted her dreams rose up from her memory, and she added, “What are you doing to them?” She hadn’t been able to save her friend, but maybe she could do something for these children—if it wasn’t too late. She just needed a little more power.
Before the voice could respond, Itziar decided she didn’t need the answer—she was in a position to determine her own fate and that of the children. Reaching across with her unbandaged left hand, she grasped the wrist of the speaker. To her surprise, for a being of so much power, the other didn’t have any wards in place to protect against leeching magic like that which Itziar possessed.
A cry like the great waves crashing against the rocks reverberated throughout the circle of power surrounding Itziar, and the rain stopped.
Blinking away the droplets of water, Itziar surveyed her opponents. A half-dozen people surrounded her, all with soft hair, sun-kissed skin, and blue-green eyes. With their uniformity, the sleeping child, a boy of eight or nine with floppy golden curls, stood out like a beacon. The moment she was distracted, the one whose wrist she held pulled away, and she let him go.
What felt like a sheet of water slammed into her from behind, and she winced as some of the mender’s careful stitches in her back and leg gave way. But the attack wasn’t just water; it held power too, power that fueled its movement. It took her a moment to shift to the new, slightly different texture, but she absorbed it. And with that, she changed, flowing into her dragon form. She snapped her slate-gray wings out to their full extension and demanded, her voice filling the heads of anyone nearby, Leave the child.
“False-dragon,” hissed the one whose arm she’d drained.
If she’d had a human mouth, she’d have smiled. Instead, she agreed, No, worse. She swung her tail at the nearest of the group, but they seemed to melt away. A swipe with her front claws afforded the same results. Switching tactics, she beat the air with her wings until she barely cleared the treetops and dived for the child from above.
The one holding him crouched down, reaching back with one arm as though to fend her off. Itziar simply grabbed the outstretched arm in one of her large clawed hands and began to pull power. She barely had to fight him—these people evidently didn’t know anything about shielding, or they had never encountered a leech before.
But she’d paused too long, drinking in the unguarded power. As Itziar reached out to retrieve the child, something wrapped around her middle, just below the wings, and pulled her backward. While she struggled to free herself, the others attacked from all sides. A sharp object bit into the back of her already injured leg, forcing her to push magic to that area in order to begin to heal the wound. She didn’t have enough power remaining to maintain her dragon shape. Abandoning it, Itziar shrunk back down to her original form.
As a human, she didn’t have the speed or the strength to fight them all. If she could just get a hold on one or two of them, she might be able to obtain more power. Catching one woman by the arm, she tried to lock her wrist in place, but while the woman fought her grip, she threw up a hasty shield to block Itziar’s efforts to latch on to her power.
As Itziar struggled to get around her defenses, one of them slipped behind her. Something heavy connected with the back of her head, and she pitched forward into the muck. It started to rain again. Through the water kicked up by the droplets and the haze from her darkening vision, Itziar thought she saw one of the people lose their shape entirely, becoming a translucent outline that melted into the downpour.
* * *
A relentless pounding in the back of her skull accompanied Itziar’s return to awareness. The argument nearby didn’t help her headache as the sun warmed her face.
“All I’m saying is that she could have been working with them,” a smooth baritone insisted.
“But she didn’t arrive until after th
e second one was taken,” pointed out a grave and scratchy voice.
The baritone countered, “Then why else would she have been out here in the rain?”
Itziar decided to put a stop to it so that they would be quiet. “Because it’s my job,” she told them, and a pang of guilt hit her as she lied, “I’m a Guardian.” She lifted up her shirtsleeve so they could see the islands on her arm. She hadn’t opened her eyes to read their reactions, but they did stop talking. She added into the silence, “We can tell when trouble is afoot.” She saw no reason not to add to the myths surrounding the Guardians before explaining, “I tried to stop them from taking a child, but there were too many.” Finally, she forced her eyes open, squinting against the sun, to survey the ring of curious faces standing over her.
“Well, who were they?” the mustached owner of the baritone voice asked.
Itziar shook her head and immediately regretted it, but sat up anyway, explaining, “I didn’t get a good look, on account of the rain.” Most of the mud had dried, caked to her clothes.
Finally, a familiar face broke through the crowd. “You’re injured!” Kirsi bustled over and said, “We should get you back to the mender’s house.”
When Itziar objected to being carried, they found two sturdy fisherfolk to place on either side of her to keep her upright. They turned her over to the mender at his door, but one turned back to ask, “Will you find them, Guardian? Will you bring the children home?”
