Water magic flowed from Marcus’s staff, and something with bunched muscles rose out of the water; its claws and teeth glinted in the fog. Spikes rose from the back of its twisted neck. Marcus smiled at the terror that replaced the men’s earlier confidence.
The water creature lifted a clawed hand. One of the men turned to run, but Marcus froze his feet to the sidewalk. He’d let the creature go at them for a while and then—
“Stop it!” Kyja yelled, stepping between Marcus’s creature and the men.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, struggling to contain the monster he had created.
She spun to glare at him. “What are you doing?”
“Getting back the baby.” Why was she getting in his way? Isn’t this what she wanted? He’d thought she’d be impressed by what he could do, but she looked mad.
She put her hands on her hips. “You’re getting the baby back by hurting these men the way they hurt me? You don’t care about the child. You’re trying to get revenge.”
The water creature hesitated, awaiting Marcus’s command. This wasn’t revenge, he argued with himself. He was saving the baby, saving Kyja. And, okay, maybe he wanted to let them experience the helplessness he’d felt, but what was wrong with that?
Kyja turned to the man holding the baby. He clutched the infant to his chest in a way that Marcus realized looked more protective than he’d expected. The child should have been terrified, but it cooed and gurgled against the man’s jacket.
“Do you know who the baby belongs to?” Kyja asked.
He nodded, looking from her to the water creature. “She’s my sister’s. Her boyfriend broke up with her and took little Lizzie. He said she’d never see her again. We thought you guys were helping him.”
His sister’s baby? Marcus’s grip on the ice staff loosened, and the water creature began to melt back into the puddle.
“I’m sorry I stabbed you,” the man said. “I guess I panicked. Are you okay?”
Kyja nodded. “I’m fine. Take Lizzie home to her mother.”
Fog swirled around them, and Marcus and Kyja were no longer in the street. Instead they were standing on a grassy clearing in the middle of a forest. Riph Raph was a skyte again, and the blood was gone from the front of Kyja’s gown.
What had happened? Why were they here? Had they passed the test, or failed it? Marcus didn’t understand. He’d felt so sure he’d been doing the right thing—sticking up for the weak. Now he realized he’d probably made a huge mistake.
29: The Second Gate
Kyja’s heart was still pounding. She couldn’t believe Marcus had made that, that . . . creature. Hadn’t he seen how the man obviously cared for the child? Had he really been about to let the monster he’d made attack them?
What if the man had dropped the infant? What if the monster had accidently hurt the baby? It was exactly the way Chaos would have reacted if he ever got loose.
“What were you thinking back there?” she demanded.
Without his ice staff, Marcus’s bad leg wobbled. He grabbed the branch of a nearby sapling to hold himself upright. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “I was doing what had to be done.”
“Really?” she balled her hands into fists. “You had to make that man scald himself? You had to freeze the other one’s feet to the ground? You had to threaten them with that thing?”
Marcus’s face slowly went red. “Maybe not. And maybe I didn’t have to save your life, either. Or did you forget about that part?”
“Hey, kids,” Riph Raph said. “How about we look for some tasty bugs? Or explore the forest? This looks like a great place for a picnic.”
Kyja and Marcus ignored the skyte. She turned on him. “You think that saving my life excuses the way you acted afterward?” Kyja asked. “I would rather have bled to death than take a chance of hurting that baby. You terrified those men.” Marcus had seemed so nice at first, but now she was seeing his real side.
“They. Tried. To. Kill. You,” Marcus shouted, spit flying from his lips.
“Because they thought I was trying to take their child,” Kyja shouted back.
“Which you wouldn’t have discovered if I hadn’t found a way to catch up to them and scare them so bad that they had to talk to us.”
Riph Raph’s head followed the argument back and forth like the ball in a ping pong game. Suddenly the skyte’s eyes went wide. “Um, if you two could put your argument on hold for a minute . . .”
“You were a brute,” Kyja said.
Marcus sneered. “And you think you can talk your way out of any situation.”
“Guys!” Riph Raph shouted.
Marcus and Kyja glared at him. “What?” they yelled together.
“There’s, um, someone else here,” the skyte said, looking to his left out of the corner of his eyes. “So maybe you could, you know, save the argument for later?”
The sapling Marcus had been holding bent as though caught in a strong breeze. Kyja barely had time to think that there was no wind when the tree turned, and she realized it wasn’t a tree at all, but a man with brown skin and thick, leaf-like hair. He raised from a bow and studied the three of them with nut-brown eyes set in a deeply wrinkled face.
“What did you learn?” the man asked.
Kyja looked at Marcus. Had the tree man been there all along? Had he heard everything they’d said? She had a strong feeling that they hadn’t made the best impression.
“You’re one of the . . .” Marcus said. “You’re like the lady in the pool?”
“I am one of the four,” the man said.
Marcus quickly let go of him, and the man conjured a root out of the ground. The root turned into a beautiful polished staff, which he handed to Marcus. “This should help you.”
“Thanks,” Marcus said. “It’s the perfect length.”
Riph Raph studied the man with big, round eyes. “Are you a person, or a . . . plant?”
“Riph Raph!” Kyja said. “That’s rude.”
The man only smiled. “I am a living thing. Like each of you. I have watched you three since you began your quest.” He spoke slowly, as if choosing his words with care. “So far I have been impressed. But now I must determine if you have learned enough to continue your journey.”
“We’ve learned that talking is better than fighting,” Kyja said.
The man intertwined his branch fingers and looked at Marcus.
“Maybe that’s what you learned,” Marcus said. “But that’s not what I learned. We didn’t start the fight, and talking didn’t help when those men first showed up. Maybe I went overboard, but if we hadn’t chased them down and threatened them, we never would have discovered the truth.”
“That’s only because they wouldn’t talk to us in the first place,” Kyja said. “If they’d told us the baby belonged to that one man’s sister, we wouldn’t have needed to fight.”
Marcus frowned. “The problem is, we didn’t have that choice. They chose to attack us. We tried to talk, but they didn’t listen. They forced us to act, and until we did, talking wasn’t an option.”
Kyja turned to the tree. Surely arguing wasn’t helping their cause. “Marcus is right. As much as I hate to say it, sometimes you have no choice but to react.”
“You’re right too,” Marcus said. “I was trying to help, but I got carried away.”
The tree man studied them, the leaves of his branches fluttering ever so slightly.
“I guess we don’t know what we learned,” Kyja admitted. “Sometimes using logic and common sense is best. But at other times, it seems like you have to follow your emotions. Maybe we aren’t ready after all.”
The man’s bark-like face crinkled into a smile. “Very good. You may continue on the path.” He pointed a twig finger toward the woods, where Kyja saw that a path had opened up.
“I don’t get it,” Marcus said. “How can you send us on if we don’t know what we were supposed to learn?”
“It’s not important that you know what
you have learned,” the man said slowly. “Only that you learned it.” He turned and started toward the woods, his root feet sinking into the ground and pulling back out with each step. Behind him, the grass looked a little greener.
“Can you give us any advice?” Kyja called after him. “Something to help us going forward?”
“Be wise,” the tree called back before vanishing into the woods.
“A lot of help he was,” Marcus said. “He might as well have told us something like, don’t make mistakes, or make the right choices.”
Kyja laughed. “Don’t believe lies. Pay attention to important things.”
“Don’t let birds poop on your head,” Riph Raph added. “And try not to eat poisonous mushrooms.”
Together the three followed the path into the woods. The trees were so high and thick that it was like walking into a tunnel. The brightness of day changed to a gloomy twilight gray, and the air took on a chill.
“From now on,” Marcus said as they walked along the winding dirt path, “I promise to talk first and do magic second.”
Glancing around the woods, Kyja had the distinct feeling that something was watching them. She edged a little closer to Marcus. “Maybe you should keep your magic ready. Just in case.”
They continued silently along the trail. Every so often, one of them stopped to look around, thinking they had seen movement from the corner of their eyes. But when they turned to look, there was nothing around.
Riph Raph, who had been flying ahead, returned to land on Kyja’s shoulder. “Do you smell that?”
Kyja sniffed. The air smelled like swamp water or eggs that had gone bad.
“Stinks like dirty diapers,” Marcus said.
The farther they walked, the stronger the odor grew. Another smell appeared too, beneath the rotten-egg smell. Kyja wasn’t able to identify it until Marcus suddenly stopped and looked around.
“Is something burning?” he asked.
That was it; she smelled smoke. Kyja looked around, trying to identify the direction it was coming from. “Do you think the forest is on fire?”
“I don’t see any flames,” Marcus said. “But I definitely smell smoke. And notice how there aren’t any more bird or insect sounds. The woods were full of cheeps, and chirps, and buzzes when we started out. But now it’s like we’re standing in the middle of a cemetery.”
Kyja patted Riph Raph’s head. “Maybe you could fly around and take a look.”
Riph Raph wrapped his tail tightly around himself. “When birds and bugs disappear, skytes tend to stay put. It’s a self-preservation thing.”
“Hang on,” Marcus said. “I have an idea.” He knelt on the ground, clasped his staff in his hands, and closed his eyes.
“Praying isn’t a bad idea,” Riph Raph said. “But I’m thinking running might be a little more useful at the moment.”
“I’m not praying,” Marcus said. “I’m seeing.”
Kyja nodded. “Like when you used water magic to find the baby.”
Marcus continued to close his eyes. “There’s no water magic here. They’ve blocked it off like they did with land and fire magic before. The only magic I can reach here is land, so I’m using it to look through the eyes of a tree.”
Kyja thought she must have misheard. “Trees have eyes?”
“It’s one of those yoga witchdoctor things,” Riph Raph said. “Become one with nature and eat a pine cone.”
“Shhh,” Marcus whispered. “Okay, I can see the sky, a lot more trees, and a mountain with a cave in the side.”
“Any smoke?” Kyja asked. “Or flames?”
Marcus shook his head. “There has been, though. I can see lots of burned trees near the mountains, but nothing recent. The forest is worried; I can sense it. They know more fires could come at any time. And . . . wait, what’s that?” He put his hand to the side of his head, brow wrinkling in concentration.
“Well?” Riph Raph asked. “What is it? Plague? Pestilence? Please don’t tell me you see starvation.”
Marcus opened his eyes and stood. “Come on, we have to go.”
“What did you see?” Kyja asked as Marcus limped quickly along the trail. “Are we in danger?”
“Not us,” Marcus said.
They walked over a low rise, and a small cabin came into view. A neat garden was planted on one side, and as they got closer, Kyja noticed that the dirt in front of the porch was neatly raked. The shutters and door had been painted a cheery green, and smooth river rocks had been used to build a chimney and garden wall. But what caught her eyes right away were the scorch marks on the roof and walls of the cabin.
“Hello,” Marcus shouted, hurrying toward the building. “Is anyone home?”
There was no answer.
“Maybe they moved,” Riph Raph said. “That’s what I’d do if I lived in a place that smelled like this.”
As they reached the cabin, Kyja noticed something discarded on the side of the porch. She walked over and picked it up. It was a rag doll with blonde yarn hair and blue button eyes. No child would willingly leave a beloved toy like this behind.
Marcus banged on the door. “Is anyone there?” When no one answered, he tugged on the leather pull and pushed the door open. Cautiously they stepped inside. The room was in disarray, with belongings strewn all over the floor and food spilled everywhere.
“What is it?” Kyja asked. “Did robbers attack?”
“I don’t think so.” Marcus looked slowly around the room before walking back outside. “See the flame marks?”
Kyja nodded. It was as if someone had tried to burn the place down—and nearly succeeded. “What could have caused that?”
“The same thing that took the family,” Marcus said. “The trees were trying to warn me, but I couldn’t understand.” He turned and pointed to the cave in the side of the mountain. “They were taken by a dragon.”
30: Talking it Out
“Tell me again what we’re trying to do here,” Riph Raph said as they climbed the side of the mountain. “Because it seems to me that we’re on our way to face a creature that could destroy an entire village. Yet we have no weapons, no spells, and no plan.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Marcus said. “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what happened when we tried to save the baby. Like Kyja said, if we’d talked to the men in the first place, we could have worked everything out.”
Raph Raph’s eyes began to twitch. “So you want to ask the dragon to give us back the family—assuming it hasn’t already eaten them? What are you going to give it in trade? Dragons aren’t exactly known for the high number of favors they do.”
“We won’t know what it wants until we ask,” Marcus said. He’d been crawling the last hundred feet, and now the mountain was so steep that Kyja had to crawl too.
“Who knows?” Marcus went on. “Maybe it’s a nice little baby dragon.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Kyja asked. “I’m wondering if this might be a situation where we use magic first and talk second.”
Marcus stopped to catch his breath. They were almost to the cave entrance, and he could see faint swirls of yellow smoke drifting into the air. “Wasn’t the idea of the thing with the baby to teach us the logic and reasoning of water elementals?”
Kyja raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
He pointed to the cave. “We negotiate with the dragon. We ask how it’s doing. What kind of dragon it is. Have a little casual chitchat to get things started. Then we happen to mention how we’re looking for a family. Maybe it’s seen them. Is there something it would trade them for? It tells us it wants some magical gem, a special sword, blue slippers, or whatever. We find what it wants, make the trade, and the next member of the four moves us forward.”
“Sounds too good to be true,” Kyja said.
Riph Raph flapped his ears. “That’s because it is. Here’s how the conversation will go. We say, ‘How are you doing?’ The dragon eats us. No more conversation. No more
us.”
“You’ve learned nothing from this experience,” Marcus said. “This is why I’m in charge.”
“Excuse me?” Kyja said. “I’m the one who made you come here in the first place. What makes you think you’re the one in charge?”
Above their heads, an especially large plume of yellow smoke rose from the cave entrance, and a roar shook the entire mountain.
“Who invades my home?” a terrifying voice bellowed.
“Remember, you’re in charge,” Riph Raph said, ducking behind a rock.
“Did you prepare any spells?” Kyja asked. “In case logic doesn’t work?”
Marcus shook his head. “Land magic doesn’t have a lot of weapons. It’s mostly used to study and learn things.”
A large, green snout emerged over the ledge. The mouth had several rows of teeth as tall as Marcus.
“I think we’re about to learn something,” Riph Raph wailed, his blue body shaking. “We’re about to learn why nobody tries to negotiate with dragons.”
Marcus craned his neck to look up at the dragon. “Hello!” he shouted. “How are you today? Nice weather we’re having.”
A burst of flame shot down at them, and they all ducked.
“No more chitchat,” Kyja said. “Get to the point.”
Marcus agreed. Arms and legs trembling, he pushed himself up on a boulder to address the dragon “We’re looking for a family and—”
The dragon stretched out its neck and gazed down at them. The creature’s head was as big as the entire cabin the family had been taken from. Each of its eyes was the size of a tractor tire.
“That’s no baby,” Riph Raph yelped.
The dragon shot another burst of flame down at them. Marcus used land magic to create a barrier of rock and dirt, but the heat still singed the top of his hair. With another roar, the dragon lunged and opened its mouth to eat them.
“Run!” Marcus screamed. He cast a spell to pull as many rocks onto the dragon as he could—creating a minor avalanche that was a distraction at best—and rolled down the side of the mountain.
Fire Keep Page 21
