by Ben Wolf
He waited a moment and felt nothing. After five minutes, he still felt nothing, but it had to be working. Its effects weren’t necessarily supposed to be noticeable.
Aeron pulled out the skeleton key, looked it over, and gulped. “Here we go.”
He inserted the skeleton key into the lock and turned it with two hands. The effort tweaked his back. Nothing else happened.
He tried again, twisted it the other way, and this time it turned. A heavy clank sounded, and Aeron pushed the huge bronze door open and stepped inside.
He only made it three steps into the courtyard.
Chapter Nine
“You there! Halt!” a voice shouted from above Aeron.
He cursed under his breath and slowly looked up. Three steps and he’d already been caught.
A soldier on watch duty atop the fortress walls pointed down at him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Aeron gulped back his fear but couldn’t muster the courage to respond. If the wrong words spilled from his mouth…
“Close the door! You’ll let in bugs.”
Relief swept over Aeron, and he pivoted, headed back, and pulled the door shut.
Bugs? It was a courtyard. It didn’t have a ceiling. Bugs would get in anyway. Maybe it’s just an expression the wall watchmen use.
He looked up, but the soldier had already gone back to watching the horizon.
So far, so good. He kept his head and eyes down and tried to look like a soldier. He’d been one for so long, it should’ve been more natural, but nothing felt right.
Was he walking too fast? Too slow? Would someone notice the back of his armor and say something? Was he carrying his shield right?
Stop overthinking it, and just move.
Most of the soldiers milled about, talking and chatting. Some sparred with each other. Wooden practice swords and spears clacked and banged against iron shields. Other soldiers grappled, both upright and on the ground. A handful climbed ropes and ladders, racing each other to the top and back down again.
Aeron scanned for anyone who might recognize him, especially Commander Brove or any of his former wyvern knight comrades, but so far, he hadn’t seen any.
He hoped they wouldn’t all be at the roost, either, but with Govalia at peace with her neighbors, the wyvern knights had nowhere else to be. It didn’t bode well for Aeron’s chances of going unnoticed.
The courtyard ended with a set of doors leading into the fortress. Brown-gray stones formed the corridor walls, and iron-wrought torches mounted at regular intervals cast flickering light along his path. He wondered if perhaps his father had forged the torches and their mounting brackets.
A fresh pang in his back severed his flippant thoughts. The sooner he got to the roost, the sooner he could free Wafer and get to the rest of his shroom stash.
He reached a familiar spiral staircase made from the same brown-gray stones, gripped the wrought-iron railing mounted to the wall, and proceeded upward. Despite his attempts to take softer steps, the weight of the armor clanked when he moved, jerking and pinching his back.
“Just a few more steps,” he whispered. “Just a few more.”
The last time he’d taken these stairs was the day he’d been escorted out of the fortress. One of the benefits of being a wyvern knight included not having to worry about those stairs. He could just fly Wafer directly in and out of the roost, and the mess hall was just down the corridor from the roost.
Five minutes later, he crested the final stair and took a right turn into the corridor, which opened into the roost itself.
From outside, a commoner might see the fortress’s massive size and wonder what could possibly take up so much space. Even considering the fortress housed and fed the bulk of Govalia’s soldiers, the fortress was huge.
But in fact, the roost claimed the largest chunk of space within the fortress, including the throne room. Rightfully so—wyverns required a lot of maintenance.
As Aeron ventured into the roost, he sucked in a sharp breath to fend off his burgeoning anxiety. It didn’t help much.
Under the open ceiling, the roost looked and smelled the same as it had when he’d left several weeks earlier. Wyvern stalls, each wide enough to accommodate a wyvern’s twenty-foot wingspan and corresponding length, lined the walls around a large central platform known as the launch pad.
Antechambers for the knights’ bunks and personal effects lay to Aeron’s right, along with an antechamber for latrines and a bath. Long before his promotion to the wyvern knight ranks, as a Featherwing—a new recruit—he’d hauled buckets of water up the very staircase he’d just summited to replenish the latrines and the bath.
He didn’t want to imagine what that kind of strain would do to his back now.
Beyond the launch pad and the stalls lay the hatchery. Female wyverns laid eggs only once a year, almost always one single egg per wyvern, and only at certain ages.
Certain male wyverns were permitted to fertilize the eggs soon after, and then the attendants brought the eggs into the hatchery.
Aeron had watched, side-by-side with a dozen other rider prospects, as Wafer’s tooth pricked through the eggshell.
He’d watched as a shimmering blue-green creature covered in scales clawed its way into the world and scanned the hatchery for its lifelong partner—its rider.
And then Wafer’s golden eyes made contact with Aeron’s. The bond forged in an electric instant. A tingle started on the tip of Aeron’s nose and shot down his neck, into his chest and arms and legs and fingers and toes. Wafer had leaped at him, tackled him to the floor, and wrapped his newborn wings around Aeron’s torso.
Aeron loved thinking of that moment now, but it had repulsed him at the time. Bloody, slimy afterbirth had still covered Wafer from his time inside the egg, and when he’d plowed into Aeron, the stuff got all over Aeron’s chest, face, and arms.
But that’s also how Wafer had gotten his name: a piece of the egg had stuck to the top of Wafer’s head, like a little hat. It was no bigger than a wafer.
Aeron snapped out of it. He could reminisce later. Time was of the essence.
He walked toward the launch pad and veered to the left. A trio of soldiers had led one of the wyverns out of its stall, saddled it up, and positioned it on the launch pad. It crouched low and exhaled a serpentine breath, and its rider mounted it.
Aeron recognized the mount immediately. The roost only housed one orange wyvern with purple striping—Nilla.
And its rider’s unmistakable white-blonde hair gave her away just as clearly. Faylen Uridi, one of only three female wyvern knights commissioned by the army. She was the friend he’d saved, and in doing so, he’d injured his back.
Faylen was stunning both in appearance and prowess, and Aeron had always harbored an attraction for her, so he was glad when Nilla reared back, spread her wings, and launched into the blue expanse above the roost.
It meant she wouldn’t be a part of what happened next, whether good or bad.
Once the other two soldiers cleared out, Aeron made for Wafer’s stall. As he approached, his connection to Wafer strengthened, and Wafer’s head popped up over the wall, searching with those unforgettable golden eyes. Aeron wished Wafer hadn’t been so obvious about it, but maybe it wouldn’t matter in a few minutes.
He made it to Wafer’s stall unhindered. Wafer made a few reptilian chirping noises, and Aeron shushed him gently. Aeron checked over his shoulders to make sure no one had taken notice. It seemed as though they were still safe.
“I’m happy to see you too,” he whispered. “I’m here to get you out.”
Wafer’s head bobbed, and he chomped his mouth open and closed lightly.
“We’ll get you something to eat later.”
Wafer huffed, loud and short.
Aeron winced. It shouldn’t have mattered; the wyverns made all kinds of noises on a regular basis. But it sent his anxiety spinning all the same.
“Easy, boy. One thing at a time. I have to get you
out of here first.”
Aeron checked the shackle on Wafer’s right ankle. The same as always—connected to a thick, black chain so Wafer couldn’t just fly away but made to unclasp easily and without a key in case of an emergency or an attack.
“Straighten up. I’m going to unshackle you.” Aeron reached down.
Then a gruff, Urthian-accented voice behind him said, “Welcome back, Aeron.”
Chapter Ten
Commander Brove had Aeron subdued and then shackled.
Aeron had tried to fight back, but too many knights came at him, and the first tweak of his back sent spasms of sharp pain ratcheting throughout his body. He gave up far quicker than he would’ve preferred.
They set up a feeding post near the edge of the launch pad. Normally, they’d hang animal carcasses from it so the wyverns could feed without assistance, but this time the knights hooked the chain of his shackles to the long hook embedded near the top. It stretched his arms high and ensured that his back pain persisted nonstop.
Then Commander Brove summoned the entire unit to the edge of the launch pad.
“A wayward son has returned,” Brove announced to them. “Leatherwing Ironglade has come back to us, despite our best efforts to keep him out.”
The knights and the hatchery attendants surrounding them chuckled.
“As you all know, he was discharged for treason, but General Cadimus saw fit to spare his life.” Brove shook his head. “But now he has committed treason once again by violating the terms of his discharge and through his attempt to steal a weapon of war. And the punishment for such treason is, unquestionably, death.”
No one said anything.
Brove drew a dagger from his belt.
A few of the wyverns stirred in their stalls.
Aeron flinched, partly from the sight of the dagger, but mostly because of his back. The fingers on his right hand had gone partially numb, and the effect had also started in his forearm, too, only it hurt more than it tingled.
“But,” he continued, “it would be imprudent to kill him without a proper interrogation, first. We ought to have some fun with this, don’t you think?”
The crowd’s reaction was mixed. They’d all been Aeron’s comrades only a few weeks prior, and some of them had stood by Aeron when Brove had first accused him.
Others, though, saw fit to side with Brove immediately. That divide separated those in enthusiastic agreement now from those who saw the injustice of it all.
“Unanimous enough for me.” Brove pressed the flat of the dagger against Aeron’s cheek. “An honest answer keeps you from getting cut. Any questions?”
Aeron very carefully replied, “No.”
“Good. How did you get in here?”
Aeron didn’t want to betray his father’s trust, so he’d come up with an alternative story just in case something like this happened. “I stole a key on my way out of here, and I used it to walk right in the front doors.”
Brove’s eyes narrowed, and he turned the dagger so its edge pressed against Aeron’s right cheek.
“It’s the truth,” Aeron uttered from the opposite side of his mouth. “The key’s tucked under my breastplate.”
The dagger’s edge pressed harder against Aeron’s cheek, then it relented. Brove lowered it and then motioned with it toward two of his men. “You two, remove his breastplate.”
They complied, but not gently. Their tugs and pulls on the breastplate’s straps delivered new agony to Aeron’s back, and he winced and gritted his teeth.
Sure enough, the key his father had made fell out and thudded on the launch pad. As the two wyvern knights tossed Aeron’s breastplate aside, Brove picked up the key and examined it.
Aeron fought to still his thundering heartbeat. It should be innocuous enough. After all, Pa had supposedly made dozens of such keys over the years.
But the fear of being caught in the lie racked Aeron’s nerves. For all he knew, Brove might’ve somehow been able to identify it as a new key.
Brove turned toward the same two men and tossed them the key. “Hold this. We’re not finished yet.”
One of them caught it and held it down by his side.
Brove placed the flat of his dagger on Aeron’s left cheek next, harder than he had before. The slightest twitch and it would cut him. “Second question, and this should be an easy one. Why did you come back?”
Aeron’s jaw tightened. Brove was fishing for a full confession. But what other choice did Aeron have? “I came back to free my wyvern.”
Brove twitched.
Fire raced down the side of Aeron’s face, and warmth oozed out after it. Brove had cut him.
Wafer roared from behind Brove and pulled against his chain, but he’d never break free from it.
“I told the truth!” Aeron snapped.
“No, you didn’t.” Brove lowered the dagger and sneered at him. “That wyvern is not yours. He never was, and he never will be. He’s strictly the property of the Govalian Army.”
Aeron rolled his eyes. “You knew what I meant.”
“And you knew the rules.” Brove pressed the dagger’s edge against the thin, tight skin on Aeron’s forehead. “Next question.”
Aeron groaned and moaned, but he did so without moving his head. No sense in getting cut again if he didn’t have to.
“I haven’t even done anything yet,” Brove said.
“It’s my back. It’s still wrecked from the accident.”
“And you came unprepared? What happened to all your magic mushrooms?” Brove taunted. He retracted the dagger.
Aeron tried to shift, but the pain didn’t subside. “They’re wearing off. I need another one.”
Brove tilted his head and smiled. He pressed the dagger against Aeron’s forehead again, and Aeron stilled.
“Did you bring any with you?”
Aeron swallowed. “Yes. In the pouch on my belt.”
Brove cut the pouch from Aeron’s belt and tucked his dagger under his armpit. He unfastened the pouch, pulled out the cloth, and unwrapped it, revealing the blue mushroom.
By that point, Aeron’s right arm had gone almost completely numb, and he tried to adjust his position to give his right arm some relief. It didn’t do much. The shackles just didn’t allow him much range of motion.
With one hand, Brove held the blue mushroom between his bare fingers and thumb and studied it. He still held the dagger in his other hand.
“If I let you have this, will it help your back feel better?” he asked. He’d neglected to put the dagger against Aeron’s body, but Aeron didn’t mind.
Aeron nodded. “Tremendously.”
Brove smiled his wicked smile again. Then he held the mushroom out toward Aeron.
Aeron leaned forward and opened his mouth. This was all about to end, one way or another.
Then Brove dropped the mushroom to the launch pad and stomped on it. Dust-like particles puffed out from it in plumes, and they wafted toward the edge of the launch pad—toward the rest of the soldiers in the roost who had gathered around.
Brove twisted his heel, grinding the mushroom into crumbles, and more spores shot out. He looked up at Aeron. “How does your back feel now?”
Aeron stifled a smirk and turned it into a scowl. His backup plan had worked even better than he’d expected. “Have I ever mentioned how much I hate you?”
“You have. I suppose I can’t cut you for that, though.” Brove laughed. “I know it’s the truth.”
Aeron remained silent.
“Last question.” Brove extended his free hand, and a soldier stepped onto the launch pad and put the blunt end of a spear into his palm. Brove shifted his grip on it and sheathed his dagger. “How would you feel if I killed the army’s wyvern right in front of you?”
Aeron stayed silent again. It had to work. He’d touched the mushroom with his bare skin. It just had to work.
Brove stalked across the launch pad toward Wafer, the spear clenched tightly in his hands.
A ru
sh of concern flooded Aeron’s body, but not of his own conjuring. The emotion originated from Wafer and transferred to Aeron through their bond.
Aeron tried to convey hope back to Wafer, as well as the courage to defend himself against Brove, but his anxiety got the better of him, and he lost focus.
Come on! Aeron’s body tensed. I need this to work!
Then Brove stopped halfway to Wafer’s stall. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes with his free hand, and then continued forward.
Three steps later he stumbled, but he caught himself on the launch pad with the spear like it was a walking stick. His legs wobbled, and he swayed noticeably.
Gods, it’s working. Aeron smiled. He looked at the rest of the soldiers.
Several of them traded yawns around the group, and he caught a few leaning on their comrades or on the edge of the launch pad with their eyes closed. One guy had even sat down against the launch pad, and all Aeron could see was the back and the top of his head.
Brove glanced back at him, blinked four or five times, and then tried to stagger toward Wafer again, but he slumped down and lay near the far end of the launch pad near Wafer’s stall. His spear clattered over the edge and to a stop on the roost floor.
Aeron beamed, and Wafer looked at Brove with ripe curiosity.
The rest of the soldiers started dropping as well. Some of them had gotten wise to what had happened and started coming Aeron’s way, but slowly, like slugs crossing a vacant street.
It was time. Aeron maneuvered his arms and reached into the wrist of his left gauntlet. He could barely feel anything with his fingers being so numb, but he pushed through the sensation.
It was a hard action to pull off, what with contorting his back and having to work around the shackles, but he managed to fish the shackle key out all the same, and he passed it to his left hand. Now he just had to hope that his father had made that set of shackles.
He worked the key into the lock and wiggled it around until it bit. Then he twisted it hard.
