The Crescents

by Joseph R. Lallo

  She did not risk touching it directly, allowing it to hang in midair before her under the influence of her magic. Deacon stood and set his own well-trained mind upon it.

  “Certainly poison. But not poison from the thorn itself. At least, not in its original state. This was prepared, distilled. Potent. That thorn was a weapon.”

  “We can discuss what it means later. I’ll extract the poison, you treat her.”

  Myranda’s hands were shaking as she drew upon the unpleasant but well-learned skill of withdrawing toxins. This was the first time she’d had to perform it on a creature so massive with a dose so small. It didn’t matter. Without knowing how badly the poison might affect Myn if it lingered, the cost of failure was too high to even consider it.

  Working magic alongside another, particularly someone as skilled as Deacon, was a profound experience. Were the circumstances not so dire, she might even have enjoyed it. They each extended their will, complementing each other perfectly, weaving through the body and spirit of the ailing dragon. Deacon’s steady, sure mind was comforting and inspiring. Having it present was like having a shoulder to lean on, a hand to hold.

  The poison gathered. It drifted toward the wound through which it had entered. All around it, she could sense Deacon’s spells undoing its damage and soothing Myn into a deep, healing sleep. It was impossible to know how much time had passed since she’d started the procedure, but again, it didn’t matter. She had no intention of stopping until she was through. Her bleary eyes focused on the pinprick on Myn’s hide. It still trickled blood, evidence of the terrible potency of the poison. With a final nudge of her mind, she drew out a fleck of the terrible stuff. It was barely the size of a grain of sand.

  “Here. We mustn’t risk poisoning the oasis,” Deacon said.

  He extended a slip of parchment. Myranda dropped the speck of poison upon it, and he carefully folded and stowed it.

  “Will she survive?” asked Grustim.

  Myranda turned with a start. She had no memory of him returning from scouting, but now she discovered both he and Garr were back, and from the looks of it, they had returned some time ago. Despite Myranda and Deacon’s distraction, the fire had been tended to. Garr was also lying beside Myn, one wing draped over her and his head resting cheek to cheek with hers. Even behind his armored mask, the dragon’s anguish was heartbreakingly evident. Both fairies had also returned to their perches among her horns. Freet was dozing fitfully. Shah sat, hugging her knees, beside herself with worry.

  “She will recover,” Deacon said. “The poison is gone. The damage is being healed.”

  “She should rest until morning. And it may be several days before she has her full strength back,” Myranda said.

  Deacon held out his crystal and willed the poison thorn from the ground. “This was wielded by the fairy. A single jab of so tiny a weapon nearly brought down a dragon. I hesitate to think what would have become of one of us if we’d been struck.”

  “The Aluall are a potent threat. The elves were right to summon aid,” Grustim said.

  “Why don’t you just turn back?” murmured Shah. She flitted from Myn’s horns and darted back and forth between the humans, addressing them each in kind. “This isn’t your battle, right? This is the elves’ battle. We are sworn to serve them for the good of our grove, but not you! Not the dragons! Just go back! Put us in our boxes and bring us back. Tell them what you found. Let them do the fighting. You are good people. You shouldn’t have to die fighting for other people.”

  “Shah, this is our fight,” Myranda said. “We knew it was dangerous. But these creatures, whoever or whatever they are, are a threat on a far larger scale than even the elves imagined. They are using D’Karon magic. We were only narrowly able to push the D’Karon back when they attacked before. If there are any D’Karon here, or if these people share their goals, then it could mean war and bloodshed the world over. In the face of that, there is no other option.”

  Shah looked uncertainly back to Freet, who was beginning to stir as well.

  “Then you need to go to the east. The northeast. The fairy that did this comes from—”

  “Shah, don’t!” Freet scolded. He buzzed up. “It isn’t our place to tell an outsider where other fairies hide!”

  “Fairies did this, Freet!” Shah proclaimed. “It was a fairy holding that thorn. Myn was stung when she defended herself against the fairy. She attacked a dragon. Dragons are friends to fairies. The stories taught us that, and Myn and Garr prove it. Did any members of our grove ever use a weapon like that? No! Would any of us attack anyone, let alone a dragon? No! And Myranda and Deacon and Grustim, they are good. They didn’t keep us in our boxes. They introduced us to real dragons. It seems to me that maybe humans are friends to fairies as well. At least these humans are. So the fairy who did this, she doesn’t deserve our protection. The wind she brought with her was the wind from the east over the brook and through the brambles.” She stared at Freet, as if challenging him to object.

  After a short contemplative silence, he spoke. “These fairies do not deserve our protection. But there are many fairies here. Fairies in every corner of every forest. What if we lead them to the wrong ones?”

  Shah darted to the thorn Deacon was still investigating. “The brambles,” she said, pointing at the weapon and glaring at Freet. “The wind, from the east, over the brook, and through the brambles. We will know when we’ve found the right fairies. And Myranda and Deacon and Grustim, they won’t do anything to fairies that we don’t say are the right ones. Right?”

  “We wouldn’t dream of it,” Deacon said.

  Freet nodded once. “Very well. If you all promise not to go a step closer to any fairies that are not these fairies, then we shall lead you.”

  “Agreed,” Myranda said.

  “I’ve never heard of fairies working with other creatures outside of Entwell. It may be that the Aluall are not a single group but an alliance of sorts. We need to be prepared for anything,” Deacon said.

  “I think it is time to summon Ether,” Myranda added. “Her powers are such that a weapon like this would be of no concern. Having her would give us a chance, even if faced with this poison again.”

  She tightened her grip about her staff again and tried to draw her mind together. Deacon placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “You did the most trying portion of the healing. Let me seek out Ether,” he said.

  “Yes,” Myranda said, blinking her weary eyes. “I think that would be best.”

  He readied his mind, coaxing a faint amber light within his gem. For the moment, Myranda found herself with nothing expected of her. It would have been wise to rest and consider what she’d learned, but the ragged weariness and overall lack of focus and energy that had plagued her since shortly before they’d left New Kenvard were beginning to affect her ability to fulfill the mission. Healing Myn would have been difficult in any situation, but she’d barely been able to achieve it. If there was some sort of affliction weakening her, next time she could falter at a critical moment. Better to spend this time seeking what, if anything, seemed to be wrong with herself.

  She turned her mind inward, first sweeping her soul for the dark stain of D’Karon workings. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. Next she searched her body. The days had been long and taxing. Even a healthy person would have been weary. But the weariness went so much deeper. And it was more than that. To a tiny but undeniable degree, the whole of her body seemed, for lack of a better word, distracted. It was almost like when someone was suffering through a potent disease, how every system in the body would labor to defeat it. But there was no disease.

  Slowly, something did reveal itself. When Myranda realized the truth, that this was what was ailing her, a flood of emotions shook her mind from its state of focus. If she were anywhere else, if it was any other time, she would have felt very differently. But now was the worst possible time. Concern for what it would mean for her, how she could risk going forward now th
at she knew, wracked her mind.

  “Myranda?” Deacon said.

  She looked to him and saw concern in his eyes. Now new thoughts and concerns rushed in to join the others, worries about how Deacon would feel, what he would say. How it would all effect the mission. She grappled with herself in the moments before answering.

  “It’s nothing. I’m fine,” she said.

  Worse than speaking the lie was what she had to do next. Deacon was a wizard, more able than most to know the truth of a statement, as he had insight into the souls of those around him. And with Myranda, he had a link. Until this moment they had been entirely open with one another. But now she had to quietly tuck away the truth, guard it in her mind and mask it from her soul. But it was the only way. Anything less could endanger the lives of all who were depending upon them.

  “I have contacted Ether. She informed me she made some limited discoveries regarding Sonril’s history with North Crescent,” he said. “It strikes me I should record our location and what we’ve learned. I have been terribly distracted.”

  He coaxed his book from his bag and flipped it open. Pages riffled and came to a rest. He held his stylus over the blank page but paused. “There… there is something here…” he said, looking closely.

  Freet darted over the page. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “There isn’t anything to be seen, but there is certainly something here. Or something intended to be here.”

  Freet looked at him curiously. “Do all humans speak in riddles like you?”

  “Deacon does so more than most,” Myranda explained. “What seems to have happened?”

  “I believe there was an attempt to copy pages from one of the other books, but something interfered with the spell. I believe I can repair it.”

  He held his stylus over the page, shut his eyes, and released it. The enchanted writing instrument hung in the air, then wandered vaguely about the page, drifting this way and that as if drawn to certain parts of it. Deacon deepened his focus, and the shuddering, darting motions became sharper and more frequent. The tip of the stylus touched the page, conjuring a line, then jumped to another part of the page to produce a curve. Momentum built and the stylus was soon dancing across the page, tracing out words a letter or two at a time, though often on opposite edges of a page. The contents of the page populated in this piecemeal fashion, such that it wasn’t until the page was nearly full that any individual line was complete.

  “That is Ivy’s writing. I’m sure of it. Or, at least it is the work of her hand!” Myranda triumphantly threw her arms around Deacon. “I knew she was alive! Can we track the origin of this message? I can’t seem to feel that aspect of the spell.”

  “No. This wasn’t written with the stylus I made for her, so it was already a weaker version of the spell, and something has confounded the magic terribly. We are fortunate I was able to retrieve the message at all.”

  The stylus traced out the last few lines on the opposite page, then came to rest.

  “There… I am not certain this is the whole of the message, but I cannot seem to retrieve any more of it. Curious. It seems to be more than one language…”

  “What does it say?” Freet asked. “That looks like the writing the fairies make.”

  Deacon nodded. “Yes. They appear to be names. Locations. This here says Mellawin of Grandwinn. The king of Sonril in its capital. And I distinctly remember this name below it coming up in our briefings during the voyage from Tressor.”

  Myranda looked aside and gingerly fetched the thorn she’d removed from Myn.

  “They have potent poison, nearly impenetrable stealth, and a list of Sonril’s nobles. This does not bode well… Contact Ether again and tell her to warn the nobles. Shah, it may be time for you to deliver a message. The elves were rather insistent that we use you and Freet for messages.” Myranda tugged Shah’s box from Myn’s back as she slept. “I don’t want to risk that they are bullheaded enough to disregard a warning simply because it did not come through their preferred means.”

  Shah darted up to her and floated rigidly at attention. “I’m ready to do my job!”

  #

  For a second time in very short order, the voice of Deacon faded out of Ether’s thoughts. She was still simmering with anger that Ivy had been taken and they had neglected to share it with her until now. Another of the Chosen taken by an unknown enemy, and she was not immediately informed. More frustrating was their insistence that she deliver a message to the nobles. A message that apparently would be repeated by one of their own messengers. It was possible, though she would never admit it to herself, that a large part of her frustration was owed to how little progress she had made in her investigations in Grandwinn.

  She paced through a hallway, a part of the sprawling palace the king called home, that rose and fell to follow the shape of the land. If the bulk of their structures were formed from trees, the palace was formed from a forest. Rooms seamlessly transitioned to outdoor groves. It was as near to a perfect union of society and nature as she’d ever observed. Unique among nobility, at least in her observation, was the nearly total lack of anything resembling true security. If home to someone of any level of importance, most cities of Tressor and the Northern Alliance had fortified themselves against the risk of attack. There was little evidence that the people of Grandwinn considered attack the remotest of possibilities. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the fact that Ether was allowed to walk the halls without accompaniment. She was an outsider. All other kingdoms treated outsiders with some level of justifiable caution. But she saw very few guards and felt very few enchantments.

  Ether paused… Something in her mind clicked into place. Of the few guards she saw, she did see some. And of the few enchantments she felt, she did feel some. They were far from the central grounds of the palace, and thus far from those she had been interviewing and investigating. Until this moment she had simply assumed they were guarding some manner of valuables, which Ether had little interest in. But the king had expressed no small amount of joy in endlessly presenting and prattling about the most precious treasures of the land.

  If she was going to leave this place, she wasn’t going to do it without seeing just what they felt warranted protection. She shifted to wind and relaxed her form, reducing herself to a gentle breeze rather than the raging gale she typically assumed in that form. Some time ago she had been lectured by Lain that she wasted her capacity for stealth. Like so many attempts at advice, she’d failed to take it to heart until recently. As it was made clear that tact was called for, and her repeated attempts to pry information from the people of Grandwinn had established that direct methods had a way of raising their suspicions, this was a moment for avoiding detection.

  Her subtle form drifted past a trio of elven sentries, each of whom didn’t offer so much as a glance toward the leaves she rustled in passing. A thin veneer of magic, however, was becoming stronger. Deacon had a knack for unraveling the intent of unknown spells. From the texture of this enchantment, she noted it seemed too weak to hold her at bay, but nonetheless offered a degree of resistance. That put her in mind of a spell of detection. She tested the edge of the enchantment and found that it encircled a large section of the palace grove, one thick with trees but undeniably an “outdoor” portion of the grounds.

  Ether’s impulse was to simply overpower the spell, to sever it with raw force of will, but as she could not restore it when she was through, all it would do would be establish that someone had entered the protected land. They would be fools to suspect anyone but her. Instead, she drifted near the ground and surveyed what clues nature had to offer. Almost immediately, she discovered the paths of woodland creatures that had passed through the perimeter of the enchantment. Obviously, such coming and going had not brought sentries running, so it was likely such creatures were exempt from the spell’s influence. A short investigation turned up a bit of fur caught on some bramble, and a brief flex of her mind allowed her to resolve into the li
ttle creature’s form. When she was, to all outward appearances, little more than a rabbit, the pressure of the enchantment dropped away.

  She hopped among the trees, sharp eyes and sharper ears sifting her surroundings for some indication of what they were protecting. It wasn’t until she was well into the guarded woods that shapes very subtly differentiated themselves from the growth of the forest. They were trees, mighty oaks, each centuries old at least. At a glance they might not have seemed much different from the other trees of the woods, but strange looping patterns, each with an oddly metallic sheen, suggested that something had become embedded in the tree. She hopped up and looked over one of the strange patches and discovered it to be the pitted and badly tarnished tip of a silver blade. Elsewhere, trees held shields and bits of armor. Most mysterious, names in elven script seemed to have been formed out of the natural whorls of wood and bark.

  It took a bit of thought before Ether reasoned out what she was looking at. To a mortal, the answer would have been apparent much sooner, but she was timeless, and seldom had cause to think about death. These were monuments, grave markers. Trees planted to mark the resting places of warriors. Their weapons were placed among the growing tree, and the growth was enchanted to immortalize their names. And if the age of the grove was any indication, they all had fallen within a few years of one another, hundreds of years ago. It painted the tale of a battle. A battle that neither King Mellawin nor his people had seen fit to mention even in passing during their many discussions.

  Ether twitched the ears of her current form and ventured deeper. She had learned much about the people of Sonril in the last few days. And chief among those revelations was their predilection toward self-aggrandizement. In the current circumstance, that meant two things. That they had not mentioned a battle, or perhaps a war, that apparently had taken hundreds of lives suggested it was a point of shame. Had it been a victory, they would have proclaimed it at every opportunity. Second, it would very likely not be enough for them to simply mark the graves of their fallen. There would be more.