“Continent seems unlikely,” Dak said. “Given how many ships travel the oceans these days, someone would have found it.”
“Well, it’s magically hidden.”
Dak snorted. “Right.”
It hadn’t occurred to Yanko that Dak wouldn’t believe in his quest. Sun Dragon surely did. But then, Turgonians never put much stock in magic, if they believed in it at all. The fact that Dak had seen fireballs hurled at his ship in the last week didn’t mean he would automatically grasp all the nuances of what people could do with the mental sciences.
“I’m searching for an artifact that’s supposed to lead to it,” Yanko said.
“To what end?”
“The person who sent me on the mission believes the land will have had time to heal and might be available for colonization and farming.”
Dak’s eye narrowed. “For the Nurians.”
“We need it.”
“You have a bigger nation than anyone else in the world already. Maybe you should fix the land you have.”
“Turgonia is almost as big. And we have ten times the population, if not more. And none of the resources. And land that’s been used up by centuries upon centuries of farming. You think that’s so easy to fix? Turgonia is young. Just because it hasn’t run into this problem yet doesn’t mean it won’t someday.” Yanko glowered. He wasn’t even sure what his point was—if anything, he was giving Dak a reason to want the hidden continent for his own people—but it rankled him that Dak dismissed his mission, as if his brother had been hurt for nothing, as if Uncle Mishnal had died for nothing. As if—Yanko gritted his teeth, refusing to get emotional over this. He already felt like a child sitting on the floor while Dak loomed over him. “Look, if you don’t want to help research, fine. I’ll find someone else who reads Kyattese. Someone who’s not too busy making potions up front to stay back here for more than five minutes.” He turned his glower in Akstyr’s direction, though he couldn’t truly be mad at the student. This was Yanko’s mission, nobody else’s. He should have foreseen this problem and thought up a solution before ever coming here.
“I doubt the answers are here,” Dak said. “The Kyattese are tight-lipped about their past, especially that which revolves around their colonizing of these islands.” Dak’s mouth twisted in an expression Yanko could not decipher.
It did not matter. He was offering up useful information. How he knew this, Yanko couldn’t guess, unless the Turgonians truly did have a better understanding of world history than the Nurians—a thought that was hard to stomach. “Any idea where the answers might be?”
Dak gazed out the window again, twilight deepening beyond the glass panes. “I have an idea as to where you might stay tonight that should be safe. I’ll check and see if the homeowners are amenable.”
Yanko pushed himself to his feet and lowered his face to hide the frown there. He could hardly scoff at an offer of assistance, but Dak hadn’t answered his question. And Dak was always so blunt.
“Meet me in the foyer in ten minutes,” Dak said and headed for the exit.
“You know, don’t you?” Yanko should not have said anything, but he couldn’t help it. The words tumbled out. “Where the answers to the Kyattese origins are.”
Dak paused, a hand on one of the bookcases. Without looking back, he said, “They are not my secrets to share.”
Before Yanko could come up with a reply, he disappeared down one of the aisles.
“Damn,” Yanko whispered, pacing around the stacks of books on the floor.
He was not shocked that Dak did not have an interest in helping Nuria with this quest—even if it stung because that also meant he didn’t have an interest in helping Yanko with his quest. But beyond his concerns, it was disturbing to think that the Turgonians shared some secret history with the Kyattese. The islands had long been contested by both Nuria and Turgonia, and the public story was that Kyatt didn’t consider either nation an ally and remained a neutral party in all matters. But that had been before the empire had become a republic and the notorious Turgonian war criminal Admiral Starcrest had become their first president, a president who happened to be married to a Kyattese woman. What if the two nations were now allies, secretly if not officially? They could be planning to take advantage of the turmoil in Nuria. And might Dak not think Nuria was even more desperate than anyone had realized if eighteen-year-old boys were being sent on missions of paramount importance?
“Stop it.” Yanko thumped a fist against a shelf. The politics, the diplomacy, the plans of war... it was far, far over his head. All he could do was focus on the task he had been given. If Dak would not share what he knew, there must be some other Kyattese person who would. Maybe he should find the Nurian embassy instead of heading off to the home of whatever acquaintance Dak had here. For all he knew, he would end up in some household full of Turgonians who would spend the night laughing at his notions of hidden continents. Except that the mage and the mage hunter out on that ship could stroll right into the Nurian embassy, the same as he could. As odd as it sounded, hiding amongst Turgonians might be health-inducing.
Yanko groaned and thumped the shelves again, afraid he had made a mistake in telling Dak anything, and at a loss as to where to find the help he needed.
“There is fine for breaking books,” Akstyr said from the aisle Dak had disappeared down, his light globe increasing the illumination.
Yanko had not noticed his approach—or that he had been pacing in near darkness, the windows no longer brightening his corner.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“You find what need?”
“No.”
Akstyr grunted, as if it didn’t matter one iota. “I never do, either. Library closes soon.” He picked up some of the books strewn about the floor.
Realizing he had made a mess, Yanko forced himself to put his pouting on hold for long enough to help. Dak had said to give him ten minutes, anyway. Ten minutes that he was probably using to chat with his superiors at the Turgonian embassy.
“That man talk on you?” Akstyr asked, tilting his head toward the exit.
“Dak? Yes.” Yanko considered Akstyr. Another Turgonian. Maybe he knew who Dak was or something about him. After all, Dak had obviously been to this island before. “You don’t know him, do you?”
“Nah. Seem familiar maybe.” Akstyr scratched his head and looked toward the exit again. “But nah. He bought one of my potions.”
“Oh. I didn’t think most Turgonians liked magic. Or needed help growing beards.”
“Nope. But I don’t care. Need money. Hate... gruthruknas?” Akstyr raised his brows, as if Yanko would have a translation for what had sounded like a cat hacking up a hairball.
“Being broke? Living on others’ charity?”
“Charity, yes. Girls are wanting good hair and money.” Akstyr sighed.
“They’re a finicky lot.”
“Yes.”
After they shoved the last books into the shelves, Yanko grabbed his gear and headed for the door. He poked his head into the thermal sciences room, did not see anyone in the dim interior, and softly called, “Lakeo?”
A book thudded shut. “Be out in a minute.”
Yanko might have waited, but he was curious as to where Dak had gone to arrange their night’s lodgings—he winced at the idea of being taken to the Turgonian embassy, even if the other Nurians would be unlikely to show up there. More, he wondered if he might catch Dak talking to someone else and perhaps revealing something telling.
He trotted down the stairs and through the foyer, glancing down hallways. With his size, Dak stood out easily amongst the Kyattese, who were closer to Nurians in height, but Yanko did not spot him. He might have left the library altogether. Maybe he knew someone else on campus who he meant to talk to? It couldn’t be far away if he would be back in a few minutes.
Yanko was about to run outside, but skidded to a halt on the polished stone floor when he spotted a door open behind the head librarian’s desk. The p
laque to the side read Staff, but Dak was inside, talking to a woman. He pointed at a communication orb on her desk. She waved a hand at it and headed for the door. Before she exited—and could ask Yanko why he was standing there staring—Yanko scooted back a few feet and turned toward a hallway close to that door.
The woman returned to the desk, tapped a clock ticking toward the top of the hour, sighed, and settled into the seat with a book. With her back now to him, Yanko stepped away from the hallway and followed the wall to the staff door. Dak’s voice floated out, and Yanko started to smile, thinking he might get his chance to spy after all, but of course Dak wasn’t speaking in Nurian. Turgonian? No, Yanko was fairly certain it was Kyattese, but that wasn’t any better as far as he was concerned. Not unless he could get the librarian to come join him in the spying and then report the results to him. Not very likely.
An older woman answered Dak, her voice cheerful as she chattered back in response to his short greeting and question. A friend, apparently, though Yanko had a hard time imagining even Dak’s friends being that enthused at the sight of his dour face.
Yanko peeped around the edge of the door, wondering if the orb was audio only, or if the person’s face might display, as well. He glimpsed a plump, gray-haired woman’s face, before Dak turned toward him, his eyebrows raised. Yanko fought the urge to lurch guiltily back behind the corner and waved instead, mouthing, “Ready to go.” Of course, he wasn’t, not until Lakeo came down. He hoped the conversation continued for a while.
“Can I help you, young man?” the librarian asked, lowering her book. She had guessed his language correctly and spoke it flawlessly. She was the one he should have talked into helping with research.
“No, just waiting for a—” Yanko almost said friend, but that wasn’t quite the right relationship, was it? Spy? Bodyguard tricked into working for him? “Dak,” he finished.
“Very well. Please let me know if I can be of assistance.”
The Kyattese were all so polite. At least on the surface. Yanko wondered what happened if one pried into the past that they were supposedly tight-lipped about. He had only Dak’s word for that.
“Actually...” Yanko made sure Dak was still talking, then joined the librarian at the desk. “A friend and I were chatting—” he waved toward Lakeo and Akstyr who were walking down the stairs, Akstyr talking and Lakeo looking like she didn’t want to be talked to, “—and we were wondering where your people came from. Originally.”
The librarian did not, as Yanko might have expected, hunch her shoulders and glance around to see if anyone was listening. She simply said, “There are numerous theories. The original colony ships battled storms and great adversity to find their way to the home we now know and love, and they lost the records and some of their ships on the way here. Many believe we broke away from the nomadic Pyrkanese tribes in the south—they were quite the world explorers and left numerous fascinating ruins to study before disappearing from this world. Regardless, we don’t have extensive records of those early times. We’ve strived to make up for that by collecting and remembering more recent history.” She spread a loving arm toward the foyer and the various rooms opening from it, each full of books.
A collective lie? The only truth she knew?
“Thank you,” was all Yanko said. Dak had walked out of the office, and Akstyr and Lakeo were almost there.
Lakeo stopped at the desk, her pack hanging low on her back. It bulged at the seams. She must have stuffed all of those pamphlets into it. Akstyr hurried for the door, his hands in his pockets and a pack clinking on his shoulders.
“Akstyr,” the librarian said, her voice stern for the first time. Perhaps for Lakeo and Yanko’s sake, or because she had forgotten to switch back, she continued in Nurian, “Did you clean up whatever mess you made today?”
Akstyr’s shoulders hunched. “Yes,” he said.
“There are more appropriate places to work on your alchemy homework.”
“Whatever.” He started to slouch toward the exit, but Dak stopped him.
“Akstyr?”
Akstyr turned a wary, somewhat sullen expression toward him. “Yeah?”
Dak switched to Turgonian, his tone firm but not particularly judging or condescending. He had purchased one of those vials, after all.
“Huh?” Akstyr frowned at Yanko and Lakeo.
Dak spoke another few sentences, then made a shooing motion with his hand.
“What was that about?” Lakeo asked as she, Dak, and Yanko walked outside.
Colorful globes burned on lampposts up and down the walkways, brightening the way with an attractive mix of hues, but Yanko’s gaze was drawn toward the ocean as he searched for lights in the darkness out there, a sign of where that ship waited. He hoped the fact that it was floating out there instead of anchoring in the harbor meant it did not intend to come in and harass the Falcon’s Flight. Or anyone else. But maybe it was simply waiting until full darkness, so it could sneak into the harbor, unannounced.
“Akstyr will drive us to our lodgings for the night,” Dak said.
“He has a carriage?” Lakeo asked. “He barely looks like he can afford clothes. Those trousers were an inch shy of falling off his butt.”
“It’s not his.”
Before Dak could expound, a rickety open-walled and open-roofed carriage rolled around the corner of the building, the entire frame made from bamboo. The way Akstyr sat with his knees up to his elbows suggested it had been made for someone at least a half a foot shorter. Yanko wondered if Dak would be able to fit without hitting his head on the frame. Without comment, he clambered into the front beside Akstyr, banging his knee, his sword, and his head. He said something in Turgonian, and Akstyr snorted and gave a short reply.
Dak waved to the back, to a hard bamboo seat in front of the engine and a pulsing green power supply. Yanko and Lakeo climbed in.
“Where are we going?” Yanko asked as Akstyr coerced the vehicle into motion. It groaned under the combined weight, but trundled off toward the road obediently.
“The Komitopis plantation,” Dak said.
Lakeo shrugged. The name sounded vaguely familiar to Yanko, like he might have read it in a newspaper. He puzzled over it, but they were well out of the city and driving along a dark road overlooking cliffs and the ocean before the answer came to him. That was the surname of the Turgonian president’s Kyattese wife.
Chapter 14
The plantation lay several miles outside of the city, with few lights burning to show off the land, but Yanko smelled the mango and citrus orchards they passed and recognized fields of sugar cane crowding the road. It grew down by the coast back home, and he remembered a boyhood trip he had gone on with Great Uncle Lao Zun to harvest some for the baker back in the village. A twinge of homesickness filled him, and he found himself wondering if his family was all right and if they were missing him. Instead, he should have been concentrating on the fact that he was going to the homestead of someone who at best must be a Turgonian sympathizer.
Snores floated from Lakeo’s side of the seat. Apparently, she wasn’t worried.
Akstyr and Dak had been having a long, quiet conversation up front, and Yanko would have given his mother’s robe to be able to understand it. He couldn’t imagine what they might have in common, aside from their nationality. Akstyr didn’t seem like someone who responded well to authority figures or liked to talk to adults, even if he might be old enough to be one now.
Now and then, Dak glanced into the night behind them, and it made Yanko nervous every time. If these were some friends of his, then why would he bring trouble here? Unless he thought the people here were capable of handling it. Yanko didn’t think he had ever read that the Turgonian president’s wife was a practitioner, but maybe she had kin back here who were? Still, there was the mage hunter, as well as the warrior mage, after Yanko. Even a powerful magic-user could fall to an assassin’s blade.
They passed a bunkhouse with a couple of lights burning and men’s voic
es raising in laughter from inside. Beyond it, a large rambling house came into view, with magical lamps brightening the cleared land around it. Despite the size, its log walls made it feel more rustic than palatial, and it looked like it might house multiple generations of a large family, much like Yanko’s own home.
The plump, gray-haired woman whose face Yanko had glimpsed in the communication orb waited next to a swing hanging on the front porch, alongside a boy and girl his age or perhaps a little younger. Grandchildren? Another figure—a man in dark clothes—leaned against the wall on the other side of the door. He stayed in the shadows.
Akstyr rolled the open-air carriage to a stop in front of the steps, waved to the grandmother, and gave the teenagers a salute, the female one most likely. She smiled back at him, but seemed more curious about Dak, Yanko, and Lakeo.
“This is our port,” Dak said, hitting more body parts on the carriage frame as he climbed out.
“Greetings,” Yanko told the crowd as he stepped out, then attempted the salutation in Kyattese, as well.
The grandmother ambled down the stairs with the help of a cane and examined Dak. She plucked at his shirt, clucked her tongue, and said something that sounded like the Nurian equivalent of, “You’re as scrawny as a chicken leg. We’ll have to fatten you up.” It sounded grandmotherly, anyway, and Yanko almost choked. As brawny and tough as Dak was, it was hard to imagine anyone daring to mother him. Did he even have a mother? It seemed implausible. But he did not fight off the woman. He merely sighed and looked at the man in the shadows.
Yanko glanced at him, too, but was more curious about the teenagers because they wore a few magical baubles, and the girl carried a book the size of a small table. He couldn’t read the title in the dim lighting, but it had the heft and age of a Science tome. Maybe she was also studying to become a mage.
“You are from Nuria,” the man in the shadows said in Nurian.
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