by Lisa Daniels
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Table of Contents
Prologue-Serpent Isles’ Fall
Chapter One-Twenty - Five Years After Serpent Isle’s Fall
Chapter Two - Meridas
Chapter Three - Alex
Chapter Four - Meridas
Chapter Five - Alex
Chapter Six - Meridas
Chapter Seven - Alex
Chapter Eight - Meridas
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The Dragon’s Life Witch
Six Isles’ Witches and Dragons
Book 1
Prologue – Serpent Isle’s Fall
Meridas watched his home die. He was only nine years old, and his little sister, Vash, clung to him, silent and weeping, as they watched the island topple out of the sky. Other children spectated as well, with their parents, all of them standing together in a last vigil of the place that had been their home.
The skyship that transported them attempted to follow the falling island. The crew members yelled at each other, sails were adjusted, and the air witches manipulated the winds so that they descended with the island—though not as fast.
Mother was on that island. Mother didn’t have dragon magic, like Meridas and Vash and his father. She’d insisted on staying on the island, trying to heal the disease that infected the core. Even though all the other witches who had tried, died.
Nobody expected the island to fall so soon. They thought they had hours. Hours and hours. Vash continued to wail, and their father stood as still as stone, fists clenched, his bearded jaw taut as they followed the island to the ground. A muffled sound, like a distant thunderclap, tore through the air, and dust and debris rose from where the island collided into the ground. The streets beneath were crushed. Buildings gone in an instant.
Other dragon children on the ship began sobbing as well—some of them had relatives still on the island. Not everyone had the power to shift into dragons, even though their island had been known as the Serpent Isle. Home to most of their people, and father said it’d been for generations.
“Father,” Meridas said, unable to keep the fear out of his voice. “Is mother…?” He thought of his mother now, with her wavy black hair, and her long eyelashes and warm brown eyes. How happy she’d been with his father, even if he did hear them shouting at one another every now and then.
“Yes,” his father said, gruff. Tears welled in his father’s eyes, but they never spilled.
The airship eventually drew to a halt just above the ruined island. Buildings had crumbled from the fall, ornaments had smashed—Meridas could see the strange, bent-in architecture from their floating height.
They called the thing that killed their home the Creeping Rot. They said it hadn’t been heard of in centuries. Now it had come back, and the first thing it did was to destroy Serpent Isle, and ruin thousands of lives, above and below.
The Creeping Rot.
His face hardened, and his little fists imitated the clenching of his father’s. No one knew what to do—they all panicked and pretended everything was okay until it wasn’t. Everyone felt so helpless. He hated it.
He’d do something. His eyes briefly met with a young girl’s. Natalie. Her eyes were hard and icy. Her father had been on the island. Refusing to leave. They shared a moment of conviction between them.
He’d find a way to stop this awful thing—and never feel so helpless again.
Chapter One –Twenty-Five Years After Serpent Isle’s Fall – Alex
Being inside prison was lonely. Alex had spent most of her life trying to survive, always dreaming of making her way to the sky towns above. How many times had she crawled onto the roof of the soup kitchen, just to stare at the floating plateaus above them? The way such things were positioned as well, they blotted out big swathes of the Undercity, as if those who lived below were forced to live in the shadows of lords and royals. People below were reminded on a daily basis just how close the sky towns were, knowing that the rich, the wealthy, lived lives free of stress, starvation, thirst, and turmoil.
You could make it to a sky town to an empty house if you had ten thousand gold circs. Enough to buy a ticket on a sky ferry to a town, and to move straight into a property. Or if you registered yourself on the Sky Lottery, and paid a small tax each week for the hope of having your number drawn, the reward being a new life above.
Alex barely had enough money to feed herself, let alone put some aside for the sky lottery. She’d managed to save up a lot of circs at one point, but that got stolen. Of course it did.
She’d stayed with Mistress Sue her whole life, thankful for Mistress Sue taking her in. With Sue’s care, Alex grew up hating the people who abandoned her. She’d never quite dispelled that feeling, even now that she’d survived a few years into adulthood, and questions about her life kept coming. Mistress Sue did have one policy in life that Alex appreciated. It was that same policy that ensured Alex’s survival.
Many people went to Mistress Sue with unwanted babies. Some left them at the doorstep. Pay her five silver circs, and she’d take the baby, no questions asked. She even took the ones people didn’t give her money for, because she couldn’t stand seeing something tiny and helpless abandoned. Some babies got resold to barren mothers or bleeding hearts. Once a month, a cart came around for any who didn’t make it. It always made her sad when one of the little ones went, or a street kid came in with something chronic, and didn’t make it through the night. But unfortunately, people liked to leave their sick, ill, and unwanted infants.
People were cruel.
It’s the circle of life, Sue had said, smiling in her hard yet comforting way. We take those who are rejected, we look after them the best we can. All deserve a chance. But some of them will be sent Above too soon, no matter our efforts.
Alex was sincerely glad she never needed to be collected in a cart. Instead, she got to live with Mistress Sue and all the other children who had grown old enough to be useful, to beg on the streets for circs, to steal from those who guarded their money too loosely, and to pass messages to important people. Sometimes they gave messages to the sky people—the dragons who ruled the roost. In all of Alex’s twenty-four years, she’d never met a dragon personally. Though she had seen specks flying between the Six Isles when she sat on the roof to stare at the magical wonders floating in the air.
A guard passed by Alex’s cell. She banged on the door, glaring at him through the bars. “Hey! You there!”
The guard, who wore a dark gray suit and carried a sword tucked in a sheath, stopped and turned slowly to look at her.
“You know when I’ll die?” Her voice rasped from lack of use. She didn’t know what response to expect from the guard but was prepared for the worst.
The guard remained silent a moment, before he said, “Tomorrow. Sunrise.”
“Thanks,” Alex said. “And for not hitting me when I asked.”
The guard shook his head, brown eyes darkening. “Bad luck to hit a witch. Even one as scrawny as you.”
Alex
said nothing as the guard walked away, his posture rigid as he made the sign of protection for himself with his hands.
Tomorrow. She strained her mind, trying to imagine that. Tomorrow, and her thinking, breathing, living, would stop. And she’d end right up at the sky halls Above if she’d lived a good life. Or she’d be yanked into the Underland, where only witches and criminals and evil people went. She stared at her own hands, sad for a moment. So much wasted potential. A life not lived in the way she’d dreamed. She wanted to stop the cruelty, but that was a difficult mission for an orphan child, and an adult without connections outside of the slums.
She’d thought she was helping. The first time the magic ever coursed through her veins, it came when she knelt over the body of a dying kitten in the street. A sad, pathetic thing, still in need of a mother’s milk. She’d mistaken it for a wet sock at first, as it lay in a puddle in the gutter. Everyone else walked by, but something in her rose, powerful and laced with grief. Tears and that burning in her throat for a tiny, helpless thing, left to die. Like she was. Like many babies were, because their awful, disgusting parents couldn’t take responsibility for those they had brought into the world. To them, a life cost five circs. Five sky-cursed circs.
Although she wrapped the kitten up in her dirty clothes to try and dry it, she knew it to be a lost cause. At least, until that strange, detached feeling stole over her. It boiled underneath her skin, and somehow, she could sense exactly what was wrong with the kitten. Its heart fluttered weakly in her ears, as she sensed all its vitals within her, protected by some kind of invisible barrier. And then… she’d pushed. Put something of herself into the kitten. The heartbeat grew stronger, and it began to struggle in her hands. She found the mother a short while later, and left the kitten among its brothers and sisters, walking with a spring in her step back home.
Shortly afterwards, Alex tapped into that power again, to help the sickliest of babies. Mistress Sue had been so surprised when the death rate lowered, and delighted. And it felt damn, damn good to save those lives, to know they lived because of her.
Turned out, though, people didn’t like magic so much. The last person she had healed, an ill, syphilitic woman, had gone running straight to the cops when she realized she was cured. Instead of, you know, being grateful Alex had saved her worthless life, the stupid woman instead screeched at the cops that she was touched by a witch, that Alex had cursed her. In all the commotion, in broad daylight, there was nowhere to run.
They didn’t give Alex a trial. Apparently, just being accused as a witch was enough, and if people got a “funny” feeling around her. Or spotted witch-like signs on her, like the dimples in her cheeks, the lock of blonde in her otherwise dark hair, and her hazel eyes, not quite brown, not quite green, which were apparently “witch eyes.”
Alex pictured Mistress Sue, now. The big, matronly woman always felt larger than life. She rarely smiled to show her teeth, because several were missing from sugar rot. But she wore her apron, her top with rolled-up sleeves, which displayed powerful arms that could tuck perfectly underneath her chest. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to her. She reserved a sob of pity for herself, for this situation, before curling up under her thin blanket. She couldn’t sleep, not when her death loomed so near. So instead, her mind swirled through every single facet of her life, through the things she knew, and the things she wished.
If only she had more time.
* * *
She woke up to the sound of her cell door being opened on rusty hinges. So, she had managed to fall asleep after all. She yawned, and then froze when an immaculate figure, holding a glowing crystal of light, stepped into her dingy little cell. Framed in the brilliant white glow, the man contrasted in an almost horrific way to Alex. Where she wore dirty rags and was barefoot, spindly and wretched, this figure sported fine blue clothes that looked as though they’d never seen a speck of dirt. Probably wore more on his skin than everyone made in Mistress Sue’s house in a year.
Her initial shock faded into a kind of sullen jealously. “What d’you want?” she said, hating how dirty she felt in comparison to the man. The man with dark eyes, like pools of honey in the blaze. He had a clean face, free of hair all around, including his head. Large, expressive eyebrows. That head was so shiny it could probably reflect sunlight.
“Ugly little thing, aren’t you?” the man said, his expression fast turning disdainful. “The way the others described you, you should have the features of a demon. Not that they’d be right, anyway, with their ridiculous superstitions. The most monstrous thing about you is your filth.”
Anger spiked through Alex, and the two guards outside her cell seemed to hunch into themselves, as if expecting retribution. “You try living here for a few weeks. See how you smell, then.”
The man didn’t approach her, perhaps not wanting to get anywhere near her, as if her dirt was a noxious aura about her. Or maybe he was afraid of her magic.
“You’re to be executed tomorrow,” he said, with a curiously light voice. Perhaps someone from the Isles. Where else would he be from? Those in the Undercity rarely dressed like him. This was probably normal attire for someone in a sky town. “This is mostly unavoidable. Unless you are lucky, of course, to ascend above. All crimes are forgiven, then.” He gave a rather sinister smirk that made her edge away.
Wading through the fog in her mind, Alex struggled to comprehend what he’d just said. It was hard to think through stress, thirst, hunger, and fear, along with an unhealthy dose of anger. “So… what are you saying?”
“I’m saying,” he said slowly and deliberately, as if she was stupid, “that I might be willing to take you with me to the skies above. On one condition. Are you really a witch? Or just another unfortunate soul to be killed?”
The guards behind gave uneasy glances at one another.
“You’d leave me in my cell to die if I wasn’t one?”
“Yes,” he said.
Well, he was honest. She had to give him that. Even if that honesty sent a fresh wave of emotion through her. She realized, with a sinking feeling, that this stranger was offering hope. And she was desperate, pathetic enough to leap for it like a dog after scraps.
“I’m… a witch.” Witch sounded like such a nasty word. When the people started accusing her of being one, they spat the word as if it was a curse.
“And what did you do to get yourself locked in here in the first place?”
“M’lord,” one of the guards said, a tremulous note in his voice. “I wouldn’t listen to a witch, no sir. That demon will tell you anything to spare herself.”
The man, the lord, made an abrupt gesture with his hand, commanding the guard to be silent.
She licked her lips, wondering if this was all some kind of cruel joke, somehow. She wouldn’t exactly put it past these people. Yet… he was visiting her in the middle of the night. Holding an expensive glowing orb. They didn’t have those in the slums. She explained to the man as best as able, though she wasn’t exactly the most eloquent person around, that the woman she’d cured had been the one to tattle on her.
“You’d think she would be grateful,” Alex sneered, wishing she’d never touched that storming woman. “I saved her life, stopped her dying an awful death, though that disease was probably her fault anyway. And what does she do? Go screaming to the cops.”
Was it just her imagination, or did something fire up in those brown eyes? She bristled further.
“You claim,” he said softly, eyes glinting with that unknown emotion, “to be able to heal others. You claim that rare power that people can only dream of—and that others would kill you for.” He glanced at the guards, who continued to stand in that stiff, uncomfortable way.
“Sounds about right,” she said, now feeling an overpowering itch in her left nostril. She resisted the urge to scratch at it.
The bald man with the dangerous eyes reached for a small pocket inside his fancy blue jacket. He pulled out a knife, brought his free hand over it, and g
ripped the blade hard, until blood dripped along the metal, his hand, the floor. “Prove to me you can heal. Seal my wounds.” He took a few steps closer to her, ignoring the anxious words of the guards. His eyes never left hers. “I need more than words, little beggar.”
“I’m not a beggar,” she snapped. Mistress Sue had never left her in want of food or shelter. She never went begging with the other urchins. It was beneath her, groveling on the cobblestones as people laughed at her, mocked or beat her out of the way. Her attention drifted to the hand, and a small flicker of fear welled inside. What if she… couldn’t? She hadn’t done anything in weeks. She’d languished in this cell, wasting away, and no longer felt as strong as before.
I can’t fail this, she thought, watching as he stepped close enough for her to touch. His nose was wrinkled up in faint disgust, and she tried not to be irritated by that. Instead, she looked at his hand, at the tributaries of red, and willed herself to succeed.
“I need to touch you,” she said, and the disgust on his face became more pronounced.
“Not before you’ve washed your hands, you don’t. Guards. Have any of you water?”
Blank silence. Then one of them strode away, returning a moment later with a cup of water. He passed it to the lord, who told Alex to wash her hands. She was tempted to spit into the liquid but decided not to. Such impulses served her no use when it came to the potential preservation of her life. She was uneducated—not stupid. She splashed the water over her hands, then, when he seemed satisfied, rested her fingers upon his cut palm. She waited for the familiar sense to steal over her. The strange… extra perception that came with whatever it was she could do. From one heartbeat to the next, she worried that nothing would happen.
She felt the man’s pain like a localized barrier. It radiated from his hand, delivering to her a sudden bout of confidence. Yes. She could do it. She pushed against that barrier, demanding entrance, demanding for the skin to knit itself up, for the blood vessels to heal themselves. With an almost resigned sigh in her mind, the flesh conceded to her wish. It reknitted. She never understood why healing felt like that. That she had to battle against the body’s reluctance for an outside force to speed up its healing ability.
