“Not since Sebastian's attack you haven't.” She crossed her arms. A strand of shining black hair that had escaped her braid slid from her shoulder as she tilted her head, studying him.
Cedric didn't move. “How would you know whether I slept well or poorly?” His words were harsh, and Ashleen's mouth tightened in response.
“Because, Cedric, you look like that the next day.” She jabbed a slender finger toward the round, shining circumference of a decorative shield on the wall. Cedric glanced at it and saw his expression within.
She was right. Dark circles ringed his eyes. He looked haggard. He sighed and planted his face in his hands, rubbing vigorously. “I'm tired,” he said.
“Have you asked the apothecary for some tea to help with that?”
“It's not a weariness born of sleep-deprivation,” Cedric snapped.
“What then?” Ashleen asked quietly. She moved toward him, her slender fingers trailing the wood grain the whole length of the table.
Cedric stiffened, pivoting the chair so it stood between them. His hands tightened on it. “I—I don't know.” His voice sounded strangled. He couldn't explain. He wanted to tell her everything about how he felt he would never measure up. He wanted to spill his frustration about his father's double life. He wanted to ask her how he could be a king when there was so much risk that he would turn into a grasping, greedy monster like so many Andrachens before him. He wanted to tell her why they couldn't go on as they had before the battle—he could never place his own sons in the position he himself had been placed.
He'd worked hard to put space between them since the battle at ClarenVale, but instead of his feelings for her dissolving, they'd only expanded, rooting deeply inside him. He had to be stronger.
He wished he could be the King his people needed.
He knew a monster lurked inside him should he fail to live up to his own standards. He was terrified of failing.
“Ced.” The familiar nickname brought his gaze to hers. It was a mistake. Her black eyes were lodestones, pulling him around the chair he'd set up as defense, drawing him to her. In those eyes, he saw compassion. “You don't have to tell me. I understand.” Her rough, work-hardened hands reached for his.
Almost against his will, he curled his fingers around hers, staring at the white half-moon cuticles that arched across each nail. He drew in a shaky breath. “We—we can't do this, Ashleen.” There, the words were out. He hadn't spoken them before, even though he'd tried to show her by avoiding her for a month.
“Why not?” Her hands tightened on his, drawing his attention to her eyes. “Why can't we, Cedric? Help me to understand, because I can't.” Her voice had thinned, threaded with pain. Moisture darkened her thick lashes. “What stands between us?”
Cedric's pulse thundered. They were so close; a mere orlach separated them. He lowered his gaze. “The blood of a cursed family, Ashleen. Please... leave me alone.” He dropped her hands and stepped back.
She stared at him. Her lips trembled ever so slightly. “You are not your father, Cedric. You are not your uncle.”
Cedric's jaw locked. If only she knew how wrong she was.
Anger tightened her voice as she spoke again, her lips hardly moving. “Helga took me aside and told me to go with you, Cedric. She gave me the responsibility of being your guardian. An Andrachen guardian—”
“I've outgrown that requirement,” Cedric snapped. “I have no more need of a guardian.”
“The Andrachens have traditionally stayed with their protectors even after they come of age,” Ashleen's voice rose in pitch, covering Cedric's protests, “even though it's more of a symbolic relationship after they've reached their majority.”
“Be that as it may, Ashleen, my mother Shaya served as my guardian for most of my life, and she died. I never replaced her, because, in case you didn't notice, I was trapped in Sebastian's prisons for months before the battle at ClarenVale.”
“Just because she died doesn't mean you can't let anyone else close to you, Cedric!” Ashleen's strained shout echoed off the wall of the room. Stunned silence followed it.
Cedric stared at her. Her cheeks were flushed, and her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. Her nostrils flared, and at last she spoke in a near whisper. “She's asked me to do this, Cedric, and I will not fail her, not when she died for this cause. So whether you like it or not, I am the burr in your boot, and I will be on Ember's back with you when we go to regain the Amulet tomorrow.”
She did not give him time to respond. Whirling, she wrenched open the door and disappeared silently into the stone corridor outside, leaving Cedric alone with the bottomless depths of his frustration.
Cedric waved farewell to Kinna where she stood in the center of the stone courtyard. Ember's wings snapped outward and pushed Cedric, Ashleen, and Lincoln forward into the air above the Channel. “Take care of Linc!” Kinna shouted. “He comes back without a scratch!” The words hardly registered on Cedric's ears as the wind rushed past them.
The Pixie was dressed from head to toe in fire-resistant clothing. A muff covered half his face, and his hands drowned in thick gloves. He perched uncomfortably on a pile of thick blankets in front of Ashleen, nervously eyeing the flaming fin in front of him.
“Are you all right, Linc?” Ashleen shouted over the wind as they rose higher into the air.
“I'm liking Chennuh better all the time,” came the Pixie's shaky rejoinder. “His scales are hot, but nothing like these.”
“We'll be there before long,” Cedric called, but inside, doubts wormed through his mind. Helga had left a mission for him, taking the Amulet so it could be destroyed, and then robbing Sebastian's army payroll when that task was done. The second set of instructions did not worry him so much as the first. He didn't want to admit it, even to himself, but the Amulet called to him—like a Siren, it sang an irresistible song of security and power, neither of which he'd had much of in his lifetime. He slammed his mental doors shut on the desire. He would not continue the Andrachen curse; he would not be as his father and his uncle were before him.
He had no choice but to retrieve the Amulet, though. Kinna had insisted on strict adherence to Helga's final instructions. We owe this to her, Cedric. She had our best interests at heart, and we can see that what she had planned is accomplished.
He had no doubt that robbing the army payroll would be an effective means of crippling Sebastian's army from the inside out. To appease his sister, not only did he have to resist using the Amulet to claim his Andrachen inheritance (his own condition for retrieving it), but he also had to remove it from Helga's safeguards, and then—destroy it.
Helga had declared that the pendant could only be destroyed by one who had gleaned all four of its Touches, in conjunction with a Dragon and a Seer Fey—along with the knife that had been used in the Bond of Blood and Fire. But he had no idea all the details it involved, and he did not possess even one of the Amulet's Touches, much less all four.
This was his most unpleasant task—discovering how the Amulet worked and finding a way to destroy it. The only living person he knew of who had gleaned even some of the Touches was Sebastian. The one other he knew of was dead.
He put the thought behind him. He had lived with his twin's pain over Ayden's death for the last month, and he refused to dwell on it further.
“Cedric,” Ashleen called against the wind, “get Ember to smother his scales across the Channel, or we'll be a beacon for Sebastian in this night sky.”
A squeak of agreement drifted forward from Lincoln, and Cedric grimaced, wishing Ashleen far away from him, and yet wishing her in front of him where he could close her in his arms and breathe the clean fir scent of her hair. His jaw cramped before he realized he was gritting his teeth.
“Ember,” he murmured, not needing to repeat the instructions. Ember already focused on extinguishing his flames, but the strain cut through both of them. Ember Dragons could put out their own fiery scales with intense concentration, but it wa
s quite difficult, nearly as difficult as it would be for Cedric—if he focused hard enough—to make his fingernails grow.
The flaming scales beneath Cedric's hands died down to a brassy sheen in the moonlight. He smothered a sigh as he glanced below. Along the western shores of Lismaria, several of Sebastian's ships berthed in various ports, some with flags flying, signaling that the crew was aboard and prepared to set sail if ordered.
War time, Cedric thought. A king must never show weakness, even when he suspects his enemies of the same fault. Sebastian must not have learned of Helga's death yet. Otherwise, he would have pressed his advantage and sent another fleet for a secondary attack. Cedric's thoughts turned dark as he considered the weakened country he'd left behind.
“Commander Lanier has mustered the remainder of his men in the garrison at The Crossings and along the coasts of the Forgotten Plains,” Ashleen called as though reading his thoughts. “If Sebastian attacks, he will not find West Ashwynd empty.”
Cedric turned. “Must you do that?”
“What?” Her too-innocent face smirked at him.
“Anticipate me.”
“Can't help it. I've gotten good at reading you.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but she cut him off, pointing. “There,” she called. “Below.”
In the moonlight that painted the ridges of Lismaria's Marron Mountains, the Silver Rush River glinted through a split in the trees. Due west of ClarenVale, Helga had said. Cedric guided Ember downward, his memories awash with thoughts of the last time he'd been here. He'd fled Sebastian's men and a Cerberus, trudging through the waters upstream to throw them off his and Ashleen's scent.
He'd nearly lost her.
Cedric couldn't explain even to himself his feelings regarding Ashleen. He only knew that he could not, should not, have her. He could not tie her into a bond with him when a blood curse hung over him. He had wanted to tell her why he couldn't, but he knew she would not accept his reasons, and so he hadn't tried; he'd only shut her out, communicating without words that she would never fill that part of his life—even though he needed her, even though he felt the smallest nudge at the back of his mind that told him if he lost her, he would lose himself as well.
The thought of losing her terrified him. But the thought of making his past her future, her reality, terrified him even more. Once he and Ashleen completed Helga's assignment, he would leave her—with good people, a good life, and he would try to make his own life elsewhere, far away. Helga had said he had to claim the Andrachen throne.
Not if he could help it.
He guided Ember into the river with a quiet splash. The Dragon snorted when the cool water washed over his talons before he allowed his scales to light again.
The high banks of the river rose above Ember's head, and above those, the overarching trees. “Upstream, Ember. North,” Cedric murmured amid the sound of the rushing water. “We're due west of ClarenVale as Helga said. Keep your eyes sharp for a gatekeeper.”
Ashleen shifted, her dark gaze scanning among the trees above them, her sable lips pulled in a tight line as she slid her bow from her shoulder and reached for her quiver on her back. She pulled one arrow free and nocked it in her bow string, every line of her body tense.
The instructions to reach Helga's taibe maze had seemed blindingly simple, but now Cedric wondered what the taibe safeguards were. He had been so focused on finding the gatekeeper and dreading retrieving the Amulet that he hadn't given much thought to the actual maze.
Helga had told them that Lincoln would have to provide a touch of taibe to open the maze; the gatekeeper, despite having taibe, could not.
Lincoln's gaze, while flickering nervously off the Dragon and over the banks and the trees, shone with the frenetic light of purpose. After opening the taibe maze, Helga had commanded him to find his daughter. Marigold had been Cedric's caretaker for his short stay in Nicholas Erlane's apothecary quarters, and Cedric knew some animosity existed between father and daughter. Marigold had been left by Lincoln to be raised by a steelworker and his wife in the lower city of ClarenVale. Though she had kept her bitter story mostly to herself, Cedric had read between the lines. She'd felt deserted, abandoned, and unloved.
Ember pushed upstream, squeezing through narrow gaps where his enormous bulk barely fit, crashing through shallows, swimming through depths. The river widened, and then the current changed.
Cedric noticed the current at the same time as Ember, who backstepped in confusion. The waters collided in the middle of a swirling pool mid-river, splashing in the air in high arcs.
Ashleen, heedless of the boulders that crested the surface of the swirling water, leaped free of Ember's back and splashed into the stream bed, the water tugging at her buckskin-encased thighs. She trailed her fingers through the liquid, glancing up at Cedric. “That's odd. Here,” she pointed, “the water flows downstream. Here,” she motioned a span to the north, “it flows upstream.”
Cedric swung his leg over Ember's back and slid from the Dragon, his boots splashing into water just past his knees. The force of the current nearly pushed him over. Cedric kicked aside a large rock that settled loosely in the water, surprised again by the surge that washed around his boots. “It's almost as if—”
“As if the water is coming up,” Ashleen said, her eyes dark in the little light cast from Ember's scales.
Ember was edgy and uneasy; he beat his wings, spreading them wide across the moving water before furling them again on his back. Smoke ringed from his nostrils as he snorted in protest.
Ashleen pulled her boot up to move it to another rock, and the resulting spray of water jerked Ember two steps upstream. He crashed into Cedric, knocking him into the water. Cedric sat up, sputtering. Lincoln had vaulted from the Dragon's back and waded through the water. He helped Cedric to his feet, and the three of them stumbled to the riverbank.
Cedric stared at the swirling, disturbed pool and studied the top of the banks.
“Do you see the gatekeeper?” Lincoln asked as he steadied himself against the steep sides. “Surely, we have reached the maze.”
“Well-spotted, Lincoln. I knew you had it in you. Aye, you have come to the right place, Cedric Andrachen.”
The voice behind them startled Cedric. He whirled around, his hand on his sword. An old woman bent over a gnarled walking stick, her equally gnarled fingers grasping it. Her whitened eyes stared over his head, and her dark mantle draped over vivid purple hair.
A Seer Fey. “You are the gatekeeper,” he said. It was a statement; there was no doubt that this was Helga's Seer Fey sister who guarded the taibe maze. “What must I do to enter?” he asked.
If he had expected a straightforward answer, he was disappointed. Instead, the crone chanted:
Brave, courageous you must be,
That, you see, is the key.
Death awaits, Andrachen heir,
Death and ash, so take a care.
He with greed for pow'r and might
Will ne'er have chance for second sight.
He with heart for others will
The line of Dragons yet fulfill.
Two obstructions thou must pass,
Water first and fire last.
If you live past water's surge,
Then you'll die when flames do purge.
The Seer Fey bowed her head, and the mantle draped over it so Cedric could no longer see her features. She neither moved nor spoke again.
“Well,” Lincoln commented, “that was informative. As always, Kayeck.” He grinned at the unresponsive Seer Fey before kicking the toe of his boot through the water. “Helga said I must open the gates with Pixie charm. Shall I try it?”
Cedric eyed the swirling water. It funneled downward in the middle of the pool. Ember snorted uneasily. Cedric patted the Dragon's flaming neck. “It's okay, Ember,” he murmured. “We'll get through it together.”
“I'm ready when you are,” Ashleen said, hooking her bow more tightly over her shoulder and adjusting
her quiver.
Cedric jerked his gaze to her, his eyebrows lowering. “You're waiting here with Linc until I get back.”
“No, I'm not,” Ashleen said, her black eyes sparking dangerously. “Helga said the magic will fight against you and you alone. I'll be fine. And you'll need help.”
“It may fight against me, but that doesn't mean you won't feel the effects of it, Ashleen. The safeguards are life-threatening. The Seer Fey,” he gestured to the motionless crone, “said as much. I—” He choked, terrified, not at the thought of what he would face, but at the knowledge that Ashleen would go with him; he could not stop her. He read it in her eyes, and no matter what he said, he would not convince her. But would she survive? “You cannot come, Ash.”
“How dare you tell me what to do?” Ashleen cried, fury washing across her expression.
“Because I—” He stumbled to a stop. He had been about to say, I am your King, before he remembered he wished to disown his Andrachen heritage. It wouldn't matter in the least to Ashleen. She did not see his position or title. She saw only him, his heart.
She saw too much.
Cedric crossed his arms, not looking away, refusing to back down.
She didn't, either. “I'm going.” She glared at him.
Fury flooded the air with tension.
Lincoln tentatively cleared his throat. “I'm opening the gate, Your Grace.” Lincoln glanced back and forth between the two of them.
Neither moved. “Don't call me that, Linc.” Cedric's words lashed at the Pixie.
“Apologies. Cedric, then.” He spread his hands in a placating manner. “As soon as you enter the maze, I'm heading for ClarenVale, all right?”
Tense silence met his words. Cedric's jaw cramped. Ashleen's face flushed. Furious tears sparkled on her lashes. Cedric refused to feel pity. He needed her alive.
“Well then, here goes,” Lincoln said. His voice changed, and Pixie charm began to resonate through his words.
Water dark and moist with foam,
Open up to those who roam
To seek your wide and turgid face.
Unleash the Inferno (Heart of a Dragon Book 3) Page 7
