by Dan Allen
The daggers, with their special counter-curved, wrist-catching handles did not rip from his hands, but the force of the impact knocked him into a backward roll and the airfoil collapsed around him like a snare trap, plunging Terith into darkness.
The champion rider tucked, continuing the roll until the chute popped out behind him as he spread his limbs, face to face with the deep. Already surrounded by fog, Terith pulled his left arm and leg in, loosening the chute on that side. He sailed sideways until he collided with the slick rock wall of the canyon.
No ivy hung there, where the dense fog dimmed the sunlight.
Terith scraped along the rock, shredding leather, until the slope weakened and he ground to a halt at the edge of the bog. The foggy air was rich with the stench of decaying ivy and fallen rotted fruits that piled in the slime-ridden swamp.
Terith choked on a lungful of fumes and quickly loosed the rings from his heel hooks. He turned and ran back along the edge of the cliff in the direction of the stone bridge. The rock ended abruptly at a short drop overlooking the bubbling mire of the bog.
A buzzing hum sounded from that direction. A cloud of the thumb-sized white, translucent biting flies rose up out of the bog, like a horde of winged piranhas. Terith froze, hoping the flies could only sense motion, but the bulged, segmented eyes had already fixed on their target. The bloodthirsty flies ricocheted off each other in their frenzy to get the first taste of flesh.
The hell-born greeting party made a buzzing drone so loud Terith could hear nothing of the battle between the dragons on the bridge.
Hope for dragon salvation from the sky on hold, Terith pulled up his mouth cover and spun the cloak over him. Dropping to his knees, he tucked the dragon-wing cloak under himself. Moments later, he was pummeled from all sides by incessant flies. The cloak plucked outwards as the feeding frenzy commenced in vain.
Terith’s mind swam as the awakening dimmed.
The lightweight dragon-wing skin wouldn’t keep them out forever, and the longer he hid, the larger the horde of flies would grow.
A crash sounded nearby, a mean thump of flesh on stone.
Terith shot to his feet and whirled the cloak, flinging hundreds of flies outward. He ran in the direction of the fallen dragon.
The limp mass showed vaguely ahead of him through the fog as flies pummeled his arms, neck and legs, looking for the tears and weak spots in his leather coverings. Terith’s heart leapt at the sight of the headless green neck oozing blood.
She tore off its head!
Terith dove under the carcass of the defeated dral as the flies diverted toward the source of the dragon blood. The useless tendon-severed wing flopped limply as he hid himself underneath it.
The diversion wouldn’t last for long. They would find him eventually.
“Fire. I need dragon fire,” Terith muttered, feeling along the dragon’s broken ribs. He moved his hands lower to the abdomen. Scraping back a palm-sized scale, he plunged his knife under it, making a tear in its underbelly. He sheathed the knife and stuck his hand into the belly cavity, reaching as far as he could.
A rope-like shape met his fingers, its gullet. He gripped it. Sliding his hand down, he found the ragoon pouch, the dragon’s second stomach. Terith widened the hole with the knife in his other hand and pulled the gallon-sized stomach out through the hole.
It was full. This was a mating dragon just back from the sacred plain.
He cut it free, wincing as the acrid odor seared his eyes and throat. Terith quickly tied a knot in the severed back end of the pouch. Tucking it under his arm like a bagpipe, he wrapped his hand around the throat section and kicked back the wing of the dral.
The storm of flies converged on him.
He squeezed the pouch and sprayed liquid fire into the air in a wide arc, lighting the deep in a firestorm of self-combusting fumes. Like living fireworks, hundreds of the grotesque translucent flies darted blindly for cover, burning as they went, their bodies screaming and popping in the searing blaze.
Terith ran up the slimy side slope, following a seam in the moss-laden rock. Rivulets of vile condensation ran down the stone where the slope steepened into a sheer cliff. The seam in the rock narrowed rapidly to a finger crack. Terith was at a dead end.
Buzzing sounded again, growing louder with each desperate breath that Terith pulled from the dank air in the deep. He whistled three times calling for his dragon.
Nine heart-wrenching seconds later, Akara soared silently downward through the mist, the severed head of the dral still clenched between her jaws. Turning her back to the cliff wall, she beat her wings in a two-beat hover, blasting a fleet of flies back into the shadowy darkness below.
Terith leapt from the rock onto her back. As her strong wings carried him out of the fog, Terith welcomed the sunlight like an old friend he thought he might never see again. His heart beat heavily with the rush of the fall, the fight, and the thrill of his escape from the deep.
Ferrin’s soldiers had come out onto the bridge. They waved and cheered as Akara rose out of the deep and over the bridge.
Terith dismounted when she neared the base of a waterfall-
powered supply lift to save her the extra weight and conserve energy for the race. For a dragon, climbing altitude with a rider on its back was no less difficult than a man carrying another person up a hill.
Terith climbed into the wicker basket elevator, and with Akara gliding on the thermals, they rose together.
A loud crowd had gathered at the top platform. Apparently somebody had seen him jump and word had spread quickly. Out of the rancor of shouts, a familiar voice caught his attention.
“Just what do you think you are doing?” Tanna bellowed, dragging him by his collar from the wicker basket at the top of the fall. “The race starts in twenty minutes.”
“I was just warming up. And there’s a bit of ceremony at first, we’ll be fine.”
“Not funny.”
“The dragon-wing cloak works, by the way,” Terith said, grinning from ear to ear.
“Shut up and put this on.” She shoved the chest harness at him, turning up her nose. “You reek like second hell!”
Terith buckled the harness and then pulled the leather thread waistband off Tanna’s dress.
“Terith!” she snapped angrily as Terith wrapped the leather cord around the end of the of dral stomach.
“Dragon fire,” he explained. “Can’t have it leaking on me.”
Tanna scowled. “A lot of trouble you are.”
“The blood on your knives makes for a nice bit of intimidation,” Werm added, hurrying alongside them as the crowd, including a surprising number from Neutat, thronged Terith on the path to the clearing in front of the keep. “What’s that Akara has in her mouth?” Werm asked, gesturing at the severed dral head.
“Breakfast. You hungry?”
“Er, no.”
Werm loaded a pack onto Terith’s back as they moved along the quarter-mile shortcut to the keep. “There are three whistlers in there: one sharp-tipped, two with tether lines, plus the torch for the cave. Only one problem—how are you going to light the things?”
Terith patted the dral stomach. “I’ve got it covered. Everything else ready?”
“Ready,” Werm said. “Just finished setting up your start.”
“One more thing,” Tanna added, “the signal beacons on the south range were lit last night. The horde is on the move again. The southern patrol didn’t get back before I left so we don’t know how far north and west the Outlanders have come.”
“This is early in the season for the Outlanders to bring trouble,” Werm grumbled. “Doesn’t bode well.”
“I’ll worry about the horde after the race,” Terith said, adopting Ferrin’s “tradition before trouble” philosophy. His mind was focused on one thing.
Terith and his friends rolle
d out from the forest trail and dissolved into an even larger crowd. Montazi crowded the landing area outside the keep for the start of the challenge. By Terith’s estimate, there were over three thousand spectators lodged up in trees and camped on the sloping hillside above the green. Some poorly supervised teens made a show of wandering dangerously close to the winged terrors.
The dragons were all free of their enclosures, held only by insignificant rope tethers.
With the ceremony on the verge of starting, Terith strode purposefully across the grassy space. Eyes turned as he marched past, the spectators whispering and pointing at the arms of his leathers that were stained to the elbows with glistening dragon blood.
“What’s this nonsense?” Pert said.
“Just tidying up a bit.”
“He’s been down by the bridge,” hissed one of Pert’s henchmen, coming up behind the short, stout menace to whisper in his ear.
“Setting traps, are you?” Pert accused.
“Actually, I was saving your hide. There was a dral waiting underneath the first bridge. I took care of it for you.”
“What a story, Terith. Did you kill a sheep and pour blood on your hands? Rather pathetic.”
Terith ignored Pert, but took a spot at the far end of the row of nine other challengers that had lined up in front of the opening of the keep. The reek of dragon gore turned noses as he went. “Ah, here she comes,” Terith said merrily.
Akara flew low over the crowd, sending children under their mothers’
skirts. Gleaming golden in the noon sun, she landed with a thump and hurled the still-dripping dral head into the center of the clearing.
Flaring her wings, her face turned in a long arc screaming a loud, “Ree-at! Chit-chit-chit!” It was a posture of absolute dominance—
a threat and a challenge. Terith blessed her for it. It was a charade since she had no fire.
Bergulo and Werm worked to subdue her as the other dragons shifted their weight uneasily from foot to foot. Three of the dragons tucked their wings in a display of submission, to their riders’ embarrassment. The dral stared unblinkingly at Akara, flexing its claws. Pert’s velra hissed and raised its head, stretching its neck out, begging a fight.
“She’s looking prime, mate!” Werm shouted eagerly, as he worked his way back through of the crowd toward Terith and the other nine challengers. “And she’s in a good mood, too.”
Pert glared at Terith from the center of the group.
That was when Terith felt it, a black presence probing him, jabbing at his consciousness.
Terith resisted the feeling of doubt and pitiful lack of ability that seemed to drain out his confidence like a slashed water skin. He felt exposed, guilty, weak. It’s just a trick.
“Not feeling well, runt?” Pert grunted from outside Terith’s reach.
The horror felt as real as festering battle wounds or the poison of bad meat in his stomach. It was an incapacitating, indomitable feeling of total failure.
Terith struggled to call up the awakening. So soon after he had exhausted its strength, no light came to his mind. Darkness seemed to close in around him like a wall, even as Ferrin stood upon a platform to make his speech. His words echoed in Terith’s mind, behind the dark curtain Pert had closed around him.
“Greetings, all.” Ferrin proceeded to introduce each of the challengers one by one.
Terith struggled for breath. Hurry up. Shallow, gasping breaths and a sudden dizziness forced Terith to put his arm on the challenger at his side to keep from falling.
“Hands off,” the man said angrily, knocking Terith’s bloody hand from his shoulder and shoving him away.
That was the trigger. The light flooded the horizon of Terith’s consciousness. He pushed back on the bands of darkness. Chest heaving a deep breath of fresh Montas air, Terith stood tall, defying Pert’s dark attack on his mind.
I’ll have to keep my distance.
“Gomder, champion of the fine southern city of Cafertat,” Ferrin announced to a smattering of applause. The somewhat scrawny rider next to Terith raised his arm then glared at Terith. He was the son of the annoying businessman that had bothered Terith at the feast.
He decided to keep an eye on him. Pert would have paid or threatened riders to gain allies in the race, and the bitter young southern rider with the picked-on look was too easy a target for Pert’s domination.
“And lastly, Terith, champion of Neutat.”
Terith raised his crimson fist into the air as a roar louder than the dragons sounded from the crowd. Looking over the faces, he realized nearly the entire village of Neutat had come to watch.
Terith smiled as the crowd continued to cheer, heedless of Ferrin’s inaudible calls for order.
“Silence!” Pert cried imperiously, with a voice that rocked the air like a cannon shot.
The crowd fell into a stunned quiet.
“The rules are simple,” Ferrin stated. “There will be no other rules.” He read from a leather scroll, “Each challenger’s dragon must pass all the obstacles—under the first bridge, over the second, through the tunnel of Drimwood, over the summit of Candoor—and retrieve a token. The dragon must return and its rider must enter the keep alive before noon on the second day and present the token.
“Each successful champion will be given the right to choose their mates in order of their arrival from among the eligible,” he gestured to the collection of alluring and, most importantly, powerfully talented women gathered on the opposite side of the clearing from the riders.
This year, at their father’s behest, both Lilleth and Enala were among the eligible, a nominally wise move to placate someone like Pert who might otherwise make a bitter enemy if they lost. But unless Pert took an unlikely third place, one of his daughters was doomed to a union with the twisted demon. Ferrin’s sacrifice to keep the realm together threatened to destroy his family.
Anger at Pert welled up inside Terith as Ferrin spoke about the consequences of killing another rider.
“If a rider is slain by direct action of another challenger, the challenger responsible must accept the burden of the slain’s debt, dealings, and defense of their village until another champion is chosen.”
“Spoils of war,” Pert said matter-of-factly, face forward, in the hearing of all the challengers.
Terith clenched his jaw.
“Riders to your mounts!” Ferrin called.
Pert knocked a few riders aside to command the point position in the group as challengers raced across the clearing, fanning out to their dragons.
Terith leapt on Akara and caressed her jaw. “Got something left for the race? Hmmm?”
She licked blood off her teeth, eyes alight, stretching her wings.
“Ride with the light,” Bergulo said. “May you live to see the dragons return.”
“May the dragons return.”
Terith looked across the clearing. Enala was already in tears. Lilleth held her against her chest. Other eligible women waved to their favored champions.
Ferrin cried out, “Begin!”
Chapter 15
Erdali Realm. Citadel of Toran.
Putting aside her fear, Reann forced herself to keep up her regimen of research with Verick. She was rapidly running out of time, and progress toward finding an heir that would take the throne was painfully slow.
It would have gone infinitely faster if Verick wasn’t so tight-lipped about the clues in the notebook of his that he regularly perused. He only occasionally shared tidbits with Reann.
It was pure torture. Her life was ending. She needed those notes.
A week after Trinah’s ceremony, Verick sat across from Reann in the library, his feet on the table, looking pleasant and pleased.
How could she get his trust?
Reann had even considered telling him about Trinah, if only to endear her
self more to him. But she was locked up inside about that. She had been burnt by a fire she didn’t know how to control and wasn’t ready to throw in more fuel.
The mid-summer gala, the solstice festival in honor of Toran’s birthday, approached. The head butler had already come to remind her that the debt Toran’s estate owed for her grandfather’s military service would be paid up when she officially became of age.
“One week,” he had said, not giving the traditional offer for a permanent staff position. “Then you will pack your things.”
Reann looked over to Verick and caught him stealing a glance at her, something that filled her with strange feelings she didn’t want to process.
Should she allow herself to enjoy his attention? Should she hate him?
Should she hate herself for wanting something she shouldn’t?
Should she just stop worrying?
Reann lifted a small document folder and fanned her neck to cool herself, but it wasn’t the overcast weather that was hot.
Verick looked up from studying the notes that he never let out of his grasp. It was torture not knowing what those notes held: clues to the heirs and possibly clues to Verick’s intentions and his past.
“Reann, what do you know of the Witch of Essen?” he asked.
Reann stopped fanning. “On what topic?”
“Her relationship with Toran, if you please,” Verick replied.
Reann considered it. “It’s complicated.” She stood and paced slowly into the center of the circle of comfortable reading chairs. “Of course you know she was the twin sister to Tira, the witch queen of Hersa.”
“I do,” Verick said.
“Then you must also know that Toran was once betrothed to Tira. Their fathers had promised an alliance: Toran and Tira would marry and produce a joint heir,” Reann added.
“Yes, I had heard as much,” Verick admitted. “Though I thought it might have been only a rumor.”
“Toran and Tira had a falling out,” Reann said. “Then Tira was exiled by the Serbani magicians for some sort of treachery or other—
