by N. M. Howell
“If we were able to find the dragonborn we were going to head back to the source. Arvall City. If we can stop the lies there, then we can stop the vicious rumors in their tracks. Overcoming the University and Arvall should be our top priorities. There’s no way the University could go ahead with its designs if it can’t get the support of its own city. And from there it’s a domino effect.”
“You make it sound simple, but it’s going to be the hardest thing we’ve ever done. These people have been having nightmares about the dragonborn for hundreds of years. And the University took that fear and multiplied it. Every day we wait the lies grow stronger, become more real. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“You’re going to bridge the gap,” Saeryn said. “Between your time and ours. You’ll have to convince them that we’re good, that we mean well, and that we seek the same peace they feel they now have to fight for. We want nothing but to find a new home and begin to rebuild. We are not the monsters and it’s important that they understand that they are not the monsters either. Aside from a few obvious differences, we’re really not so dissimilar. But I won’t presume to teach you how to do your job, you’re already sacrificing so much. I won’t take your autonomy on top of it all. I have faith in you.”
“So, Arvall?” Andie asked.
Saeryn offered a small smile. “To Arvall.”
The three nodded and there wasn’t much to say after that. Andie walked Saeryn back up onto the upper deck. Oren and the captain had moved outside and were discussing something in great depth. Oren looked thrilled to see Andie, and even happier to see that Raesh was not with her.
“I think our best bet is to go back on foot,” the captain said.
“What?” Andie said. “Why? We can’t go back on foot that would take too long.”
“Oren here was telling me that the river turns south a few kilometers further.”
“But I thought it went straight until it hit the coast?”
“I’m afraid that was our doing,” Oren said. “In creating our caverns and tunnels we’ve had to displace a great deal of soil and stone. In addition, the erosion of the lowest peak has pushed the river into a new direction.”
“But that shouldn’t matter anyway. We can just turn around and go back the way we came.”
“We can’t, Andie,” the captain said. “The Nathair has one of the strongest currents in Noelle. If we opened the ships engines to their max we could probably fight a good way back, but with the ship working that hard we’d run out of fuel before we even made it halfway. Even if we did have the fuel, I’d never try to push the ship through the Gray Fold coming from this direction. It’d be suicide. If we keep on the direction we’re going now, at a moderately increased speed that will cut down time but not burn too much fuel, we could make the coast in two weeks, but then we have to sail all the way around the bottom side of Noelle to get back to the port at Arvall.”
“Captain, are you telling me that there’s not a single stream or river we can take to get back any faster?”
“This isn’t a commercial river, Andie. The current is just too strong. Once you’re on it you’re on it until your reach the end. There are a lot of tributaries, but they’re all flowing too strongly in the wrong direction, making too many delaying twists and turns, or too small.”
“How long will it take to sail around Noelle, once we reach the coast?”
“At least three weeks. We’ve got to travel down the coast and then turn west to come around. We turn north when we pass New Carthage.”
“I’m terribly sorry for our inconveniencing you,” said Oren.
“No, it wasn’t you. Even if the river was still running the way it used to, we’d be in trouble.”
“How long would it take you and the passengers to cross on foot?”
“I would take a few days to cross these lands safely. After that it would simply depend on what kind of transportation we could get. I’m not familiar with the area, but this is the most rural part of Noelle and I doubt if anything is coming through this region that can carry all five hundred plus of us at once. So, I’m guessing we’d be walking most of the way.”
“That’s too long,” Andie said. “We need to get back now. We’ve already waited too long.”
But they were out of ideas. They knew that the University was already preparing to reopen soon as a military training ground and that would be the end of everything. The dragons could cover the distance easily and rapidly, but there was no way the creatures could carry the dragonborn warriors and the Council fighters. The dragons were strong enough, but there wasn’t enough space. They talked it over a bit more, but when nothing viable came up they decided it was finally time to call it a night.
“Andie, we’ll come back and speak with you tomorrow,” Saeryn said. “Enjoy your time with your friends.”
“Actually, I...”
Andie didn’t know how to say what she wanted. She missed her friends, all of them new and old, but there was no possibility of her staying on that ship overnight. She’d told Raesh that she would be staying the night, but she hadn’t meant it. When he asked her, he’d had a look on his face that almost begged her to stay with him; he seemed as if he was either afraid himself or was totally against her going back up on the mountain with Oren. Andie wasn’t an idiot. She’d noticed the looks they’d been giving each other, which was stupid because she didn’t even know Oren, and Raesh was... Well, Raesh was Raesh.
Truth be told, Andie did want to stay with Raesh. Just to talk with him and laugh with him, and maybe pretend for just a night that things were the way they used to be when she was a scared first-year student at the Academy and he was the flirty-but-sweet boy who helped his father around the restaurant. But she couldn’t stay on that ship, not with a traitor on-board who was potentially one of her closest friends. She didn’t know who to trust. And if the traitor truly had as much power as they were beginning to believe that person did, then Andie couldn’t risk getting others get hurt in an attempt on her life.
“I’m going to go back up with you,” Andie said, raising her voice as several bolts of lightning came down nearby. “I don’t know who to trust on this ship and every time I think about it, it just gets worse.”
“But what about your... what about Raesh?” Saeryn asked.
“He’ll understand,” Andie said. “Will you tell him, captain?”
“Of course.”
Andie mounted up behind Oren, and he and Saeryn lifted off and cut through the flashing sky. As the lightning curled through the air around her and the thunder ripped through time and space, Andie began to seriously think about the future of the fight. For all she knew the traitor could have converted others by now, could have devised an entire plan to wipe them all out before they made the coast.
The spy had the advantage of anonymity and of knowing exactly what the University was planning. The only kink that had happened so far was that the person had been locked up because they got too eager and performed the spell in the same room with Andie. But if the person managed to find out Andie’s destination without being in the control room, there was no definitive way of saying that they had to be in the room in order to cast the spell. She simply didn’t know what to think.
When they finally made it back to the mountain, Andie went straight to the area that had been given to her to live in. She said some parting words to Saeryn and nodded to Oren, and then left in such a way that everyone knew she was asking not to be bothered again that night.
Andie tried to think of a plan, any plan with any outcome, just something to keep her mind busy, but she couldn’t. All she could think of was the peace of mind she’d lost and all the lives on that ship that were suddenly susceptible at the hands of a traitor. She wondered how someone could be that evil.
It was easy to understand why Chancellor Mharú and his cohorts were so against the dragonborn: they had been raised to hate them. They had known nothing but that hate since birth and since the dragonborn wer
en’t around to defend themselves, the people had no reason to change the way they felt. But the traitor had lived among people who felt otherwise, people who knew how kind and how beautiful the dragonborn were. This person had made a conscious decision to brutally betray everything and everyone surrounding them. They had put the lives of hundreds of Council fighters at stake and could potentially doom the dragonborn if not unmasked soon. And if the traitor was successful and provided the University with the things it needed to grow, that would be the end of Noelle as they knew it.
And the University itself was a whole different kind of evil. They were proud of the systematic genocide that had been carried out centuries before and wanted to bring it back again. They had no proof that the dragonborn were who they thought they were—they just wanted them dead, gone. Andie couldn’t believe she had ever trusted that place to teach her, to educate her about her own people, her own power. Failing to get anything done, physically or mentally, Andie put out her light and laid down.
But sleep did not come. Her mind wouldn’t stop working, worrying. And when she finally did manage to forget about those things for a moment, a crushing nostalgia set in. What she wanted more than anything that night was to make things revert to the way they used to be. She wanted to go back to Michaelson, before the Academy, before dragons, before the battle in the Archives, before that little room over Marvo’s restaurant, before her father’s accident, to the time when she and her parents were a family. When they were whole.
She wanted her mother back, the woman she was forgetting more and more as time went on. Sometimes, late at night when she was alone and pretending to be asleep, Andie could almost feel her mother’s arms around her. She could hear her voice, smell her, and even see her there next to her, smiling. But most of the time that woman was a kind of void inside of Andie, something that had existed too long ago to leave as lasting an impression as she wanted. Andie wondered what her mother would have to say if she were there with her, if she could see the way the world was so eager to hate and slow to accept.
Andie knew the University wanted to win the unanimous support of Noelle before opening the military facilities. Raesh had told her about some of the news they picked up along the Nathair. The University had almost finished constructing the newest facilities and adapting the old ones. Soon it would become the perfect training place for killers driven by fear. It would also become the perfect fearmongering institute, undoubtedly the first of many.
The University knew how to manipulate fears—they had been doing it for five hundred years. She could almost see Chancellor Mharú sitting at his desk, smug and satisfied, thinking that the battle was practically won. The only thing that scared her where that coward was concerned was his resources. The chancellor may have been cravenly, but some of his associates and interests were not. He had access to hundreds of years of magical knowledge, relationships, money, tools, infrastructure, and more. All Andie had was her power and her allies, and the latter was in an unreliable state.
Thinking of the University made her think of Tarven, the other coward and traitor, though the only person he had betrayed was Andie. She would never admit it out loud, but she thought of him every night. She liked to think of him and some days she even looked forward to it—not because she felt in any way romantically linked to him, though. She thought of him in order to keep herself fresh, sharp, at her most aware. She never wanted to be caught in the open like that again, which was part of the reason why her current situation was hitting her so hard. Thinking of Tarven forced Andie to face her mistakes, her bad judgements, all the forgiveness she had heaped on him until the last possible moment when it was almost too late and almost cost her the lives of her friends. Tarven had played her like an instrument, had toyed with her and blinded her. She never wanted to feel that again or be the kind of person who forgave the unforgiveable, or ignored her own instincts just for the sake of preserving an illusion she knew in her heart wasn’t real. As she thought back she realized just how far she had come in a short period of time. It hadn’t even been a year since the fight in the Archives.
Chapter Thirteen
“I want to tell you a story.”
Andie nearly jumped out of her skin. It was Saeryn. The Queen had crept up without a sound and was standing behind Andie, smiling and waiting patiently for the girl to respond.
“Saeryn, I didn’t hear you coming.”
“I’m a dragonborn warrior. You never know I’m there until it’s too late,” she said, taking a seat.
“Let me make a space for you—”
“No need. I may be a Queen, but I’m not spoiled. A little dirt is good for humility. Now, I want to tell you a story and I don’t want you to interrupt. You can take whatever point you want from this story or you can forget it entirely. It will be your choice. I only want to share it with you because I genuinely believe it will be of some help. Also, you’re a terrific listener, Andie, and your heart is full of hope, no matter how bitter you may want to seem on the outside. Do you accept my terms?”
“I do,” Andie said, leaning back on her arms and waiting for Saeryn to begin.
“Well, good. This is a story about me. I wasn’t always a Queen. In my time, I was just a girl. Truth be told, I was little more than a peasant. Much like you, my mother had been killed by fanatics from the University and I lived with my father. In those days, the dragonborn wouldn’t think of hiding, even though we had already been scared into submission. Some cruel mind had invented the Sentinels, the only things I’ve ever seen that can kill a dragon. Our poor, beautiful creatures began to fall all over the regions.
“My father and I were farmers. We grew crops, raised animals, and did some modest pottery. We never had much, but we always had each other. It was rather nice, actually. But, of course, the University wouldn’t be sated by any amount of carnage, no matter how terrible. Eventually they came to our region and enslaved or butchered everyone. The last time I saw my father I was being ripped from his arms. You see, though we were considered lesser, savages, the sorcerers sometimes kept the women and girls around for their pleasure. I didn’t hear of my father again until some years later, but of course they’d killed him the same day they took me.
“I was fortunate enough to fall in among a group of older women who had been slaves for a while already. They took to me and protected me. For three years, they looked out for me and kept me from the filthy hands of the sorcerers. Those were dark times, Andie, and we suffered terribly. There was no relief for me even in avoiding the lechery of the sorcerers. Torture, starvation, humiliation. There aren’t words for some of the things we endured. And the sorcerers just kept hurting us, figuring out new and innovative ways to bring us pain because our dragonblood kept healing us. But as you know, though we heal we still feel pain. We still feel every second of pain. I can’t tell you how much it broke my heart to see those women going in my place, offering themselves for those nightmarish evenings instead of letting the perverted sorcerers have me. They would cover me in mud or rub me down with molded food to make me less appealing. They were my angels.
“I’d only passed seventeen winters, but I had no intention of being a slave all my life. I knew I need to escape and knew that somebody needed to unite my people, give them hope. I already knew that I came from a long line of royalty, but by the time I was born our people had been thrown into disarray. Even my mother never got a chance to sit on the throne. By the time I was enslaved, our people weren’t concerned with royal lineage, only survival. In fact, there were many royal lines. I’m proud to say that mine was the kindest. Even dragonborn had cruelty in their history, but my royal line had always been fair and understanding.
“One day the guards came for me. I had made up my mind to go with them that night. I refused the mud, the rotten food, and all the other tricks the women had used to keep me safe. Three years was more than enough time in slavery. The women cried as I was dragged off, but I knew what I was doing. The sorcerer who kept us was so wealth
y I don’t think even he knew how much money he had. His palace was so large, it took twenty minutes to reach him from the slave gallery. When the guards dumped me at his door he looked me over, then made me bathe. I let him watch me, let his eyes drink me in. I relished the bath. I had not been fully clean since I’d left home. I washed my body, my hair, cleaned my teeth and feet. When I was ready I went to stand by the bed; I beckoned him, pretended I had accepted my fate. He did not know what I planned.
“I won’t tell you how, but I will tell you that I disposed of him in a manner I thought fitting. I snuck back to the slave gallery, told the others what I had done, and offered them a choice. We found our strength and from then on, we fought back with everything we had. It wasn’t long before we had completely overrun the palace. We left there and divided into groups, liberating our people in multiple regions. I grew in influence and my power grew as well, as I ceased to be afraid.
“Before I knew it, I was a general in our militia. We began to understand that the only reason the sorcerers had defeated us physically was because they had first defeated us mentally. We had let them frighten us. We had cowered in their shadow. But that was done. Soon we were uniting in the mountains we had previously called home and not long after I was given the great honor of being asked to reign among our people. I didn’t want the throne at first; it seemed silly to stand on ceremony and call myself a Queen when we were fighting for our lives and didn’t even have a permanent home. But I did as the people asked. If it had not been for Eitilt, that terrible curse, we would have taken back our world, yet that was not the turn fate had planned for us.
“I know you have many questions and concerns, not the least of which is why you were the one to hear our call for help. That answer is... complex. As are the many ‘whys’ behind your betrayer’s actions. Such is life. You fret too much. I will go now, but I leave you with this: we are a powerful people, Andie, and there is no limit to our power when we choose to abandon fear and leap into hope.”
