by Shae Ford
“Ooo, you’ve had one? Who was it from?” Silas said, creeping in closer beside her.
“Kael Witchslayer!” Jake shouted, shaking his fists at the crowd of minceworms that had encircled their camp. “And if he were here, he’d have crushed every one of you sorry little blighters with his bare hands!”
“Kael Witchslayer?” Silas growled, and Kyleigh knew he could sense how her heart thudded harder at the sound of his name. “Who is he? Another halfdragon?”
“No, he’s a whisperer,” Jake answered — which was a good thing, because Kyleigh doubted if she could’ve said it herself.
That memory was suddenly all she could think of. She was surprised at how well she remembered it: the feeling of his lips, pressed firm and confident against hers. The way his arm had wrapped around her waist, holding her tightly in the very moment when her legs went numb. She thought she’d felt a burning between them — a fire that arced from his heart to hers, a thrill he felt that set her soul ablaze …
But then again, perhaps she’d only imagined it. Perhaps she’d wanted it so badly that it hadn’t been him at all … perhaps it was only her own thrill she felt …
“Whisperer,” Silas murmured. He closed his eyes tightly, and Kyleigh knew what he was doing.
It was a price all shapechangers had to pay: when their souls bonded, they lost a good portion of their human memories — and gained new ones from their animal halves. Kyleigh found it difficult to sort through them all, to remember which memories were hers and which were those of her dragon soul. Sometimes she would have dreams of lands she’d never visited, of battles she’d never fought in.
And sometimes, if she closed her eyes and concentrated, the memory she needed would come drifting out of the dark, swimming up like a fish to rocky shores.
She knew that was what Silas was doing. He was combing through his human memories, searching for the meaning of the word whisperer. And she hoped desperately that he wouldn’t find it.
Then his eyes snapped open. “No … not a Marked One,” he hissed, glaring at her accusingly. “Dragoness, you know bet —”
“Are we going to play tonight?” Jake called from the edge of the fire wall. He twirled his staff in his hands, leveling it at Silas. “Or do you concede defeat?”
“I concede nothing,” Silas said, rising to join him. But before he left, his hand clamped down on Kyleigh’s shoulder — and his fingers curled tightly. “You and I will be discussing this later.”
She glared at him, and he smirked back.
“Will you keep score?” Jake said to her. He propped a hand to the side of his face, pointed at Silas and mouthed: He cheats.
“I do not cheat,” Silas said without looking. “Don’t blame me for your poor aim, shaman.”
After Kyleigh promised to keep things fair, the boys took their places at the edge of the wall. There wasn’t much to entertain them in the evenings. Once the sun went down, the minceworms would come swarming out of the sand, trapping them inside their camp. But Jake had discovered a way to make the best of it.
He started sending fireballs out among the worms — purely for experimental purposes, he’d claimed. Silas laughed uproariously when the worms caught fire, and it wasn’t long before he wanted a turn at it. They began keeping track of who was able to destroy the most of the horrible, squirming little creatures each night.
Then one of their shots had accidentally hit a minceworm full in the mouth. It swallowed the fireball whole and a second later, it exploded — putting out a burst of flame large enough to take out a chunk of the worms crowded around it.
And so Jake’s experiments had dissolved into a game.
It was Silas’s turn to go first. He took careful aim, holding Jake’s staff and squinting with one eye until he found his target. “Fire!”
Jake muttered the spell, and a fireball shot out of the staff. It sailed over the wall and directly into the open mouth of a distant minceworm. A small explosion burst on the horizon, briefly lighting up the night — and sent several nearby worms sailing.
Silas cackled loudly as their flaming bodies fell from the sky. “That one was at least eight points,” he said.
“Eight? You know, sometimes I don’t think you even know your numbers.” Jake did a quick sum on his fingers. “That couldn’t have been more than five.”
“You’re both wrong — it’s six,” Kyleigh said. When Jake looked at her curiously, she sighed. “You counted the five that got their hides blown out from under them, but you forgot about the one he actually hit.”
“Ah, you’re right,” Jake said, adding one more finger to his sum. “Six it is, then. And now it’s my turn.”
Kyleigh watched them for a while, doing her best to keep them both from cheating. But her heart just wasn’t in it. After months of patching things together, of carefully stitching her frail hopes to a sturdy leaf of patience … his name was all it had taken to pull the threads apart.
Just one mention of Kael, and she immediately grew restless. Her toes curled beneath her. She had to fight to stay put.
“Are you leaving?” Silas called as she made her way to her tent.
“Yes, I’m … tired,” she said. She thought her armor might be the reason her chest felt so tight. She’d sweated in it for days on end, after all. So she stripped off her shirt and jerkin and replaced it with a silk tunic. She kicked off her boots, but left her leggings — just in case she needed to get up in the middle of the night.
“Well, I think we’d all better call it an evening,” Jake said loudly.
“You’re just saying that because you’re ahead,” Silas countered.
“What? I would never —”
“Oh, save your words. You’ll need them when I defeat you tomorrow,” Silas added, with what she could only imagine was a toothy grin.
Kyleigh lay with her back against the tent wall for a moment, enjoying the softness and warmth of the pelts beneath her. She thought she had a pretty good chance of drifting off when she suddenly felt as if she wasn’t alone.
She opened her eyes — and saw Silas lying across from her.
“Get out of my tent.”
“Hmm … no,” he replied. “I promised we would talk. And so I mean to.”
Kyleigh most certainly didn’t want to do that. She tried to shove him out with her heels, but he knocked her feet aside. “Don’t you have some licking to do? Or some fleas to gnaw at —?”
“Nothing is more important than what I’m about to say,” Silas retorted. He slid closer to keep her from kicking him. “We’re both alone in the world, dragoness — I, because I choose to be. And you, because you are a strange creature without any friends.”
“Are you certain it’s not the other way around?”
He smirked at her; his eyes glowed playfully. “I will ignore your insult —”
“How kind of you.”
“— because I know that your strange, scaly heart is broken.”
She fell silent.
He took a heavy breath. “And because we are both alone, it’s my unfortunate duty to have to remind you of the laws of our people.”
“I know the laws,” Kyleigh growled. She hated rules. Rules were for people who liked to wear their breeches laced up too tight, and she loved nothing more than to break them.
But though she gave him a look that could’ve melted ice, it didn’t stop him from lecturing her. “Then you know why I must speak with you — why I must stop your feelings for the Marked One, this whisperer, before they destroy you both.” Silas sat up on his elbow. “If he were a regular brand of human, I’d tell you to take him to the forest and cast your lot at the Braided Tree — to perform the ritual, and hope to Fate that he’s reborn a halfdragon. But he’s not the normal sort of human, is he?” Silas’s eyes stared a hole through her head, trying to pry reason from between her brows. “He’s a whisperer. And you know as well as I that no man can survive Fate’s dagger twice.”
He held up his hand, and even in the dim
light she could see the thin, white scar that cut across his palm. Her fingers twitched involuntarily for her own scar. It was the mark the ritual had left behind. Wherever Fate meddled, she always left a mark.
“Need I remind you why this is a problem?” Silas drawled, inspecting his scar, and Kyleigh got the feeling that he was enjoying himself. “Have you so easily forgotten the weight of the Three Tenets?”
No, she hadn’t forgotten them — though most of the time she wished she could. But for some reason, it was as if they’d been scratched permanently into her skull. Even when she’d wandered nameless and naked through the woods, struggling to remember who she was, the Tenets still rang inside her head:
To take your own life is to forsake your eternal rest. To try to destroy your second self is to take your own life. And —
“To bond with any but your own is Abomination,” Silas whispered. “And upon all Abomination, Fate will loose her brother — Death. You see, dragoness? Your feelings for the whisperer are exactly that: an Abomination.”
Kyleigh hated the Tenets. They were stupid, vague rules that could’ve meant a thousand different things to a thousand different people. “Maybe it’s not an Abomination.”
Silas narrowed his eyes. “But it is. It says so in the —”
“Any but your own,” Kyleigh cut in. “It doesn’t say anything about my own kind. Perhaps shape has nothing to do with it. If I’m for him and he’s for me, then wouldn’t that make him … mine?”
Silas’s laugh raked obnoxiously against her ears. “You shouldn’t try to put words into Fate’s mouth.”
“Then perhaps Fate’s mouth should’ve been more specific,” Kyleigh said testily. “I know what I feel in my heart, and nothing is going to change that. Not even Fate.”
“Are you willing to risk your own life to prove it?”
“Yes, and gladly.”
“Are you willing to risk his life?”
The words froze on Kyleigh’s tongue. She studied the high arches of Silas’s brows. They rose higher in her silence. “It wouldn’t be his life at —”
“Upon all Abomination, dragoness. Death would punish your little whisperer as swiftly as he punished you.”
Kyleigh hadn’t thought of that. But now that she did, the thought made her furious. “Get out,” she snarled.
Silas shrugged. “As you wish.” He crawled backwards out of the tent, but paused at the opening. “Remember, dragoness: we have a duty to protect those weaker than us — and unfortunately, that includes the humans. If you truly care for him, you should be careful not to lead him down such a dangerous path. And if you cannot control yourself … then perhaps it would be best to separate from him, rather than sentence him to death.”
Kyleigh went to throw a pelt at Silas, but he was already gone. She sank back down and propped her hands roughly behind her head.
Though she tried her best to ignore it, Silas’s warning rang in her ears. It was no idle threat: she knew very well that Fate often punished the shapechangers who disobeyed her Tenets.
She remembered the stories Bloodfang used to tell the young pups to pass the long winter nights. Some of those stories were about the curses Fate had put on shapechangers who broke the Tenets. She remembered one in particular about a halfwolf named Bleakhowl, who’d been so distraught by his second shape that he starved himself to death — breaking the first Tenet. But Fate didn’t let him perish: instead, she took away his human shape and forced him to live forever as a man trapped inside a wolf’s body.
The story claimed that travelers could still hear Bleakhowl’s woeful cry, on nights when the moon was full.
Kyleigh stared past the shadows in the tent’s roof, thinking. Nothing could ever change what she felt. But she didn’t think there was any chance Kael’s feelings would change, either. He had that stubborn mountain blood running through his veins. Once he set his mind against something, that was it.
But if he ever were to change his mind … then perhaps Kyleigh would have no choice. Perhaps it would be better for her to leave him alone than to put his life at risk.
She didn’t know what to do. But she knew one thing for certain: in the end, she would do whatever was best for Kael — whatever that happened to be …
No matter how badly it hurt.
Chapter 17
A Dagger in the Back
Elena waited patiently, frozen atop a nearby dune. Her legs were tucked beneath her, and her arms were balanced across her knees. She was careful not to budge.
She watched as the three figures within the ring of fire finally stopped their chattering. One by one, they slipped into their tents. Then she waited another hour, measuring by the rise of the moon. Her breath was so soft that she hardly felt it cross her lips. When she was certain the three companions were asleep, she got to her feet.
Their trail began at Arabath, where a woman who worked the date stand had casually mentioned that she’d seen three strange travelers enter the southern desert. She had wondered if Elena was part of their group, looking very pointedly at her blackened armor and the deadly knives strapped to her arms.
Elena had smiled, but she didn’t answer. And the woman seemed to realize that asking another question might cost her more than a few dates.
“Four men followed them into the desert — men who had the blood of many travelers upon their heads. And they never returned,” the woman had said. She raised her chin defiantly as she handed Elena her rations. “Their families went out to collect their bones in the morning.”
Elena heard the warning in her voice, but it didn’t trouble her. In fact, the date woman had been most helpful: now that she knew the sort of brawlers she was up against, she would take no chances.
Tracking the Dragongirl’s party across the sands had been easy. The glass caps they’d left behind lit up like beacons when the sunlight hit them. Once she knew where they’d gone, it became a simple matter of catching up. Elena traveled at nearly twice their pace everyday — she had plenty of water and rations, and sleep was all she needed to replenish her energy.
The task ahead of her would be the most difficult of the journey.
The minceworms were creatures she knew little about. During her first day of travel, she could feel the worms rolling in the sand beneath her, following her steps. She left some dried meat behind, but when that didn’t seem to tempt them, she tried something else.
One of the first lessons the Countess had taught her was how to quiet her steps. Elena could move silently, if she wished. And once she’d concentrated on stepping lightly, the minceworms stopped following her. So she supposed that it was the noise of her steps that had attracted them, and not the smell of her blood.
As long as she traveled quietly and slept perfectly still, the worms didn’t bother her. Now as Elena jogged towards the ring of fire in the distance, her feet hardly brushed the sand.
The heavy footfalls of the Dragongirl’s party had stirred the minceworms up to the surface. Elena strained her eyes in the darkness and wagered that there were close to three-dozen worms ringed around the glass cap.
The only way she could get close to the camp was if she timed her steps perfectly. She couldn’t linger, and she had to be careful. If she so much as brushed a worm with the top of her boot, they would swarm — and she refused to die in the jaws of scavengers. It would be a humiliating death.
Elena picked up speed as she reached the edge of the worm ring, daring to dig her toes in a little bit deeper. She kept her eyes on the ground, searching for the bare patches of sand between worms, springing from one gap to the next. It took all of her concentration to keep her balance at every awkward landing. She kept her arms spread apart and the ring of fire in the corner of her eye.
When she felt she was close enough, she leapt.
Her arms stretched in front of her as she dove over the flames. She landed on her palms, rolled on her shoulder and popped swiftly to her feet. A shadow would’ve made more noise than Elena did.
T
he others had their flaps laced up tightly against the cold, but the Dragongirl’s tent was wide-open. Elena crept towards it, her knees bent and her palms parallel to the ground. She moved on the balls of her feet and kept her muscles tensed: the Dragongirl had a fierce reputation as a swordsman, and she was determined not to become another victim of her blade.
As she crept closer, Elena prepared for the worst possible scenario. She planned through what would happen if she found the Dragongirl awake and waiting for her, or if she wore her armor and slept with her sword under her pillow. There were several dozen ways her attack might go wrong.
But when she ducked inside the tent, she saw that all of her worry was for naught.
The Dragongirl was sprawled out upon what looked like a blanket of animal furs. She lay on her back and had one arm stretched above her head. The other was tucked closely to her side. Elena paused at the tent’s opening and quickly took in her surroundings: the white sword was sheathed and lay atop the Dragongirl’s shirt and jerkin, well out of her reach. There weren’t any other weapons in the room. Even if she did wake and try to defend herself, Elena would have the advantage.
She couldn’t have planned it better.
There was a slight twang of regret in Elena’s throat when she saw how beautiful the Dragongirl was. She hadn’t expected her to be quite so lovely — or young. Her soft breath teased the strands of raven hair that fell across her face; her lips rested softly.
And with a sigh, Elena drew a knife.
It was one of the three poisoned blades that the Countess had given her, the one she’d kept tucked inside her gauntlet. Even in the pale light, she could see the dangerous film that coated the blade. The Countess’s poisons had never failed her. Elena wagered that it wouldn’t take much: just a shallow cut, just enough to draw blood, and the tainted blade would do the rest.
Elena placed the tip of the knife against the Dragongirl’s smooth throat. With a deep breath, she went to flick her wrist across the vein beneath her chin … but nothing happened.
