by Sam Ferguson
Kyra shook her head and sighed. This was not how she had imagined spending the next few years of her life. Fortunately, she had completed the first year of four that she would spend as an apprentice at Kuldiga Academy. Well, four years was the normal course of study for the average apprentice at any rate. She wondered whether she would be expected to complete the terms as normal from here on out. Ever since the winter festival last year, she had only had one-on-one instruction with Cyrus following an incident with a teacher against whom Kyra had defended herself. Unbeknownst to Kyra, Lady Priscilla had been with child, and when Kyra’s wind spell had caused the teacher to fly back into a wall, it had put both mother and child in serious danger.
Kyra sighed, remembering the incident. If only Feberik could have let her be that first term! His incessant visits had spoiled any chances she might have had to make friends, or at least quietly complete her terms while teaching herself spells from the book her mother had snuck into her bag the day she had left home. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth for a moment before blasting an old stump with a fireball as the memory of that little spell book brought a flood of memories and emotions rushing into her mind. Kyra picked up the pace, knowing that the sooner she could get to Leatherback, the sooner she would have something positive to focus her energy on.
Just the thought of her friend put a smile on Kyra’s lips. Perhaps she would learn enough from Cyrus to leave with Leatherback in the next year or so, if he grew enough to make the flight across the sea to the north. It all depended on him. Then he would be safe from Nagar’s Blight, and she would be free of the rumors of her half blood, the priests, and most of all, she would be free from the engagement which loomed over her.
Continuing to tromp along, Kyra began her ascent up the second hill from the academy. She needed to put enough distance between herself and the priests and faculty members who may be curious about her adventures before she could conjure the portal that would ultimately take her to the aspen wood. Not wanting the priests to suspect that she had the ability to magically travel away from her dorm room, she began most of her visits to Leatherback these days with a long hike across the hilly terrain. She always made sure to wait until she was safely over the third ridge from the school before travelling the rest of the distance in a single leap.
She was nearly to the place where she normally conjured the portal when she heard something. She stopped and glanced to the right. She didn’t see anything there.
“Heading off to see your pet dragon again?” a familiar voice called from behind her.
“Kathair!” Kyra shouted disapprovingly.
Kathair Lepkin stepped out from behind a large oak and gave a flourish of his right arm and a mock bow. His blue eyes seemed to sparkle as he stepped toward her. “You know, I have mentioned before that I don’t really care for my first name. You really should call me Lepkin.”
Kyra shook her head. “And I have told you that I disapprove of being followed.”
Lepkin held a finger in the air and his boyish grin stretched as he seemed to wrestle with himself over letting the next words out of his mouth. He settled on saying, “Fair enough. But what else am I supposed to do with my free time? Though the dragon slayers are excellent company,” he began sarcastically, “and I need something else to occupy my free time when I am not in classes.”
“It’s summer, there aren’t any classes,” Kyra replied evenly.
“Exactly!” Kathair said, pointing at her emphatically. “Classes aren’t even going on. As boring as they might be, at least it would be something. When I recovered and learned that the other students that… caused the problem,” Kathair seemed unwilling to fully recall just how badly he had been beaten by the gang of students who had attacked him in his dorm room last term, “had been expelled from the academy, I thought it would be good to come back. But arriving the last week of the term was so strange. Everyone was finishing exams and packing up to go home.”
Kathair’s eyes dulled a bit and his smile faded. “And I, well, I guess I don’t really have a place to go home to for the summer. I’m welcome in Tualdern, of course, but I’m not an elf. I guess I thought I might spend the summer better up here, with you.” The words hung in the air as they both shared a brief glance. Then, his boyish grin came back, flashing those dazzling white teeth of his as he swept his arm out to the side. “Besides, the dragon slayers are staying around too. I figure they might let me go on a few of their hunting trips if I play my cards right.”
“Hunting trips?” Kyra echoed. “They’re looking for Leatherback?”
Kathair shook his head. “No, something else. They are being awfully secretive about it, but I think it has something to do with that creature you fought.”
“You mean the shade,” Kyra said. “They’ll have to find him before I do,” she said through gritted teeth. Then after a moment she realized that Kathair might actually be angling to accompany her to see Leatherback. “You know I can’t take you there,” Kyra said quickly. “I know you wouldn’t hurt him, but if the other dragon slayers found out you knew where he was, they might pressure you into talking.”
Kathair waved off the notion. “My field training is a bit sporadic now, anyway,” he said. “They have bigger issues to deal with than me. I don’t think it would even cross their minds.”
“Kath—” Kyra began, but abruptly changed what she was saying when Kathair began to take in a deep breath, “Lepkin, what you need is a project. You know, something that can really capture your interest.”
“Yeah, but not everyone can just wander out into the woods and find a dragon egg to raise up.” The two of them stood for a moment in silence. “Well, I won’t keep you,” Kathair said suddenly. “If you ever want to study together in the library sometime, maybe I can help you out. I have learned a lot with the dragon slayers, you know. I’m decent with a sword too.”
Kyra nodded and smiled. If it were any other boy in Kuldiga Academy, she would think he was boasting to be impressive, but she knew better in this case. She remembered clearly the trouncing he had dished out to the group of students –not to mention their instructor— that had caught him in the courtyard last year.
“Maybe I’ll see you there soon. Cyrus gives me a lot of materials to read.”
“Excellent,” Kathair said with a widened smile and bright eyes. “Try to stay out of trouble, will you?” With that, Kathair Lepkin disappeared behind the tree again and was gone.
Kyra tried to see which way he went, but there was no sign of the boy anywhere. It was as if he vanished into the air. The young sorcery apprentice moved around the tree and scanned the area for him, but she never saw so much as a wiggling branch. Kyra thought it must have been a trick he learned from the elves who raised him, for she had never seen a human so easily disappear into a forest before.
She waited for a few moments, just to ensure that Lepkin had actually gone and was not hiding somewhere just to follow her to Leatherback. She knew better than that though. Kathair wouldn’t want to risk Leatherback being discovered by the dragon slayers any more than she did.
Taking one last look around to ensure that there were no prying eyes, Kyra opened the magical portal that Njar had taught her to use as the surest way to the aspen wood and smiled when she finally saw the green and golden leaves flittering about in the summer breeze. After quickly closing the portal behind her, the young woman turned sideways as she slithered through the tangled mess of white trunks and grinned wide when Leatherback noticed her coming into the secret glade.
His tail flicked up and thumped the soft grass as what could only be described as a joyful grin stretched his lips over his fangs. His sky-blue eyes twinkled and his nostrils flared as he lifted his head.
“Hello Kyra,” Leatherback greeted.
“Hello, dear friend,” Kyra replied. “Is Njar around today?” she asked.
Leatherback shook his massive head slowly. “Already gone.” A wisp of smoke slithered out from his nostrils as he spoke. Th
e dragon stretched his neck forward and rested his head down upon the ground in front of his forelegs. “Story?”
Kyra shook her head and crossed the grassy ground to pet the top of his scaly snout. “I’m afraid not today. I just came to see you, and ask how you were feeling.”
“Priests today?” Leatherback asked, his grin diminishing somewhat.
“Not today,” Kyra answered. “Just me.”
“Good.” Leatherback closed his eyes and let Kyra scratch the area of his neck just behind his jaw.
He emitted a sound akin to a cat’s purr, only it was much louder and vibrated throughout the glade.
“I know it’s been hard having those priests around all the time,” Kyra said as she ceased stroking the dragon and curled up next to his head, leaning back into the sturdy neck. “I think I might have a great idea of how we can just forget about them for a day.”
The eye closest to Kyra popped open as Leatherback asked, “What idea?”
“I thought we might find out whether or not you have any of Gorliad’s talent in the water.” At this suggestion, both of Leatherback’s eyes opened wide and he stood so abruptly that Kyra had to twist quickly to avoid being swept up by the large horn which protruded from the side of his head. Kyra had read Gorliad’s story, Ascension, to Leatherback while he had still been in his egg, and again after he was old enough to understand the story. Having received it and its companion volumes from her mother for her fourteenth birthday, she had worked hard to translate it from the Old Peish it had originally been written in.
“Swim?” He cried, a hint of a roar escaping from the back of his throat in his excitement.
“Well, yes. We will have to get a bit creative to make a place for you, but the trout stream in the forest over there does have a deep eddy that we might be able to widen,” she smiled mischievously and ignited a small fire ball in her hand, “and deepen. We are far enough away from the school. What do you say to a little target practice?”
Leatherback snatched up Kyra’s aspenwood staff and dropped it into her waiting hands. “Go now!” he said eagerly. Kyra made her way through the aspens as Leatherback, now entirely too big to wind his way through the close-growing trees, flew up and over the outer ring of the aspen wood, and landed to wait for her amongst the oaks and pines that generally made up the rest of the forest. They walked the short distance together to the stream and then followed it until they came to a waist-high waterfall where the terrain descended for a short distance, and then levelled out again, causing the stream to have naturally formed a wider, deeper section that Leatherback had discovered early on was an excellent place for catching trout.
“We’ll make a fantastic mess, but I think that if we can carve out a place right in here,” she indicated the section of stream from the waterfall to a spot downstream,” and pile the rock and dirt around as we go, we just might be able to make enough of a pond for you to use. At least until you grow to your full size,” she added, looking up to his head which already towered over her.
She paced back and forth on the bank of the stream for a few moments, trying to decide the best way to get started on the project. She had just taken a step back to try and visualize where the edges would be when Leatherback suddenly let loose a fireball that blasted into the opposite bank, sending mud and water flying everywhere. She was so surprised she jumped back half a foot while emitting a shriek. She shot a reproving look at Leatherback as she put a hand over her thumping heart. Leatherback gurgled in his throat, laughing at her.
“You said, ‘fantastic mess.’” And with that he shot twice more in rapid succession, causing a small amount of mud to rain down on her hair. Kyra lost no time to retaliate. She sent a large fireball of her own right into the water nearest to where Leatherback was standing and laughed heartily when the water caught him full in the mouth as he had opened up to release another blast of his own. He shook his massive head in displeasure as smoke leaked out of the side of his mouth and his nostrils, apparently having been quenched quickly when Leatherback had abruptly snapped his mouth closed.
After that, any thought of analytically approaching the project and completing it in a calculated fashion was lost entirely. The two of them took turns blasting new sections of bank away in turn, trying to shower the other with as much debris as possible. It was fortunate that Kyra was so proficient at ward spells, as several times there had been large chunks of rock blown up from the bottom of the stream bed, and she had quickly needed to protect herself from certain damage.
Once she began to feel tired from the expenditure of magic, she held her hands up to him in surrender. “We really should take a break. The water isn’t even remotely pooling in the way we need it to.” She looked about them and realized they had come closer to creating a miniature swamp than anything that resembled a swimming hole. “Why don’t we try to deepen what we have here? Or rather, you can start digging to deepen it while I,” she started wringing mud out of her hair, “see if I can get any of this muck out of my hair!” With that, she playfully tossed a handful of the sticky stuff at Leatherback, succeeding only in catching the outside of his wing as he blocked her. “Even Gorliad was willing to get his claws dirty excavating his home, remember?”
Leatherback happily stepped to the center of what had, only an hour before, been a quiet mountain stream, and began pulling out chunks of water logged mud and rock with his claws. Kyra laughed as she headed upstream to where the water still flowed clean, and bent down to wash her long, black hair in the stream as best she could. Whoever lived downstream would not be happy about the disruption in flow for the day, but this was the most fun she had had since she had come to school. She and her mother had often enjoyed silly activities together as her mother tried to find inventive ways to teach Kyra spells and creative applications for them.
The first time Kyra had successfully cast a simple ward at age six, they had been in the large kitchen at Caspen Manor. Her mother had sent the servants out for the day, and had spent the afternoon helping Kyra to hand mix a warm, sticky mess of any ingredient Kyra chose to add to the large batch of bread dough the cook had left behind to rise. When the dough was so discolored, and so full of strong, spiced aromas that her mother assured her it was completely inedible, her mother had begun tossing bits of it at her, giving her instructions before each throw to help her try and deflect the sticky blob with a ward. They had been laughing so hard, tears had been making their way out of her mother’s eyes, but when Kyra unexpectedly conjured the ward, she had dropped the entire bowl of dough on the floor in her motherly excitement. Kyra’s hair had been full of sticky substance that day too.
The memory brought a smile to her lips, but also made her whole chest ache. How would she ever stop missing her mother? At this moment, it felt like that empty feeling in her chest would be there forever, and the thought made her angry all of a sudden. She was going to find the shade who had killed her mother. She was going to find him, and she was going to destroy him and any other creature that might have been working with him. In answer to the anger inside of her, she inadvertently conjured a little spark of lightning and gave herself a little shock when she closed her fist as she imagined pummeling anything that got in her way. She jumped a little at the sensation and then stood up and decidedly wrung her hair out.
When she returned to the place where she had left Leatherback to work, she was amazed at the progress he had made in such a short amount of time. Piles of mud and rock as tall as she was had been thrown up all around the place where the eddy had been. She came up on Leatherback from the middle of the stream, rather than trying to scale the slippery mounds of streambed that would otherwise have separated her from his work space.
“Been having fun?” She asked with a sweep of her arm, indicating the area which now seemed expansive enough to accommodate Leatherback’s length twice over, and, if it held water, would allow him to swim a little as long as he tucked his legs up under him.
“I could ready my own mountain.
Like Gorliad,” he said proudly, stretching his wings out and shooting a single flare of fire into the air.
“I believe that! Maybe someday we will find you a mountain. For today though, we may need to be done.” She looked at the water that was beginning to pool up around Leatherback’s feet and realized that they would have a proper mess if there wasn’t an outlet for the water that would allow it to follow its original path down the mountain. More than that, they might have someone miss the water downstream who would follow the stream back up to them and cause trouble.
“Let’s put our fire to work over here and see if we can’t make a proper outlet for the water. It will probably take it the better part of a week to fill up at this rate,” she looked behind her at the water which was trickling down what was left of the little waterfall, “but then we will need a place for the extra water to go.” She waded through the water to the far end of the pool and showed Leatherback where she thought they should focus their work. When she was satisfied that the water would be able to escape in a controlled manner after filling the pool, she tapped on Leatherback’s leg. He lowered his head to her and allowed her to climb on up behind the crown of horns that grew from the base of his skull.
“I’m frozen, let’s head back to the aspen wood so I can dry out!”
Chapter 3
In a dark hovel, a young girl sat at the edge of her mother’s bed. Torn blankets covered the doorway and the dirt floor was littered with the stalks and husks of various plants that had been recommended for a healing poultice that had ultimately proved to be ineffective. Eleanor now cursed the time she had spent gathering the herbs and flowers instead of tending to her mother, and watched as she coughed into a stained, brown rag again and again.
