Dragoon (War of the Princes Book 2)

by A. R. Ivanovich

  Just, please, let her still be alive!

  I put my hands down atop what must have been her shoulder.

  “M--” I began to say, pressing down to roll her onto her back. The rest of the word was crushed by the lung-burning gasp that ripped from my chest. Half falling, half scrambling, I backed away from what I saw.

  It's not possible.

  C hapter 38: Clarity And Other Curses

  The person lying under the mountain of rags on the floor was not my mother. Not even close. This was a man. One of his eyes was purple and swollen shut, his hooked nose had a crusted gash across the bridge, and was clearly broken. Salt and pepper dusted his short matted hair and his ragged beard. His lips were cracked and one of them had split. The deep laugh lines at the corners of his middle aged face made him look tragic. It was difficult to imagine someone in such a state ever laughing again.

  Despite the carnage of his face and my well founded shock, I recognized him.

  “Professor Block?” I said hollowly. My tears retreated, leaving my disbelieving eyes to burn.

  “What?” Behind me, Sterling pushed past Rune to get a better look. “Professor Block!”

  No, no, no. This is wrong!

  “Where’s my mom?” I asked stupidly, casting about the room. There were no other occupants. “Where is she?”

  Professor Block had begun to stir. He peeled open his good eye and tried to look at us, grunting and groaning as he pushed himself up onto one elbow. A spasm of violent coughs assaulted him, and Sterling rushed to his side before he could fall back down.

  “Mister Mason? Is that really you? Can’t be. I can hardly see… I can hardly see,” Block said with a strained, wheezing voice. He was a crumbled, ruined version of the passionate history teacher I knew and respected.

  Paperglass To Be!

  I followed the Pull and it lead me straight to him. I did it again, and again, the result was always the same. I paced around him in a circle while Rune watched me. I must have looked like a maniacal animal, driven out of its mind by the torments of captivity.

  She had to be here. I knew she was. What were we missing? There was a clue here somewhere, a hidden door, something!

  There was nothing.

  Mother.

  The Pull blazed to life, spinning me in a half circle. Excited to follow it, I took a step forward and nearly walked into one of the cell walls. I caught myself, bracing my weight on my palms, feeling the oily grime of the stone slabs on my skin.

  Mother.

  The tug persisted into the wall. My denial was beginning to fracture, allowing clear thought to leak in.

  Father.

  No change.

  Haven.

  It was exactly the same. The Pull was leading me in the same direction for each of them. Then, I was submerged in a sense of knowing, as crisp and clear and cold as frozen water. Stakes hadn’t broken my Abilities. When I’d used the Pull in Breakwater, I wasn’t mistaking my step mom for my birth mother. She was there all along, in Haven. She’d never left.

  “Sterling,” I said desperately. “I need you to make me remember her.”

  “He’s hurt, bad,” Sterling said to me and Rune both.

  All of my fear and anguish poured into the word. My voice came out raw. “Please,” I begged, on the verge of a nervous break down.

  Sympathy touched his face and he held a hand out, laying it on the inside of my outstretched forearm.

  Driven with a speed and intensity I hadn’t anticipated, I was thrown backward, into my memories.

  * * *

  I remembered pages floating away on the wind. Rivermarch's weather tower was in ruins all around me. Kyle was with me, and we were surrounded by destruction. An arm of metal crashed down beside us and the tremor shook me to my bones. Seeing the violent ruin of a familiar and peaceful place was as wrong and jarring as it'd been the moment it happened. I passed the memory, flying farther back.

  I was in Constable Mason's interrogation room. The agent came in to meet me. Sandra Loring, cool, focused, severe, and proud, like an eagle. My mother's best friend. She and her people were taking a force to the Outside to recover the lost team. She asked if I'd sign the papers. Join them. I told her no. No one should go. It was too risky. I remembered holding her sleek quill pen in my hand. I remembered the stack of papers in the folder. A legal agreement so they'd face no repercussions from my father if I died. Papers that would later litter the wind, catching on the crushed body of Eddie Elm. Was it that very wind now that burned my eyes, and ripped me through my own mind, farther back still?

  Hyper flashes of people and places lanced past me with painful speed and clarity. Sixteen, having dinner with my family, and trying to start a fight with my dad just to see him crack his ever-supportive composure. Thirteen, Ruby stopping me from running away to Pinebrook on a train. Ten, sitting in a tree with Kyle, shooting people's hats off with sling shots and crumpled paper.

  Six skidded to a halt, like I'd fallen from a galloping horse into gravel. Six years old. The sky was black, and then white. Thunder roared furiously over Rivermarch's night sky. The rain mingled with my tears as I fought for my dad's arms to release me. She was leaving. That long curly mass of black hair, so much like mine now, was moving away from me forever. She was leaving. I could feel it now. The wild lightning was drawn to me even at such a young age. I was afraid then, but the thunder was calling out, like it was lending my pain its greater voice.

  “I'm finished wasting my time!” Her voice carried over the storm, over my father's pleas for her to come back inside, over the cries of her six-year-old daughter. Calling me onward, my memories pushed me farther back.

  Still six. A fight. They thought I was asleep, but I wasn't.

  “Stop trying to control me, Keller,” my mother shouted at him. I could see their legs through the keyhole of their bedroom door, but that was all.

  “Asking you to come home and have dinner with your little girl isn't being controlling,” he argued, snapping. Never in my life had I seen my dad angry. At least, I hadn't remembered. “She misses you. What's controlling about that?”

  “You! You are! If you ask me where I was one more time,” she threatened.

  “No one at the Research Society knew where you were.”

  “I will leave!” she ranted on like he hadn't spoken at all. “I was in Pinebrook. I had work to do!”

  “You always have work to do!” My father shouted. “Nothing should be more important than your family!”

  “You're wrong about that. The Still Well is more important than any of us and it's changed, I know it has. We're so close! I could make the greatest historical discovery of all time and you want to hold me back for the sake of mashed potatoes, a slice of pie, and a child that's going to forget that she was disappointed in the first place!”

  “You always twist my words! I never said she'd forget everything.”

  “Then when I am here, you smother me with questions.”

  “You disappear half the week! How am I not supposed to worry?”

  “Your worrying, your paranoid sense of protectiveness will drive every last person you love out of your life forever, Keller Kestrel, you mark my words.”

  The memory melted and I slid back farther still. I felt raw, burned from head to foot.

  Four. I was sitting on her lap. I could feel her warmth, I could smell her. It wasn't specific, but it was Mama.

  I was happy. Thrilled.

  My dad was sitting across the coffee table, grinning at me. He held his arm out, palm facing downward, just over the table's surface. When he pulled his hand away, he had left behind a tiny gray cloud. In every respect it looked as though it should be much larger. It was the size of an orange, fluffy, dark and roiling with storm.

  “Well, well,” Mama said and I could hear the smile in her voice. “Developed a rebellious streak have we? She's not supposed to know.”

  “Until she's of age. You found out, and it turned out okay.”

  “That
was an accident, and I paid for it with three extra years of private tutoring and psychological exams. I don’t want our little girl to go through what I did.” The topic was a serious one, but my mom sounded patient and warm.

  “Yeah, I know, but look at that face,” he chuckled.

  “It's a storm cloud!” I said in my tiny voice. The little cloud began to rain a fine silvery mist onto the table.

  “Shh... Katie-bug, it's our secret, okay?”

  “Yes!” I agreed exuberantly. “Ouwr secwet!”

  “Don't worry, she'll forget,” Dad assured Mama.

  I did.

  Mama hugged me, spinning me around to face her. I put my arm around her neck, and touched one of her long copper earrings. She had my wavy black hair, and my freckles spilled over her nose and cheeks. The face I saw, happy in the moment, and regarding me lovingly, belonged to officer Sandra Loring.

  * * *

  I snapped back to reality. Only a few seconds had passed but half my lifetime of lost memories were churning in my head. I lost my breath.

  I was on my knees, and my eyes were battling to focus in the dim light. Tears intruded on my vision but I refused to let them spill. I took in a shaky breath, sucking in my bottom lip a little as I inhaled.

  My dad! He could create storms! How could I have forgotten that? Our Abilities were related! My poor dad. Now I knew why he never scolded me for being independent, never acted like he was worried. He thought I would leave him forever, like she did. It broke my heart, but the pain lanced even deeper.

  Sandra Loring was my mother. To what extent had she gone to cover her freckles with makeup, to straighten and color her hair, so that I had no chance of recognizing her? Had she rid our home of all of her pictures before she left? Kendra Kestrel was Sandra Loring. Kendra and Sandra. The names were reminiscent of one another, why couldn't I have figured it out while I was there?

  The cold woman told me my mother had been her greatest friend, and she hadn't lied. Selfish people only have one friend, themselves.

  She'd only told me that my mother had been the key member of the missing team after I'd already said no. She was using me, manipulating me, forcing me to go. She never bothered to meet me. She didn't know me. How could she have known I'd care whether she lived or died?

  Because I'd been raised by my loving father who'd taught me that nothing was more important than family.

  I slammed my hands on the wall so hard that it hurt all the way up my arms. I was angry with my father for being so kind to me, I was angry with myself for being anything like her, or that I hadn't figured it out sooner, yes, but I was enraged that she would do this to me. She'd sent her own daughter off to die.

  I was here, in the belly of the largest installment in the region, buried within the army of the Prince of Shadows, surrounded by a war that cared nothing for sparing the lives of my innocent friends or me. We were far from safety and farther from home. The world closed in over me, stacking brick upon boulder upon mountain atop me. If ever there was a time for one of my attacks of claustrophobia, it would have been then, but the panic never came. Fear gripped my gut so hard I couldn't feel it any more. There was shame, and hurt, and fury, though. There was plenty of that.

  C hapter 39: A Lifetime of Forgetting

  “Hey!” Sterling said sharply, getting my attention. “He needs help.” My former classmate carefully pulled Professor Block up into a seated position.

  Block slumped, his head responding to the movement as though it was far too heavy for his neck to hold up. As soon as he was half way vertical he cried out in pain.

  Hurt and anger still pounded at me. It all seemed futile and I felt stupid for being so easily strung along. I wanted answers or a fight or a weeklong crying session. It was like I'd been poisoned. My mouth tasted sour, all I could smell was the filth of the room. Everything was wrong, all wrong. Emotionally, I swung between terror of the seemingly impossible odds at hand, and the kind of fury that gives you the wings of a hurricane.

  Then there was Block.

  “My chest,” the professor said raggedly, barely able to work his lips. “It's crushed.”

  I looked down at the man who had taught me three years of high school history. He was the only person in Haven, besides me, that had made an effort to find out more about the Outside World. He'd told me that he was entranced by the mystery of it. He was bright, kind and patient. Crumpled against Sterling, he looked like he might die. My mother had been a lie, but Professor Block was here. There was a moment where I consciously chose not to be self-centered.

  We needed to get him out.

  I navigated my way out of the fog of shock. “Can you stand?”

  “Miss Kestrel?” he said squinting up at me.

  “You know him?” Rune asked.

  “He was our teacher,” I told him and took in the dingy room for the first time after my revelation. We were one person short. “Where's Kyle?”

  As if on command, he appeared in the cell doorway behind Rune. Dull shuffling sounds echoed in from the hall. I tensed. We all did.

  Seeing our alarm, Kyle held his hands out. “I opened the other cell doors.”

  “You what?” Rune demanded, widening his stance and looking over Kyle's shoulder like he was ready for battle.

  Kyle shrugged in his awkward, unassuming way. “I couldn't leave them. How bad could they be if they were down here with, with... Professor Block?”

  “How many did you free?” Rune asked, edging against the wall and peering out the door. One of his hands rested on his sword.

  “Seven,” Kyle was saying, but his words became softer and softer as he focused on Professor Block. “Three weren't moving at first, but they're okay now.”

  “They're making their way out,” Rune said, peering out the door. “There'll be a flood of Dragoons down that stairwell as soon as they’re spotted. We have to leave. Now.”

  Kyle dropped down onto his knees. When Kyle was afraid, his eyebrows would pull up and set little wrinkles into his forehead. His eyelids would be open wide, like it would help him see better. His lips would part half way, hanging like he'd just taken a punch in the gut. That was how he looked now.

  “Professor,” he whispered. “You shouldn't be here. How did this happen?”

  Block coughed hoarsely. Blood seeped from the crack of his mouth.

  “We have to move him,” I told Sterling.

  “No! No,” Block hissed weakly.

  Kyle reached a hand out, settling it on Block's shoulder. The older man coughed and cringed with every slight touch or movement. Then he began to shake, roiling in agony. When he quieted, I thought he was dead. His good grey eye stared up, glossy and unfocused. A long slow breath escaped from his broken lips.

  Block's hand, with scabbed, knobby knuckles, reached up from beneath the blanket of rags. His eyes regained focus and they skipped down to look at his chest, where his hand was pressing. Energy suddenly revitalized him, and wincing, he pulled himself up. He wasn't the picture of health, his cuts still oozed and he still frowned from the pain, but the difference was obvious.

  “My chest... the bones...Mister Kiteman,” Professor Block said in astonishment. “You're a healer.”

  “No,” Kyle said, dragging himself up. Was that denial or sadness? I couldn't tell. “I'm not.”

  Bewildered, I stared at Kyle. I'd heard of people with the Ability to heal, but I'd never met one, and I certainly didn't expect Kyle of all people to be one of them.

  “I can get up now, I think,” Professor Block said to Sterling. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” He was still exhausted, and swayed as he stood.

  Sterling rose to his feet and offered me a hand. I was far from being a wilted helpless girl, but I accepted his assistance, more out of friendship than necessity.

  “Are there more of you?” I asked Block.

  He looked foggy. “Uh... there. No. No more of us. The others are all gone.”

  “We need to move,” Rune reminded us.

&nbs
p; In the end, Professor Block still needed Sterling's help to walk, his arm slung about his former student's shoulder. The room outside was already deserted. Each and every door was swung open, revealing empty cell upon empty cell. Maybe I should have been glad the other prisoners were free, but there was something eerie about it. Something I couldn't put my finger on.

  We ran for the stairs, with Sterling and Block shambling after us. Rune had taken the lead, and I was close behind him. He took the steps two at a time, launching up to see if the way was clear. The distinct sound of approaching footsteps echoed in the stairwell.

  Rune threw me a warning glance and placed his hand against the wall near the torch sconces. The light of the flames flickered and fled to smoke one after the other all the way up the stairs. It would have seemed like a strong wind had blown them out, but I knew better.

  The footsteps drifted off and I let a tense breath escape my lungs. A small blue light puffed up from Rune's hand, and I smiled at him. He smiled back.

  Holding my right hand out, I called little swirls of lightning to my fingertips. We wouldn't risk much light, but it was enough for us to get by. I waited for the others to catch up to us so that our light was evenly distributed.

  I was in the back of the group, behind Sterling and Professor Block, when Rune was attacked. There was a horrible, thick crack, like someone had been slammed against the stone wall, and then two tangled bodies tumbled down the stairs, knocking Professor Block from his feet, and almost taking me down with them.

  Rune caught himself as they fell, and pulled himself over his attacker, holding the escaped prisoner down as he repeatedly slammed his knuckles into the man's jaw. The filthy attacker was bald, wiry and lean, his clothes were soiled and torn. He was viciously feral, baring his broken teeth and grunting. He clamped one hand around Rune's throat, and the other clawed at his face, going for the eyes.

  Barely able to see between the mad prisoner's fingers, Rune quit punching, and used both hands to grab the man by the collar. Hunched wide, his feet awkwardly separated by three steps, he heaved the man up, bashing him back down, hammering his head against the wall. By the second hit, the man went limp.