Revelation of the Dragon

by J Elizabeth Vincent

  “I think you know the rest. For allowing them to escape, the village mayor was executed and replaced. The house and the smithy were burned. The soldiers ordered the villagers to leave it alone, to never to rebuild on the spot. It was to be left as an example for those that would defy the king. Shortly after, orders were posted in town and have remained since. Anyone who sees or comes into contact with Magnus, Ashanya, their daughter, or any Ceo San is to report to the guard. Failure to do so carries the penalty of death. Anyone capturing Mariah herself has been promised enough gold to see them through the rest of their life.”

  “No wonder you’re famous,” Shira murmured in Mariah’s ear while squeezing her shoulders.

  An awkward silence filled the cave. After several minutes passed, Tibbot suddenly emerged from the tunnel. He met Mariah’s eyes briefly before turning to Shira. “Hey, nose, let’s take him outside.”

  “Tibbot!” Mariah gasped. “You’re not—”

  Shira bristled, but Tibbot spoke, interrupting Mariah and cutting off anything Shira was going to say.

  “Man’s been tied up here for ages. Even I can see he’s got needs.”

  Mariah flushed. It hadn’t even occurred to her. She nodded. “Do you need help?”

  “Your friend can do it.” Tibbot gestured toward Shira. “If I can’t escape from her jaws, our man here would have to think twice about trying to run from her lest she close them on his jugular.” There was menace in his voice.

  In short order, Vasdaf had been untied enough to allow him to stand and shamble out of the cave. Tibbot held a knife steadily at the man’s side, and Shira followed both in bear form. The lieutenant might not have realized it, but Tibbot was probably as much of a threat to him as the bear. Mariah had seen his fox latch onto a man’s throat in the flash of an eye, and he had been sick, starved, and weak at the time. If Vasdaf tried anything, he would no doubt repeat the act but with more power now that he had months to heal and recover his strength.

  When the trio had left the cave, Mariah found herself grateful for the quiet, for the time alone to absorb everything that Vasdaf had revealed about her family. If he was telling the truth, where had her parents gone? Had someone warned them, helped them get away? And, if so, who? Where were they now? Had they gotten somewhere safe?

  When she realized her mind was running in endless circles, Mariah redirected her thoughts to her other purpose, the one that had brought her back to Varidian in the first place. By the time Tibbot and Shira returned with their captive, she had more questions for him.

  * * *

  Morning came too soon. As the first light of dawn crept in through the tunnel, a strange sound woke Mariah from an uncomfortable sleep.

  Their captive was sitting up in his blankets, still bound.

  The night before, the trio had allowed the lieutenant to eat before replacing his bonds. Now, he was awake, sitting against the wall again and looking toward the mouth of the cave, clucking his tongue.

  “What are you doing?”

  The noise stopped suddenly, and Vasdaf’s gaze shifted to Mariah. “Oh, you’re awake.”

  Tibbot was also awake, having taken the last watch, but he wasn’t speaking; instead, he was staring at the lieutenant and playing with his knife, passing it from hand to hand in the dim light.

  “What are you doing?” she asked again.

  “I heard Shadow, my horse. Just wanted to let her know I was all right.” He glanced down at the floor a moment before asking, “Will you take care of her or let me, please? She needs to be fed. Maybe exercised a bit.”

  Of course. She’d almost forgotten the animal outside. Mariah nodded without saying anything else, her mind already working through everything that had been said the night before, the thoughts having followed her from their conversations into her dreams and then into wakefulness again.

  She leaned over and shook Shira until the other woman stirred. As she rose, Mariah looked toward Tibbot. He nodded, giving his silent agreement to keep watch over the prisoner. Just before the two women exited the cave, Mariah turned back.

  “Tibbot, don’t do anything to him. Please.”

  He scowled at her and muttered, “I don’t know why not. Seems to me we finished with this piece of trash last night.” She stared him down, and after a moment, the old man grunted and turned his gaze back toward Vasdaf. She’d figured that was the closest she was going to get to assent.

  Shira and Tibbot agreed on one thing. They both seemed to think it was best to kill the soldier and get rid of his body before they went on their way. Shira had been more reluctant to admit it than the old man, but they both told her that it was too big of a risk to do anything else. As if that weren’t enough, much to Mariah’s astonishment, as soon as Vasdaf had figured out what they were about, he had asked to join them, to help them in their endeavors to free the Ceo San children from the slave camps.

  Mariah doubted his sincerity but mostly because of the armor he wore, had worn for years. Shira and Tibbot made it clear that the armor was enough.

  Her thoughts roiling, Mariah wrapped her head again and pulled on her cloak and gloves before following Shira outside. In the growing light of the forest, Shadow, a large seal mare, nickered in greeting when she saw them emerge. She nuzzled Mariah’s hand when she approached but whinnied and danced back a moment later when Shira got too close.

  “Horses have never liked me much,” her friend admitted, the disappointment clear in her voice. “I think they smell my other side. Can’t blame ’em for not trustin’ a bear.”

  Mariah untied Shadow and began to walk south toward the little creek they had crossed the night before. Shira paralleled their trail, walking on Mariah’s side and giving the horse a wide berth.

  “Ya know, your fox friend would take care of our soldier problem for us if you’d just let him.”

  Mariah stiffened as she walked, her fingers tightening on Shadow’s lead. “May I remind you that he hasn’t raised a hand to us?”

  “How can he, all tied up like that? Besides, Mari, he’s one of the king’s guard,” she hedged. “He’d put his sword in us right quick if we just gave him the chance. That or lock us up and drag us back to Glenley. You wanna go back there?”

  “Of course not. But I’m not sure he’d do that. What about everything he told us last night? Everything he volunteered?” Although she didn’t say it out loud, his connection to her childhood contributed a large part to her reluctance.

  Her friend moved close enough to grab her arm, and Shadow sidestepped quickly, dancing at the end of the braided leather lead.

  “I know you want to believe him, lady,” Shira hissed as Mariah shushed the horse, “but like as not, what he told us is a pack of lies. He probably doesn’t believe we’ll do what’s necessary. He’s just talkin’ until he can find a chance to escape or until we do something stupid and let him capture us.”

  “Maybe.” As Shadow stilled, Mariah reached out to scratch the base of her mane. “I’ve been thinking about it, though, and I’d like to give him the chance to prove himself.” Tugging at Shadow’s lead, she started forward again.

  Huffing loudly, Shira picked up her feet and pushed through the snow alongside them. The sun was brightening beyond the canopy of the trees, bringing warmth and the sounds of trickling snowmelt all around them.

  “Just what did you have in mind?” Shira asked.

  Mariah told her.

  Chapter Twelve

  Trust

  Every muscle ached when Mariah found the cave again nearly a week later. Blinking against the exhaustion that threatened to drag her under, she had nearly passed it. If it hadn’t been for the formidable silhouette of Shadow grazing outside, she would have flown right by it. Again. The horse was down to just a lead and halter and had been moved to a different tree, but the massive animal was hard to miss against the barren backdrop of the Foxgrove.

>   Snow still covered the ground, but irregular patches of black were starting to show. Shadow’s footprints had left tracks on nearly every available square inch of snow for a good twenty yards around the big boulders that marked the cave entrance. The animal nickered a greeting around a mouthful of something as Mariah flew past.

  In hawk form, she circled the rocks once and then flew right into the entrance, not bothering to change, fear dogging her movements as she cried out a questioning greeting. It had taken her so much time, so much longer than she had anticipated. Had Tibbot lost patience, feared her demise, and executed their captive? Had Shira?

  Shrieking again, she circled the inside of the cave, relieved to find Vasdaf, Shira, and Tibbot around the fire, all present, all still breathing. And all staring at her.

  Mariah landed softly on a jagged spike of rock near the back edge of the cave. Her talons found purchase on the little outcropping, but the rest of her wanted to melt into a puddle. Was that even possible? Her fatigue really was getting the better of her.

  Shira was hurrying over toward her when she looked up. “Lady! Thank the gods! Where’ve you been?”

  Mariah knew she should change, wanted to change, but every particle of her cried out for stillness. She wasn’t sure she could change. She did manage to clap her beak at her friend and emit a quiet chirp. Sighing, Shira held out an arm as the men looked on. Mariah stepped onto the offered forearm, and her friend returned to the fire, looking her over.

  “You’re not hurt?”

  Mariah gave one quick shake of her head. Shira settled to the floor, and Mariah adjusted herself so that she was sheltered by her friend’s body. The vulnerability that she had felt being out in the open for so long finally started to ebb, and her eyes drifted shut.

  “Guess we’re gonna have to wait for news a bit longer, gentlemen,” Shira muttered, but there was no anger in it.

  As Mariah began to sink into sleep, a loud noise startled her.

  Vasdaf had cleared his throat. “Lady Shira, Captain Atha should have reached the capital by now, reported to the king. She knows where I was headed. There might be Trappers headed this way as we speak. Now that she’s back, we should get moving. Now.”

  Trappers? The word sliced through Mariah’s exhaustion, and she blinked her eyes open, her wings fluttering.

  Shira was quiet for a long moment, and when she did speak, Mariah could sense her reluctance. “Even if he lied about everything else, he’s right about this, Mari. We can’t stay here any longer.”

  Pushing her fatigue aside one more time, Mariah hopped down to the floor and away from the fire. Emptying her mind of everything else, even the comforting crackle of the flames, she pulled the magic around her, through her. The effort was tremendous, but when the warmth started tingling under her feathers, it caught like a flame and sang through the rest of her body in an instant.

  The transformation complete, Mariah found herself flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling, the muscles of her arms and legs all having the consistency of jam and her skin feeling as if it were coated with a thin layer of ice. “It’s true,” she panted. “Everything he said is true.”

  Shira helped her into a sitting position and sat close by, their knees touching. Mariah slumped but didn’t topple.

  “I checked every camp he told us about, the Ceo San slave camps”—she refused to use the word drudge ever again—“and each one was exactly where he said it was, and each one was heavily guarded.” In the camps where the prisoners were already chained with that awful golden cuff, there had been at least one full-fledged Trapper for every Ceo San. She had seen men and women passed between them like chattel.

  Shira was staring at her. “All of them? You checked all of them? Even the one in Adis Ador?”

  Mariah nodded. “I had to be sure.”

  In a flurry, Shira started pulling maps out of her pack. The pack, Mariah noticed, had been neatly stuffed as if she had been ready to leave. She spread the parchment out on the floor before staring at Mariah in awe. “Even in one straight go … you must have flown a thousand miles.”

  More. Nothing had been straightforward. “He’s right,” Mariah nodded at Vasdaf. “His captain must have reached the king. At the second camp, they were waiting for me.” The minute the guard on the wall had spotted her, he had called out to his fellows, and a line of bows had been raised. From then on, at every camp where she had allowed herself to be seen, there had been close calls, arrows whizzing close to her body, forcing her into tight dives and rolls, threatening to send her back to the king’s dungeon. Threatening to make her one of the ones she was trying to save. She would be cuffed, chained, and led around like a dog. “After that, I had to be much more careful and stay completely out of sight.”

  “Were they watching for you or just any … bird?” Shira asked.

  “I don’t know. It didn’t seem like a good idea to hang around any of the camps long enough to find out.” Soldiers had been patrolling the areas around the camps as well, sometimes with Ceo San slaves. They weren’t taking any chances. Was all this because of their rescue mission last summer, or had they been lucky? At the time, the king had been starting his last push into Adis Ador and had called many of his soldiers to the western kingdom. Maybe what she had seen this time was normal, how it should have been when they had rescued Ayla and Nya. Maybe they had just gotten lucky that first time.

  As she pondered, silence filled the cave, and her exhaustion threatened once again to pull her under before Tibbot made a harrumphing noise. After a sidelong and not so friendly glance at Vasdaf, he asked. “What next, then? How’re we supposed to help these kids escape, get somewhere safe, if every camp and every soldier are on alert?”

  During her long hours of flight, helplessness and determination had warred in her thoughts, tumbling over and over until she thought her mind would burst. Her final solution wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.

  She hated to leave any child captive for even a minute longer, but what good would they really be doing if she and her companions got killed during their first attempt to liberate them?

  Somewhere over the Falmswell River, as she had crossed back into Varidian from Adis Ador—or what had been Adis Ador—she had swallowed the difficult truth: Even with Vasdaf added to the mix, their little party was not enough, not by far. Even if they managed to get some children out, they’d only be slaughtered.

  “We can’t go after the camps yet.” She turned to Shira, whose eyebrows raised in question. “Like your mother said, we can’t do this alone. We have to find more help first. We can’t shepherd everyone. We need more people, as many as we can find, people who are tired of seeing their friends and family taken and treated like … well, animals. People to help even if we don’t make it. They must be out there. We just have to find them.” She met Shira’s eyes, swallowed. “We already know where a large group of Ceo San is, people”—if you could call them that—“who have already defied the king. If we can get them to help …”

  Shira did not appear surprised or even angry, only resigned. Her gaze moved away from Mariah to the earthen floor of the cave, a hand going to her arm, covering a spot where Mariah knew there had once been a nasty wolf bite. Putting her own hand over Shira’s, she turned to the others.

  Mariah hated to do this to her friend, but if they had the help of grown Ceo San to help, people like Shira and Tibbot, their odds would increase many fold. Even the help of Xae’s mother had been instrumental in rescuing the boy’s sisters. As she thought of him, a pang of longing shot through Mariah’s chest, a longing for home, for Gwyn, for Bria, for everyone. Would what they were doing help at all to keep Rothgar’s war from reaching Cillian’s shores?

  She leaned into Shira and whispered. “I was able to send a message to Xae. From Quell, but I don’t know how long it will take.”

  “Thank you.”

  Before she could say mor
e, Vasdaf spoke. “But where? Who are these people? The king has done an excellent job of frightening his subjects into compliance. I’ve seen fathers lock up their wives and mothers hand over their children rather than risk his wrath.”

  Mariah rubbed her forehead against the ache that was beginning to build there. “Laikos.” It was the soldier’s turn to raise his eyebrows, his face paling. “Then Direstrand,” she croaked. “Shira and I have a friend in Laikos, someone who might be willing to help us get started.” Remembering the promise Loleon had forced from her, she left it at that, hoping that the wolves’ magic wouldn’t care about them talking about Ruby as long as they didn’t mention what she was. Mariah had probably already stepped over the line, but the binding had never seemed to hold her as it did Shira. Had Ruby even made it back to that dark forest? She shook her head. There was no point in dwelling on it. They would find out when they arrived. “As for Direstrand, there was someone there once, someone that would help, according to my mother. Let’s hope there still is. Maybe the … people in Laikos will have some information about them. Who knows? Unless one of you has a better idea?” She looked around, but the men’s faces were blank, and Shira still wouldn’t look at her.

  “You’re the boss,” Tibbot grumbled after a moment, nodding to Mariah. He rose quickly despite the hand he held to the small of his hunched back. “Let’s get on then. No point in sitting here, waiting to be caught.” He pulled out his knife and headed toward the lieutenant.

  “Tibbot!” The old man ignored her and squatted down in front of Vasdaf.

  Pushing the tip of his knife squarely against the bottom of the man’s chin, the fox leaned in and whispered something into the soldier’s ear, something even Mariah couldn’t hear. Vasdaf nodded fervently, and in a quick motion, Tibbot sliced through the ropes at the man’s wrists, leaving a narrow streak of blood on each arm. He did the same with the bonds at Vasdaf’s ankles and knees but managed not to cut the lieutenant’s clothing at least.

  “Tibbot!” Mariah snapped again, gathering her wits. “I don’t want you to come with us to Laikos.”