Faelost

by Courtney Privett

  Chapter 11

  The dragons were a problem. A big one. Sure, they were small now, but they were growing, and eventually they would be too big to hide just about anywhere. Even if we managed to avoid our unknown enemy, there would come a time when the dragons would be too big to shove into crates and carry on horseback. They would need space to move, larger prey than insects to eat, and I assumed some sort of training so they'd know that our friends weren't food. There was no place for them in Jadeshire, so would that mean there was no longer a place for us there, either?

  Damn it, Shan, what have you done? Why didn't you leave those eggs where you found them and let the Hycinth deal with these tiny promises of chaos and death?

  It was in the past and I needed to stop blaming him for the present. We couldn't go backward, only forward, only onward.

  Shan was on his side next to me, asleep under a heavy wool blanket. I assumed Lumin was curled up somewhere in the vicinity of his elbow. His hood was off and the campfire light danced across his face, causing his scars to alternate between angry and undetectable.

  Serida chirped, then scurried up my leg and perched on my forearm. Her tongue flicked as she craned her long neck to stare at me. I raised her close to my face and she nuzzled my lips and released a soft purr.

  “You look reluctant every time you interact with her,” Marita said. She and I were the only ones left awake, so we were on first watch. She stepped around the fire and over the sleeping lumps of Rose and Nador so she could sit next to me.

  “I guess I am. I didn't want this. Not at all.” I closed my eyes as Serida licked my earlobe and buried her face in my hair. Behind the boles, a horse quietly snorted. A second horse nickered in response. An owl hooted high above.

  “The dragon or the journey?”

  “Both. Everything. This entire last year. Everything collapsed, then fused back together in a different configuration with some new pieces tacked on, then collapsed again. The more things shatter, the more clear it becomes that the brittle and broken things will never again be made whole.” I opened my eyes and smiled at Serida. She clicked her jaws and closed her blue eye. Her amber eye continued to stare at me. “I know coming to terms with that is just part of growing up, but I'm not sure what to do with it yet. There are people in my family who think I have no right to be distressed since I wasn't taken and wasn't injured like my mother and brother were. They think I'm being selfish when the thing I'm most afraid of is them dying. I don't know, maybe I am selfish. Until a couple months ago I thought my father had abandoned me, so the thought of the rest of my family abandoning me through choice or circumstance or death is terrifying. Is it selfish to not want to be alone?”

  “No, I don't believe it is. Sometimes we all have to be a little selfish to protect our own souls.” Marita held out her hand and blew across her palm. Misty green light rose from her fingertips and condensed into a rotating sphere. “Or to protect the lives of those we love.” She shook her wrist and the sphere evaporated. “You seem to have a lot on your mind. I asked about your dragon and your thoughts danced you elsewhere.”

  I drew a deep breath and held it for a moment before allowing it to rejoin the cool night air. “Sometimes my mind sends me tumbling down a hill I never intended to climb. Sorry about that.”

  “How old are you, Tessen?” Marita asked. She picked up a charred stick and prodded the wood near the base of the fire. The flames crackled and embers rose into the starry sky.

  “Seventeen.”

  “From what I've seen of you, you are an intelligent and kind person. I've also heard you're quite a good swordsman. You are many things, but you need to keep in mind that you are young and with youth comes uncertainty and strife. You're still discovering who you are. Give yourself time and patience for that, because frustration serves no master beyond fear.” Marita stared into the fire and smiled. “At least that's what I've been told. I'm only twenty, myself. My life has shifted into something unrecognizable over the past two years, and I'm still getting used to it.”

  “Is that when you became an operative?” I asked.

  “No. That's when I exiled myself for refusing to hide my magic,” she said with an uneasy laugh. “My parents—especially my mother—could not accept my particular form of magic. Queen Lyssandra herself is a green witch of forest elf birth, but still my family sees it as magic unbecoming for anyone but the lowest-born gutter elf. I decided I'd rather be that lowly gutter elf than continue pretending I was something I wasn't. I left the only people I had ever known with nothing but my wits, two stolen spellbooks, and a cloak of insults riding upon my back. I renamed myself and spent somewhere around a year alone in the forest discovering my skills.” She nodded across the fire and swallowed. “Then Iefyr found me while he was stalking a renegade mark. I helped him take down that mark, and he took me to Ragan, who got me into Covert Services and initiated me as a Jade operative. I'm still training and will be for another year or two.”

  “So am I. I'm apprenticing as a silversmith. I suppose this journey is going to set me back significantly as far as that path goes.” I scratched Serida under her chin. “I'm trying not to blame this little one for anything. Not as if she chose to exist, or to have so much importance assigned to her. She's just a baby, as innocent as any other baby. As innocent as my new sister, who I'm afraid won't survive if the people who shelter her can't keep her and the rest of our family safe.”

  Marita slowly reached her hand out toward Serida. Serida hissed and snapped her toothless jaws. Marita jolted and withdrew her hand. “You handle her like she's a kitten, but to anyone else she's wild. She truly is bound to you and only you, isn't she?”

  I cocked my head toward Shan. “She tolerates him a little, but only because he's bound to her brother, and maybe because he smells kind of like me.”

  “Imprinting, binding, dragon binding,” Marita whispered. She pressed her fingertips together in front of her lips and an effervescent green dragon wing formed between her palms. It fizzled and crackled, then collapsed and vanished. “Do you know much about what it means to be dragonbound?”

  “Only that she thinks I'm her mother and everyone else can go sard themselves.”

  “Oh no, it's much deeper than that. Your soul is now intertwined with hers, as your brother's is with Lumin's. You have become part of each other, and part of the whole of the world. It will change you—emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Possibly even physically. The changes are different for each one of the dragonbound.” Marita sighed and tossed a handful of twigs into the flames. “Of course, that could be rumor. I only know what I've read.”

  “I only know what Daelis told me, and that's nearly nothing.” A yawn escaped my mouth and took with it a measure of my alertness.

  “It may be something you have to learn on your own as you continue to experience it.” Marita arched her back and gazed through the towering boughs at the crescent moon. “Moon light, star bright, embrace the night. Lady of Flight, keep us safe and gift us might.”

  “Was that a spell of some sort?” I asked once she relaxed her posture.

  “Nah, just a childhood invocation. Utter nonsense. Real spells don't rhyme, at least not the ones in my magical realm.” She yawned and rubbed her eyes. “You look as tired as I feel. I think we ought to wake up Iefyr and Rose so they can take the next shift.”

  Chapter 12

  “Tessen. Tessen, wake up. Now, Tessen.” Shan buzzed above my ear like an angry bee.

  “Go away, damn it.” I rolled onto my back and flung my arm over my eyes to block out the golden sunrise. “Let me sleep. Having this weird dream about flying through a forest made of stars while ice drakes danced beneath the aurora. Beautiful. I wanna know how it ends.”

  “Tessen, open your eyes.”

  “No. Comfortable.”

  Shan straddled my chest. He placed a cold hand on either side of my face and shook me. “Now!”

  My eyes still closed, I shoved him away and sat upright. My head swam with
residual stars. Such a strange dream, but nothing like the nightmare I'd had when I slept on Ragan's couch the previous night. That one involved my family members approaching me, one at a time, and shriveling from their usual healthy selves into emaciated and diseased wraiths. One at a time, over and over, approach, shrivel, and die.

  Shan grabbed my shoulders, snapping me free from the memory of the nightmare. My heavy eyelids still refused to open.

  “Come on, wake up,” Shan growled. “You can't refuse to wake when you're in danger, you just can't. It will get us all killed.”

  “Not in danger right now. Maybe later,” I said with a yawn.

  “Bullshit. Open your gods-damned eyes and see it for yourself.”

  The fatigue dashed away on the chilled wind. My eyes finally responded and creaked open. Well, that wasn't what I expected.

  The redwoods were gone, as were the ferns, the squirrels, the ruins of the campfire, and the well-traveled Diamond Road itself. Instead of the rolling expanse of the Jade Realm, I was surrounded by a flat plain of shimmering gold sand. No, not sand. Silt. The texture I found when I reached beyond my bedding was more akin to velvety flour than gritty sand. Our companions were still asleep, and it appeared we had been arranged in a circle, feet facing the pair of tiny dragons at the center. The horses slept in a concentric circle around us.

  Beyond the horses sat a vast field of spherical boulders. Some were the size of my fist and others were easily taller than I was, but the majority appeared to be about waist-high. They were gray-flecked white in hue, with a subtle surface sheen that reflected the dawn light as minute, sparkling galaxies.

  “What the . . . what the . . . where the . . . Shan?” I shifted so I was sitting on my knees, then reached for my sword. My knees sank into the silt. “Shan?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “How did we get here? Weren't you on watch?”

  “Not that I remember. I don't think anyone woke me up for it. Hey, don't look at me like that. I'm just as confused as you are.” Shan crawled across the golden silt and rested his hand on Lumin's side. He sighed and sat upright. “Just making sure. Had a sudden fear that they were dead. Everyone is still breathing as far as I can tell.”

  I rocked from side to side, assessing the positions and conditions of my companions. “Shan . . . Shan this is wrong. All wrong. We need to wake them. Now.”

  The sinister sun ignited the few wispy clouds in the otherwise blue sky. The boulders darkened from white to silver and the sparkles faded. The metallic landscape made me feel as if I should be warm, but I wasn't. The air and ground were cool, almost uncomfortably so.

  I tried to stand but my legs were uncooperative and the silt offered no support. I lowered myself to my hands and knees and tilted my head to look at Shan. “I'll wake Ragan. Wake someone else. Anyone.”

  “I'll wake Marita,” Shan said without hesitation. He slipped past Iefyr and touched Marita's foot. “Marita, wake up. Now.”

  Ragan was barely a yard to my left. I crept to his shoulder and leaned over his relaxed face. “Hey, Ragan? You need to wake up. Something's happened. Something weird. Maybe bad. Yes, bad. Very bad.”

  Ragan startled and opened his eyes. He was upright an instant later. His eyebrows knit as he tensed into a defensive crouch. His tail bristled as it whipped the air behind him and he looked more like a feral cat than I'd ever seen him before. He breathed heavily as he took in his surroundings with a mixture of rage and confusion in his blue eyes.

  “How? What?” Ragan's nose twitched and his eyes slowly shifted until they landed on me. “Tessen? What the hell? Where the gods-damned sarding hell are we?”

  “No idea. Woke up here, same as you. Looks like everyone and everything is here, but we're clearly not in the forest anymore. I don't know what this is.” I turned away from the rising sun and scanned the horizon. “We're alone here. I don't know where here is. Just boulders and golden silt. Who was on watch last?”

  “You were,” Iefyr said. Everyone was awake now and frantically attempting to assess our situation. “You and Marita.”

  That didn't seem right. “No, I remember waking you up, at least going to wake you up. Marita and I were too tired to continue watch, so we woke up you and Rose. I know we did. I remember the conversation.”

  “Do you remember actually waking them? Do you remember settling down to sleep?” Ragan asked.

  I searched my memory and found nothing. “No. I don't understand. I remember Marita saying we should wake the next watch, and then nothing. I was in the forest, and then I was here and Shan was waking me up.”

  “I don't remember anything beyond that, either,” Marita said. Her feet sank deep into the silt as she retreated from the inner circle to check on her horse. “I said something. I think we ought to wake Iefyr and Rose for the next shift. And then nothing, just waking up knowing I'd been asleep. I dreamed of stars and lights in the night sky.”

  “So did I,” I said.

  Nador crept close to Ragan, then sat and embraced her knees. “I dreamed of black mist and distant lightning.”

  “This place . . . there is nothing familiar about this place. Nothing I've heard, nothing I've read . . . where are we?” Iefyr shivered as he pulled a striped woolen blanket tight around his shoulders. “How do we know what direction to go to get out of this infernal place if we don't know where we are?”

  “We'll figure that out in a minute,” Ragan said, his hand raised. He wore a copper bracelet on his wrist that I hadn't noticed before. Decorative etching reminiscent of ivy ran along the band, and at the center of the design was an embossed monogram. ASD. I knew what that meant. Alon Sylleth Dannis. Ragan carried a small token of his son with him just as my mother did. Her own bracelet was my first silversmithing project, a leather cuff with small silver stars fastened to it. Each star contained a letter. S T A Y. Shannon, Tessen, Alon, Yana. I added the Yana star after she joined our family, but I didn't have time to make a Z for Zinnia before we were separated.

  Marita gestured toward Shan, who had moved away from the circle and was now pacing between the boulders beyond the horses. “He was the first to wake?”

  “Yeah. He woke up and immediately woke me,” I said. I tilted my head so I could look past Rose. Shan took small, uneasy steps and periodically bent to examine something on the ground. “Shan, what are you doing?”

  He held up his hand and shook his head. His shaggy wheaten hair fell over his eyes. “Shh, don't bother me. I'm analyzing.”

  “Whatever.” I sighed and watched Ragan's eyebrows alternate between drawn and raised. “This is confused Shan, not guilty Shan. I know you're thinking that because I see it on your face, Ragan. He didn't do this. He couldn't have. He can't even teleport himself without losing his clothes and ending up in the wrong place. Why don't you ask Rose if she brought us here? She's a warlock, too.”

  “I can't teleport at all,” Rose said, her hands held out and her eyes narrowed. “Even among University-educated warlocks that is a rare skill, a very rare skill, and I'm barely more than a hedgelock. The Nightshadows are the only family I know of where it is common. I wouldn't be surprised if they intentionally bred the ability into their line.”

  “This is true. Nightshadows were paired with the intent of creating magical offspring, specifically teleporting warlocks,” Shan said. He meandered toward us, a fist-sized sphere held in his left hand. He bent to scoop up both sleeping dragons before sitting at my side. He transferred Serida to me and closed his eyes. “I'm not even a proper Nightshadow, and I'm terrible at it. I mean, I can teleport, but I can't take anything with me. The only reason I've done it at all is because the University Masters know I can, so they've been forceful about me developing the skill. None of them can do it themselves, so I don't know why they're making me bother with it.”

  Shan's eyes remained closed as the others stared at him. I suspected he was afraid the tears would come if he opened them. This wasn't the first time he'd woken up in a strange and dangerous place,
and our new situation was almost certainly reviving memories he had no wish to relive.

  My own racing heart needed to remain quiet. If I panicked, so would he. I slid closer to him and put my arm around his shoulder. “We'll be okay. We just need to figure out where we are.”

  “Am I ever going to be in control of my own life?” Shan exhaled and tilted his head to my shoulder. “Just a fleeting thought, so don't answer that.”

  “This place is wholly unfamiliar. We may need to travel in the wrong direction to find the right one,” Ragan said. He stood and looked to the west. “Never seen anything like this. No hills, no trees, no nothing. Boulders and weird fine sand. Nothing else. It's so damned flat here, but the horizon's hazy. Not sure if it's a shift in the terrain or a gods-damned sandstorm bearing down.”

  “The sun has risen, but it's still cold. It shouldn't be this cool in the summer,” Rose said.

  “I think we're north of where we were. Far north,” Shan said. He held up the stone sphere. “Before I was coerced into becoming a warlock scholar, I was a student of physical sciences. Specifically, geology. This is alabaster, they all are. I don't think it's a native stone for this terrain, so the spheres were brought here from elsewhere. Some of them are broken and worn, but all appear to have been shaped by unnatural means. Someone carved these and put them here. Probably many someones over many, many years. Wherever we are, this landscape is intentional.”

  “Well, that doesn't make it any less alarming.” Ragan bent to touch his sleeping horse's face. “We need to get out of here soon as the horses are up. We only had enough provisions to make it to Melodar before we'd need restocking, longer with whatever we foraged or hunted. Nothing to hunt or forage here, and doesn't look like Melodar's on our map, so we've got two, maybe three days before we're gonna find ourselves real gods-damned hungry. Marita, your elf eyes see better in this light than any of the rest of ours, so get up and have a look around. See if you can find anything in the distance worth heading toward, anything besides more of this shit.”