Lightfall, p.34
LightFall, page 34
He nodded, and we focused on the upward trudge. But after not too much longer, he paused and unslung the bulky satchel he carried. He scrounged within and withdrew a small flask that he handed over to me. “Your little Osri friend gave me some yombark tea. Just the tea, not the sleepers’ elixir.”
I uncorked the cask and wrinkled my nose at the pungent fragrance that emerged. “He didn’t have complimentary things to say about this.” I took a cautious drink.
Aric watched me closely. “And?”
“Am I your tester now?”
“You do test me,” he said with a sigh. “Let me try it then.” He took a sip, and some silly part of me tingled as if his lips were on mine. “Not bad.”
No, our kiss had not been bad at all.
“Not what I expected,” he continued. “Tastes a little sweet, if a little dirty. Like the waterfalls overflowing the Argonyx in spring.”
I wished he was talking about our kiss instead of the yombark.
Surprisingly refreshed by the Osri tea, we started out again. When we stopped for another drink later, the spot was little more than a narrow ledge overlooking the precipitous way we’d come.
I stared at the palace that now seemed very far below. “So small from here. Like I could step over the walls.”
“The High Keep stood against the Great Gorging,” he reminded me. “We can’t put a wall around all the Living Lands, but we’re safe enough here.”
I decided not to remind him that we weren’t within the walls right now.
“So now that we are too far for me to run away, will you tell me where we’re going?” I put my hands on my hips.
He took a long drink before answering. “I might as well tell you because you’ll figure it out soon enough,” he grumbled. “The old woman who lives in these heights was bound to the dragon before the Xabhad scion who was before me.”
I sucked in a startled breath. “But I thought you said… Doesn’t the dragon, ah, consume its rider eventually?”
“She does, and she did. But with Daoja, for some reason the dragon let her go before exhausting her aura completely. It was after a battle that Daoja collapsed, insensate, and the haloria pronounced her dead. They wrapped her in sunlaris-doused shrouds and interred her body at the dawn well for a mourning period, but before the ceremonial cremation, Daoja revived. Fortunately—or perhaps not—she was alone. If Kalima had found her alive…”
At his grimace, I imagined he must be thinking that could’ve been him: waking on a cold pallet, shrouded in winding-clothes. Being consumed live by pyre flames seemed the only thing worse than being devoured by the dragon.
When I started to reach for him, he thrust the flask into my hand instead as he went on, “As Daoja tells it, she crawled out of the dawn well temple, still dazed, and had just enough sense to creep away from the lightkeep before the haloria started searching for her. She didn’t remember much for a very long time, but she dug herself a little refuge up in these peaks, slowly regaining her memories.” He looked away. “Some I think she prefers not to remember.”
“You don’t blame her.” Even knowing that her unforeseen freedom had meant he inherited the demon’s doom. No, that wasn’t fair; even if this Daoja had died, the dragon would’ve been bound to the victim before him and then to Aric. And when his turn was through…
My fist tightened on the flask as if I could throttle the thought.
Unaware of my inner struggle, Aric went on. “I didn’t know that she had survived, not for several years. One night, after I’d returned from a fight against the horde, she made her way back to the obsidian tower. She said she’d seen the dragon pass above her and felt compelled. She gave me a few thoughts—not all lucid—on how to survive. Then she slipped away again, refusing a place in the tower. She knows if she were caught, the haloria would finish what the dragon started, and though she is not entirely sane, she wants to live. And she’s too wily to ever be caught again.”
I gazed at him. “She gave you hope.”
He scowled. “Nothing like that. But knowing she survived the dragon is what made me think the Chosen Ones might be reawakened and some semblance of their selves salvaged.” He angled farther away from me to turn his glower toward the mountain. “I can never be sure if I’ll find her again, or if she’ll speak to me or even know me, and I’m not sure we should trust anything she says, but if anyone might have insights no one else can claim, it’s her.”
I knew basically nothing about dragons and demons and auras, but what little I’d been told or gleaned seemed antiquated, suspicious, or wrong, and now one of our few remaining resources was some old, mad, runaway demon-bait? As much as I admired the running away from death part, maybe I finally understood Aric’s uncertainty and cynicism that we’d stumble onto any road that would lead us out of the dark.
When I shivered, he pulled a cloak from his pack—the same one he’d wrapped around me when we flew with the dragon; how dare he take back what I’d taken from him?—and slung it over my shoulders. At my thanks, he just shook his head.
But I was pitiably glad for the protection as we continued upward toward ever starker, sharper peaks where the wind passed from fretful to hostile to gleefully murderous. On one pitch, steepest of all, I almost lost my grip and only the prince’s fist in the back of the cloak kept me from plummeting to serious bruises or worse.
“Almost there,” he said in response to my frantic curse, as if that were any consolation.
But he hadn’t lied, and as we rounded along one last narrow ledge, we emerged into a ragged crevice full of scree. If he hadn’t pointed, I wouldn’t have even noticed that some of the broken rocks were piled into something like a shelter.
Though I was eager to get out of the nasty wind, he put a restraining hand on my arm. “Wait here until I hail her.” As he stepped forward, he withdrew a long knife, more like a short sword.
“What’s that for?” I shifted uneasily.
“I told you; she doesn’t always know me.” He grimaced. “Or maybe she knows me too well and senses the dragon still. The monster haunts her sometimes, I think—not on the wing but in her dreams.”
“How sad,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but to think of what she’d gone through and yet not really escaped… Could any of us escape our fate?
Aric shrugged. “At least the taint of the dragon’s fury in her keeps any wandering demons at bay. She’s been safe enough here all this time.”
Shifting uneasily from foot to foot, I waited as he approached the camouflaged shelter. “Daoja,” he called out. “It’s Aric. Remember me? I brought you wintryberry and that stinky cheese you liked last time, remember? And some of that ale that you said tasted like hart piss but reminded you of home.” He paused. “Unless you’re not at home now, in which case I will dump it all into the ravine—”
A figure popped out from behind the rocks. A yelp gurgled in my throat at the sight of the ragged demon. But no, it was no demon, I realized after a terrified blink. Dirty, ragged, bent worse than any decrepit crone in Sevaare’s dankest alley, but not a demon.
“Wintryberry, you say? Where’d you get that?” The woman took few faltering steps toward us, then froze.
Aric shrugged one shoulder, making the satchel swing enticingly. “They’ve brought more Chosen to the High Keep,” he said in a gentle tone. “For a Devouring. And I need your counsel.”
But she wasn’t looking at him or the satchel with the wintryberry or the yaxen-piss ale. She was staring at me.
“You’re not alone,” she whispered to him. Or was she whispering to me? “You’ve always been alone.” Her seamed, wind-burned face was like the mountain stone, and set deep beneath scrubby brows, her eyes were like his: opals scratched from the inside until the rainbow hues were lost in the scars.
“This is Feinan,” he said, glancing back at me, his expression indecipherable.
“Um, hullo,” I said. “A pleasure to…uh…” Casting a quick return glance at Aric, I noted that he hadn’t yet put away the short sword. I had my knife and the animdao blade too, but he hadn’t reacted well to that the first time he’d seen it and I didn’t want to see what it would spark in Daoja.
Even without my weapons, she flinched, hunching down into the gray rags of an old, much-patched cloak. “You can see me?” she demanded. She twisted toward Aric. “She can see me? I thought I was gone.”
“Not yet,” he said softly. “We see you.”
Neck swiveling with an unnerving sinuousness, she stared at me again. “She’s no Chosen One. Her aura is as pitted and skewed as a huckster’s hedrons.”
He chuckled, the sound conveniently eclipsing my indignant sniff. “Not even close to pure,” he said with a little too much cheer for my taste. “But what she lacks in nobility she makes up with a truly appalling recklessness.”
“Not reckless,” I muttered. “Just finding my way through a troubled world.”
Daoja let out a rusty laugh. “Ah, fancies herself a trickster. Even the horde avoids the tangles of a trickster.”
I stopped myself from bristling, partly because I was maybe slightly flattered that this woman, who had flown a demon dragon, thought I was at least a little dangerous.
Aric turned casually aside to sheathe his blade with a smooth gesture, as if he’d only had it out for fresh air, and to my shock, he put his freed hand on my shoulder. “No. Feinan doesn’t steal, not like the horde anyway. And if her tangles are mostly of her own weaving, perhaps that is true for all of us.”
“All the knots in the Living Lands can’t hold the horde.” The old woman’s face crumpled, like a painfully slow avalanche. “They will take everything this time, and nothing can stop them. I’ve seen it, the cracks going all the way down.” She began to keen under her breath.
Aric cast a quick glance at me, then released me to step toward her. His hand hovered near without touching. “Daoja…”
I cleared my throat. “Maybe some of that ale?”
With a dip of his shoulder, he let the satchel slide into his hand. “And maybe step out of this wind?” Arm still outstretched, he herded the elder back toward her house. She shuffled ahead of us to duck past a heavy, dun hide that blended almost invisibly with the rock.
The stacking of stone was more meticulous than it seemed from the outside, the interior more spacious and better appointed than I would have guessed. Some of the crockery patterns matched Nenzo’s kitchen; Aric must have brought her some things—or maybe the belongings had been hers to start with—after she fled her grave at the dawn well.
There was more to the demon-touched prince that the people of the Living Lands knew.
We sat on soft rugs spread on the gravel floor while Aric passed around the ale and twists of soft, salted bread. He arranged the contents of the satchel into a nook in the stone wall. We ate and drank with only the ceaseless discordant whistle of the wind finding its way between the stones breaking the silence.
When Aric refilled her cup—a lovely silver goblet, strangely unadorned, with no inlays or etching—Daoja sat back with a sigh deeper than the wind. “That was good.”
“Not so much like yaxen piss?” He smiled.
She sniffed back. “That last batch you brought was brewed from the straw under their hooves.” Though her eyes were scarred as ever, her voice seemed clearer. Not my usual experience with drinkers, but I’d never met someone this cut off. Even Aric was closer to people.
Was this his fate too, the most he could hope for?
Sipping from my own mug, I hid my stricken expression.
Daoja glanced at me. “My father was a brewer,” she explained. “I would’ve been his apprentice.”
If she hadn’t been given to the dragon. I swallowed hard, the lingering salt and hot tang of the ale stuck in my throat like stifled tears. “My family left me with an innkeeper. If I’d stayed with him, maybe I would’ve served your ale someday.”
Her pale gaze darkened when she half closed her eyes. “If the threads had twisted another way, perhaps.”
“Instead the knots have blocked every way but this one.” Despite his size and the length of his limbs, Aric had folded himself neatly into the rock dwelling, looking more at home here than the palace’s grand galley. “Daoja, you told me once you’d read everything in Ormonde’s library. Do you remember a scroll about luminarci?” Quickly, he recounted Dyania’s trick with the rune, the old poem, and everything that had happened since. He ended, saying with a touch of breathlessness that maybe only I would note, “If we could enshrine pure auras as was once done, so long ago, before the Great Gorging—when there was no dragon…”
As he spoke, she’d been staring down into her empty goblet. Now she clutched it closer, as if she could curl into the dregs at the bottom and disappear. “No dragon. Auras caged and captive. The crack in the world…”
Her voice roughened with each word, like the thoughts were chipping away at her, and Aric and I glanced at each other uneasily.
I bit my lip. “The haloria said that the auguries are claiming a terrible attack by the horde is coming, worse than the Great Gorging. Is that what you mean by the crack the world?”
She laced her fingers so tightly around the stem of the cup that her thickened knuckles blanched. Despite the unkempt surroundings, her hands were surprisingly clean.
Except for the auric stain of all the Chosen Ones and demons that she and the dragon had destroyed in her time, of course.
After a long moment, she shuddered, as if shedding her silence and fear. “Sometimes, when I rode at the dragon’s heart, it all went away. I had no questions, no fears, just the wind and the untouched sky.”
I shot another glance at Aric, but he wasn’t looking at either of us. Maybe lost in his own feelings about the monster?
“We lost the scroll about the luminarci,” I told Daoja. “Can you remember anything about that story, or about any other legends of fighting the horde?”
Her clouded gaze snapped to me. “You think I wouldn’t have done it? You think I wouldn’t have fought with everything I had?”
“You might not have known you had it,” I pointed out. “What use is a key if you don’t have the lock?” I thought for another moment. “The reverse being not so much a problem,” I admitted. “Locks without keys were rather my unofficial apprenticeship.”
Aric snorted. “I thought I wasn’t to needle you anymore about your past?”
I shrugged. “Maybe just do it in an admiring tone.”
Daoja glanced between us, her bushy brows lowering then rising. “Not alone,” she murmured. “Will that matter? Is that the lock and key?”
She tipped her head back, and the hood of the cloak slipped down, revealing the thin, shorn wisps of her gray hair. Through the scant strands, the traceries of old scars on her skull whispered colder than the wind of the violence she’d faced. And the whispers said these mountains could do nothing to her worse.
“I don’t remember the scroll you speak of, not that one precisely.” When we both let out disappointed breaths, she held up one gnarled finger. “But I did read through the old king’s library, trying to understand.” She curled her lip in scorn. “The haloria refused to explain anything to me, said I was just a brewer’s daughter though the fate of the Living Lands apparently rested in my hands.” Releasing the empty goblet, she turned her hands over in front of us, staring down with a faint look of surprise, as if in her memory, the fingers were lean and strong, not the gnarled joints of age.
With a little shrug and an even more crooked grin at us, she continued, “They didn’t want to tell me anything, but I could read, my father made sure of that. And so I would sneak into the library, horrible as it was to sit under Ormonde’s ominous eye.” She squinted her own eyes by way of demonstration. “As I read, it came to seem strange to me that a master of the diamonde light, powerful enough to summon a demon dragon—neh, minus an arm—would then be resigned to flying out to years of slaughtering and butchery with his imprisoned beast, sacrificing aura after aura, holding her but never more.”
When she paused again, I mused, “Maybe Ormonde wasn’t as powerful as he let the stories and song tell it.” I’d never thought of the great king as a demon summoner; saying such now would be a blasphemy and risk of execution. “Or maybe he was just afraid to lose more of himself.”
“Lost?” Daoja hissed out a breath. “He made himself king of the Living Lands. Blade to bone, but that is a clever sort of loss.” We all sat there contemplating that for a moment, before she added, “Though after Ormonde, the l’Thine royal scions always found someone else to pay the price. They brought in other children to bind the dragon, and other noble families to pay with their auras. And the haloria kept their secrets.”
The bitterness in her voice—and the traitorous accusation, almost as bad as Ormonde being a summoner—made me stiffen. “They serve the Living Lands, same as us,” I said. But I noticed my own voice rose in a question at the end.
“And feed their own power,” Daoja said, “at the same time they feed the dragon.”
When I rolled my eyes in consternation toward Aric, he looked away. “You of all people can’t be surprised at who takes and who loses,” he said. “Who shines and who falls.”
I struggled to focus on the immediate issue. “Feeding and falling being our problem at the moment, how do we hold onto the dragon without sacrificing anyone else?” I wouldn’t be mentioning the missing bone whistle. I leaned forward to pour a little more ale for Daoja. “She didn’t kill you when she had the chance,” I said apologetically. “Since she let you go, maybe… Maybe she’s not purely bad.”
Despite her traitorous statements of only moments ago, Daoja looked scandalized at my suggestion. “Not purely. She is a demon. She is only evil.”
Once I thought it though, it made sense to me. “Most auras are like mine, not exactly pure.” I scowled. “And I’m not all bad.” When Aric sat preternaturally still, I glared at him. “I’m not! So maybe the dragon isn’t either.”
