Heir of Amber and Fire

by Rachanee Lumayno

  My father put the necklace, amber first, into the bowl. When the last gold glint had slid beneath the surface, he said, “Junctus. May the two become one. Fiat.”

  There was a flash, and the sickly smell grew stronger, then completely disappeared. As did the water in the bowl. All that was left was my necklace and a few soggy herbs at the bottom.

  “Did it work?” I breathed.

  “Let’s check, shall we?”

  My father quickly bound my cut with one of the bandages lying nearby and released my hand. He lit the candle and waited until there was a nice, steady flame. Then, picking up the necklace, he held the amber up to the light and studied it intensely.

  “Well?” I tried to hide my impatience.

  “See for yourself.” My father waved for me to come closer. I leaned in until I was practically touching the pendant with my nose. I studied the gemstone, but didn’t see anything. I looked at my father, who just shook his head at me and nodded back at the jewelry he was patiently holding over the flame. I looked again.

  There — I could see something. At first I thought it was my reflection, but it couldn’t be. The image of myself in the amber was too clear for that. It was more like my likeness had been caught inside the amber. And I felt it pulling me in, crying out for me. My father willingly dropped the necklace into my outstretched hand. Once my fingers touched it, I felt much better. Complete.

  “May I?” My father took the necklace from me and clasped it around my neck. He beamed. “Perfect. It suits you, daughter of dragons.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I SPENT THE NEXT DAY practicing my magic and shapeshifting skills, aided by my new soulstone, while Joichan rested in the back of the cave. With the stone, I was able to change forms faster and maintain my dragon self longer.

  After several hours of intense spell casting, I sat down next to my father for a much-needed break.

  “Even with my new soulstone, it’s much harder work than I thought,” I said.

  “You’re doing well, considering other shifters have been practicing since they were children, and you’re trying to cram a lifetime of learning into just a few days,” Father said. I basked in the glow of his praise, something I had rarely gotten from my false father, Hendon.

  Which reminded me...

  “Father, something has been bothering me.”

  “Yes, Jennica?”

  “How did Hendon get a hold of your soulstone? And how was he able to use it against you?”

  In dragon form, Joichan arched his back, stretching. “I was a fool, overly trusting. Hendon sought me out, claiming he hoped to learn from my dragon wisdom. I allowed him to stay with me for several days, in which he learned much about Annlyn and dragon magic — and my soulstone. Including how to create one, and how to tap into the magic of an existing one. Soulstones, while primarily used by shapeshifters, can aid other users of magic. It’s just that the secret of how to create one is very well protected by us shapeshifters. My only consolation is that he never learned I was able to change into a human too, as I didn't shift at all when he was staying with me.

  “One night, he drugged me and stole my necklace while I slept. I woke up and my stone was gone, with no way of tracking him. I could only surmise that he must have cast or carried some kind of spell to disguise himself and obliterate his tracks. I spent several months hunting him down, finally locating him somewhere near Calia. So I settled down there to wait for him, hoping his greed would cause him to be foolish.”

  “Greed? What do you mean?”

  Joichan pointed at my amber pendant. “A soulstone is linked to only one person upon its creation. It gains its power through the constant usage and link it has with its person. A symbiotic loop, if you will. If someone else were to use it, they would eventually deplete its magic, since they are not ‘keyed in’ to the soulstone. My stone would have run out of power and then Hendon would either need to create his own or replenish mine.”

  “But Hendon’s not a shapeshifter. How could he create a soulstone?”

  “Ah, that’s the trick, isn’t it? As I recall, he’s from Rothshan. They’re about as magically dry as you can get — not only does that kingdom have no magical abilities, they pass down teachings about how evil it is, so they have generations of mental defenses built up against it. It would take a lot of magical power for someone like him. An immense amount of power. And it’s dangerous; it could backfire on him and cause him to go insane. Or even kill him. It’s incredibly risky, but if he could do it successfully then he would have a source of magical power to tap into. It would eventually run out though, since, again, he has no innate magic. He’d have to find a way to replenish it somehow.”

  BY THE END OF THE DAY I had just about mastered conscious control of my changing, even if I wasn’t able to stay a dragon for more than half a day.

  My father declared his pride in my progress, and with the next breath, announced that he was completely well and we would leave in the morning for Calia. I was glad to get going; I still couldn’t connect with Taryn. But I was also worried about what we’d face back home — and facing Hendon.

  We didn’t prepare any provisions for the trip. Since we’d be flying to Calia in our dragon forms, we would hunt for food along the way. But my father didn’t think it would be necessary, as he said the trip would take just under a day. I hoped I would be able to keep up. I hadn’t had a chance to practice flying, since just changing into a dragon had been such an ordeal for me.

  In the morning, before we left, I prepared an extremely large breakfast. Bemused, my father grabbed a single roll and sat down, eyeing me as I wolfed down my food.

  “Flying on an overly full stomach can slow you down,” he cautioned. “Not to mention give you stomach cramps.”

  I piled a second helping onto my plate. “I just don’t want to hinder our journey by having to stop.”

  “Hunting on the go is not a problem. It’s quite easy, actually, and a skill you should learn.”

  I shuddered. “No, thank you.”

  My father laughed. “When you’re in dragon form, the instincts take over. You don’t even notice the raw meat.”

  I tried not to gag. “I’d prefer not to have to hunt at all.”

  “It’s inevitable. Dragons, even small ones, eat at least five times as much as any human. How are you going to make up that food deficit if you won’t hunt?”

  “I’ll eat trees or bushes or something. If we find a nice apple orchard...”

  My father snorted. “A vegetarian dragon. Imagine that.”

  I stopped eating as a thought suddenly hit me. “When you hunt... you don’t hunt anywhere near Annlyn, do you?”

  Joichan shook his head. “Shapeshifters don’t taste very good. It’s the confusion between which form you’re eating. Human? Or animal?”

  The food I had just swallowed threatened to come up. I pushed my plate away, my appetite gone. “Oh.”

  My father laughed. “I’m just kidding. I’m a shapeshifter myself; I don’t hunt my own.”

  I nodded, but it was some time before I was ready to finish my breakfast.

  After we cleaned up the morning meal, we got ready to leave for Calia. On the ledge, I looked over the steep slope going downward. There wasn’t enough space for us both to transform, much less for me to get up to speed for flying. “Uh... Father? How are we going to do this?”

  “We jump.”

  “You can’t be serious.” We would plummet to our deaths within moments.

  “I am. Now, jump.” With that, Joichan took his own advice and leapt off the ledge. I screamed, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of Joichan’s plunge or because suddenly there was an immense golden dragon flapping its mighty wings in front of me. The dragon didn’t say anything, but I could just see the exasperated amusement in his eyes. What are you waiting for?

  Okay, here I go, I thought. I hope he can fly fast enough to catch me before I hit the ground.

  I closed my eyes and stepped off
the cliff.

  I may have screamed again. I’m not sure; the air was rushing by me so fast that any sound from my throat got ripped away. I opened my eyes, expecting to see my father flying right next to me.

  Instead, he was still hovering in the same place I had last seen him in.

  And the ground was coming up way too fast.

  I closed my eyes, trying to slow my anxious breathing so I could concentrate. In. Out. In. Out. My nerves calmed somewhat, enough for the hasty training of the last week or so to take over.

  My awareness turned into myself, pushing out any intrusions from the outside world. My magic settled deep within me, filling every part of me and heightening my sensation of my self. My body tingled with the latent power within me. When I was ready, I pulled.

  There’s no better way I can describe it. It felt like I was tugging my human skin over my head, revealing my dragon form underneath. My nose elongated into a snout, smoke trailing from my nostrils. My body grew larger, skin becoming thicker with shining golden scales, new muscles rippling. Wings unfurled from my back, and I was aloft.

  I glided a little unsteadily back to my father, who had been watching, unmoving, as I went through my shift. Was he laughing at me? There was a smile in his eyes, something I never thought that was possible for a dragon.

  “Good job.” Joichan’s rumbly voice held a tremor. He was definitely laughing at me. We started our flight northward to Calia.

  “You just stayed there. Would you have flown after me if I couldn’t have changed in time?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “But I knew I didn’t need to.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  WE HEADED STRAIGHT for Calia, with a few stops for rest and food. The dragon’s body was much stronger than my normal form, but as I was unused to being a dragon for any length of time, I tired faster than Joichan did. Also, I was still learning to fly — some of it was instinctual, which helped, but I definitely needed more practice.

  My father was highly amused when I insisted we cook the game we hunted. Even though I was resting in my dragon form, the human side of me couldn’t stomach the idea of eating raw meat. Joichan obliged, and kindly turned away to eat his share, one of the cows we had taken from an open field. I was pretty sure I could still hear it mooing, although my father assured me he had killed it first before consuming it.

  As we flew I asked my father about his solitary life. In general, dragons didn’t enjoy living near civilization. But if you were a dragon who could also become a human, wouldn’t you want to live near other people?

  “Not necessarily,” Father said. “Dragons are, by nature, very reserved creatures. In my case, my dragon nature won out over my human side.”

  When he was eighteen, my father said, he moved to the nearby cave where my friends and I had first encountered him. But with constant interruptions from dragon seekers (or worse, dragon hunters), he moved to his second cave in the mountains, occasionally using the first one as a base to visit his foster family or his few friends in Annlyn.

  And Father lit up when I mentioned meeting Pazho. “He’s a good man; he just accepts things as they are and never imposes his viewpoint on them. He’s one of the few people who never treated me like I was cursed.”

  “He’s the one who gave me my soulstone,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised. Pazho is one of the wisest people I’ve ever known. He has an uncanny ability to clearly see to the heart of things — or people.”

  We were gliding through the air, our huge shadows skimming the ground below us. Admiring the fast-moving countryside, I looked up and ahead — and flew straight into a cloud. Suddenly I was being attacked my hundreds of little wispy feathers made of cold air. I began sneezing uncontrollably, bits of flame snorting from my nostrils.

  Father laughed. “That’s why you should pay attention to where you’re flying.”

  “Easy for you to — a-choo! — say,” I said, my voice thick. “A-choo! I need to rest.”

  Spotting an empty field, I winged toward it, my father still laughing heartily as he followed me.

  Despite our frequent stops, we still made good time to Calia. The sun was dipping low in the sky when we saw the towers and crenellations of the kingdom’s castle. We landed several miles away from the kingdom’s gates. It was partly out of a desire to stay hidden. Dragons weren’t common in Calia, and it would have raised an alarm if we were spotted so close to the kingdom. But also, we couldn’t get any closer.

  Surrounding Calia for miles around were bunches of tents and makeshift camps. Twilight was just giving way to nighttime, and the random fires that flared up illuminated our way. We kept to the shadows, but most of the campsites were too busy to pay attention to two nondescript people walking through.

  We passed by one tent, an imposing emerald-green affair that could have easily housed me and my former traveling companions and had room to spare. I fleetingly wondered what became of them after Joichan had taken me away. Most likely they had returned to Orchwell. Perhaps they were already on a new seeking mission. My heart twisted, and I wished I could have had a chance to explain things, or at least say goodbye.

  A tall male servant returned to the campsite holding an empty chamber pot. A stout woman sitting by the fire, roasting a rabbit on a spit, looked up as he approached.

  “His Grace has kept you hopping tonight.” She turned the rabbit slightly.

  “I’ll be glad when this wedding is over and we can go home to Shonn,” the man said. “Bad enough it took so long to come this far west. We can’t even get a room in the city, everything’s so full. Camping makes His Grace irritable and then he takes it out on us. And we still have the journey home, too.”

  The woman clicked her tongue in warning. “Don’t say that too loud. You never know who’s listening.”

  “He’s not here,” the man assured her. “He’s at the castle, for some dinner party King Hendon is throwing for all the nobles prior to the wedding. Don’t expect him back until late. If he can even stumble his way back after drinking all night.”

  The woman turned the spit again, this time with enthusiasm. “Perfect. More for us.”

  The man laughed and disappeared into the deep green tent, presumably to put the chamber pot away before joining his companion for dinner. Joichan and I continued on.

  On the outskirts of the campgrounds, I saw two familiar figures hunched around a fire. I gave a little cry of recognition and moved toward them, even as my father tried to grab my sleeve to hold me back. Two faces turned toward me: Farrah and Rhyss.

  “Allayne!” Farrah jumped up, about to embrace me, but Rhyss stood up warily.

  Now that I was face to face with my former traveling companions, I wasn’t sure what to say. “Uh. Hi, Farrah. Rhyss. Um. How have you been?”

  “Well enough,” Farrah said. “You?”

  “Same.” There was an uncomfortably long silence. I looked around their campsite. “Where’s Beyan?”

  At that moment I heard footsteps approaching the camp. Beyan stepped out of the darkness and into the firelight. He stopped short when he saw me. “Allayne.”

  “Beyan. It’s good to see you again.”

  He stepped closer to Farrah and Rhyss, forming a human wall that quite clearly kept me out. “I don’t know that I can say the same.”

  “I know you’re angry at me for what happened at the dragon’s cave.” I looked at each of them in turn. “I’m sorry you felt like I betrayed you. I couldn’t let you kill him.”

  Farrah and Rhyss shifted uneasily. I knew that they had been against Beyan killing Joichan — indeed, any dragon — as it would have corrupted the mission and Beyan’s soul. But he was also their leader and their friend, and they were duty bound to support him and his decisions.

  “Why not?” Beyan’s voice was bitter. “You knew what it meant to me.”

  I looked back uncertainly, to where my father was waiting in the shadows. He stepped forward, nodding slightly. Now that I had his unspoke
n permission to share our secret, I felt better. With more confidence, I turned back to my friends, who were staring open-mouthed at Joichan.

  “That’s ... that’s the man from the cave!” Rhyss said.

  “Yes. This is Joichan,” I said. I turned to Beyan, who stiffened but didn’t move. “I know you wanted to kill him because you wanted to avenge your father. I couldn’t let you do that because... Joichan is my father. That’s why I wanted to find him.”

  Now all my friends’ gaping faces were fixed on me.

  “My mother asked me to find him because we need his help. My mother is — ”

  “Queen Melandria of Calia,” Beyan said flatly.

  Now it was my turn to gape, at Beyan. “How did you know?”

  “When we came here, to Calia, your name was on everyone’s lips,” Farrah said. “The upcoming wedding of Crown Princess Jennica Allayne Kenetria Denyah of Calia to Prince Anders of Rothschan. When we asked around, the description people gave of the princess matched yours. Simple, really.”

  “Why did you come to Calia? I figured you would all return to Orchwell, since you had technically fulfilled your task.”

  Suddenly no one in the group would meet my eyes. Was it embarrassment? Beyan said, “We wanted to find you, and thought you would eventually make your way back home.”

  “We’ve been camping here for a few days, enough time to ask questions,” Farrah added. “That’s how we discovered you were the princess.”

  I was amazed that my luck in hiding my identity had lasted so long. “If you knew that I was the princess, then didn’t you wonder why I was on the road headed south instead of here in Calia preparing for my wedding?”

  “Once we figured it out, we did discuss it among ourselves,” Farrah admitted. “But nothing we came up with made any sense.”