Silver shook her head. She would never use Hiyyan in her quest for racing glory. But the rest? Overthrowing monarchies and owning many more water dragons? Were those things possible with the strength of the heartstone? What was the heartstone capable of, after all?
Silver licked her lips. A strange pull seemed to come from the stone.
She considers all angles, Ge said.
Ssun nodded. There is much for her to think about. Much to learn. Much to discover about what the heartstones will and won’t do. She will learn well. And do well.
Yes. Silver’s future came with clarity. She certainly would do well. But for now?
“I just want to heal Hiyyan. I just want us both to be free.”
And all other water dragons? Dortaal asked.
“Of course!”
Do not lead her into promises she doesn’t understand! They’re not predictable, these humans. The female Aquinder pressed her lips together, thinking. But bonds were created, and bonds exist, and they cannot be fully taken from this world, it appears. We must work with what we have and hope for the best.
Silver got to her feet, sensing that some decision had been made. Her blood slowed in anticipation. “Please,” she said again.
Sapphires gleamed as the female Aquinder held out the dragon heartstone and dropped it into Silver’s outstretched hand. Then she shook her head, settling her cloak around her shoulders.
I don’t know if choosing your Hiyyan above all others is the right choice, but it pleases the majority of the council. And so you have earned the heartstone. You’ll do with it what you will, and we’ll react as we must should we disapprove of your actions.
“Thank you for the chance to show you how much Hiyyan means to me.”
The Aquinder smiled and, for the first time, looked as old as Silver thought she might be. Her weary eyes crinkled at the edges, and her nostrils flared, but there was a warmth in her expression, too.
I hope to discover the truth of your words, she said. And I hope you are not disappointed in the truth of the heartstone.
The Glithern immediately dipped into the stream and swam away, while the three larger dragons walked into the darkness before Silver heard them, too, take to the water and leave.
Her brain and body ached; she was full of questions and confusion, but only one thing mattered. Silver held the dragon heartstone high. She had no time to shout his name before Hiyyan had tackled her to the ground.
Silver laughed so hard it hurt her belly.
He was real. Real! She and her Aquinder wrestled together, frantic in their joy of being beside each other once more. And when they paused to take a breath, Silver felt a warmth pulsing in her palm. She opened her hand to admire it again.
Her dragon heartstone.
“We found it,” she breathed. “I can heal you.”
Silver pressed herself against Hiyyan’s flank, and he pressed back. They rested for a moment, breathing in the crystallized silence of the burrow, their hearts swelling with gratitude, though for what they weren’t yet sure.
Although questions still swam through Silver’s mind, instinct told her to press the dragon heartstone against the wound on Hiyyan’s wing.
Everything glowed: the stone, her arm, his wing. Warmth flowed through both of them. Silver had forgotten what it felt like to be healthy. She closed her eyes and prepared to soak it in, just as she used to soak in the sun in the vast desert. Suddenly, a thousand decibels of sound battled for space in her brain—some sounds were low and slow, others high and snappy. Silver pushed them away, her breath quickening.
When she opened her eyes again, the scales that she’d pressed the stone against remained gold, like a softly polished pendant from her father’s workshop.
“Look, Hiyyan,” Silver said softly.
Hiyyan craned his neck to inspect the new mark on his skin. Then he caught Silver’s eye. It had worked! Finally, they would get out of the burrow and off the mountain. They would fly again. And then they would go to the Island Nations and procure their freedom.
Together, they grinned. Together, they lifted their arms high.
Together, they fell to the ground and bellowed in agony.
Silver’s pulse hammered the space behind her eyes as the sounds, once again, built up to a roar in her brain. A tear rolled down Hiyyan’s snout.
Soil rained down, the sound hitting the mucky floor like laughter.
No, Hiyyan said.
“This—this can’t … be happening,” Silver stammered. She tried to move her arm once more, cringing at the bitter pain in her muscles and bones. Frowning at her limb’s refusal to move, she tried wiggling her frostbitten toes and stretching her aching neck. Nothing had changed.
They weren’t healed.
The dragon heartstone didn’t work.
FIFTEEN
Silver considered chucking the heartstone into the dark shadows of the burrow, hoping it would find and roll into a crack in the earth that funneled all the way to the core, where the useless bit of rock would melt and never taunt her again.
Instead, she tucked the heartstone carefully into her bag with trembling fingers and closed her eyes. Nausea rose in her throat as the noises in her mind continued chattering away.
“I failed,” Silver whispered. “Finding an antidote is our only hope now. We have to get back to the Keep. Look, there’s a way to climb out of here.”
The duo moved slowly up the hand- and footholds in the walls, Silver and Hiyyan both crying out in pain with their efforts. She cradled her bad arm and curled her broken-nerve fingers on her good hand into a claw. Their breathing came heavy and deep. When they finally reached the forest trail once more, Silver doubled over, her head pounding with the racket.
Hiyyan stretched out beside her, his limbs trembling. I hear them, too. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of water dragon voices. Words and song. Why are they talking so much?
Silver’s eyebrows shot up her forehead, and she blinked at Hiyyan. That was the most advanced sentence Hiyyan had ever bond-said to her. Somehow she knew he was singing the words, but as they reached Silver’s mind, they were transformed into the language she knew best.
“Why are they talking so much? Why are you talking so clearly?” Surprise jolted Silver again. Her own words sounded mostly normal in her head, but something around the edges made them feel unfamiliar. They flowed differently. It was almost like when she held Nebekker’s heartstone, but amplified a hundred times over.
She realized she was singing instead of simply speaking.
A burst of steam rose from Hiyyan’s nostrils. His breathing was more labored than ever. Silver snuggled in next to him. She wasn’t sure they could go on without a longer rest.
You speak dragon, Hiyyan said. I haven’t taught you those songs before.
“No, that’s impossible.” From her mouth and into the painfully damp air, her words were the same as she’d always spoken, but there it was again: that feeling she wasn’t quite thinking the words she meant to think. And yet, their meaning was the same.
“I’m speaking my own language,” Silver protested. “And you’re speaking yours.”
I hear dragon.
“I hear human. Say something else. What are you thinking about?”
I’m sick and so cold, and I want to see my mother and—
“All right, fair enough!”
Hiyyan batted his long-lashed eyes at Silver, and she allowed herself a tiny laugh. She pressed her face into his mane, searching for some semblance of warmth. The voices continued to race through her head, but Silver let them. The noise made her dizzy, and that, in a strange way, took her mind off all her other bodily aches and pains.
I can speak your language, Silver thought with wonder. Fully. Not just a word here or there, not only a single song. “And you can speak mine. This would have been so useful in Calidia. But now … it feels like it’s come too late for us. Too late and too useless, like a broken heartstone.”
Hiyyan sighed, and the bonded
pair wrapped themselves around each other.
“We must keep walking,” Silver murmured.
A little more rest, Hiyyan replied.
Silver closed her eyes and waited for the next darkness.
* * *
THEY WOKE IN the Dragon Den, nested under so many furs and blankets that Silver wasn’t sure if it was the layers making it difficult to breathe or the poison swirling so close to her lungs. It took too much effort to decide, what with all the noise in her mind.
“There’s so many voices,” Silver whispered. “I can’t turn them off.”
“You’re awake, then.” Nebekker sat on the edge of the pallet, book in her lap. Her hand drifted to Silver’s forehead and paused there, as though checking her temperature. The old woman frowned and the wrinkles around the corners of her eyes deepened. “I wondered if you ever would, after Lers found you wandering around outside and dragged you back in, caked in mud and incoherent.”
“Think yous’n can eat?” Lers, perched at the base of the blanket pile, nodded kindly at Silver and Hiyyan.
“I do actually feel hungry,” Silver said, and Lers immediately went off in search of food. Silver was elated to see Nebekker and Lers, but then the disappointment over the dragon heartstone crashed in again.
As she pondered her failure, the voices started up again. Talking, talking. So many voices:… warm meat … I am in charge … race you downriver!… where is … not enough for winter … the humans come closer … new ice cave …
“Heartstone,” Silver gasped to Nebekker. “Broken.”
“What do you mean?” Nebekker asked, folding the book closed, setting it on the floor, and leaning forward with concern.
Lers came back into the Dragon Den with Mele just as Silver was pulling the heartstone from her bag. It emitted a weak light that made Mele gasp, but Lers set down his tray without a second glance at the object. Silver let Nebekker inspect the heartstone while she focused on the food.
“Broth. For yous both. Get that down, and there’s summat bread, too. G’awn, show me yous can eat.”
This time, it was more than the poison weakening Silver’s ability to lift a spoon to her mouth.
“Here, I’ll help you.” Mele came over. She took up the spoon and teasingly said, “Open the burrow, the desert fox wants to go home!”
Parents would say that to desert babies when feeding them spoonfuls of yogurt, but it was the exact wrong thing to say to Silver. Her throat closed around the sip she was trying to swallow. Even Mele realized what she’d said once it was spoken aloud. She tipped the spoon into the bowl and set everything aside, her cheeks as red as garnets.
“Sorry, Silver,” she said as she ducked her head. “Your heartstone is beautiful. I’m so happy you got one! How’d you find it, anyway?”
Silver squirmed and glanced at Hiyyan. She remembered some things about the trials: seeing her family bound, the dangerous tug in the depths of her belly when she considered the power the stone could give her. Fog shrouded other things. There were dragons—four of them?—exuding quiet strength and purpose. And two were Aquinder. That alone made her trial seem impossible.
“It’s hard to remember everything that happened. And some of the things I’d rather forget.”
“Like what?” Mele said, her eyes shining with curiosity.
“There were challenges. Queen Imea was there.”
“What?”
“She wasn’t really there. At least I don’t think really.” Silver rubbed her eyes. The more she spoke about the trials, the more confused she became. Nothing in that dark forest had been real. It couldn’t have been. And yet it seemed real. She’d been exhausted and in pain. She’d touched real skin, made real decisions. Hadn’t she?
“There were lots of choices I had to make. Once I even—” Silver swallowed. Her action was too uncomfortably close to what Nebekker had scolded her for earlier: sacrificing everyone and everything in the pursuit of her own dreams.
Silver’s voice went low and husky. “I chose freedom for water dragons over saving the people I love the most.”
Mele went quiet for a moment, contemplating. “That’s not the decision I would have made, I think,” she said finally.
“I know,” Silver said miserably.
“But it’s a decision someone would have to make,” Nebekker spoke up.
Mele nodded slowly. “And that’s what makes you different from anyone else. You’re willing to make the harder choices, take the unwritten path, struggle against a wind that wants to bury you in shifting sand dunes.”
Silver’s pulse slowed to a crawl. Mele’s words warmed her heart.
“Thank you, Mele,” she said.
Mele took up the spoon again. “Someone has to be that person. To think of the bigger picture, of the world beyond our hearts. I can’t do it, but I’ll always help you when you have to.”
Nebekker passed the heartstone back to Silver. “It looks perfectly fine to me.”
“When I tried to use the dragon heartstone to heal Hiyyan, it didn’t work. I’m doing something wrong.”
Mele and Lers shared a troubled look.
“You can’t even heal Hiyyan?” Mele asked.
Silver shook her head. “I failed.”
“No, you passed.” Nebekker rubbed a gnarled hand over her face. “You have a heartstone, don’t you?”
“Yes, but what am I doing wrong? How did you learn to use yours?” The old woman was the only other person in the world who Silver knew possessed a dragon heartstone.
“It wasn’t like putting a key in a lock to open a door,” Nebekker said. “I continued healing and my abilities were enhanced over time.”
“I need to study healing first?” Silver turned the stone over in her palm. “What’s the point of a magical stone if I have to do all the work? Maybe I need the wisdom of the Watchers to decipher it.”
Nebekker’s nostrils flared. “What makes you think they know anything about heartstones? What have they revealed to you thus far?”
Silver let her gaze fall on her Calidian friend, knowing Mele’s face showed all the hope and despair that clouded her own thoughts when it came to healing Hiyyan.
A log in the fireplace sent a flurry of rainbow sparks into the air, and the light ricocheted off the heartstone, dazzling the room.
Nebekker was right. The two of them were the only ones with any real knowledge about heartstones … and that wasn’t good enough.
Silver let a flood of voices penetrate her thoughts before pushing them away again. Something had happened—changed—when she received her heartstone, but nothing that was useful to Hiyyan.
Mele sighed. “We’ll figure this out. Just tell us everything you remember.”
Now Silver’s expression changed, and she turned away, unable to face her friends. She’d abandoned them during the trial. She’d turned her back on her entire family.
“I can’t speak of it. Not yet.”
“You don’t ever have to,” Nebekker said, pacing the room with her slow, stuttered step. “Even if a hundred annoying girls ask you a thousand times about your experience.”
Silver swallowed back some guilt. She’d certainly peppered Nebekker with enough personal questions to make the old woman want to toss Silver into a glacier’s crevasse for good. But now wasn’t the time to stop probing.
“Nebekker, can’t you tell me anything? Please. Some clue to help me understand why my heartstone doesn’t work?”
Nebekker seemed to drift away from Silver, her face going slack and her eyes glazing over. She rounded the room once, twice, her breath deepening and taking on a noisy, rattling quality.
“You ask again and again about how I found my dragon heartstone. I imagine my story is much like yours. Strange figures demanding us to make difficult choices. I will never ask about your trials, Silver, because they are personal to you. They are private, yes, but also they are things I cannot understand because they have not been my experience. You could defend your choices with passion
, but an outsider could never grasp your reasons. Not unless they could see deep into your heart.”
“I’m not an outsider,” Silver whispered. “Not anymore.”
“Hughn,” Nebekker grunted.
A look of understanding passed between Mele and Lers and, without a word, the two rose and left the den.
Nebekker nodded. “No, I do not believe you could understand my decisions during my trials, Silver Batal. And you also cannot understand what I’ve carried with me since. I am going to tell you two things, and after I tell you, I want you to never ask me about my trials again.”
Silver swallowed hard and nodded. Nebekker’s face looked older and more tired than ever before. The coolness between them was melting away. Nebekker’s face was heavy with memory, with pain, and with guilt.
“The minutiae of the trials are inconsequential. I was asked to make choices, and all you need to know is that I chose Kirja over all. Over all, Silver Batal. I don’t know if it was the correct answer, but it earned me a dragon heartstone. Now I think my choice was naive, for it also tested my heart. Have you ever heard of a little town called Deir-aa?”
Silver’s fingertip traced the edge of a fur. “No.”
“You wouldn’t, because it hasn’t existed for many decades. You see, the moment I chose Kirja over all, a great tsunami rose up and swallowed the town and all its inhabitants. It’s the town I was from. Where my family still lived. I chose Kirja over all, and my choice was immediately challenged. I know those water dragons who’d bestowed the heartstone on me were watching carefully. I’d told them my family didn’t matter to me. My past didn’t matter. So they wanted to see how I would react when they took both away from me.”
“How did you?” Silver whispered. Scenes flickered at the edges of her vision: Jaspaton destroyed by a great sandstorm, her family gone, her heritage swept away in a wind. Her chest clenched as if she’d swallowed gemstones. No.
“I moved on. Shut everything out and kept going … wandering … until I found a place so different from my home that I could stop for a bit. Where no one knew my past or how I was responsible for the murder of hundreds of people.”
Race for the Dragon Heartstone Page 13