She was still thinking on it, scanning the forest as she did so, when she realized the shrike had stopped. It waited for her on a flat stone in a mostly dry stream twenty feet away. It spread its wings wide, unmoving.
She halted. The streambed, which ran diagonal to her current path, extended down the slope through a corridor of trees and underbrush. It was far wider than needed for the tiny trickle of water that flowed through it. Upstream, it passed through a steep canyon of rock and earth, which formed a natural passage into the hills above.
Alert for shadows or movement that might give Maeron away, Corinna peered first through the canyon, then downstream and into the trees on either side. A boulder across the stream made a likely hiding spot. She circled to one side until she was satisfied of its innocence. If Maeron was nearby, he hid well — likely up the canyon.
Corinna thought to ring Austin again, but her mobile now lacked any signal at all. Instead, she closed half the distance to where the shrike remained on its stone.
“Here?” she whispered with a motion to the area in general.
The shrike gave an avian nod and warbled once.
“Maeron!” she tried. “I’m here! Let’s have a chat!”
Her voice faded into the trees. The shrike folded up its wings and sidestepped atop its stone. There was no other response.
“And if you’re waiting for me to get atop that stone, you’re going to be waiting a while,” she added under her breath. “Maeron?”
The shrike warbled again and launched upward with an explosive triple screech. Corinna gasped and crouched on instinct before it disappeared above the treetops.
Muscles coiled, Corinna waited a few scowling moments until renewed quiet blanketed the forest. If this was the new rendezvous, where was Maeron? Had he known the shrike would guide her here without Austin? Did he wait to emerge until Austin joined them? To assume so, she expected, would be to underestimate Maeron. She counted potential hiding spots of her own in the area, and yet both intuition and logic told her that pausing here would be foolhardy.
Corinna approached the canyon entrance, careful to avoid entering the streambed itself. “Maeron, if you’re waiting for Austin to get here, you’ll be waiting a while. He’s not coming around until I’m satisfied with what you’ve got to say!” She reached the canyon with no response.
The canyon led higher into the hills. Wait here, or push forward? Her heart beat out a couple of measures before she tired of hesitation and crossed the canyon’s threshold. Nothing happened.
She pushed further. No change stirred the path behind her. No force ahead tried to stop her. Onward she hiked, watchful not only for Maeron or the shrike, but for something more: the source of the soft, familiar echo that had begun to tug at the edge her senses.
She had not gone far when she spotted in the hills above — perhaps a quarter mile to her left — a dark hole, bounded by oaks. Boden claimed both the crystal and rift rested in a cave. Was it the same cave?
The echo she guessed to be the feel of Rhyll emanating through the rift gave hope that it was. If so, she might either surprise Maeron there or even find him gone long enough to either recapture the crystal or destabilize the rift itself.
“Or it’s a trap,” she whispered, “and he’s given me just enough rope to hang myself.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The cave was broad but shallow. Shattered piles of shale and mud at its edges hinted of a collapse in its not-too-recent history. Corinna stood twenty paces inside the wide crag that formed its entrance, her head just below the ceiling. In front of her, the floor dropped another two meters to a cavern bathed in the gold and lavender light. The light wafted from the rift floating above the middle of the floor on the cavern’s right side. Almost no daylight penetrated the length of the entry tunnel. Shadows danced like those before a campfire.
Aside from the rift, the cavern appeared empty. She could see no other passages save for the one by which she had entered. Eschewing the natural switchback from her vantage point to the lower floor, Corinna jumped, landing as softly as possible on rubber soles.
She had gone cautiously to the cave. Now, possessed with a thief’s need to burgle a house before its owner returned, she beat a rapid path around the cavern edge. A large, mostly level stone sat near the rift. A dried, black stain covered its top and sides. Behind it, concealed from the entrance, lay a broken lantern and a duffel bag.
Was that the crystal’s hiding spot?
She dashed to the duffel, then stopped short to give it an experimental nudge with a stick she had grabbed outside. Nothing happened. Forced to accept that as the most she could do against a booby-trap, she looped the end of the stick through the duffel’s handle, dragged it away from the stone, and tugged it open.
She sighed. A few stakes and lengths of rope lay atop no more than some clothing and mundane odds and ends. There was no crystal. She tossed the duffel back, eyes searching. Boden might have lied. Maeron might have moved the crystal out of the cave more recently. Or, she hoped, it might still be here, hidden.
Unless Maeron had already taken it through the rift, which meant he had already caught Austin, which meant . . . Corinna glanced in fear at the dark stains on the stone: blood, yet far too dried now for it to be Austin’s. She grit her teeth and forced herself to focus on possibilities that were still of use. The crystal must be hidden here. Somewhere.
And then it hit her. “Gods, I’m thick.”
The first magic she had ever learned was a trivial incantation: a child’s illusion that lit the image of a flame in the palm of the hand. With a glance at the still thankfully empty cavern entrance, Corinna held out her palm and risked the simple spell.
A tiny flame burst into being there as if struck from a lighter. So the crystal was near! Slowly, she backed toward the closest wall. The flame winked out within a meter’s travel. Grinning, she dashed across to the other side of the cavern and tried the spell again, moving toward the cavern center until the flame lit anew. It didn’t take long to map the edge of the aura’s radius, and at its center, buried in a low mound of earth, lay the crystal.
Elated, she snatched it up and ran for the exit. The rift would wait. For now, with no time to determine how much Boden’s bonds had weakened, she needed to hide the crystal from Maeron.
She retreated down the hillside as quickly as she dared, wobbling on uneven ground and loose rocks, still watchful for an attack. Before long, she came to a broad gully. It was steep at the sides, shallow in the middle, and lined with naked earth and shale. She had crossed it on the way up: the halfway point from where the shrike had left her. No sign of the bird showed above or below. Corinna scrambled into the gully, then continued forward, intent on hiding the crystal there.
Without warning, shale scraped and gave way beneath her foot.
Suddenly trying to walk on open air, her reflexes barely spun her to solid ground. She stumbled back from the opening maw before she lost her balance and fell backward. Her elbow cracked on the shale at the sinkhole’s edge. Falling rock splintered below. Corinna braced, certain she would tumble into the hole, but the splintering subsided as swiftly as it began.
She belatedly realized she had fallen to stable ground.
Eyes darting about for further danger, Corinna righted herself, shielding her protesting elbow. All was quiet. The sinkhole, nearly four meters deep, appeared to be only the natural result of a chance step in an unstable place. Nevertheless, she waited what must have been a full minute for any additional surprises before continuing.
She made her way past the gully’s center and uprooted a fern from between two jagged rocks. Another hurried search for the shrike turned up nothing. Corinna thrust the crystal beneath the fern, replaced it, and continued her watchful way toward the five-foot cliff that marked gully’s edge.
Intent on brainstorming how to proceed, she didn’t see Maeron until she had barely finished climbing out.
He was rounding a bend in the path. Slung over his should
er was a body that, while still hidden from the waist up behind a tree branch, unmistakably belonged to Austin.
They froze, both surprised.
Rope bound Austin’s ankles. In the second it took for Corinna to take that as a sign he remained alive, Maeron dropped him and threw forth his magic. Even as she tried to evade it, her muscles locked from the neck down, paralyzing her on the very brink of the gully. The toes of her right foot, poised behind her left, seemed to cling to the gully’s edge. Her right heel hung over open air and sunk her stomach into vertigo: the slightest breeze could spill her, helpless, back down into the gully.
The alarm with which Maeron had cast the magic melted into his usual smiling veneer. “It seems I win again, doesn’t it?”
Austin groaned where he lay. His eyelids fluttered as if he struggled to wake. His wrists were bound behind his back.
Maeron followed her gaze. “Oh, Mister Blanchard is fine. You’d be wiser to worry more about yourself.”
She found she could still talk. “Taking him to the rift before you can kill him?”
If Maeron was surprised that she knew about the rift, he didn’t show it. “I’ve no need to kill him. That might even be extraordinarily dangerous. But he’s linked to the crystal, so they’ll go through it together. And then maybe I’ll kill him.” He chuckled. “I really can’t be sure yet.”
Her mind raced. She knew the location of the crystal. She could use that to bargain. Except he would murder her the second he took it, assuming he did not simply rip it out of her memory. Damn her timing! If she had only waited a few seconds longer to hide it, she would still be within its aura when encountering Maeron. Just a meter or two might make the difference.
“Your bird was friendlier than the wolfhound,” was all she could think of to stall. “I didn’t have to kill it.”
Amused, Maeron approached to a mere step away. “Not my best plan, but I improvised.” He indicated Austin. “You chose an ingenious way to hide yourself these few years, Rhianon. Overwriting someone’s memory, stealing their body: I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“My name is Corinna,” she insisted. “And this was an accident.”
She could feel the soil under her right foot slipping. She seized upon a plan and pleaded this world would let it work.
Maeron peered deeper into her eyes. “Oh, Rhianon is in there. A meld of some kind? You know such a thing can’t last.”
Austin stirred behind him, awake, struggling to sit. Maeron spared him only a glance. Corinna shut her eyes and focused inwardly, calling to mind the theory behind the spell Maeron had used, its strengths and weaknesses.
“Pretty sure no one’s ever done it this way before,” she said. Eyes still closed, she visualized the length of her body, the magic’s control on her, and the root of that control within her own nervous system. “It might last. You should keep me alive to find out. I’ll even tell you how I did it.”
“Tempting. But the rift will close eventually, and I don’t have the time. Why don’t you tell me now? Spare yourself the pain of having it taken.”
Internally, she struggled to drive a wedge between Maeron’s magic and her own control. “Try me,” she stalled. “I’ve learned a few secrets about this world’s effect on magic. You might be surprised how well I can defend myself without the crystal.”
It felt like trying to push a toothpick beneath an anvil, but just a little was all she needed. She willed her right ankle to respond, implored it, forced it . . .
Corinna’s ankle shifted, relaxing for only a moment before Maeron’s spell took hold again. It was enough. Her body weight pushed her heel down and sent her teetering backward over the gully’s edge. She cried out despite herself and tried to brace for the impact through her paralysis. The fall seemed to take ages. Her shoulder slammed into the gully’s slope with a spine-wrenching impact. Now rolling on earth and gravel, she cried out again as her head hit something. The slope turned her sideways and tumbled her again. She got a mouthful of dirt before coming to a stop on her back, still frozen and wracked with pain.
She whimpered, half baiting, half sincere.
Maeron clambered down and crouched beside her. His necklace, a silver icicle hanging at the end of a slender chain, dangled forward between them. “Dangerous terrain we’re on. The rift, it makes things a bit unstable, I suspect. I’ve never considered suicide a viable defensive measure, but if that’s your preference . . .”
Corinna’s heart pounded. She forced herself to wait. “Can you afford to use more magic just to kill me? I’m sure creating that rift took a bundle. How much left have you to play with?”
At this, Maeron’s hand moved halfway to the dangling icicle as if on instinct. Taking that for as much of a confirmation as she would get, she mouthed something too quiet for Maeron to hear, and then, “Please?”
“Pardon?” He leaned in closer.
At once, drawing on the crystal’s aura that her fall had tumbled her into, she shouted the magic that shattered her paralysis, then grabbed the dangling necklace. Clenching it until it cut her palm, unsure if she drew on its power or the crystal’s, she hurled a lance of force straight into Maeron’s chest. It snapped the necklace chain and flung him ten meters across the gully. His yell broke the moment he landed.
She stood, grinning at her correct guess about Maeron’s necklace: magic tingled across her palm from the silver icicle. It was indeed a battery. “I can defend myself a lot better with the crystal, of course.”
Maeron began to stand. She watched, momentarily torn between regaining the crystal from its hiding spot a few meters away or going to free Austin. Corinna sidestepped toward Austin, out of the crystal’s aura, and squeezed the necklace tighter. There was no way to be sure if the spell she had unleashed on Maeron was its doing or the crystal’s. She might very well be helpless, but then, for the moment, so was Maeron.
“Cunning, Rhianon,” Maeron hissed upon standing, “hiding the crystal so near. Now give that back. You don’t know how to use it.”
“Willing to take that risk, are you?”
Maeron stalked forward and stepped up onto a piece of shale that creaked under his weight. “You fell into the aura. There are only so many places it could be. You’d want somewhere you could mark. My guess: beneath that fern. Do you think I can get there fir — ”
Stone scraped stone, cutting him off as the shale shifted. Another sinkhole appeared, perhaps triggered from his initial impact. Maeron pitched to his knees before the ground below him opened entirely. It pulled him down and swallowed his yell in a crash of splintering rock.
Corinna wasted no time. She dashed to the fern, reclaimed the crystal, and bolted for the gully’s edge. She climbed to the top with not a sound from Maeron. Austin was on his knees, his face a mask of pain as he tried to stand on bound ankles. Corinna pushed the crystal into his hands, pocketed the icicle, and turned to watch the sinkhole as she attacked the knots at his wrists.
“Didn’t exactly go as planned, did it?” she quipped. “You’re looking less than well?”
“Chest hurts like hell. What just happened?”
“I’m a right clever girl is what.”
“Maeron?”
She finished unraveling the knots. “At the bottom of a hole, hopefully bleeding out from a cracked skull.”
Austin lit up for a moment before he gasped and held a now freed hand to his chest. Even so, a weight appeared to have been lifted. “We should check, though.”
“Aye, we should.” She paused to appraise the pain clear in Austin’s expression. “Wait here. Do not let go of that crystal!”
Leaving him to untie his own ankles, Corinna slipped back into the gully. She made her way to the sinkhole across what she hoped were the most stable areas. It was not until she reached the edge that she wondered what she would do if she found Maeron conscious.
Fortunately, such planning remained unnecessary. He lay sprawled, face down, atop a heap of stones and earth five meters below. Though the sh
adows concealed any way to tell if he still breathed, she saw no movement. Regardless, she couldn’t leave it at that. Spying a likely stable path of descent, she tested a foothold, held fast to the sinkhole’s edge, and lowered herself down.
Austin yelled for help before she could go a meter. “Shit! No! Corinna!”
Rapid footfalls on shale sounded from somewhere up above. Unsure what to think, she cursed and started to clamber back up.
“It’s Boden!” he yelled, already across the gully. “I can’t stop!”
She surfaced in time to see Austin dash up the gully’s side, crystal in hand, and disappear into the trees toward the cave.
TWENTY-NINE
“Boden!”
The dragon refused to answer. The forest rushed past. Austin couldn’t stop it. With every heartbeat, an invisible blade stabbed his chest and destroyed any effort at resistance. His right hand clutched the crystal; he couldn’t let it go. Corinna shouted somewhere behind him, but she was too far off. Boden drove him up the hillside and into the cave.
A violet-gold tear in the darkness shimmered in the cavern before him. It could only be Maeron’s rift. Boden jumped him to the cavern floor. Certain he would be flung directly into the rift, Austin could only brace himself.
Abruptly, his feet stopped. Boden still gripped him. Against Austin’s will, his right arm lifted as if to smash the crystal down to the cavern floor. Austin grabbed it by the wrist with his left hand and wrestled to hold it there.
“The bones are here! You will set me free!”
Austin transferred his left-handed grip from his right wrist to his right hand and clutched it around the crystal. One hand fought the other.
“Now! Before she catches up or I will force my way out, through you! You! Will! Die!” His chest exploded in agony that buckled his knees.
“You can’t!” Austin gasped. His right hand crushed his left. “Or you’d just do it already!”
Memory of Dragons Page 26