Smoke and Shadow: An Epic Fantasy Progression Series (The Dragon Thief Book 3)

by D. K. Holmberg

  He wasn’t so sure.

  His brother had been faithful to the Flame, but Ty had never had that interest. Did his lack of desire to have that connection to the Flame mean that he was forever destined to fail reaching the dragon?

  They hurried onward, and when they reached the tavern he recognized that something was off. The building itself was intact. The street-facing side of it didn’t look any different than it had before, but there was something that gave him a strange sensation.

  “What is it?” Gayal asked.

  Ty shook his head. “I don’t know. It just feels like…”

  He reached for the dragon-bone dagger, unsheathing it and starting forward carefully, looking at the door as he did.

  As he started to open the door, Gayal stepped into the doorway in his stead, letting the shadows start to swirl away from her. It happened gradually, but it slipped along the cobblestones, around the door, and then through it.

  She stood there for a moment, the cloak having disappeared.

  “How do you use the dragon like that?” he whispered.

  “You will learn how to do so in time.”

  “Is it the dragon itself, or the dragon’s power?”

  The cloak fluttered around Gayal for a moment before falling still again. “It is a little bit of both. The dragon needs the host in order to survive.”

  “The host?”

  Her cloak moved again. “These dragons are unique, Ty. They are like the dragons the king hatched. Whereas those dragons could live independently—however much smaller and stunted they are compared to the ancient dragons—those that we are connected to need a host. We provide something for them.”

  “Which is why we have to work with the dragon.”

  “You have to work with the dragon, and you have to coax the dragon into working with you. It has to be a relationship for the both of you. It cannot be one-sided.”

  Maybe that was his problem. Ty was trying to let the dragon decide, but in this case, it couldn’t be that way. It had to serve both of them.

  He focused on that burning, hoping that he could feel something, wanting to ask the dragon how they could work together, but there came no answer.

  They stepped inside.

  “The tavern is empty,” Gayal said.

  She stepped forward into the tavern, and Ty gripped the dragon-bone dagger as he followed her.

  It would be so much easier if he could use the smoke dragon the way that she used the shadow dragon, but for now he had to resort to traditional weapons, especially if he didn’t have any other way of fighting.

  It was late in the day, a time when the tavern should have activity. The tables were toppled, resting on their sides, and chairs had tipped over. He stepped over broken glass—mugs of ale that had been shattered as they fell to the ground. Some parts of the ground were damp and others were stained, deep red or in one section a little bit of brown. He didn’t want to know what that represented.

  Rather than arguing, Ty headed through the tavern, pausing at one section where he looked at the ground, noticing a mixture of blood and ale and something else. There had been a fight here, and as he looked around he tried to understand what was here and what had happened, but he couldn’t make any sense of it.

  “I’m going to gather what I need,” he said to her.

  Gayal nodded.

  He headed up the stairs, moving carefully, slowly, and worry filling him. They already had the dauvern. What more did they need?

  When he reached the top of the stairs, he paused.

  The doors on the second level were all closed. He headed along the hallway, reaching the door for his room, and he pulled out his key and unlocked it. When he pushed open the door, he felt concerned that he might find the room in a complete shambles, but everything was untouched.

  It was the way he had left it. And there was nothing else here that he needed.

  As he looked around the room, he realized he hadn’t needed to return. He didn’t know why he had thought that he might. Now that he was here standing in front of the bed, the small table, and the wardrobe, he realized all he needed was clothing. He gathered a quick pack, slipping everything together, and sorted through his belongings for another moment before heading back down into the main part of the tavern.

  He found Gayal searching around the inside of the tavern, looking over everything. A deep furrow formed on her brow as he did.

  “What is it?”

  “Dorian was here,” he said.

  “I thought you said he left the city.”

  Gayal nodded. “That was the message I received, and that I believed, but perhaps he stopped here before he did.” She straightened up, looking around the inside of the tavern, and the shadows continued to swirl, moving with her. “I’m not entirely sure what is here.”

  Ty didn’t know why Dorian would’ve made it here. Could he have come looking for Ty?

  It was odd that Esme’s tavern would fall so quickly. She was tough. There had to be occasional fights in the tavern, so whatever had tossed the tavern had been more than what she typically would’ve dealt with.

  “We should look for Esme. She might know what happened.”

  Gayal followed him to the door along the back wall.

  He poked his head in the kitchen and found it in the same disarray as the common area of the tavern. Pots were strewn about. Food dumped on the ground. Knives and pans and plates all left in heaps.

  The fighting had come back here.

  He saw no sign of bleeding. No sign of anything that would suggest that anybody had been hurt here. But why would they have attacked inside the tavern like this?

  He stepped back out and frowned. “They were after something,” he whispered.

  “You said they already have the dauvern.”

  “They do, but…” He squeezed his eyes shut, frowning. “They have the dauvern. They have the king’s dragons. And…” His frown deepened. “There has to be something else. They have to have been looking for something more.” He didn’t really know. “I need to find Bingham and Esme to make sure they are safe.”

  Ty darted back up the stairs and down the hall. He should have checked Bingham’s room when he’d been up here before, but he had been distracted by what had taken place in the tavern itself and hadn’t been thinking clearly.

  Then he stopped at the end of the hall.

  It was a simple room, and though the door was closed and locked Ty slipped out his lock pick set and hurriedly opened it. It was an easy lock to pick, especially with the lessons that Bingham had given him. He probably hadn’t expected Ty to be picking the lock to his room, but it served its purpose.

  Bingham’s room was very different than his. For one, it was larger. He had a double wide bed that had a large canopy over it with a bit of lace. He smirked at that. He could only imagine Bingham requesting that Esme provide him with a nice room, though if they had rekindled things, maybe Esme had given him the nicer room so that they could share it.

  A dresser ran along one wall, an ornately carved mirror hanging behind it. Images of dragons were worked into the wood frame, though all of them looked like traditional dragons, nothing like the dragons that he had started to connect to, and certainly not like the dragons that he had seen in the king’s Hatchery.

  He had a wardrobe angled in one corner, and Ty pulled it open to see only a few pieces of clothing there. Otherwise, the room was simple—and fairly empty. Surprisingly, Bingham had a stack of books on a table, and Ty thumbed through them. There wasn’t anything to those books that would help him understand what Bingham might have been looking into, and then Ty stepped back out the hall, closing the door behind him.

  When he rejoined Gayal, he shook his head. “Bingham didn’t have anything in his room, either.”

  “Did you expect him to?”

  “I didn’t really know. I thought…” He shook his head. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I thought. Bingham came to the city for a reason, and I thought maybe he cam
e because he was concerned about me, but maybe he had come because it was all about Esme.”

  “How will we follow them?”

  “I have to hope that Dorian will send word, and we can follow him.”

  “What about the dragons?” He grimaced and found Gayal watching him. “You said that Tecal can use the dragons to find somebody else connected to them. Wouldn’t the king’s dragons have something similar? Wouldn’t they be connected in some matter like that?”

  “It is possible.”

  “I am not able to connect to my dragon, but your shadow dragon might be able to detect something, wouldn’t it?”

  Then again, it would be difficult to follow quickly.

  When he mentioned that to her, she smiled tightly.

  “There are other ways we can travel quickly,” she said.

  “How is that?”

  “With the dragons.”

  He started to smile, but Gayal didn’t respond.

  Instead, she guided him outside the city to a small rise that overlooked the massive capital set within the Dragon’s Jaw, and then she held out her hands. The dragon fluttered for a moment, but only a moment. When it eased, the dark shape slipped around Gayal. A shadowy winged dragon had taken shape.

  She held out a hand to him. “Come with me.”

  Ty looked back at the capital.

  It felt like he had only been here a short while, time where he had still searched for answers, time spent trying to understand what had been going on and trying to understand his connection to the smoke dragon, but also time where he had not come up with those answers.

  And yet, he felt a little bit closer to understanding that power now.

  How could he not when he could still feel the fluttering of the shadow dragon around him, the occasional stirring of the smoke dragon buried deep within him, and a hint of energy that suggested that the combination wanted him to reach it, wanting him to understand it?

  His time in the city and around Bingham and his brother had made him question more about his past than he had before. Perhaps it was long overdue. Maybe he should have been questioning his mother and her connection to the dragon relics long before he had, and yet he had not. There were secrets that he needed answers to.

  There was something else for him now. Not only to understand this dragon, stop Roson, but to learn the truth of his family.

  He took Gayal’s hand.

  When he did, the shadows swept around them. And then there was a strange drawing. It came like a burst of power, a sense of movement, something that he had never imagined before.

  They glided forward.

  Ty had no other way to describe it, only that they were sliding along the ground, power carrying them forward, an energy that he couldn’t quite explain in any other way. It was powerful, amazing, and unlike anything that he had ever experienced.

  He looked over at Gayal and found her holding her gaze straight ahead, staring into the distance, a tension around her.

  Ty was afraid of interfering with what she might be working on but wondered if he could learn to do what she was doing. Could he truly learn to be one of the Tecal?

  And if he could, was that what he wanted?

  Or was it all about finding his parents?

  Maybe it didn’t have to be about one or the other.

  If he could travel with the dragon, how much more could he do?

  Chapter Eighteen

  They stopped for the evening with a view of haze rising in the distance. The sun tilted far forward in the sky, heading toward the horizon, though not quite reaching it. Ty could feel energy around him, almost as if he could feel something coming, some sense of power that was pressing toward him, though he had no idea what to make of it.

  They hadn’t seen anything, wrapped as they were in the shadows of Gayal’s dragon. He began to wonder if he would feel anything. It was almost as if there was some concealment here, something unlike anything that he had ever experienced, wrapping around him, holding on to him. Ty tried peering through the shadows, gauging what might be around them, but every attempt he made to see beyond that darkness failed. He didn’t suspect that Gayal tried to obscure anything from him, just that the nature of how the dragon carried them prevented him from seeing.

  A strangely twisted tree rested near the road. It had thorny branches, cracked bark, and very thick, almost waxy leaves. A single flower, completely white, grew on one of the upper branches.

  “Why here?” Ty asked.

  “We need to rest.” The shadow dragon reformed the cloak around her, and Gayal paused for a moment, taking a deep breath and settling down on the road. “Or I should say that the dragon needed to take a rest.” She smiled, shrugging. “I suppose it’s the same.”

  “The dragon can’t carry you like that indefinitely?”

  She pulled a strip of meat from her satchel. “The dragon can carry me for incredible distances. It’s how I tried to find Roson James when I tracked him through the kingdom, but unfortunately the dragon also grows tired. It would be different for the ancient dragons.”

  “I don’t know that anybody knows anything about those ancient dragons. But I have a hard time thinking that they grew tired.”

  “We have a hard time thinking about anything that sits outside of our experience.”

  She took a deep breath while biting into the dried meat and then offered a strip to Ty.

  He wasn’t terribly hungry, though he suspected he should eat. If he didn’t, he figured that he might end up hungry when he needed to be ready to react.

  He settled down on the ground next to her and took the meat from her. It was tough and strangely textured, but the flavor was good. “I’ve never had anything like it before.”

  “It’s from the mountains of Pellu. They have the creatures they hunt. I was there when I chased Roson James. There is snow on the mountaintops, and it is quite lovely.”

  He looked off to the west toward the unseen. “I can’t even imagine what that might be like.”

  “Mountains? You grew up in Zarinth with Ishantil—”

  “Not the mountains. The snow on top of them.” He smiled, shrugging. “I’ve heard the stories.”

  “They are more than stories,” she said. “The people there are simple. They live simple lives. They want nothing more than to be left alone, to hunt, to enjoy the mountain vistas, and yet…” She shook her head. “Unfortunately, the people in places like that are increasingly bothered by pressure from outside. The king tries to protect them as much as he can, but there’s only so much that he can offer. It’s difficult for the king to get access to those mountain villages, which puts them in danger.”

  “Pellu is beyond the borders of the kingdom,” he said.

  She nodded. “It is, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t offer it protection.” She took a deep breath. “The dragon will recover quickly, and then we can keep going. I fear waiting too long.”

  “Where are we?” Ty asked, looking around. He had a vague sense of where they had traveled, though he didn’t know with any certainty. “There is something here.”

  “What is it that you feel?”

  “I don’t really know. Just that…” He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to feel for the power that had to be around him. Maybe it was dragon power, but maybe it was something else.

  He breathed in and out slowly and gazed in the distance, trying to call upon the power of the dragons in order to know what was out there, but even as he did he didn’t detect anything more than what he already had.

  “Maybe it’s nothing more than the smoke dragon I’m feeling.”

  “Maybe,” she said, smiling tightly.

  “What is it?”

  “If you’re detecting something, I don’t want you to dismiss it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there might be something to it.” Gayal shifted, twisting, and looked up at the sky. “We’ve been traveling for the last few hours, and if we were going by horseback, a journey of this dista
nce would have taken us three days.”

  His eyes widened. “Which direction were we traveling?”

  “South.”

  “South means the steam swamp.”

  She nodded. “Very good.”

  “You’re going to try to get there before Dorian?”

  “They won’t be able to travel the same way that we can. Even the actual Order of the Flame has limits. They might know how to use the dauvern and can track the dragons with it, but they won’t be able to use that power to travel this fast. So regardless of the head start they might’ve had, it won’t matter.”

  “If you get to them—”

  “Then we have to understand how to stop them.” She nodded to him. “I think it’s time for us to focus on trying to gather your control, mostly so that you can master a way of protecting yourself. You need to use your connection to the dragon.” She looked at him, and she smiled. “What I would ask is for you to keep working on it. Keep testing. If you can find a way to reach for that power, and if you can use that power, then you should be able to summon it in a way that will help protect you.”

  He sat next to her for a moment, arms wrapped around his legs, feeling for the energy of the dragon buried within him. “You want me to learn how to reach that power,” he said.

  She looked over at him and nodded slowly. “You’re going to need to have control over it in order to do anything with it.”

  “What if I can’t get that control?”

  Gayal smiled slightly and tipped her head to the side, frowning. “I’m afraid that’s not an option.”

  “I don’t have any choice but to gain control over it?”

  “It’s necessary, Ty. You need to gain control, and you need to be able to hold onto it so that you can fully master everything that you can do.”

  Ty focused on the burning in his belly. “I can feel the connection, but I can’t get the dragon to do anything. It’s there with me, but it’s using the dragon I’ve failed at.”