As She Ascends

by Jodi Meadows

  Gerel glared. “They elected their leaders.”

  “Even so”—Ilina spoke softly—”they’re not always given a choice.”

  Chenda’s mouth was drawn into a line. “Before we make any sort of judgment against Anahera’s leadership or her people, we must find proof. It is one thing to suspect the empire of quietly conquering the Fallen Isles, and the complicity of all our governments to avoid a war. It is another to suspect one of our own.”

  Hristo nodded. “If it’s true, then not only did they use the Mira Treaty against the other islands, they were clever enough to make it look as though the Algotti Empire was responsible.”

  “That sounds like Anahera,” Ilina muttered.

  Gerel eyed her. “Why do you hate Anahera so much? Besides this, I mean.”

  Ilina went rigid. “I—” Her gaze darted around the office. “I don’t think it’s relevant right now.”

  Gerel crossed her arms and waited.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

  “If it gives credit or doubt to the allegations against Anahera,” Chenda said, “it is relevant. Don’t you think?” Her tone was careful, even, like she understood just how quickly tensions could spike between them.

  Ilina licked her lips. “I’m not supposed to talk about it. I made a promise to my parents years ago.” She looked up at me. “That’s why I never said anything. It’s not because I don’t trust you. I do. Both of you.” Her gaze shifted to Hristo.

  He nodded encouragingly.

  The office was quiet, save the whisper of water on the hull and the throaty purrs of dragons.

  “My father is from Anahera. He escaped to Damina and married my mother so that the Luminary Council would protect him.”

  No one spoke a word. Because what could we say to that? I desperately wanted to know more—what did she mean, escaped?—but considering how reluctant she’d been to tell anyone even this much, questions felt like insensitive prying.

  “Ilina.” Hristo touched her shoulder, and then wrapped his arms around her when she leaned toward him. If anyone understood the complicated feelings of heritage and home, it was him.

  My throat was tight with worry, but I said, “I agree with Chenda that we need to know more before we make any judgments, but right now we do know that the dragons, giant noorestones, and Ilina’s parents are all being held on Anahera.”

  Ilina pulled herself up straight. “My parents said I shouldn’t look for them if they were ever captured.”

  “Oh.” My heart twisted painfully.

  “But when have I ever done what they’ve told me?” Her smile trembled, but she was trying to put on a brave face for the others. “Let’s rescue them and they can punish me later.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Altan?” Hristo asked. “Do you think he was telling the truth about knowing where the dragons are being kept?”

  “He’s a monster,” I said, looking at Chenda. “But maybe—in this case—he can be a useful monster. He does care about dragons. He also cares about protecting the Fallen Isles from outside threats. So yes, I believe he was telling the truth.”

  Chenda leaned back in the captain’s chair; she hadn’t hesitated to take it earlier, and it seemed unlikely she’d ever leave. “Still, I don’t want to tell him about Seven. Let’s keep that to ourselves for now.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Seven said he has a partner in Flamecrest. A person called Nine. We should find them and look at any documentation they have. If Seven’s claim turns out to be true, then we can decide whether or not to tell Altan. But he’s not one of us. He doesn’t get to know what we know. Not until we’re ready to share it.”

  The others nodded.

  LaLa squawked and wiggled away from me to inspect the items on Captain Pentoba’s desk. An inkwell, a sheaf of papers, a spare compass: all of it risked becoming LaLa’s property.

  Chenda watched the raptus with an amused smile. “I can’t believe that after everything, we’re actually going to rescue dragons. Are you happy now?”

  I shot a wide smile at her, mostly in jest. “Of course I want to help the dragons. If we have the opportunity, we should. Right?”

  “Yes,” she conceded. “I’d be a fool to not believe in the Great Abandonment after everything I’ve seen.”

  The office door creaked open and the first mate entered. “Made yourselves comfortable, I see.” He nodded toward LaLa and Crystal, both on the desk and shredding a piece of paper. “Just make sure they don’t touch the logbook and the captain won’t care.”

  “We’ll clean up after them.” I grinned. “Are the calculations finished?”

  He nodded. “We’ll be ready for you in a few minutes.”

  “Thank you, One,” I said as he left and closed the door after him.

  Aaru tapped on my arm. ::We know a lot of people named after numbers.::

  “Do you think One—”

  ::Don’t know.:: Aaru gazed at the door beyond me. ::Strange, isn’t it?::

  When I interpreted for the others, Ilina said, “I always assumed the captain called him One because he’s the first mate. But how can we trust anyone at this point?”

  “Surely Captain Pentoba has known him for years. First mate is a trusted position.” I reached down to pry the inkwell from LaLa’s teeth, but before I touched her, the jar clattered to the desk and rolled, and LaLa let out a long, low whine. Crystal echoed her a moment later.

  Ilina petted Crystal’s slender neck. “What’s wrong, little lizard?”

  But instead of coming to us for comfort, the dragons straightened their spines and made their wings into tents around their bodies. Their whines grew into wails, and within seconds they’d launched themselves into the air—heading directly for the open window.

  Everyone scrambled to action, first to close the window and then to block the door. Hristo caught Crystal’s jesses and hauled her back to Ilina, but LaLa was wily. She slithered just out of reach and threw herself onto the window, clawing and scraping at the wood.

  “LaLa!” Not that she cared about my scolding. Even when I clipped on her tether, she ignored me.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Chenda asked.

  “I don’t know.” I tugged at LaLa’s tether, but she just flapped wildly at me. “They’ve never done this before.”

  “They have, though.” Ilina had managed to clip on Crystal’s tether, but the little dragon exploded from her grasp and shot toward the window. The two small moons strained to escape, their wings arched and ready to steal into the air. “This is the same noise they made the day of the Idrisi tremor. About an hour before we felt it.”

  Talons shredded the wood as both dragons keened.

  “Do you think there will be a quake?” Hristo asked.

  Ilina nodded as the draconic howling crescendoed.

  ::Where?:: Aaru’s quiet code came sharp against the desk.

  I shook my head and freed a small noorestone from its sconce, hoping to distract the dragons. But they didn’t even acknowledge it; LaLa just wailed and thrashed her tail, while Crystal bit at the window. “LaLa, stop! Crystal!”

  But they didn’t. Maybe couldn’t. Our sweet dragons tore at the ship, struggling to escape to the sky. Nothing I did had any effect. Not noorestones, not soothing tones, and when I tried to touch LaLa, she batted my hand away as though I were a stranger.

  “I should warn the captain. Hopefully we can reach land before the tremor hits.” I’d never been at sea during an earthquake, and I didn’t want to find out what it was like.

  “Go.” Ilina gathered up both tethers. “I’ll make sure they don’t fly after you.”

  The moment I opened the door, the dragons abandoned their assault on the window to chase me, but Ilina held fast to their leashes.

  Aaru followed me out to the main deck and slammed the door shut behind us. With the little dragons’ scratching and wailing muffled, the only noise was the crew chanting, water lapping
the hull, and the rush of wind in our sails. We sped north at a fast clip, carried along by air and current and crystal.

  Aaru took my hand. ::Are you all right?::

  My heart pounded, but only some of it was me. The worry for Crystal and LaLa was easy to identify, but there was another terror—deeper and primal—which came through my connection with the dragons. Crystal, LaLa, and Hush.

  A polyphonic roar cut the night.

  The crew went quiet and stared west, toward Darina.

  The Drakontos titanus thrashed through the darkness, pouring fire into the star-strewn sky. Her talons clawed at the air as though to shred it into a thousand pieces.

  “What is that?” Captain Pentoba strode across the deck, drawn by the anguished cries of two raptuses and one titanus. “They won’t set my ship on fire, will they?”

  I squeezed Aaru’s hand and gazed up at Hush. Her flame spun across the sky in great red and orange ribbons, then scattered by the rush from her wings. I could feel it: anger and anticipation pulsed in my temples, hot with terror.

  “Ilina said they did this before the tremor on Idris.” My jaw ached with tension, and not even the gentle pressure of Aaru’s hand around mine could calm the whirling in my thoughts. “What happens if there’s a tremor?”

  “If the waves looked bad, normally I’d drop anchor to keep from getting carried off course.” She frowned up at the sky. “I already know what you’re going to say, though.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  She just shook her head. “Get us there quickly, because if hard waves come before we slow down, we’ll be torn apart.”

  I didn’t waste time. The moment One said go, I dropped into my connection with the ship’s noorestone and pushed.

  It was easy now, like breathing. With only a thought, I could make the stones bend to my wishes. I could wrap myself in their power and I could fly.

  At least, that was what it felt like as the midnight waves split before us. As Darina disappeared behind us. And as the stars moved along their pathways above us.

  Aaru stayed at my side, our fingers linked, and when it was time for us to slow, he squeezed. ::Here. Here. Here.::

  I opened my eyes, tendrils of noorestone shine falling away from me like silk scarves.

  ::Incredible.::

  At first, I thought Aaru was talking about Flamecrest. The noorestone-lit city stood between crimson cliffs, a bright fire against the brilliant night sky. From here, it was too far and too dark to see the sandstone-cut buildings or the bright tiles on rooftops, but I’d been here before; though anger and fear now tempered my awe, I knew that Flamecrest had more than earned the title of the Jewel of the Fallen Isles.

  But Aaru wasn’t looking at the city. He was looking at me.

  ::You,:: he said. ::You are incredible.::

  My heart leaped, and I couldn’t stop my smile. For a moment, it didn’t matter that we were about to work with the man who’d tortured both of us, or that we had two shrieking dragons locked with our friends in the captain’s quarters, or even that somewhere a tremor was about to begin. For a moment, the only thing was Aaru and the soft way he looked at me.

  I listed toward him, letting my lips graze his jaw when he pulled me close to hug. A shiver worked through him. ::Yes, yes, yes.:: He kissed just above my ear.

  But then the captain’s door squeaked open and the cacophony of dragons spilled out.

  I pulled away, aching with something deep and unfamiliar.

  Boots thumped. Voices rumbled. On the quarterdeck, Gerel and Hristo stood on either side of Altan while the warrior told the captain where to go. They’d cuffed his wrists together. The sight of my nemesis as a prisoner should have brought me comfort, but instead it sparked worry in my chest. Altan was here because he wanted to be here. If he’d instructed his warriors only to capture the ship’s crew, it was simply because he understood that killing them would prevent him from getting anything from me.

  Maybe he should have thought about that before planting an explosion in my city and murdering everyone in the council house. And my parents—no, I couldn’t think of them now.

  “We should help the others.” I lifted my eyes to Aaru again. “Before the tremor. Before the little dragons chew a hole in the ship.”

  He smiled. ::We will have time later.::

  Together, we returned to the captain’s cabin, where Ilina and Chenda were trying to hold a conversation over the noise of frustrated dragons.

  “Where’s Hush?” Ilina asked as I relieved Chenda from her death grip on LaLa’s leash.

  “She didn’t keep up with us.” I could feel her in the back of my thoughts—just as frightened and angry as earlier—but the thread was thin.

  “Maybe we should let these beasts fly, then.” Ilina eyed her dragon, still straining to escape through the door. “Since there’s no danger of Hush hurting them.”

  The other two options were equally bad: we could take them with us—on their leashes—or we could leave a pair of angry dragons on a very flammable ship. We’d already set one ship on fire this decan; it was probably smart to stop there.

  “All right.” I towed LaLa to me and carried her outside. Her squawks and thrashing only got worse, but I unclipped her. “There you go. Even sweet dragon weasels need to scream sometimes.”

  As soon as the leashes were off, both dragons launched toward the crescent moons, as brilliant as shooting stars as they streaked upward.

  Slowly, the ship turned away from Flamecrest and toward one of the magnificent sandstone cliffs. It was hard to see from here, thanks to distance and all the light billowing up from the city, but I could just make out a familiar structure: broken, soaring arches, ancient and beautiful.

  Ruins. I’d seen them before, during my tours of Anahera, but only from afar. No matter how sharp my curiosity, my requests to visit had been denied.

  The ruins were sacred, some said. Haunted, said others. Either way, I’d not been permitted to visit the site. To the goddess of destruction, every ruin was a temple.

  It was from those ruins that I felt it—the first stirrings of foreign anxiety. Not mine. Not LaLa or Crystal’s. And not Hush’s.

  “That must be it,” I breathed.

  “What?” Ilina pressed her shoulder against mine as we both looked up.

  “That’s where the dragons are being held.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  WITHOUT MUCH TIME TO PLAN, WE HAD TO MAKE our first decision fast:

  Altan would come with us.

  We couldn’t leave him on the ship—not with my sister sulking in our cabin, or the crew understandably wary of any warrior other than Gerel. We considered leaving him bound and gagged somewhere else, but we couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t escape, or that his warriors wouldn’t come for him.

  And because even as my prisoner, Altan knew how to gain control of a situation. He claimed he could reach the ruins without alerting Anaheran authorities, and that he had information regarding the layout and number of guards stationed there, as well as an idea of how to move such large creatures out of the building.

  Of course, he would not share the information. But he would show us.

  Time was short, leaving us little opportunity for debate, but if we wanted to succeed, then we needed him.

  I just hoped this wasn’t a mistake.

  THERE WAS NOWHERE for the ship to dock—not without going through Flamecrest—so the Chance Encounter dropped anchor and the seven of us took a small rowboat to the beach. There, Altan promised we’d find an old trail that led to the elegant, first-century ruins where he claimed the dragons were being held.

  Places like this were scattered all over the Fallen Isles. The Crescent Prominence sanctuary even had its own quaint collection of ruins, occupied only by small dragons and dust-smothered memories.

  The ruins above Flamecrest were far more impressive. And, according to Anaheran legend, haunted.

  As we stepped off the rowboat, I could just see one of the pale t
owers rising above the edges of the red cliffs. Two thousand years of storms and neglect had left the stone battered and crumbling, but achingly beautiful to behold. Arches, too, reached into the sky, their delicate fingers bent and broken. They vanished from my sight as Altan guided us to a trail, hidden by time and dust and overgrown weeds.

  Two by two, with Altan positioned between Gerel and Hristo, we ascended the trail. Morning haunted us from beyond the horizon, though the sky remained a deep, unending black, studded with stars and softened by hints of distant darkdust. In this predawn hour, I could make out the shapes of Theofania (the Innocent), Lesya (the Weaver), and Suna (the Judge) straight above. Airtor—the Wanderer—was never easy to find, as his stars moved across the sky in unpredictable patterns, but I finally spotted him on the western horizon.

  “Do you think the Upper Gods are watching us?” Ilina followed my gaze, the tendons in her neck standing sharp as she lifted her face.

  “If they are, they’re laughing.” We must have seemed so pathetic to them, attempting yet again to help dragons while all the powers around us moved to hasten the Great Abandonment. Perhaps the Upper Gods were just as eager for their Fallen brethren to return as I was to keep them here.

  “All right,” Gerel said as we walked around a switchback. “We’re on our way up. Tell us what to expect when we get there.”

  “Not yet.” Altan rattled the chain between his shackles. “I’ll tell you as we reach the top. Otherwise you’ll leave me on the side of the trail as soon as you don’t need me anymore.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Chenda said behind me. “You’d free yourself and run away. We wouldn’t risk it.”

  Altan glanced over his shoulder, his lip curled in disgust. “Obviously you’d kill me first.”

  I shook my head. “I know it’s difficult for you to understand, but we aren’t like you. We value life. Even the lives of monsters.”

  The warrior’s shoulders stiffened; he kept his eyes focused straight ahead.

  Maybe calling him a monster to his face—to the back of his head, rather—was too much. I forced my tone even and said, “Tell us what to expect up there. Guards. Layout. Everything. If you want to succeed, we all need to work together.”