by S. M. Boyce
Her stomach lurched again and the wind blowing over her face slowed, signaling a drop in altitude. She clenched her eyes tighter behind the blindfold and wrapped her arms around her mount’s scaly neck. The air warmed, but her skin still tingled. The momentum stopped with a sudden, soft thud. The cotton-soft scales moved out from underneath her so that she was once more on her feet.
Garrett’s voice broke the ringing in her ear. “You may remove your blindfold, Kara.”
A lazy wind teased the curls on her neck, tickling her. She pulled off the red sash and blinked until the world came back into focus.
They’d landed on a level platform cut into a mountain that looked out over the treetops of a forest. Vertigo shook her center of balance. She threw herself against the mountain wall to stable herself, but the dizziness stuck. Every nerve in her body prickled. The sheer cliff face stretched above her, blocking out half of the sky.
There was a small cave in the wall of the mountain, only a few feet taller than Kara herself and not much wider. It was dark inside. The smell of moss and the echo of water dripping through the rock made the crevice an unwanted mystery. A streak of blue slithered in her peripheral vision.
Garrett stood nearby, but Adele had not shifted back into her human form; she was a small blue dragon, about the size of a horse and completely different from the red one that had rescued Kara from the Stele. Its scales were softer, and its thin head was long, probably three feet at least, with two spiraling horns jutting from the top of its head. Adele’s rich blue eyes distracted Kara—for a moment, at least—from the fact that Braeden was not with them.
“Where is—?”
“Safe,” Garrett interrupted. He shook his head once in a slow, subtle motion that implied they couldn’t discuss this further.
Her stomach churned again, but this time it wasn’t from the vertigo or the drop in altitude. She looked him over and took a deep breath, wishing that she knew where Braeden was.
Adele the blue dragon stretched her wings and crawled onto the cliff face, digging her sharp claws into the rock so that she could hang on the side of the mountain. Pebbles cascaded past her, bouncing off of each other as she ripped them from the stone. She paused and watched Kara as the wind picked up around them.
“You must go alone,” Garrett said, nodding to the crevice.
“Why aren’t you guys coming?”
“We have already made our arguments in your favor. This trial is yours alone.”
“Wait, this is a trial now?”
“They’re deciding whether you’re worthy of drenowith intervention, Kara. They will judge you.”
Garrett’s form flickered and popped. He shifted into a blue dragon that was larger but otherwise identical to Adele’s new form and raced up the mountainside without pausing to say another word. Dust and small rocks tumbled past in his haste. Adele, however, waited. She made a soft noise, like a dove cooing, and then tore up the mountain after him.
Kara took another deep breath and peered into the cave. It was dark after the first couple of feet, so her first instinct was to listen. Steady dripping echoed from its recesses and the sharp zing of moss and slime caught in her nose. She ran her hands along the cave wall as a guide and inched her way through the darkness.
Her eyes didn’t adjust, even after five minutes of shuffling through the pitch black cave, and the nerves in her stomach twisted with a vengeance that broke her focus each time she tried to start a fire in her palm. She wanted to call out, to see if someone was nearby or if the cave would end soon, but her lungs deflated and her voice caught in her throat.
Light winked into view ahead on the left. It was close. She headed for it. The glow brightened, and shapes bled into view: boulders and the recesses of a massive cavern. When she reached the entry, she paused and examined this new cave.
The ceiling was a hundred feet high, and small breaks in the rock above let in daylight that illuminated the white birds soaring overhead such that they glowed. The birds ducked and rolled, swerving around the thick stalactites which hung from the ceiling. A towering waterfall in the distant corner of the cavern tumbled into a pool, which broke away in creeks through deep channels carved into the rock. One of these streams passed in front of her and disappeared into a break in the wall. The echoes of water rapids gushed from its depths.
The walls were lined with a green and blue fog that hummed with a life of its own. Kara brushed her fingers through the mist, which wrapped itself around her hand at her touch. The fog shifted over her skin, leaving a tingling itch everywhere it passed. She shook it off.
Across the stream, about thirty feet away, a clump of stalagmites rose from the floor. Each was a dozen or so feet tall and as clear as glass, but they glinted in the light and distorted the world behind them.
A small man sat in a throne carved into the center of the cluster. He wore a simple, tan robe and hunched over himself on his perch, his hands folded in his lap. The wrinkles on his face cascaded over each other, hiding his eyes and rippling to his chin. Two wiry gray eyebrows clung to his forehead and told her where to find his eyes if he did ever manage to open them.
“Welcome, Vagabond,” he said. The cavern’s acoustics amplified his voice until it was a bellow. A few birds resting on the top of his massive throne flew off at the sound.
“I am Verum,” he continued. “I see that which you don’t see in yourself and that which you wish to hide. Be still and don’t be afraid.”
Figures appeared from behind the throne, and as she saw each new face, her fear became more difficult to suppress. A colossal, red serpent with yellow stripes slithered around the throne on the last few feet of its tail, most of its body raised as it sniffed the air with its tongue. Human figures in green satin robes joined the snake, but Adele and Garrett were not among them. A minotaur walked around the throne and glared with cold black eyes that made her heart skip a beat.
He was several feet taller than her and thick wool covered his entire body. His bull’s head finished with thick, sharpened horns, and as she looked him over, she recalled the minotaur that huffed its way past the hidden cave after she’d escaped the Stele. She forced herself to swallow hard, since this couldn’t be the same beast, but the racing panic would not dissolve.
The minotaur cleared his throat. “Child, drenowith don’t lightly intervene. It’s not our purpose and not our way. But considering that fate brought you to meet not one, but two of our kind, we are considering whether you are truly worthy to keep them near. They have chosen to stay by you, should the Council permit, though the rest of us can’t understand why.”
Kara didn’t know what to say, so she glanced back to Verum. His eyebrows were higher on his forehead, now, and two green eyes watched her from behind his wrinkles.
“Did you know that the first Vagabond learned most of his gifts here, in this hall?” Verum asked. “All those years ago, Adele took the young man as her pupil.”
“I had no idea. Adele never told me.”
Kara’s mind raced back to the small cave with the scar in the wall, when the muses had told her she could never go home. “You remind me of someone I lost,” Adele had said. “I failed him. I will not fail you.” Had she failed the Vagabond, then?
“Do you understand why we are hesitant to help you?” Verum asked.
“I have a guess.”
“What is that guess?”
“You don’t know if yakona are worth saving.”
“Life is always worth saving.”
“Why, then?”
He hunched farther in his chair and coughed before scooting to the edge of his seat. He gripped the throne’s arm with his thin fingers, their wrinkles visible even from where she stood by the entrance. She walked closer so that he wouldn’t have to strain his voice, crossing the stream to close the gap between them as he spoke.
“It was Adele that once taught the Vagabond to break a yakona’s bloodline loyalty, but we never imagined the consequences such a gift would bring against
him. To us, it was knowledge learned for its own sake, but it changed him from a prophet to a threat. His knowledge drove greater fissures through the tensions of his people. It was his power and vast understanding of magic that ultimately destroyed him.
“We prefer to be myths, Vagabond, for when we interfere as we did then, we so very often destroy. Yet here you are, a human who knows little of this world, and you do need our help. Ourea is a fascinating and deadly place.”
He sighed. “I am therefore torn. The Grimoire is a powerful tool, one you alone can wield. Should your intentions in its use be flawed, I will not permit any drenowith near you. There are few of us left in this age. We must protect each other. I will search your mind, now, to discover these truths.”
“I hope this doesn’t sound rude,” she interjected. “But I don’t even have intentions yet. I’m still learning.”
He frowned. “You don’t need to speak for this. Your mind will tell me all I need to know.”
Well that was comforting.
Verum closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. Fingers brushed Kara’s arm. She turned, but there was only the rock wall behind her. The unseen hands crept along her neck to her temples. Her body froze. She couldn’t move. The base of her neck began to throb. Her bones suddenly ached. The dull pain pounded in her head until it clouded her ears. Her eyes twitched.
Verum’s frown deepened. His wrinkles grew longer.
“Why does your mind insist that you killed your own mother?”
Kara stopped breathing. The raging gust of the waterfall faded. All she could hear was a ringing noise, like she’d heard on the flight over. Her words stuck in her throat, and she watched the old man with a barely beating heart. He was going to make her relive everything, but all she’d ever wanted was to forget.
“Your heart vies for redemption and yet also longs for peace,” he continued. “These two forces are destroying you from within.”
Memories sprang, unbidden, from the depths of her mind. She pushed against them, but they shrugged off the chains with which she’d tried to subdue them and consumed her once again.
It’s a hot and humid Tallahassee night. Rain licks the windshield. Miles of wet road shift beneath the headlights. Spanish moss hangs from the low tree canopy along the road.
“Stop,” she whispered. The invisible hands dug into the base of her neck.
Mom is sitting in the passenger’s seat, clutching her stomach from the stabbing pain. It has lasted all evening and it’s so bad that she said she can barely see. Her face flushes green and she holds her hand to her mouth, suppressing the bile. The hospital is just three miles away. Miccosukee Road is the fastest route.
The tires skid once, but Kara recovers.
“We shouldn’t have gone this way.” Her mother’s voice echoed in Kara’s mind, drowning out even the ringing.
“Please,” Kara begged.
She tried to look up at the old man in his throne, but her eyes were blurry. She couldn’t see past the tears. She was somehow kneeling. Her knees ached. She must have fallen hard on them. The memory pulled her back.
“You know I don’t like this road, Kara. Too dangerous at night.”
They veer around a curve. Mom heaves again. The vomit splashes down the seat and hits the floor mat in chunks. Another curve. The stench burns the air in the cabin. The car races over a hill.
Kara stuttered, her cheeks hot and flushed. She sobbed. Her temples and her throat and her knees all stung. She pushed against the memory, fighting to stay in the cavern and not relapse into reliving that night again. Not again.
“Please, God, not again,” she sobbed.
But the memory recoiled and pushed harder as she battled it. She was losing.
A ditch passes beneath the headlights. The car skids, but recovers one last time. The curves are sharper on this stretch of the road.
“Kara, for God’s sake! Slow down—”
Mom rolls her window down. She misses. More vomit spills on the seat. The sweat on her brow makes her hair stick to her face like glue.
“Slow down.” The words repeated in Kara’s head until they no longer made sense, until they were just a meaningless echo in her mind.
They were the last words Mom ever said.
The road snaps to the left. The yellow reflector is there, hidden by a low-hanging tree, but it isn’t visible in time. The car hydroplanes. They scream and slide. The ditch looms suddenly into view and is gone just as quickly. The tires squeal and screech. Metal crunches. Glass shatters. A scream is cut short.
Mom is in the passenger seat. She’s staring out the front of the car, eyes out of focus. There’s a deep gash from her temple to her jaw. It’s bleeding and bubbling. It’s really deep.
“STOP!” Kara screamed.
She tried to yell again and swear at the old man, but she was sobbing too hard to do anything. Her shoulders ached and shook. Her knees trembled, even though she was curled on the floor. Breath came in shaky bursts because of the thick, choking tears.
It took a moment of wiping away the hot trails from her face, but she did look up at the old man through the sobs. She could see him, but the rest of the Council members were just blurred figures in her peripheral vision. He glared down at her with his beady little green eyes.
The tension in her forehead dissolved. The memories abated and, for a moment, she could breathe again. Relief flooded her lungs. She buried her face in the dust on the floor and covered her head.
“You are damaged, Vagabond. You can’t expect to heal a broken world until you yourself are whole.”
“I don’t want this,” she said.
“In your world, you were not found guilty of murder, unintentional or otherwise,” Verum continued, ignoring her. “Yet the guilt eats away at you. You are a murderer, but only in your own mind.”
Her cheeks burned. She tightened her hands into fists and her knuckles bleached white. Her stomach twisted. Numbness ate at her from the inside out. She wanted to scream, to run, to defend herself, but the painful truth had been finally dragged from her.
The hall was still except for the race of the waterfall. The wet-soil smell of mold suddenly pricked her nose. She tried to speak, but her voice was a crackled whisper with no meaning. Her head was too heavy to lift. She couldn’t meet anyone’s eye.
Her heart slowed after a few steady breaths so that she couldn’t hear her pulse anymore, which was a start. She pushed herself to her knees, plucked up what remained of her pride, and finally looked back at Verum. The sage wrapped his fingers one over the other, slowly.
“Why, if you were not found guilty, does this death eat away at you?” he asked.
She just shook her head in response.
“Do you consider yourself above the law?” he continued. “Have you defied it?”
“No, sir.” She tasted the lie on her tongue as she spoke. When Verum opened his mouth to continue, to catch her in her dishonesty, she held up her hand to stop him.
“I’m not above your laws.”
“But of course you consider yourself above our laws. You have the gifts of the Vagabond, the coveted knowledge of his Grimoire, and you would use your new powers to conquer death. I see it in the way you carry yourself, in the way you speak, more so than in your mind. Your parents were both lost because of something you did. Family means more to you than anything else, yet you are an orphan. At your own doing, no less.”
She bit her tongue and looked at the floor, swallowing the growing knot in her throat as she tried to answer him.
“Death isn’t your law,” she finally said.
“No, but the earth is our law. Balance is our order. We guard Her ways because without a world in which to live, there is no life. Death is a part of this balance and you will never overcome Him. Remember that above all else, because your attempts to do so will be your undoing.”
His eyes shifted from green to black. She shuddered.
“Human, you aren’t fit to protect Ourea. Not yet, at least.
Return to me when you have healed yourself and we may once more breach this question.”
“Are you saying—?”
“You may not have drenowith guides until we speak again. You will leave now.”
With that, he closed his eyes. She became aware of the room once more. They were alone, she and Verum. The other drenowith were long gone, and the ancient man was now as still as the crystal throne in which he sat.
A hand grazed her back. She snapped her head around, certain that the old man was searching for more memories, searching for more ways to torture her.