by Terah Edun
Ciardis blinked. “It is that big of deal?”
Sebastian answered without pause. “Protocol to most dragons is everything. Your mother is right: this was a signal of something bigger on the horizon.”
Lillian sniffed. “Of course I’m right. I’ve been a member of these courts for decades. I was born here. I shall die here. I know when something is amiss, and so does the Emperor who rules us all.”
Ciardis swallowed harshly, but she forced herself not to react to Maradian’s name. It did no good when her mother seemed to think the sun rose and set inside his bum, no matter what personality she happened to be currently inhabiting.
“So he imprisoned her?” Ciardis said.
“He confined her,” Lillian corrected. “It was the only thing he could do to control the narrative, and that is most important of all, of course.”
Ciardis heard the shouts of the soldiers outside. She continued to ignore them.
Sebastian stepped forward with a wave of his hand at the prone body. “If I may ask, what did his plan entail next?”
Lillian blinked and the calculating light seemed to die in her eyes.
She gave the dragon a wistful look and a gentle pat. “I don’t know,” the Weathervane matriarch said, “but we could always ask him directly.”
An uncomfortable silence fell over the room. The younger Weathervane eyed the new Lillian who began to whistle. The bright and perky personality with emotions that bubbled far too close to the edge was obviously rearing its head again.
If Mother could see herself now, Ciardis thought, she would be absolutely horrified.
“Well?” the bubbly Lillian said. “What say you?”
They all looked at her and back at each other.
“No,” said Sebastian Athanos Algardis.
“Not happening,” concurred Thanar.
“Time for a new plan,” agreed Ciardis Weathervane. “One that doesn’t rely on a backstabbing Emperor as our savior.”
Lillian glared at them all, sniffed, and promptly sat down at Ambassador’s Raisa’s feet with a pout that would have done a four-year-old proud.
Ciardis looked away from her mother and back at her soulmates. When a solid minute had passed and no one was offering up any ideas, she let out an exasperated, “Well?”
Sebastian rolled his eyes and looked at her. “We’re stuck in a cinderblock room with no signs of egress, a dozen or more soldiers on the other side of a rapidly folding door, an unconscious dragon, and a woman with split personalities. That’s about all I got.”
Before she start pacing or yelling, she wasn’t sure which this situation called for exactly, Thanar said in a practical manner, “We need to figure out a way to force ourselves out before they force themselves in.”
Ciardis suddenly had an idea. It might not have been a brilliant one, but it was something.
She raced over to a bed and grabbed one of the sheet-covered cotton bags.
Taking it up, she ripped it open as she had seen Sebastian do before and eagerly sorted through the contents.
“I’ve got gauze, honey, liniment, needles, and oils,” she said eagerly. “What about you all?”
Thanar looked at her as if she was finally going insane, and Sebastian just cast a dubious glance over at the two packs he already opened. “They’re about the same.”
“About the same or the same?” snapped Ciardis as she looked up at them. “One of these objects could be the key.”
“The key to what, Ciardis?” Thanar snapped. “We’re going to file our way through solid stone?”
She threw up her hands and said, “At least I’m trying.”
“Try harder!” the daemoni prince roared.
“Stop yelling!” shouted a clearly frazzled Lillian Weathervane.
“Grow up!” Ciardis said, whirling to her mother.
Lillian hunched in on herself and began sobbing into her hands.
Just another fine addition to this day, Ciardis thought wearily.
19
Ciardis felt her anger disappear as quickly as it arose; she felt horrible a second later. She sank down on the nearest bed, almost in mirror image of Lillian’s own position. Ciardis didn’t cry, but she was close to it. She was angry. She frustrated. And worse, she felt like she had just kicked a puppy, but that puppy happened to be her mother and one of the few women she knew who could have gotten them out of this mess. That is, if she had been her normal self.
Instead, she was a puppet for Maradian Athanos Algardis in every way, and there was nothing Ciardis could do to save her. Just like she couldn’t stop him from sentencing her to indefinite internment at her trial.
In a way, Ciardis felt like she was being punished for her failures.
If not her crimes.
To her surprise, she felt a warm presence by her side. She was staring at the ground and had closed in on herself mentally, even if she couldn’t bring herself to withdraw physically as her mother seemed capable of doing whenever a situation got tough.
Ciardis felt an arm wrap itself around her shoulders and then…a wing.
She looked up from her intense concentration on the floor to see not Prince Heir Sebastian sitting side by side with her, but a certain daemoni prince who she was pretty sure didn’t have an emotional bone in his body that wasn’t aligned with anger or terror.
But the face she looked up into was not lined with either emotion.
In fact, Thanar looked concerned.
Which was scary in and of itself.
She didn’t say that to him, though.
Instead, she asked a simple question. “What are we going to do?”
“We’ll get through this,” he said in a comforting tone as he squeezed her shoulder with both wing and hand.
“How?” she almost sobbed.
He smiled. “Does it matter how?”
Ciardis stared into his eyes. “What do you mean, does it matter?”
She heard Sebastian walk up to her. As he crouched down in front of them both, he took her free hand and said, “He means…that no matter how tough it gets, we always get through. We don’t always know the way our path will be forged, but we always get through.”
Ciardis sniffed loudly, the kind of snuffle you chose to do when you were trying to not let snot drip out your nose and down your face.
It was highly undignified, but the alternative, she was fairly sure, would have been worse.
She let out a cautious sigh. “Well, if you two can believe we can get through this…”
“We do,” confirmed Sebastian with a squeeze of her thigh.
“No chance we won’t,” Thanar said.
“Then so can I,” Ciardis said as she defiantly lifted her head. She felt a cautious hope start to shine in her mind. She wasn’t sure if that was because Thanar was hopeful and therefore was influencing her own emotions, but she didn’t care. Right now they could all use a little boost.
And not a moment too soon, either.
Behind her an enormous crash sounded against the door that they had managed to wedge shut behind them with a lot of luck and some fire courtesy of Thanar’s magic. Ciardis was actually surprised the door had held this long, but with the healer’s magic aiding them, the soldiers had been unable to break the barrier down using their magical skills.
It sounded like they had elected to transition their efforts to sheer force of will.
With a rueful sigh Sebastian said, “I guess they found an object big enough to break down the door with.”
“It sounds like they found a huge battering ram,” said Thanar dryly.
“That too,” Sebastian said with a tired rub of his eyes.
“Really?” said Lillian, standing up with hope in her eyes.
Ciardis stood as well, more with a curse on her lips than joy in her gaze. She was really getting tired of this new split-personality Lillian Weathervane. Give her the sharp-witted and sharp-tongued mother any day.
Ciardis almost laughed as she thought that.
/> Lillian sniffed. “I think we should open those doors.”
Looking over at her mother ruefully, she chuckled and said, “I never thought I’d see the day when I actually approved of my mother’s style of, well…mothering.”
Sebastian blinked and looked back over at Lillian, then back at Ciardis.
Another bang sounded as Sebastian asked uneasily, “Are you feeling all right?”
Ciardis shook her head in brusque denial. “Not of that mother. But the other one. The one that I got know as we upended the courts and took on the very man she welcomes with open arms now. That Lillian Weathervane was a fearsome sight to behold.”
“Oh yes,” said Thanar softly. “That Lillian would have gutted two soldiers, convinced another five that they really wanted to align with her, and swanned out of here with the rest still staring at their tails.”
“Yes, that sounds like the real Lillian,” Sebastian said dryly.
Firmly Ciardis said, “We’ll get her back. We will.”
An impatient foot started tapping the floor. Lillian said in a snarly voice, “I’m right here, you know.”
All three looked over at her and said in a chorus, “We know!”
Then a voice shouted through the door. There was no more time to discuss or plan or argue, just react.
“We’re coming in,” a soldier yelled. “You can surrender peacefully or be thrown to the floor!”
It wasn’t really a request.
“This day just keeps getting better,” Thanar said as he stretched his wings and grabbed what looked like a bedpan off the floor.
The daemoni prince tossed it at the double doors so hard that it rang like a gong. Ciardis was sure the sound was loud enough to reach even the first level of the healing hall floor.
“Give us a bloody minute!” the daemoni prince yelled at the doors as soon as the sound of the gong’s loud ring ended.
It wasn’t like they had anywhere to go. The entire room was enclosed with no windows or doors leading out but the way they had come in.
They were inside a stone cliff face, after all.
There was silence on the outside, and then the sharp crash of the battering ram being deployed against the doors sounded out again.
They had their answer.
Meanwhile, Ciardis walked over to her mother, bypassed her, and touched the face of the woman she had been avoiding for as long as she’d been inside this room.
Ambassador Raisa of the Empire of Sahalia lay peacefully on her back, dressed in a court gown and looking quite serene, undisturbed by the cares of her people or the world as she slept. Ciardis had never seen her so sweet-looking before, which was a weird thing to think about a dragon. But Raisa’s soft hair and relaxed expression brought a bit of softness to an otherwise richly textured face.
Ciardis both wanted her to sleep forever and to awaken immediately.
As a friend, Raisa was the perfect ally, when she wasn’t threatening to eat your stable of steeds, anyway. But as an imperial ally, she was an unknown element. Until the last few days, the two sides of herself had never warred with each other in Ciardis’s experience. The Weathervane had done her utmost best to stay out of official court politics and even away from the capital city of Sandrin itself, though those circumstances had tended to happily coincidence with the Emperor’s own efforts to get her kicked out of court rather than Ciardis’s intense desire to travel the lonely roads of the empire.
Now that she was back at court, in the Emperor’s grasp, and everything she held dear was being threatened, she wasn’t so sure that waking up a friend would be the worst idea in the world.
After all, Raisa would have to get them out of here first, before she could rat them out to her own people. Or so Ciardis assumed the plan would go. The trouble was, you couldn’t really depend on a dragon to drop in and save your skin when you most wanted it. They tended to drop in on their own time, if at all, and it was often a surprise. There was no way to tell if Raisa would skip out on them or help them elude the Emperor’s grasp.
Besides, Ciardis didn’t know the first thing about waking a dragon up from a deep sleep.
But she had the feeling that whatever had put Raisa in her coma in the first place was far beyond her depths of knowledge, both magical and physical.
This was a job for a real healer.
Unfortunately, that was a group of individuals they were in short supply of at the moment, though she wouldn’t have put it past Maradian to have one among his personal guard just in case.
Grimacing, Ciardis lifted her hand away from the still dragon’s face and turned around to see her mother standing far too close to her.
Ciardis jumped back and snapped, “You have to stop doing that!
Lillian shrugged. Ciardis wasn’t sure which one she was looking at, though.
She’d know when she spoke or if tears started welling up in her eyes.
“I’ve never jumped in your face before,” Lillian said in an innocent tone.
Ciardis sighed. It was the emotional one. At least she wasn’t crying this time.
“No,” the younger Weathervane agreed. “But I still need my space.”
Lillian frowned and sat back on the bed. “She’s your friend, isn’t she?”
Ciardis didn’t pretend that she didn’t understand who Lillian was referring to.
“She was,” the Weathervane said softly as she walked away.
Behind her Lillian asked, “She’s not anymore?”
Ciardis shrugged as she took a ready stance half a dozen feet from the door. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know anymore. It’s hard to tell where a friend ends and an enemy begins this time around.”
Lillian was silent behind her, and Ciardis took that as assent. Either that, or she got bored.
Meanwhile, she stared at the door as she waited for the soldiers to crash through.
“Any more plans to review and discard before we let them in?” Sebastian asked as he came to stand by her side.
Ciardis noted that Thanar was a bit off the edge, giving himself room to maneuver, but essentially on the same alignment as the two of them.
“Not off the top of my head,” Ciardis said congenially as another boom sounded and they watched the wood in front of them splinter.
She wished she knew more. About Maradian’s plans. About the ‘boy’ her mother had mentioned. About what the Emperor of Algardis planned to do with them all, including a slumbering dragon. But she knew that the only person with the key to all that knowledge was Maradian himself, and he would have to come through that door to give it to them.
20
Ciardis felt nervous butterflies in her stomach, but she kept a calm face. She was ready for this. As ready as she could be, anyway.
Maradian might have had a dozen or more soldiers at his beck and call, he might have had her mother brainwashed, he might have had the dragon ambassador in fugue, and he even had the law on his side, but she had Thanar and Sebastian.
They would see this through to the end.
Another crash sounded against the door in front of them. This time, the double doors wedged open with surface cracks radiating from the center.
They could see the soldiers milling about on the other side.
They couldn’t get in yet, but they would.
Ciardis eyed them in dissatisfaction.
“How much longer is this going to take?” she asked.
Now that she was ready to confront Maradian, every second of further delay just felt like holding out for the inevitable.
“It was a pretty stout blast of fire,” Thanar said defensively.
Lillian piped up helpfully from the back of the room, “Maybe if you hit it from the inside of the edges of the door, they could push in from the outside and create a concave effect?”
Ciardis almost sighed. She just barely held back her contempt on the matter.
Couldn’t just one plan go right?
“What do we do?” she said with a tired look.
“We keep waiting,” Sebastian said quietly.
She glared at him. “That’s not a plan. I reject that solution.”
“Ciardis,” said Thanar in a practical tone that she was beginning to hate.
“No, I know what I said, but by the gods, we’re better than this!” she shouted.
“The door will come down soon, sweetie,” Lillian said in a sugary voice from behind them where she still sat by the comatose ambassador.
“I’m not talking about the door!” Ciardis snapped.
“I know,” Sebastian said, facing her head on. She was no longer focused on the door that seemed to be taking forever to come down. Neither was he.
Fortunately for them both, Thanar had already said what he had to say when she’d been breaking down before. Now he just watched the soldiers push in on the door like a cat waiting for mice to walk into a trap. Sometimes she wished she had his confidence in both his sense of self and his place in the world.
Unfortunately, she didn’t, and that was becoming abundantly clear right now to the prince heir forced to deal with her in the wake of their tribulations.
“That man out there is an evil man,” she said, gesturing wildly at the door. “A walking parasite who has made me question my very sanity and will to live, not once, not twice, but three times in the past week alone!”
Sebastian winced.
“I won’t do it!” she said, adamant. “I won’t!”
“Won’t do what?” asked Thanar in a practical tone.
She could tell that he was just trying to walk her through the motions. Perhaps even get her to calm down, but his very calmness made her feel enraged. She was not only angry, she felt trapped. Not only physically but mentally. Trapped by responsibilities. Trapped by regrets. Trapped by guilt, and trapped by a man who didn’t seem to realize those senses of self-confinement actually existed, let alone that he as the Emperor should be burdened by them.
Life for her had been far simpler as a poor washerwoman on the outskirts of an empire, living in a small village. She had grown and educated herself with each new challenge that presented itself before her, but until now it had never occurred to Ciardis Weathervane that she was unique in that desire to self-improve. That there were people out there content rest on their laurels, to use their birthrights to get by in the world, and to do nothing more for the good of the people surrounding them. Maradian was the very epitome of such a person, and yet he, most of all, was one who had been born into such privilege, such majesty, that Ciardis couldn’t fathom how his sense of entitlement was so strong that he refused to give back.