‘No snow up there at this time of year?’
Charlotte shook her head. ‘What snow there is comes earlier and stays later than it does down here, but none of the Great Spine mountains are high enough to have snow all year. You have to get into the High Plateau and the Silverlands for that. Even the Grey Hills are green in summer.’
Krystal gave her friend a smile. ‘Have you ever been up onto Frostfall?’
‘Oh, no, but they teach us a bit of geography from all the regions with Skylord cities in them. I can even tell you a bit about the Sand Wall, over on the eastern edge of Greenland.’
‘The Skylords get around. Cities on both continents and Concordance.’
‘Their weakness and their strength. They have strongholds all over, but always kind of beholden to their neighbouring lands. Spinyard couldn’t really survive without trade. We can just about manage to produce enough meat, but crops are just inviable. At least enough crops to feed a city of dragons. And the layout of the city means a lot of dragons spend a lot more time than usual in dracoform.’
Krystal frowned. ‘Is that going to be a problem for me? I could change, but… I’d still rather not show off if I can avoid it.’
‘You’re going to have to explain that to me at some point, but no, there are lifts and stairs. It’s just easier to fly.’
‘Okay. And I’ll explain, as best I can, to everyone, when we get back to school. That’s assuming Trudy will listen.’
Charlotte turned from the view, leaning against the balcony’s rail. ‘She wouldn’t say why she hates royals so much, but… Well, I think she was more annoyed that you hadn’t told her than that you were a royal. I think she’ll listen. I don’t know what she’ll do when she’s heard what you have to say, but I think she’ll listen.’
‘I hope so. I really do.’
~~~
The menu at the inn seemed to consist almost entirely of sausages. There were a number of different kinds of sausage, made with the best meat from a number of animals, and offal from various animals, but there were a lot of sausages and they were mostly served with a minimal variety of vegetables.
‘Does Hillgate have some sort of sausage fixation?’ Krystal asked, eyeing the menu.
Charlotte actually managed a giggle. ‘Things do get pretty macho up in the mountains, yes.’
‘That is not at all what I meant, but it’s nice to hear you laugh.’
‘We’re laying Glinda to rest tomorrow. That’ll be sad, but she’ll be with her ancestors in Necrodracona. This isn’t what I wanted for my best friend, but she’ll soon be in a better place.’
Krystal was not entirely sure that the dragon underworld really counted as a better place, but if it comforted Charlotte, then Krystal was not going to say anything. ‘You don’t sound as angry as you did.’
‘I’m still angry, but… What can I do about it? I’m a magic student. Not even a good magic student. Glinda was the good student; I just want to fly. Against a necromancer, what am I going to do?’
‘Well…’ Krystal pursed her lips, considering whether saying more was a good idea. ‘Necromancers aren’t any different from other magi. All they’ve done is studied, and practised, something illegal. What they can do is horrible, abominable, an insult to the ancestors… Except that the spells to destroy undead are also necromancy. We let draconist priests study necromantic spells because they’re supposed to follow the precepts of draconism and that means they would never create undead. We deny the same corpus to magi because they don’t have the same morality. Except that six out of the ten most powerful necromancers in the history books were fallen draconists, and a lot of magi practise draconism and would never make a zombie. It’s a stupid double standard. You know, the ritual they’ll use tomorrow to lay Glinda to rest is, technically, necromantic.’
‘I thought it was all spirit corpus,’ Charlotte said, frowning. ‘Commanding the spirit of the deceased to move on.’
Krystal shook her head. ‘Raised by nuns, remember? You need to ease the passage to Necrodracona, push the spirit to take the bridge, and ensure that the body can’t be raised. That last part is necromancy, but the priests generally don’t like anyone knowing it is.’
‘But they burn the body at the end of the ritual.’
‘And there are necromantic spells that could still bring something back from the ashes. Actually, you don’t want to know what those spells bring back.’
‘Oh,’ Charlotte said. ‘I think I’ll take your word for that.’
‘Very wise. Now, what sort of sausage would you recommend?’ Krystal looked earnestly across the table and knew, just from the expressions creeping across Charlotte’s face, that the answer was not going to be serious.
‘Well, the waiter looks nice…’
~~~
Krystal lay in the darkness, listening to Charlotte shifting about under the blankets. The day had been warm, but with the coming of night, the temperature had dropped so that blankets were a useful addition to the bedclothes. Highgate was not much higher than Concord City, but the extra altitude was, apparently, enough for something of a change in climate at this time of year.
‘Can’t sleep?’ Krystal asked eventually.
‘No,’ Charlotte replied wearily. ‘Nights are the worst. I’ve nothing to do but think about Glinda. I feel like she’s standing over me.’
‘Maybe she is, but I’m sure she’s happy now. Tomorrow she’ll be laid to rest, thanks to you insisting on going out to find her.’
‘Huh. I hadn’t thought of it like that. Thanks to all of us, then. We all went looking for her. And you destroyed that horror she’d been turned into.’
‘Yes. Yes, I did.’
There was silence for a second and then, ‘Krys, uh, would you mind if I kind of cuddled up to you?’
‘If it makes you feel more comfortable.’
There was the rustling of sheets and then Charlotte’s arm curled around Krystal’s waist. Charlotte’s breasts were smaller than Trudy’s, and her body was longer. It did not feel at all the same, but somehow having the athletic blue pressed against her back made Krystal feel happier too.
‘It does,’ Charlotte said. ‘Make me feel more comfortable. Thanks.’
‘It makes me feel a little better too. Night, Charley.’
‘Night, Krys.’
And then there was silence.
Concord City, Concordance.
Trudy lay in the silence, staring into the darkness of her room. Her room, and Krystal’s room. Krystal was not there, of course, for which Trudy was thankful. Except that there was no one to whisper to in the dark when she could not sleep.
Turning over, Trudy pushed the thought aside, annoyed. Krystal had lied. She had said that she had no dracoform, and she had turned out to be a royal. A royal! Trudy had good reason to hate royals. Royals were rich, entitled thugs, and one of them… But none of that really described Krystal, did it? Krystal had grown up in an orphanage and she really did have no more money than the grant she had received from the Guild of Magic Users.
But Krystal had lied about knowing what her dracoform was. Trudy turned over again, punching her pillow a couple of times before laying her head on it. Krystal had known she was a royal since she was twelve and she had kept it a secret…
Trudy frowned. What colour had Krystal’s eyes been? All that hair had made it hard to tell and Trudy had been too busy seeing rainbow scales to notice the eyes. Not all royals were exactly royals. The lesser royals were children born to one royal and one dragon of another colour, and they were considered the lowest of the low. Even greys looked down on lesser royals. If Krystal had discovered she was a lesser royal, maybe then she would want to keep it secret for as long as possible. Orphans were down at the bottom of the pile with lesser royals, but orphans had a chance of moving up. If Krystal was a lesser royal, she was stuck in the shit and likely to live a short, unpleasant life. The lucky lesser royals, the ones born to a royal mother, were hidden away by the royal families to br
eed from since outside blood helped avoid inbreeding, but that was clearly not the case with Krystal.
But that was no excuse. The pillow got another battering and Trudy slammed her head into it, hoping this time it would be comfortable. Krystal should have said something sooner, explained herself. Especially after they had started sleeping together. She should have… Except that Trudy had told Krystal on day one that she hated royals. And then Trudy had given Krystal no opportunity to explain after it had all come out. Maybe Krystal had not been keeping it secret because she was a lesser royal, but she had to have a reason, and Trudy had given her no chance to explain.
‘Ancestors damn it,’ Trudy grumbled as she sat up in bed, frowning into the darkness. There was enough light to see Krystal’s bed across the room, even if just as a dark shape. Slipping out from under her sheets, Trudy trotted across to the other bed and slid into it. The pillow still had Krystal’s scent on it, a faintly musky smell combined with the floral shampoo she used. That scent mingled with another, even muskier one as Trudy pulled the sheets up to cover her: they had not changed the sheets since the last time they had made love. The commingled smells made Trudy squirm a little, but she still drifted off into the sleep she had found so difficult to achieve in her own bed.
Great Spine Mountains, Concordance, 18th Day of Autumngate.
Krystal was fascinated. The view from the window of the airship they were taking up into the mountains was like nothing she had ever seen before. There were the mountains, sure, but there was also the view from a few hundred feet up above the ground. When she had learned of her dracoform she had, of course, tried flying, but she had always stuck to low altitudes to avoid being seen and, in truth, she had barely spent more than a couple of hours with her feet off the ground in her entire life. This was magic!
Charlotte was, understandably, less excited by the experience: she spent much of her time in the air and she had travelled across these mountains by airship before. Still, she peered out of the window with Krystal and pointed out the landmarks. The flight took two hours from boarding to landing, so there was little else to do but play tour guide.
‘That peak there,’ Charlotte said, ‘the tallest one, that’s Twilight’s Peak. They say that it’s so tall that there’s always some part of it in shadow.’
Krystal giggled. ‘It doesn’t really look that tall.’
‘It rains a lot up here. It shrank.’
‘Uh-huh. Sure.’
‘Anyway, it’s nicer in the winter. When there’s snow on it, it really sparkles.’
‘Nice. I’ll have to make sure to come back during Snowfall.’
Charlotte laughed. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. They basically shut down the air traffic through the mountains all through Snowfall. Even the Weather Bureau can’t keep things from being unsafe. You can see Twilight’s Peak from the city. You’d have to overwinter there and I don’t think you really want to do that.’
‘I might. If Trudy won’t listen to me, I might.’
‘She’ll listen. Now, the one there with the flat sort of top, that’s Fire Fountain Ridge.’
‘But… It’s not on fire, or a ridge.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s because–’
Krystal narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you just making these up as you go along?’
‘No, of course not. Fire Fountain Ridge was a volcano, but it stopped… volcanoing.’
‘That’s not a word, and it’s still not a ridge.’
‘Hey, I didn’t name the things.’
‘Unless you’re just making the names up,’ Krystal said, smirking.
‘I’m not! Now, those two rounded ones right down there are called Onayra Nightsky’s Butt because–’
‘You so made that up!’
‘Yeah, okay, that one I did…’
Spinyard, Concordance.
There were two couples and a young man waiting for the arrival of the airship when it landed. Krystal recognised none of them, of course, but Charlotte seemed to, though her reaction was a little odd: she fixed a smile on her face which had so much sadness behind it that it looked strained. The reason became obvious as they crossed from the landing area to the concourse where the five people were waiting.
‘The shorter couple are Glinda’s parents,’ Charlotte said, keeping her voice down. ‘Gloria Starshimmer and Mordrake Stormwind. The other couple are my parents, Andrea Cloudborn and Jacob Windspring, and the big lug with them is my brother, Alexander. He’s a bit older than me. Sixty-three, he is, and he works on the airships. He’s a pilot.’
‘You have a cool older brother?’ Krystal asked, smiling. She could feel the edges of her own smile cracking almost as much as Charlotte’s was. She was about to meet Glinda’s parents.
‘I guess Alex is kind of cool. Okay, deep breaths. I’ll handle the introductions.’
The introductions had to wait while Charlotte was hugged by her parents and brother. Krystal stood awkwardly aside while that happened: she had never really had anyone to come home to like that and did not really know what the proper protocol was. Why had the nuns not covered family reunions in her servant classes?
‘Okay,’ Charlotte finally said. ‘Everyone, I’ve already told Krys who you are, so I just need to introduce my friend Krystal Ward. Uh, she was with me and my other friends at the school when we went looking for Glinda, and she was the one who…’ And then she choked, her throat closing up before she could finish.
‘I was the one who was able to cast the spell that stopped the zombie,’ Krystal said. ‘I’m just happy I was able to perform that service for your daughter’s spirit.’
Charlotte cleared her throat. ‘Sorry, I thought I’d pulled myself together enough to get through that. Krys is an orphan, so she was raised by the nuns in Appleyard. She knows more about the undead and necromancy than most of us. She knew what to do.’
Gloria Starshimmer stepped forward and took Krystal’s hand. ‘And we’re both grateful for it, Krystal Ward. It had to be a very hard thing to do.’
Krystal pulled herself up straight. ‘No, Gloria Starshimmer, it wasn’t hard. I didn’t know Glinda for very long, but she was my friend and it had to be done so that she could rest.’ It was a lie: destroying the zombie Glinda had become had been a hard choice, but not because it was Glinda. Krystal had known what revealing her dracoform would mean, and that had been hard.
‘Doing what is right,’ Mordrake Stormwind said, ‘is something many a dragon has found difficult to do, young lady. We will always be grateful.’ He paused for a second and then gave a bleak smile. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse us, we must take receipt of our daughter’s remains. We’ll see you all at the ritual.’
~~~
No time was being wasted; Glinda’s body had been without the proper rites for long enough as it was, so there was some haste to get everything expedited now. Krystal and Charlotte had arrived on time at eleven a.m., and the ceremony to ease Glinda’s passage into the afterlife began, promptly, at two p.m.
Krystal had attended a couple of funerary rituals before: some of the nuns had been very old. And because Krystal’s interest in magic, and her talent for it, had been well known to the sisters, one of the visiting priests who had come to conduct one such ceremony had been persuaded to explain the more practical aspects. The gathering of mourners was the primary point of the funeral: the spell which the priest was there to cast was not an easy one for someone who was not a magus and they often needed all the help they could get. Priests, generally, did not have the same talent for magic that magi did. No one knew exactly how either ability worked, but it was a longer, harder process for a priest to shape a spell. Luckily, they had the advantage of a gathering of willing assistants, in this case the mourners. The combined will of the congregation worked to help the priest in his ritual, so long as the priest was able to direct them properly. Religious rituals were usually conducted in a place which, much like the laboratories at the school, had been used for similar magic for generations. All the stages of t
he funeral rite were meant to bring the mourners to the emotional peak needed for them to contribute to the priest’s magic and, from the number of people gathered for Glinda’s funeral, the priest would not have much difficulty with his ritual today.
‘The family is pretty high up in the Spinyard social set,’ Charlotte had explained as the two girls joined the mourners. ‘Mordrake Stormwind is high up the ranks of the Weather Bureau in Spinyard and Gloria Starshimmer is the kind of woman who gets invited to all the right parties. They’re still nice folks. Never said anything when their daughter wanted to hang out with someone way down the ranks. They even get on well with my parents.’
In fact, seats for the two girls as well as Charlotte’s family had been reserved in the front row of the large room being used for the service. Charlotte’s mother was seated beside Glinda’s, and the bereaved dragon seemed to be leaning quite heavily on Andrea Cloudborn to get through it all.
The priest, clad in the traditional sky-blue robes of a draconist officiary, gave a speech about the ancestors and the loss of a young life with so much potential. Then one of the ranking officers of the Weather Bureau took the podium to give a speech about a young life with so much potential. And then one of Glinda’s teachers got up to make a speech about the loss of a young, bright girl with so much potential. It was getting a little repetitive until Gloria Starshimmer, supported by both her husband and Andrea Cloudborn, spoke of the loss of a daughter who, though they might have another child, could never be replaced. And Krystal had found that her cheeks were wet and, looking around, she knew that everyone was ready for what came next.
Returning to the stage, the priest started the ritual which had been used since there had been draconists in the world. ‘We, who knew our sister Glinda Starshimmer in life, gather here together to speed her passage unto the next life. Though she will soon walk with her ancestors, she will be with us forever in our hearts…’
Misfit Magic (Misfits Book 1) Page 11