Dragonoak

by Sam Farren

  She guided me onto the bed and pulled me close, arm wrapped around me, right hand placed against my chest. She kept it there, broken as it was, finger and thumb grazing lightly across my smooth skin, and I buried my face in her neck, breathing out of time with her.

  “Someone in Orinhal let the Felheimish know who I was. What I was,” I murmured. “I wasn't going to let them take me.”

  Kissing the top of my head, she said, “Do you think it was Katja?”

  “No,” I said bitterly. “She doesn't care about me anymore.”

  “I should like to ignore this all,” Claire said, leg still trembling. My hand went to her knee, taking the pain from her leg and ribs and staying there. “To call this the end of our journey. To stay in Kyrindval, where we would never have to fret over war and violence again, and the biggest problem would be what to name the hatchlings at the end of each winter.”

  I managed a smile, lifting my head to press my lips to her cheek. She exhaled, ridding herself, if only for a time, of some burden that had been weighing upon her mind and caught me in a kiss. With my hand on her cheek, Claire kissed me and let herself be kissed for almost a whole minute, before the reality of what she'd become caught up with her.

  I didn't push her. Didn't tell her she was beautiful, though she was, because it wouldn't have made a difference.

  “Read to me,” I said, untangling myself from her arms. I crawled across the bed, hopped off the edge and reached for the shelf. “I've spent weeks looking at the pictures, but I've no idea what any of it says.”

  I lugged The Sky Beneath The Sun back with me, falling down on the nest of pillows Claire had made. Taking hold of a thin blanket, she draped it over her shoulders and held her arm out wide, wrapping it around me when I shuffled against her side. I placed the book in her lap and she opened it with her free hand, flicking through the pages, not content to start from the beginning.

  “I recall a passage that might be of interest to you,” she explained, finger running along the lines of text as her eyes scanned for familiar words. I placed a hand on the corner of the book, keeping it open.

  “Here: It has long been speculated that the phoenix population was not merely on par with humans and pane within Myros, but socially speaking, they were revered in the same way that necromancers were. There are countless records that have survived the creation of the Bloodless Lands, brought south through the mountains during the great exodus, pertaining to the partnership and unity between phoenixes and necromantic Priests of Isjin.

  “Indeed, in one account, a phoenix by the name of Sino-Toku is stated to have '... achieved Priesthood on the dawn of the thirty-ninth anniversary of [his] most recent rising.' Sino-Toku is one of the most widely documented phoenixes, believed by many to have worked alongside Kondo-Kana, who many scholars have argued fled Myros at the end of the War...”

  “Those scholars will be glad to know they're right,” I said, grinning. “I wonder if that's true. The part about Sino-Toku. I'll have to ask Kondo-Kana.”

  Claire rested her head atop mine and said, “When I met you, you'd never seen so much as a town. Listen to you now.”

  Claire kept reading, finding passages on famous phoenixes and paragraphs dedicated to their physiology, and I listened with my eyes closed, mind rolling back from her words to the golden phoenixes of Canth, thoughts settling on the first time I'd seen the phoenix pendant hanging from her neck.

  CHAPTER XXII

  “Anyone in?” I asked, door creaking on its hinges as I stepped into the corridor. “Zentha sent me. They said you might have a spare room.”

  The buzz of conversation died down in the living room and a pane, no older than twenty, poked his head out of the doorway. One of his horns was growing faster than the other, but I didn't get to see much more of him; he disappeared back into the room, as if by moving quickly enough, I wouldn't have time to have seen him in the first place.

  The pane blurted out something about little friends, and a gruffer voice said, “You're kidding.” The floorboards creaked as the pane rose to their feet.

  A much older pane turned the corner and stood with his hands on his hips, grinning down at me.

  “Thought that was a small voice I was hearing,” he said, shaking his head so that his long braids fell over the backs of his shoulders. “Been hearing all kinds of rumours about an influx of little friends, lately. What can I do for you?”

  “Zentha said you might have room for me... ?” I said, smiling as best I could manage, fiddling with the cuffs of the shirt Claire had leant me, collar far too stiff for my liking. “I'm going to be staying in Kyrindval for a while, and they said I'd be a good fit here.”

  “Oh, yeah?” the pane said, resting his shoulder against the wall. “What are you planning on doing here?”

  He asked because he was curious; he wasn't demanding I pay my own way.

  “I thought I could help teach Mesomium and Canthian, for anyone interested,” I said.

  “That so?” He tapped a claw against one of his fangs, and bellowed out, “Hafor! Get back out here. Our new housemate's gonna teach you that Mesomium you're always prattling on about.”

  Hafor sheepishly dragged his feet behind him, took refuge behind the older pane, and managed a wave.

  “I'm Rowan,” I said, holding out a hand to Hafor. “It's nice to meet you both.”

  When Hafor only blinked at my hand, the older pane took it, saying, “Draeis! Good to meet ya. Hafor here will show you to the empty rooms. Had a few move on lately. One went off to Jorjang, actually. It'll be nice to have some life in the place again. All you need to know is that everyone has their own day to do the cleaning, we take breakfast and dinner together, and if you want cooked meat, you're gonna have to see to that yourself. No offence meant, of course. I just don't think you'd appreciate charcoal for dinner.”

  Moving in to a cabin wasn't as big an event as I'd built it up to be, and I preferred it that way. Hafor shuffled down the corridor, showed me the unoccupied rooms at Draeis' behest, and I chose the smaller of the two, lest another pane show up. The room had all I needed in it – somewhere to sleep and somewhere to put the clothes I didn't yet have – but when Hafor left me with a mumbled goodbye, I was hesitant to take another step in.

  I hadn't had much luck making myself at home of late.

  I spent most of the morning getting to know the household. Draeis was a brewer and had spent years building an extensive cellar beneath the cabin, and while Hafor wanted to work around the sca-isjin, one day, he was currently apprenticing for a tanner several streets over. The third occupant was an energetic woman by the name of Maedir, who tended to sickly dragons when they sought out aid.

  Claiming that he didn't like to presume, Draeis asked if I happened to know the other humans who'd been in Kyrindval lately, and I explained how I knew them as best as I could. Mentioning a brother earnt me puzzled looks, though they'd had the concept explained to them before, and Maedir chimed in that she'd spoken with Michael a few times in the past, and that he'd always had plenty to say for himself.

  None of them were adverse to the notion of a second breakfast, and I even tried a chunk of raw meat, when Draeis goaded me into it. It wasn't the worst experience I'd ever had, but it felt far too slimy in my throat to consider repeating. I did my part, washed the plates with the aid of a step, and headed out into Kyrindval, hoping to find something in the shops that might fit me.

  I stepped outside of the cabin and saw my brother heading in the opposite direction.

  “Michael!” I called out.

  “Ah! There you are,” he said, hurrying over to me. “Zentha said you'd be somewhere around here. Getting all settled in, are you? I hear you had quite the day, yesterday.”

  “Does word really get around that quickly?”

  “I spoke with Kouris this morning. Excellent to see her again,” he said, aimlessly taking the lead. “The pane don't care much for all this nonsense, honestly. They likely think we're being petty. Well, they're
not far wrong, are they?”

  I didn't think there was anything petty in trying to defend a city against invading forces, but it was too early to get into an argument with Michael. I had no chance of holding my own in a debate with him now that we'd spent years apart.

  “Claire's in Kyrindval now. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not,” I said, “Have you seen her yet? She's back at her old place.”

  Michael frowned, humming flatly.

  “Well, you see...”

  “Did something happen?” I asked when he trailed off.

  He shrugged and I jumped in front of him, blocking the path. A shrug from Michael never indicated that he didn't have the words, or that he didn't care; it meant he was avoiding giving an answer.

  “You didn't see her after Isin, Rowan. She was angry. Hell, of course she was angry. She was hurt, and far worse than you can image. She couldn't get up for months. She handled it all as well as anyone could be expected to. That is to say...” He paused, sighing. “We did not part on the best of terms. A lot of her anger was misguided, and a lot of it was not. Surely you know about the drinking; she would go from blaming herself for Felheim's actions to blaming me for not being a good enough brother to you a dozen times a day.

  “Which, in her defence, may have had some grain of truth to it.”

  That said, he stepped around me and carried on walking.

  I set off after him a few seconds later, and dropped my gaze once I was by his side. How easy it had been to imagine that Claire had been like this since Isin fell; that she hadn't yet started to get better, and this was the very worst of it.

  “You could've been worse,” I grumbled. “Remember when you found me putting that dead lamb back together? You could've panicked, could've told the entire village that I was a necromancer, but you only cared because you thought it was impressive. Like something out of a story, you said.”

  Laughing under his breath, he said, “That was, what—seven, eight years ago? I'm surprised you remember.”

  “Of course I do! You were the first person who knew I was a necromancer. I'd only been working as a healer for a few years, but if I'd had to keep it to myself for much longer, I don't think I would've been able to take it. And it kind of made me feel like it'd be okay if other people figured it out, too.”

  My hands were slick with blood when he'd found me and the lamb's coat was stained the same colour. He'd taken refuge behind a crumbled wall when he'd encountered a wolf on the way back from the village late one evening, and after I'd chased it away and fixed the lamb, he'd knelt next to me and used a handkerchief to wipe the blood from my fingers.

  “And look how that turned out,” Michael said blithely, tugging on the collar of my shirt. “This doesn't suit you at all, for what it's worth.”

  He took me to one the busier streets in Kyrindval, home to a dozen shops, as well as a library. I spent a tedious half an hour staring at book spines covered in squiggles that meant nothing to me, and once Michael was finished attending to his business, he didn't have so much as a single book to show for it. We headed to the tailors, after that. Pane clothes were vastly different to anything humans wore: bulkier, thicker, and far better made than anything I'd owned throughout the first twenty-three years of my life.

  Had a Canthian set sights on anything a pane wore they would've fainted on the spot.

  Two walls of the tailors were dedicated to showcasing spools of fabric in every colour, arranged by hue, stretching from the floor to the ceilings. Pane tended to use leather and fur for most of their clothing, but after a few minutes spent chatting with my brother, the seamster agreed to put together some more human-looking shirts for me. I held my arms out and he used a stick with hundreds of tiny black lines scored along one side to measure me, but insisted on only using the colour Zentha had assigned me.

  The pane worked quickly and precisely and we left within an hour, two new shirts folded over one of my arms.

  “Can you help me with something?” I asked.

  “Something else, you mean?” He grinned, not missing a beat. “What is it?”

  I kept my eyes on the ground as I went, hopping between giant flagstones, made dizzy by the enormity of the world around me. The longer I was in Kyrindval, the deeper I went into the tribe, the smaller I seemed to become.

  “I'm going to start teaching Mesomium and Canthian, for any of the pane who want to learn,” I explained. “Zentha said I should leave a note on one of the noticeboards.”

  “What—you want to teach, Rowan?” he asked, incredulous. “No offence intended, of course. You speak it well enough, but what about grammar! What about different kinds of adjectives and irregular verbs and prepositions and writing?”

  I stopped on the spot, raising my brow.

  “I'm not going to use any of those words, which I think already makes me a better teacher than you,” I said, frowning. He could've been speaking Agadian, for all I'd understood. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  He mulled it over, rubbing at his chin as though holding me back would be a service to Kyrindval, but ultimately couldn't pass up the chance to be helpful, if it involved a quill and parchment.

  We gathered supplies from his cabin, and I sat opposite him at the dining table, swinging my legs back and forth as he wrote out four copies of what I assumed were the same notice. Screwing the lid back on his inkwell, he lifted each piece of parchment, ensuring the words no longer shone in the sunlight.

  “There we are. I trust you'll be able to post them yourself. There ought to be nails by all of the noticeboards,” he said, clicking his tongue when I gathered the pieces of parchment up and bent one of the corners.

  “Thank you,” I said, glancing down at the meticulously neat script. “What did you put?”

  “Don't say you don't trust me, Rowan,” he said, rocking on the back two legs of his giant chair. “... tuition in Mesomium and Canthian available from a native Mesomium speaker. If interested, speak to Rowan Northwood at the fire pit any day this week, around eight o'clock, is the gist of it. And in parentheses: look for the smallest little friend within the tribe.”

  Michael was far too pleased with himself over that last remark, and I didn't give him the satisfaction of rolling my eyes. Folding the parchment in half and slipping it in my pocket, I got as far as the door before saying, “Actually, I'm pretty sure I'm taller than Kidira.”

  Michael opened his mouth as if to refute the point, but soon realised there was none to be made.

  “I always manage to forget that she's short,” he said. “Do you want me to change it? I'd hate to be indirectly responsible for troubling Kidira.”

  “It's fine,” I said, “I'm meeting Claire soon.”

  I succeeded in posting three of the notices. The board was far too high up for me to nail it to any part of it but the very bottom, and I hoped it wouldn't become lost beneath a sea of parchment scraps that were undoubtedly more interesting than anything I had to offer.

  I kept the last piece of parchment folded in my pocket, and decided to track down a fourth noticeboard after I'd seen Claire. We were meeting with Akela and Kidira to discuss our next move. I'd expected them to make plans without me, but Claire hadn't even asked if I wanted to come along. My being there was a given. She'd simply told me where to head.

  I dropped my new shirts off in my room, didn't take the time to change, and followed the map Claire had drawn for me that morning. We'd been lucky to have the great lodge to ourselves yesterday and couldn't expect to claim it two days in a row; Claire had assured me there was a study room in one of the libraries we could make use of.

  I didn't understand why Kyrindval needed more than one library until I got there. This library was a world away from the severe building Michael had taken me to that morning. It was made from stone, surrounded by beds of tulips brighter than any I'd ever seen before, and inside, the books were as much for decoration as the paintings of mountain and coastal landscapes lining the room. There weren't any rows of
bookshelves; rather, they ran along the walls, creating a wide, open space.

  Cushions bigger than I was were strewn across the floor, and pane lounged against them, reading or napping with a book folded open against their chest, their head in someone's lap. Three doors led off the larger one, and I would've asked the pane who weren't too immersed in their books if they'd seen any other humans pass through, if not for the way Akela snuck up behind me.

  “Northwood!” she said far too loudly for our current surroundings. “Northwood, my friend, a very good day to you! An excellent day to you! You are most certainly deserving it, yes?”

  “Hello...?” I said, convinced I'd missed something. When she only grinned toothily, I said, “Are Claire and Kidira already here?”

  “Yes, yes, they are through this way,” Akela said, hands on my shoulders as she guided me between piles of pane to the door on the left. “They are talking about something dreary, I am not doubting this. It is a good thing I am having you for company, yes?”

  The room was set aside for writing, more so than reading; there was a table in the centre, surrounded by an assortment of armchairs, and the scrolls in the room were all blank. Inkwells, quills and candles were placed atop a cabinet in the corner, and a wide, high-up window let in sunlight. Claire and Kidira were waiting for us, one more patiently than the other, sat opposite one another at the table.

  I pulled out a chair between them, inching it towards Claire.

  “Did everything go well?” she asked.

  “I have somewhere to stay, and Michael helped me with the notices,” I said, keeping it brief as Kidira drummed her fingers on the edge of the table.

  “Now,” Kidira said, bringing her hands together. “What is our next step? Do we retake Orinhal, or consider it lost to us indefinitely?”

  Kidira wasn't wasting any time. If she was susceptible to a fraction of the cheer Akela was, she buried it deep, kept it hidden beneath her blunt words.