“Theus Academy Village,” he told the driver.
The driver punched the display a few times, initiating a timer, then glanced at Emmanuel in the rear-view mirror.
“Shipping off to the Academy, eh? They look too soft to me, just being honest and all. My guess is only half of them graduate.”
Emmanuel frowned. “You went to the academy. Let me guess… you dropped out?”
The driver tilted the metal handles on his steering panel. The Wingvan lurched as it shot off the ground.
“You could say I dropped out, Professor Emmanuel, son of Sargos. You could call it that, sure you could.” He grinned, showing a set of yellow teeth. “Or you could say I left with my limbs intact. Well, most of them anyway.”
The driver tilted back and lifted his right leg. The lower half was gone, the pant leg tied into a knot at the knee. Milo looked out the window, wishing they had called a different driver.
The Wingvan wove dangerously around other flying vehicles, carriages, and solitary riders on levathons. Owen clutched his belly and groaned. Emma had cocooned herself inside her wings, only her head and legs sticking out from either end. Everyone else stared quietly through the windows or down at their hands.
“Okay,” Milo said a few minutes into the ride. “I’m going to say what’s on everyone’s mind.”
His uncle looked back at him from the front row. He raised his eyebrows slightly.
Milo continued, frustrated. “One minute, you and the Archon are best friends, and the next minute, you’re throwing us out of his house without even saying goodbye. Why is that? What happened back there?”
Emmanuel braced himself as the Wingvan veered to the right to avoid another cab. The rain had thickened, and the sound was like drums inside the van. The man’s silence was unbearable.
“Come on, Uncle Manny. What wrong?”
“I want to know, too,” Emma said. “This doesn’t feel right.”
Emmanuel nodded in defeat, then reached up and tapped a panel on the ceiling. They heard the driver say, “Come on, was it something I sai—” before a force field shimmered to life, separating the front and back compartments and cutting him off.
Emmanuel took off his sunglasses and slid them into his coat pocket. When he spoke, his voice was low and hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure how much they were prepared to hear.
“Raston Rogarth used to be a student of mine at the academy. In the hundreds of years that I taught there, I never met anyone quite like him. He was a horrible student. Couldn’t write a paper or pass an exam to save his life. His father was Archon at the time, which was how he got in when others of his aptitude would have been summarily rejected.
“But, he was a brilliant speaker. I once watched him bring an entire audience to tears during a speech about humility and patriotic duty—when he was a first-year student, no less. He became the youngest president of his fraternity. Female students wrote him love letters, which he would bring to class and read aloud to impress his friends. All he cared about was being popular.”
Emmanuel shook his head. “He had no mind for philosophy, engineering, or spellcasting. No interest in magic or the workings of luminether, despite his Savant birthright. Getting him to work through a simple formula or cast a Tier I spell was like getting a Berserker to perform open-heart surgery on a fruit fly.
“And yet, just now, back in his mansion, he took credit for one of the most amazing inventions I’ve ever encountered. When I challenged him, he explained in detail how it worked. Everything from the math that went into planning it, to the magic that fueled it, to the feats of engineering used to install it. He wasn’t simply reciting from memory. I can sense that sort of thing from having been a teacher for so long. Somehow, unless I’m delusional, this failed student went on to become a brilliant magical engineer. And with this invention of his, he’ll be elected for another term as Archon. Maybe several.”
Emmanuel went silent, his gaze turned completely inward.
“What was the invention?” Milo asked.
Emmanuel gave him a look that was almost pitiful. Instead of answering, he hit the button on the console to kill the force field. The driver blinked at them in the rearview mirror.
“Gossiping back there?” the driver asked. “Hope you kids didn’t take what I said too seriously. I’m sure you’ll do just fine at the academy and keep all your limbs nice and pretty.”
“Have we crossed the barrier yet?” Emmanuel asked him.
“Almost there.”
“Good. Do you know what a Fountain of Joy is?”
The driver frowned in the mirror. “Course I do. Everyone knows what they are. I only wish I’d been near one when I lost the old leg. One of those babies would’ve taken care of me in a flash. I probably wouldn’t be here right now, talking to you. I’d be out climbing a mountain or something.”
“Take us to the nearest one,” Emmanuel said.
“Huh? Why? Are you sick?”
Emmanuel slipped his glasses back on. “Just do it. I’ll pay the extra fee.”
“You got it, professor. But it’ll mean turning around.”
“That’s fine.”
The Wingvan whipped around so fast it made the orphans crash into each other. Milo had to apologize to Lily for thumping her nose with his shoulder. She was too anxious to care.
The sky flashed overhead, followed by a deep roar of thunder.
“This is messed up,” Sevarin said, to which the others nodded their agreement.
CHAPTER 7
“We’re here,” Artemis said, snapping Calista out of her reverie.
During their sprint across town, Calista took note of how quiet everything was. The buildings sat uninhabited, the windows covered in dust. Everyone was gone.
“You’re not even breathing hard,” Artemis said when they finally came to a stop. He stood bowled over his knees panting, his face a bright red beneath the matted gray hair of his head and beard. “You’ve been keeping up with your exercises.”
Calista stared at him. “You’re alive,” she said in wonderment.
Artemis gave an exhausted laugh. He stood straight and looked around, still an intimidating man despite all the weight he had lost. His sunburnt fists made her think of bricks. His broad shoulders still looked big enough to fill a doorway.
“This is it,” he said.
They were standing in a yard behind a row of swoophouses. Poor people had once lived in these buildings, which had no walls except for clusters of rooms in the center of each floor. No outer walls meant people in bird shells could fly right in, sometimes not even phasing back into human form. The poor of Valestaryn loved the openness of swoophouses because it was easier to live life in animal form and let instinct guide them to their next meal than to phase back into human form and be productive, as her mother had always told her. Swoopers ate in the wild, crapped in the wild, and only came back to these buildings to rest up so they could phase back into animal shells the next day and resume the hunt.
Calista heard her mother’s voice in her head.
You want us to live like swoopers? Eating rodents out in the field and flinging our waste down into the streets? Because we could do it! A lazy scamp like you would enjoy that, wouldn’t you?
“Cali,” Artemis said, putting a hand on her shoulder. The gesture reminded her of Ascher, whom she missed every bit as much as she had once missed this man.
“What?” she said shyly.
Artemis lifted her chin with one finger, something he hadn’t done in a long time. She instantly felt better.
“Keep your chin up. You’re safe here.”
“But what are we doing here? And what happened to this place?”
“You see that swoophouse right there?” he said, looking off in the distance.
She followed his gaze. The building looked dilapidated, its many levels like a stack of crooked trays supported by a crude pole someone had stabbed through them.
“There’s an opening at the very top that
leads down through the central column into a cellar space. There are others down there.”
“How many?” Calista said.
A hesitant smile turned up one corner of his mouth. “Some you would recognize.”
“My family?” Calista’s eyes widened.
“We need to fly up there.”
Artemis took a step back. With a burst of air, he shrank into something small and dark that hung flapping a few feet away. The bat stared at Calista with beady eyes, its mouth opening to reveal fangs. It screeched at her.
“All right, all right,” she said, readying herself.
The transformation enlivened her, as it always did. Like standing up in a cool waterfall. Her mind locked onto a distant memory of biting into a wounded hawk she had come across in the forest one day. The tangy taste of its blood rose in her mouth once more. There had been no way to save the creature. Some predator had torn it apart during a battle she could have only imagined. Calista had taken the opportunity to drink from its life stream so she could learn its form and master its shell.
Her senses expanded as the human part of her faded into the background, and then she was flying.
The building’s central column was pitch black and full of mites and fleas and other insects that leaped onto her feathers. Cringing in disgust, she spread her wings and let herself glide down.
Upon landing, she used her hawk senses to scout for any signs of danger. Seeing none, she became human again. Artemis landed next to her, already in his man-shape. The fact that he had phased mid-air meant he trusted this place.
They were in an earthen basement that smelled of moss and wet dirt. The only light came from the sky at the top of the shaft. Calista searched until she spotted a tunnel across the way with pure darkness inside.
“We’ve been building tunnels underground,” Artemis explained, leading her toward the opening. “You wouldn’t believe how much space is down here now. Some of our men found a greater mole and leeched from it. They’ve mastered the shell to the point where they can spend days at a time burrowing. There’s room for a hundred of us down here, though sadly, we’re only thirty strong, more or less.”
“Who’s down here?” Calista said, following him in the pitch-black darkness, guided only by the sound of his footsteps and the smell of his sweat. “People from town?”
“Survivors.”
“And my family?”
“Your mother and sister didn’t make it, Cali. I’m sorry. They were among the taken.”
“Taken where? Who took them?”
“Patience, Cali. All will be revealed in time.”
Calista stopped. “What about Lance? My brother?”
“Follow me.”
He sounded eager, as if he’d been waiting for her to ask. Breathless, Calista kept onward, struggling just to place one foot in front of the other without breaking into a sprint.
They came to a wooden door where Artemis banged a distinct rhythm with his fist. Someone on the other side opened it. A thin woman with dirt smeared across her face and wide, cautious eyes that made Calista uncomfortable stood before them. What evil were they hiding from down here?
“Thank the gods,” the woman said, smiling in obvious exhaustion and relief.
Artemis gently patted her arm and smiled back. The woman stepped aside, and Calista followed Artemis into a narrow room with a low ceiling and a floor of packed dirt. Crude wooden cots and tables had been arranged neatly against the walls to maximize space in the center. Four people occupied the room, their features barely visible in the shivering light of oil lamps planted in the walls.
In the far corner, a young man sat up on a cot. He stared at Calista as if he couldn’t bring himself to trust his own eyes. Tossing aside a book he had been reading by the dim light, he sprang from the cot with the agility of a young Feral who had spent his youth climbing trees… which was exactly how Calista remembered her brother Lance, always coming home for dinner with leaves in his hair.
“Gods,” he said, stepping uncertainly toward her. “Cali? It’s been so long.”
“Lance.”
Calista blinked away tears. She ran into his open arms. He was more man now than boy, the years having added several inches to his height and burned away all his fat, leaving taut muscle in its place. His orange eyes were as familiar as the ones Calista saw every time she looked in a mirror.
“You’re alive,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
Lance hugged her again.
“For this moment,” he said. “Just for this moment.”
LANCE HAD BEEN the only one in her family to suspect that something strange was going on with Calista. She began showing up with baked goods every few days, pastries and loaves of bread, and tomato-and-cheese sandwiches that were all the rage in town after Artemis had proven his talents not just as a baker but as a farmer, too. Either Calista had become an amazing thief with a foolproof method, or she had a suspicious relationship with the baker.
He confronted her on his way to school one day, while Calista was carrying a bag of fresh-smelling bread buns toward home.
“Tell me,” he said, stepping into her path. He was a lanky, quick-footed fifteen-year-old who could easily outrun her thanks to his years of playing on the school’s wingshot team. There was no way out unless Calista lied, and she had never been able to lie to Lance.
So, she played dumb. “Tell you what?”
His orange eyes burned, and his gray, shorthaired tail lashed from side to side—a sign he was eager to get what he wanted and wouldn’t stop until he did.
“What’s that you’re carrying? Huh, Cali? Just today’s score? Are you robbing the bakery in broad daylight three times a week without getting caught? You’re just that good, huh?”
“I’ve never heard you complain,” she said. “Probably because you’re always too busy stuffing your face with the food I bring home.”
She sidestepped to get past him, but he easily blocked her.
“Tell me. How are you doing it?”
“I found a way in,” she said. “Foolproof.”
“Pluck feathers. You and that baker are up to something. Why is he letting you go with so many goodies? Something I should tell Mom about?”
“You wouldn’t say anything to her. I know you.”
He rolled his eyes and looked away. “But if it’s something skeevy… I mean, if he’s forcing you to do something—”
Calista shoved him backward, harder than she had intended. He regained his footing and stared at her with his mouth open.
“Geez,” he said. “Guess that answers that question.”
“Got any others?” she challenged him.
Lance gave her a hard stare, and then his shoulders began to shake. Finally, his mouth split into a grin as peals of laughter burst out of him.
“The man who marries you someday,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye, “let’s hope he has a damned fast hawk shell.”
“Why’s that?”
“So he can fly away when he realizes his mistake.”
Calista rolled her eyes. “Very funny.”
“Well? Are you gonna tell me or not?”
“Fine. I’ll tell you, but I need something from you first.”
She motioned for Lance to follow her along the muddy sidewalk.
“This is the way to school,” he said, confused.
“I know.”
“But Mom stopped paying for you to go.”
Calista shrugged. “I found another school. Except this one is at night.”
“So, like I said about skeevy…”
“I’m taking lessons in personal defense from the baker,” she blurted out. “Get your mind out of the mud pit.”
Lance was silent as they stepped around a puddle.
“Personal defense,” he said finally. “Like fighting tactics?”
“More like techniques. Artemis was a soldier in the Forge. He trained soldiers to fight with swords, daggers, and bows and arrows. Now he’s trainin
g me.”
Lance shifted the sack he used to carry his books, moving it from one shoulder to the other. His gaze was vacant as he considered what she was saying.
“So, let me get this straight. You stole from him—and now he’s teaching you how to fight?”
“It’s a long story, but he saw potential in me.”
“But what’s the point? Are you joining the Forge or something?”
He gave her a concerned look. Calista had trouble meeting his gaze.
“I don’t know. I’m sick of living here. Once Artemis finishes training me, I want to leave Valestaryn and see the world.”
“But… what about us?”
“You should come. The way I see it, Mom hates me, and Marcely will probably win some beauty pageant and marry the son of an alpha in some big city. You and I can do whatever we want. Forget about them.”
“Well, what if I don’t want to go? When I finally learn a monkey shell, I’m moving out to the woods.”
“You mean you’ll live in a swoophouse like the other swoops.”
“Nope. I’ll just live in the trees, away from everybody. I figured you could come visit me. I’ll have a tree fortress.”
“Lance, don’t be a dummy. Only wackos live in the forest. At least swoops have flocks.”
Lance hopped with excitement. “Can I learn personal defense, too?”
“No. You’re smart. You’ll finish school, and then we’ll leave Peleros forever. We’ll open a business in Theus.”
“But they don’t like Ferals.”
“That’s Ankhar and D’Aliara you’re thinking of. Theus is different. It’s a real city. People are open-minded there.”
“But I like Peleros.”
Calista flushed with anger. Maybe her brother was no different than the other small-minded residents of Peleros, with their stupid crop festivals and obsessions with beauty queens and sporting events. Maybe she was the only one who noticed there was an entire world beyond the forest surrounding this crummy town. If Lance insisted on staying here, then she would just have to leave him behind like everyone else.
“Do whatever you want,” she said. “I’m going.”
Savant & Feral (Digital Boxed Set): Books 1 and 2 of the Epic Luminether Fantasy Series Page 51