by D M Fike
“I just went on an errand,” I explained.
“By leaving the homestead and directly disobeying an order,” Guntram snapped. “I suppose you went searching for the breach.”
I balked at this. “No, I didn’t. I just enjoyed a quiet meal by myself.”
Guntram smoldered. “You went into town?”
I gave him a half-shrug.
Guntram tugged on his beard, a sure sign that he wanted to wring my neck. “What am I going to do with you, Ina? You say that you’re committed to become a shepherd, but you defy all our traditions.”
I stiffened. “I took an oath, just like you, to honor Nasci and protect the dryants with my life. Just because I do things a little differently doesn’t make me a bad shepherd.”
“‘Doing things differently’ doesn’t even approach your infatuation with human civilization,” Guntram growled. “And don’t get me started on your obsession with lightning.”
“It got the job done.” My voice rose to my augur’s level in spite of my resolve to keep it down. “I banished the vaettur harassing Ronan. That’s what I’m supposed to do, right?”
Guntram’s face mottled with red. “There’s more to being a shepherd than just barging into the fray like some magical cowboy and shooting everything in sight.” He leaned toward me so I could smell the garlic on his breath. “And if I have to prove that to you by humiliating you, I will.”
With that, he stormed out of the room.
Bewildered, I scrambled after him. What did he mean by that threat?
I found out a few seconds later as Guntram slapped his palms on the counter in front of Tabitha. “I’ve tried everything else,” he told her.
“You have the patience of the howling wind itself,” Tabitha observed. “No one else would have tolerated her insolence this far.”
Guntram narrowed his eyes at this, but said, “Well, it’s your duty now, if you will take it.”
Tabitha turned to gloat at me. “I’ll gladly accept the responsibility that this one shirks.”
My jaw clenched as that smirk stabbed me right in the heart. “Guntram, what’s going on?”
Guntram glanced at me, the anger gone, replaced by a tired sadness. “I’m giving Tabitha and Darby the task of locating and sealing the cockatrice’s breach.”
Mortified horror shot through every muscle in my body. All shepherds, even an eyas like me, knows it is their duty to properly finish a vaettur banishment. Unless both Guntram and I were mortally wounded, we should have been in charge of sealing the breach. I had never heard of anyone else taking over such a sacred duty.
“Is this a joke?” I asked Guntram. “How are they even going to find the breach? You and I were the only witnesses to the vaettur’s location.”
Guntram did not so much as blink as he said, “You’ll accompany Tabitha and Darby at dawn to the beach where we banished the cockatrice. They will take it from there.”
Insult onto injury! Not only would I not be sealing the breach, I would lead the very two shepherds who despised me most to do it for me. “Y-you can’t be serious!”
“Don’t talk to your augur in such disrespectful tones,” Tabitha scolded.
She looked like she wanted to say more, but Guntram stopped her by holding up his hand. She reluctantly shut her pie hole. “I need another day to heal my arm,” he said pointedly to me, “and I don’t trust you not to be foolhardy doing it on your own. It’s a reasonable solution.”
A solution, by his own admission, meant to humiliate me. I imagined a thousand retorts and might have launched one at him if I hadn’t heard Darby snicker in the corner. Still in her yoga pose, she delighted in every word. I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of soaking in more giggle fuel.
“Fine,” I said flatly to Guntram. “I’ll lead them in the morning.”
Guntram appeared surprised at this easy acceptance of my punishment but said nothing as I stalked down the hall to another empty bedroom. I heard Tabitha bemoan the pitfalls of training a haggard. I didn’t care to hear the details. I’d heard it all before.
Let them all think they’d pulled one over on me. I had better things to do tomorrow anyway.
CHAPTER 5
GUNTRAM POUNDED ON my door at a heinous hour the next morning. “It’s time, Ina!”
Groaning, I huddled deeper underneath the wool blanket, cursing at the straw that poked my sides. I’d been up until the wee hours of the morning reading through books in the library. I wanted to master a certain sigil, and it had taken me a while to find one that worked, longer still to commit the proper stroke order to memory. Sleep tugged at the edges of my consciousness, begging me to return to its loving embrace.
“I don’t hear movement!” The door rattled again. “Get up! Tabitha and Darby are ready to go!”
Guntram knew me too well. He would continue harassing me until I got out of bed. I threw my legs over the side, stretching the kinks away. Shepherds think it’s ‘sleeping in’ to get up at dawn. One of Guntram’s favorite lectures centered on how the natural world fell in rhythm with the rise and fall of the sun. I retorted that I’m nocturnal. He said I had enough diurnal instincts to get stuff done during the day, so he forced me awake early anyway.
I pulled on my hoodie, shorts, and boots, then hauled my groggy butt to the common area. Someone had eaten pickled preserves for breakfast, leaving a vinegar sting in my nostrils. My stomach churned.
It was just as well because I didn’t have time for breakfast. Tabitha glowered at me underneath her fur-lined hood, tapping one foot near the door. Next to her, Darby smirked. They looked like overachiever college coeds ready to go for a run.
“Your outfit is preposterous,” Tabitha observed as I rummaged around the kitchen pantries.
“Top o’ the morning to you, too,” I replied as I shoved a satchel of nuts and hard tack into my kangaroo pocket for lunch. If I had been smart yesterday, I would have bought some real food at a convenience store instead of visiting invalid strangers in hospitals. Guess I had to make do with squirrel chow.
Guntram appeared behind the pantry door as I shut it. He wore a robe again, arm still limp at his side. “You are to escort Tabitha and Darby to the spot where you banished the vaettur. You will leave the breach completely to them.”
“Yeah, I got it. I can’t be trusted,” I said, waving him off.
“Let me finish.” Guntram busted through my interruption. “Afterward, you will finish fortifying the defensive sigils where we left off. There’s only a few miles left to complete.”
I did not see that coming. “You want me to do more grunt work?” The statement came out more as a whine than I intended.
Guntram sighed. “Ina, defensive sigils are the foundation of shepherd protection. Even the Oracle spends time performing this task.”
“Then why aren’t you coming with me?”
Guntram touched his broken arm and winced. “I must remain here to heal a bit further.”
I frowned. “Your arm’s still bothering you?”
But Tabitha was done with chitchat. “Your augur doesn’t answer to you, haggard. Let’s go.”
“It shouldn’t take you more than a day, two at most, to draw the defensive sigils,” Guntram said as my adversaries bounded out the door. “Return here when you have finished.”
I resisted the urge to retort given that he was obviously still in considerable pain. I didn’t understand why his arm was healing so slowly. I decided to cut him some slack. “Okay. I’ll do what I can.”
My mind remained focused on Guntram’s slow-healing injury as I caught up with my fellow shepherds. I pushed my worry aside by guiding them toward the first wisp channel that would lead us back to Cape Perpetua.
Darby would have none of it. “Let your elders walk first.” She elbowed me behind her.
I raised an eyebrow. “How am I supposed to show you the way if you take the lead?”
“I know the wisp channel routes much better than you,” Tabitha interjected. “Y
ou will escort us only when we are much closer to our destination.”
Cape Perpetua covered quite a bit of ground. Odds were slim Tabitha would navigate us through the most efficient wisp channels to get us to the specific beach where we smoked the cockatrice, but hey, if they wanted to waste their own precious time, fine by me. I took the caboose and let them do their thing.
As predicted, they led us in the exact opposite direction of where we should have gone. I kept my mouth shut as Tabitha navigated a series of channels that by my calculations would require at least an hour of backtracking. When we ended up at the far south end of our destination, Tabitha asked me to show her where we’d met the vaettur.
I dutifully pointed north.
Darby grumbled, but Tabitha took the lead again, forcing me in the back. We hiked an entire hillside before they had the bright idea to ask me how far north we needed to walk.
I did the quick mental math. “Thirty miles.”
“‘Thirty miles?’” Tabitha repeated. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
“I didn’t want to disrespect you,” I answered sweetly.
“Insolent whelp,” Darby said.
I rounded on her. “Seriously, what kind of an insult is that? Are we in a Charles Dickens novel all of the sudden?”
“Be silent!” Tabitha cut me off.
I stifled a giggle at all the extra time we would have to hike to make up for their arrogance. I hoped they’d use the time to consider not treating me like garbage next time.
In the end, though, Tabitha has traversed the Talol Wilds far longer than me. She led us to a wisp channel I didn’t even know existed a quarter mile away. We arrived at the U-shaped beach in a matter of minutes.
“So much for payback,” I muttered as we treaded through ferns and brush for the shore.
Darby halted in her tracks, jabbing a finger into my collarbone. “What did you say?”
Before I could come up with a witty comeback, Tabitha interjected, “Ignore her, Darby. She is like a gnat to an elk. A nuisance, best left to swat away with your tail whenever possible.”
More terrible put-downs. I grasped for an appropriate response but realized whatever I said would just come back to haunt me later. I contented myself with rolling my eyes.
A putrid odor permeated the air as we overlooked the beach where I’d attacked the cockatrice. Peering down the cliffs, yellow hazard tape roped off the entire area. Bits of rotting red globs lay scattered everywhere, from the waves to the parking lot, the natural consequence of exploding a whale. Darby threw a hand over her mouth while Tabitha wrinkled her nose. “What horror is this?”
Despite fighting the urge to gag, I reveled in a rush of schadenfreude. Tabitha and Darby had spent the morning berating me and now they would have to swoop in and clean up my mess. They had not understood how literal that would be. As much as I hated handing over my responsibilities, I personally would not be wading through whale carcass to track down the vaettur breach. Perhaps karma had been served after all.
“Looks like this is where I say goodbye,” I waved my fingers at them.
Darby shoved me with her shoulder as I tried to skirt by her. “Just stay out of our way, haggard. Don’t try to aid us with your incompetence.”
“Me?” I patted my chest in mock dismay. “I wouldn’t dream of bothering you. I’m just going to strengthen defensive sigils as tasked by my augur.”
Not well equipped to deal with sarcasm, the two groused as they poked their way down into the horrid stench of the whale murder scene. I only caught one curse they threw in my direction, comparing me to animal scat.
With the less pleasant task of the morning out of the way, I turned on my heels and marched away from the forests that needed sigil work. I hadn’t exactly lied. I would eventually get around to Guntram’s assignment.
Just not right away.
* * *
The funny thing about wisp channels is, if you know the right trees to take, it can actually take you less time to travel a longer distance than a shorter one. It only took me ninety minutes to get from Cape Perpetua to the very edge of the Deschutes National Forest on the other side of the Cascades, more than fifty miles past Sipho’s homestead. Here, where the trees thinned out at a higher and drier elevation, I straddled the line where two wilds met: the Talol Wilds with its more temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest and the Bitai Wilds filled with desert lands that stretched down into the southwestern corner of the United States. Up above, the sky roiled with ominous dark clouds.
I departed my own shepherd territory to trek out into the arid sands. I didn’t technically have permission to do this, but my self-imposed training necessitated it. I pulled out the burner phone from yesterday. Normally I didn’t like carrying it around because Guntram might discover it and throw it away. With my augur still out of sorts, though, I figured I could keep it in my hoodie’s kangaroo pouch for a few more days. It made the job of finding the perfect spot to hone my skills that much easier.
I stepped away from the wisp channel until I found faint cell reception. I then waited an eternity for the weather app to load up. It took fifteen minutes altogether, but I confirmed an almost 100% chance of thunderstorms southeast of Derrick Cave in an hour.
Score!
I traveled through a final wisp channel and ended up ten miles south. I buried my phone under some pine needles near a scraggly tree’s base. I’d learned long ago not to take a phone into a lightning storm, not unless I wanted to fry it and buy a new one. Then I trekked straight out into the sagebrush.
I almost killed myself the first time I chased a desert storm. Guntram had prepared me to survive in a shaded forest, not on hot, flat plains. It had not helped that my first attempt happened in the middle of summer. I nearly baked to death even with my hoodie off. I hadn’t brought anything to drink, and I quickly used up all the water pith in my pithways and charm. Dehydration and isolation do not mix. If it hadn’t been for a friendly rattlesnake who led me to a watering hole, I might have died of exposure. I’d waited until late fall when the heat was less of an issue to hunt another storm.
That autumn jaunt marked my first real practice with a lightning storm.
Not that there wasn’t precedent. I have been fascinated with thunderstorms ever since my childhood days. They rarely formed around Seattle, but when they did, I always insisted on watching them. My parents once even had to drag me inside because I tried to watch it from the backyard. The loud crashes and intense flashes never frightened me. Quite the opposite. I felt connected to it somehow, as if I could just reach out and touch it.
My parents thought my fascination with storms was just a phase at first, but then they got the idea stuck in their heads that I might become a meteorologist, or a storm chaser at least. I never cared to study the science of it, though. That didn’t stop them from pushing me into physics camps and doing a job shadow with one of my dad’s professor buddies. I could never get them to understand my fascination with lightning storms had nothing to do with academia. It was primal, a deep sense that I was meant to dance out in the storm.
Not only that, but my first experience with ken happened during a summer lightning storm. Some rich kid on my dormitory floor had rented a group tent site at Silver Falls campground the week before fall term my sophomore year. We had a great time hiking the falls Saturday afternoon only to face torrential rain that evening. Most of the dormies wimped out back to campus, but I stayed behind with a few hardy outdoorsy types. At the height of the storm, well after sundown, I needed to pee, so I borrowed a flashlight, threw on my rain poncho, and trudged my way to the outhouse. Halfway there, underneath the towering trees and vertical rain, a bolt of lightning lit up everything underneath the forest canopy. Once the afterimages faded, I met the largest red fox I had ever seen, directly on the path in front of me. Easily bigger than a wolf, her size would have been a dead giveaway that she was dryant, but without any shepherd training, I didn’t recognize what she was at the time.
>
I just knew foxes didn’t have two tails.
The dual-tailed fox grinned at me before slinking off into the forest. The storm died down with her disappearance, and if my bladder hadn’t threatened to burst, I might have run after her. I was even more stupid and headstrong back then, if you can believe it.
In any case, that would be the first of many dryant sightings I experienced that year, my awakened ken blasting into overdrive. Those sightings would eventually lead me to Guntram, who would indoctrinate me into the world of Nasci. I fully expected lightning to be a part of my training, although Guntram insisted from the start that shepherds simply did not wield lightning. He had also never heard of any fox dryant, which was strange since dryants tend to hang out around the animals they protect. He told me to forget about lightning and foxes, focus instead on the basics.
I suppose a rational person would take him at his word. Guntram was quite an accomplished shepherd, not only of augur rank, but the highest master of air (after the Oracle) within the Talol Wilds. And yet, here I am, a genuine sorceress. Most people in my previous life would find my current lifestyle as believable as the latest blockbuster movie. My view of what is and what is not possible has been broadened beyond recognition.
And I know what I saw: a fox dryant that seemed to come and go with a lightning storm.
So, I never gave up on the idea that I should absorb lightning. That’s why I made these trips into the Bitai Wilds. I became a storm chaser after all, a shepherd pursuing the only natural source of lightning, intent on manipulating it like any other element.
The atmosphere thickened as I dove deeper into the desert. I mentally practiced the new sigil I’d learned last night at the library. Since there are no books on how to use lightning, I had to make stuff up as I go. I’ve tried dozens of fire sigils as a substitute, assuming fire pith would be the most similar to lightning. Unfortunately, nothing so far had helped me control lightning. They all ended up like the exploded whale. I decided to test a new advanced fire sigil in the hopes it would at least allow me to aim the lightning in a particular direction.