by Reilyn Hardy
“I’m not an actual chronomancer, Vihaan.”
“But your father is.”
I study the cuffs around his wrists.
“What if you change into a dragon? Will it break off?”
“This is dragon-forged iron, Mae. Forged with my own blood. It’ll change as I do. It’s not coming off,” he says and sighs. “Now how do we get out of here?”
“Is that what keeps you here? There’s no way out?”
“Artemis! How did you get here?”
“Right, sorry. Don’t call me that. There’s this tree, and between the roots there’s —”
“Stop!” The guards yell and we start to run again.
“Why aren’t they turning into dragons?” I ask.
“Guards need permission,” he says as he follows closely beside me. “Usually only the dungeon guard has permission to change immediately if someone’s trying to escape, but that usually stops right then and there. No one makes it this far.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t give them permission just yet.”
I dart through the cluster of trees and run along the edge of the forest with Vihaan and the old woman trailing close behind. I clench my jaw at the thought of us getting captured again. I don’t even want to know what they did to prisoners who had only tried to escape. I glance out of the row of trees, to the rest of Mithlonde from where I’m running, to see how close the dungeon guards are. But instead, I notice the platform again, in the very center of the lowered city.
Even from there, I can see the crimson splatters that stand out against the pale dirt. Blood of the fallen, blood of all those who have been tortured and killed there. Those who were publicly humiliated.
Including me.
I try to avoid looking at the boulders, but my eyes purposely find them, and Nannu’s story replays in my head at the sight. Giving me the same visuals I had while I was chained to the platform. I try to shake the thoughts. I need to clear my mind. We have to escape.
But I stop in my tracks and my mind goes blank when I see Nannu standing there, her shaking hand grips tightly around the material of my bag, and she turns to face us.
“Nannu!” I shout and she smiles, and I throw my arms around her. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“I was afraid ya had already gone and forgot ya things,” she tells me and hands me my bag. She takes the Skinharvester beak out and puts the string around my neck.
She smiles at me.
“Come with us, Nann —”
My shoulder burns and I fall against the tree, grabbing my arm. I shut my eyes tightly and I can feel blood running down my fingers as it gushes. Pain is searing through my body, and my arm is starting to numb. I bite down on my bottom lip and grip the bar that pierced my arm. I yank it from my shoulder and drop to the ground. I drop the bar and clasp my hand again over my bloody wound, while it continues to gush through the spaces of my fingers.
Nannu kneels down beside me and puts her hand on the side of my face as I start to sweat, my body is trembling.
“I was reminded of all the things I long forgot, thanks to ya.” She smiles. “Be a good boy, Mae.” I lean my face in toward her palm as she pulls away from me.
I know what she’s going to do.
I try to get up from where I’m slouched over on the ground, but I fall back against the tree again.
“No!” I shout as I try to stand, watching her walk away from me. “Nannu! Come back!”
“Artemis! We have to go!” Vihaan tries to urge me to the deep roots of the tree but I don’t want to.
I shake my head violently.
“No! Nannu! Stop!” My voice is growing hoarse and I’m getting dizzy, but I’ll continue to scream for her until I can’t anymore. She’s walking right out to the guards, she’s walking to her death.
“Ya will not harm my Mae,” she hisses at them and shoves her walking stick into the ground in front of her, with such great force, that it knocks several of them down.
Within seconds, she transforms right before my eyes, from a fragile old woman into a beautiful, black dragon. The sails of her wings are ripped and her eyes are still white, but she stands her ground. Many of the guards that hadn’t fallen, clumsily run into her, unable to stop in time and their imitation flesh sizzles against her obsidian scales.
The Obsidian Inferno.
I’m still shouting for her, I still want her to turn around.
I want her to come with us but I’m silenced when a larger, red dragon with black spikes on its head and down its back, rises up in front of her.
My eyes widen.
It’s King Solomon, still adorned with the scar over his eye.
She snaps her jaw forward, and he sways to the side, taking a bite out of her neck. He clenches his jaw, and she struggles until she stops moving, her head dangling from his mouth.
Her lifeless body is the last thing I see as Vihaan drags me through the roots.
She’s gone.
My own heart stops with hers. All of the tears I have struggled to keep down, all of the times I tried to stop myself from crying, there is no stopping it now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
western eye venom
The guilt is eating me away. It’s consuming me to a point of no return. The visual of Nannu’s head hanging from King Solomon’s mouth is tormenting my mind. I can think of nothing else. All I see is him biting into her; sinking his teeth in, and snapping her neck.
As I’m falling. As I land.
I crash into the ground on a blanket of snow and get up as fast as my aching body will allow. The guilt is destroying me. Emotions overwhelm me, I can hardly feel the pain now. My vision is blurry, but I can still see him, I can still see Vihaan.
Traitor.
I shove him as hard as I can.
“How could you do that?” I shove him so hard he nearly trips over the old woman he had set down. I think I caught him off guard, I don’t think I would have managed to move him otherwise. “We have to go back!”
He stands up straight now, his massive structure towering over mine. I try not to flinch, I try not to show fear and cower away but I wipe my runny nose with my sleeve and sniffle violently, suddenly feeling very small and pathetic in his presence. I would feel stronger if I wasn’t crying but I can’t help it.
I can’t help it. He doesn’t care.
He grabs my shoulder and digs his thumb into my bloody wound.
“She sacrificed herself so you —” he digs harder and I’m forced to take a step back. Wincing, my breathing grows heavy, jagged and rough. I grip his hand and I make an attempt to get him to let go. I can’t push him away. He’s too strong. “Could get away.” He growls at me, thick black smoke starts streaming from his nose. He huffs deeply and blows it out of the way, yanking his thumb from my cut. He takes a step away from me.
I clutch onto my shoulder and turn away from him. The blood is gushing from it again.
Dripping down my arm, it coats the snow in red.
“Going back would mean she died for nothing,” he says and smells my blood on his finger.
I don’t even want to look at him. I don’t have to, I can see him out of the corners of my eyes.
“That bar that hit you was laced with Western Eye venom. You’re going to hallucinate and you’ll be dead before sunrise if we don’t get you help.”
“She died, Vihaan. How can you not care? At all?”
I sound defeated. In many ways, I am.
He takes a quick step toward me and I don’t step back. I stand my ground, I’m not going to let him intimidate me, even though I can barely keep my posture straight.
“I do care — don’t you dare tell me what I feel.”
My hand moves over my wound because I don’t want him to jab his thumb back in there. I make an effort to look up at him, but there are several of him now and I don’t know which one is the real one. There are too many.
Everything is blurry, everything is distorted. My brain is throbbing and I
can’t control my breathing. I’m sweating I think, but it’s so cold.
“Every living thing dies, Art. That’s why we cherish it while we have it. That’s why we respect the decisions our loved ones make for themselves. That’s why we love, and why we care and why we hurt. Because everything dies. You want to be able to smile when you think about the ones you lost, because you won’t have the chance to make new memories ever again. So you want to make ones worth remembering. Nannu cared about you, so respect her sacrifice. You owe her that much.”
I don’t have to tell him he’s right. He knows he’s right and so do I. It doesn’t mean I have to like it. Not that it matters.
My mind is dizzy and I think I hear him saying my name but I can’t be sure. My vision is getting worse now and the more I struggle to see clearly, the worse my head feels.
I hit the ground, my hand still gripping onto my shoulder. The ice burns my cheek, but this isn’t pain. This is a pillow for my throbbing head. I want it to stop. Everything is loud in my mind. The pain in my shoulder is subsiding, but I don’t think that’s a good thing.
I shut my eyes tightly, feeling the pain jolt through my body, it travels through my veins. I can feel it as it moves. As the poison starts to claim me for its own.
Finally, I’ll be free from this living hell. From the guilt that’s eating away at me slowly. From the pain. From it all. But I’m not free. They won’t let me go. My body, it won’t let me go. It won’t let me fade. I struggle and it holds onto me with a forceful grip.
I try to open my eyes but my lids are heavy and I can’t. I struggle anyway, I can feel my lids fluttering over my eyes but they won’t open.
Someone glued my eyelashes together and I can’t get them unstuck.
“Help!” I yell, touching my face. “Hel —”
My words catch in my throat, they’re stuck there as I feel over my sockets.
My eyes are missing.
* * * * *
I wake with a gasp for air and shiver when a cold rush of air covers me. Blinking, Vihaan and Miko come into view.
Wait — Miko?
I frown.
“I don’t think he’s very happy to see you,” Vihaan says and Miko frowns now too.
“I just saved your life!” She hits me on my wounded arm. I expect pain to surge through my body again, but there’s nothing.
Just the skin starting to hurt from her whacking me.
“I’m okay?” I ask.
“I don’t know, are you?” Vihaan asks, and he grins a little.
I frown again and ignore him.
“How’d you do it?” I ask Miko. “How am I alive?”
“With his blood,” she says, pointing her thumb out at Vihaan. “Dragon’s blood can heal almost anything, remember?”
“And some other ingredients you don’t want to know,” he adds and she laughs.
“I thought I had no eyes,” I mumble as I sit up, rubbing my shoulder. There’s some kind of muddy paste on it but beneath it — it’s healing. I can feel it. The paste is pulling the venom out of my body.
“I told you that you were gonna hallucinate,” Vihaan says.
I hope I’m not hallucinating now. I reach over for my bag and Miko just continues to eye me curiously. She’s waiting to say something, I can tell.
“Well? Go on,” I say.
She crinkles her nose a little.
“There were myths about Western Eye venom, myths regarding what someone sees when they’re infected. That it ties into truths and whatnot. The elves think it’s your brief encounter with the Fates, because you sort of linger in this limbo state. Not dead, but not completely alive anymore either.”
“But there’s no proof —” Vihaan starts.
“What could mine mean?” I ask, cutting him off. It doesn’t hurt to ask. “If I have no eyes? What does that mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Your eyes were missing. Obviously there’s something someone doesn’t want you to see.”
“But what?” I ask and she shrugs.
“How should I know?” She looks over at Vihaan, who just shrugs his shoulders too. “I didn’t even know you were Artemis of Glasskeep.”
“Vihaan!” I snap.
“What?” He asks, taken aback by my accusation. “I didn’t tell her. She already knew.”
“How did you know? Wait, Miko how are you even here? I thought you were dead.”
“This is going to be good,” Vihaan says.
“What is he talking about?” I ask.
“Rhiannon,” she says simply. “After she got the empusa off of me, she suspected something bad would happen in the woods and told me where to go just in case. I think she was more concerned about Jace than anything else. Anyway, when I got to the tree, I saw that she was right. I saw the claw marks in the bark, the broken branches —”
I don’t want to hear about Jace.
“But you left. She said —”
She shakes her head.
“She scratched me with the bark of a white oak after the empusae attacked. It knocked me out for hours. She lifted me into the trees and said I’d be safest like that — unconscious I mean — from anything else because nothing could smell me anyway and I was. I’m here aren’t I?”
“But how — I barely got through with the Harvest Moon — how did you —”
“Rhiannon said once the passage is opened, it stays open until the initial traveler goes back through it.” Miko frowns a little. “You don’t remember seeing me in Mithlonde? I gave you water.”
“That was you?”
“I’m sorry for what they did to you and I wanted to help — really — I did — but I was scared. I was scared of what they might do to me — a halfling. We’re not exactly widely accepted.”
“So you left me there.”
“I’m sorry —”
I shake my head and hand her the sack of Thirondel charms.
“Take as many as you want,” I say.
“What?” She sounds confused, she looks confused too.
“If you didn’t leave me there, you might not’ve been here to save my life now. You said you wanted to earn them — you did.”
She reaches into the sack and takes a handful, it’s roughly the same amount that I tried to offer her in Thealey.
“You don’t want more than that?”
“This is how much you offered me, this is all I’m going to take.”
For some reason I expected her to take the whole thing. I thought she’d think she earned the whole thing, she sort of had. I’d be dead without her.
“So where are we?” Vihaan asks as he looks around, but I don’t. “This doesn’t really seem like the Whispering Woods.”
“That’s because it’s not,” I say as I get up. I need to get off of the ground, it’s freezing. We’re in the center of a few trees, but there’s smoke coming from cottages not far from where we stand, and I can’t believe I’m back.
“Portals don’t always link back to their entry point,” Miko tells Vihaan. “Sometimes they’ll link back to a place the initial traveler needs to go.”
“So then where are we?” He asks again.
“Merrowley,” I say, dusting myself off. “It’s where I lived with my dad and my brother before he left us.”
“Your dad? You mean the chronomancer? Father Time?”
I nod.
“But I don’t think he’s here,” I say. “Someone else would’ve found him by now if he was. This isn’t the best hiding place. We weren’t exactly hiding when we lived here, so everyone kind of knew where we were.”
Miko hands me the sack of charms back. She stuffs the ones in her hand into a pouch on her belt and Vihaan picks up the old woman with ease and turns to me.
“Lead the way,” he says.
I start to rub my arms to warm myself up.
“I want to know the truth, Vihaan. And I want to know what really happened between you, your father and the Grim Reaper.”
“Here? Now? Really? It’s freezing
—”
“Do dragons even get cold?”
He rolls his eyes. I didn’t think so.
He turns away from me and puts the woman back on the ground. He coughs, but he doesn’t turn around to face me yet, and instead is making strange noises that sounds like he has something stuck in his throat. He lifts his arm and turns around — his hand is to his mouth.
He coughed the red stone back up. He takes it out of his mouth.
“When you told me to get the woman,” he sighs, “I decided I needed to get this too.”
“How do you know there are creatures in Mithlonde?”
“Because I overheard the Reaper talking about it. He wanted this, Mae. He wanted Mithlonde to be brought back so that he could take over. You were right not to tell my father because he wouldn’t have believed you. He doesn’t even realize anything’s wrong. He doesn’t realize Mithlonde was moved, he doesn’t know they’re no longer apart of Aridete anymore.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“I don’t expect you to,” he says.
“Is your father on his side or not?” I take a step back from Vihaan. “And whose side are you on?” I ask.
He laughs, but I remain where I am. He looks at Miko for some sort of back up but she doesn’t offer any. “Oh, you can’t be serious.” He rolls his eyes at me again. “If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be here. Why would I have even let you out of Mithlonde? I pulled you through the portal, remember? Mae, I gave you my food, my water. Why would I have done any of that?”
I shrug.
“Maybe this is really all about your dad. If he executed me, what would’ve happened to him? What would the Grim Reaper have done to him?”
He sighs.
“I knew it. This is about him, isn’t it?”
I take another step back.
“Mae,” he holds up his hands in surrender, his thumb his holding the stone against his palm. “Don’t be like this.”
“Are you going to deliver me — my dad to him, personally? Is that what this is about? Is that how you want me to help you?”
“Stop this! This is nonsense!”