by Audrey Faye
Dragon Kin
Jae & Fendellen
Shae Geary
Audrey Faye
Fireweed Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Shae Geary & Audrey Faye
www.audreyfayewrites.com
Contents
Prologue
I. Midwinter’s Night
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Interlude
II. Friends & Feathers
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Interlude
III. Two Hearts True
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Thank You
Prologue
Peace. It was a thing that had not been celebrated in her lifetime, and Lovissa did not yet trust that it would stay, but the fires of midwinter burned and her dragons rejoiced, not caring what the spring might bring. They had not lost a single dragon since midsummer, and for those used to living battle to battle, it was a heady feeling indeed.
She looked over at the fierce black dragon who had landed silently at her side as the sun set and been a lurking shadow ever since. Watching the fires, but not joining them. ::You worry that they will be weaker when it is time to fight again.::
::Perhaps.:: Baraken sounded thoughtful. ::Or perhaps they gain in strength and purpose. There are many who pair up. We will have new hatchlings when the sun warms the skies again.::
They always had one or two, but she knew what he meant. Peace, even a most tenuous one, came with hope. ::Marphus reports that the snow levels on the south slopes are low. The coming year will not be any easier for those elf clans.:: Drought had weakened the elves—and kept her dragons alive.
::The north is more worrisome.::
She looked over at the warrior who had delivered many of their peace offerings. ::They have not ignored our gifts.:: Some on the southern slopes had died rather than accept food from a dragon.
Some—but not all.
Baraken’s eyes did not leave the fires.
She did not need his words to be spoken. She knew he hated every morsel of food and every drop of water delivered to their enemies. But he said nothing even as he returned with empty claws. There was nothing to say. The clans of the north accepted their gifts, but they had not yet agreed to a cease fire.
Lovissa knew her dragons doubted, and in the quiet of her own cave, she doubted with them. But they must not see their queen waver. ::If it is war they want in the spring, they shall have it.:: Adding a little meat to their weak bones would not change the battles overmuch—and perhaps they, too, breathed in the air of a crisp midwinter in which no elves had died and let themselves dream of peace.
Or perhaps she was weak, ensnared by visions of a future in which elves were no longer the enemy.
Baraken’s head turned a fraction. ::I did not know you doubted.::
Lovissa sighed. She would not have burdened him with her own uncertainty. ::The ashes spoke most clearly.::
::Indeed.:: A long pause. ::And we have not been murdered in our caves as we slept.::
There were far too many guards posted for such a thing, but again, she heard what he did not say. Even her finest warrior dared to hope. ::Perhaps, in the spring, they will be willing to talk of peace.:: Even one or two clans of the north would be a boon. Their dragonkiller arrows flew more swiftly than those of the southern slopes.
There was a disturbance in the valley below. She could feel it—a shifting of attention away from the fires and into the dark.
Baraken snapped to attention beside her.
A path opened to the central fire, and then she heard the flapping, felt the disturbed air of a dragon coming in fast and hard.
Her heart leaped as a small, lithe body landed with an abruptness that would embarrass him later. Timot. He was one who guarded the outer edges of the valley, overflying the northern slopes. Surely the elves did not come now. The snow had blocked the passes two moons past.
She spread her wings. Her landing would be no better than his, but he clearly came with news, and she would hear it first. She felt Baraken take to the air behind her, far more gracefully.
She set her feet down in front of Timot, her head held high. “You have news?”
He gulped. “Four elves. Where the Marash is highest.”
The lowest of the passes, and the only one reachable in the inhospitable weather of midwinter. “Are they armed?” Four elves were no threat, but perhaps more had found a way to hide themselves in the snow.
Timot shook his head slowly. “They bade me to land.”
Every dragon within earshot hissed.
He quivered, and she could see the doubt in his eyes.
She had been a scout once. They were chosen as much for their good judgment as their flying skills. She nodded. She would hear the rest of his story.
He gulped. “They put down their weapons and waved. They did not appear to be a threat, and I thought I recognized two of them from the hunting parties.”
Timot often flew scouting trips, and against her better judgment, he had let himself be seen. He had also delivered many of their gifts. “So you landed.” A foolhardy and brave act, but he had proven himself to be the second many times over, and rarely the first.
Timot looked as if he wished to hide behind the nearest rock, but he held the gaze of his queen. “I did. They kept their hands high, and two stayed far back.”
The ones who would avenge the other two should the dragon attack. Lovissa swallowed. He had been a brave and foolish dragon indeed.
“They put a bowl. On the ground.” Timot’s throat clicked. A dragon’s remembered terror. “It smelled of meat, and other things I did not recognize.”
Lovissa’s entire body stiffened. “They brought you a gift? Of food?”
Something in Timot’s gaze eased. “I did not know if it was a gift or poison. But I did not want to start a battle by believing it to be poison.” He swallowed, and his throat clicked again. “I took only a very small taste at first.”
Just as they taught the hatchlings to do with an unfamiliar berry. Lovissa held her breath, just like every other dragon within earshot. Waiting to hear the rest of Timor’s story.
His breath huffed out in smoke and remembered fear—and something else. “It was good. It tasted of meat and berries.”
It clearly hadn’t killed him, so they would speak of slow-acting poisons later. “Tell me of the elves, Timot.”
She could see his confusion. “I didn’t understand their words, and they do strange things with their faces and their arms. But when I finished the bowl, the smallest one brought me this.” He held out his claws.
Lovissa felt alarm billow through the valley—and then awe.
A dragonkiller arrow.
Broken in two.
Part I
Midwinter’s Night
Chapter 1
It was the kind of cold Gran called crackling, where the air froze as soon as you breathed it out, like winter was trying to take your soul and turn it to ice. Or at least that’s what the villagers thought, huddled around their hearths on this, the longest night of the year. They would be asleep by now, bedrolls pulled close to the fire, or deep enough in their cups to take little notice of strange things in the night.
Here in the high mountains, the villagers knew better than to notice strange.
Jae slid out of her cloak, shivering a little, even though she didn’t feel the cold like the others. It still slapped against her skin, a crisp wind with no manners. She tipped her head back as it snatched at her hair, streaming it out behind her. She loved the wind currents of her mountains, unlike the other villagers, who complained bitterly. Gran said it was because she’d been born on the rocks.
Left out on the mountain to die, the others said, but they never did it where Gran could hear. Those who had when Jae was younger found themselves on the wrong end of a healer’s wrath the next time they got sick.
Gran never refused to heal anyone, but her brews could be made to damn near kill you before they healed you. Young Mellie’s brews tasted better, but they didn’t always work as well, so the village had learned to be kind to Jae, even if she was a foundling and mountain strange right down to her bones.
Jae worked quickly, unwrapping the wide band of cloth from around her middle. She shivered anew as the cold blew right threw her thick woolen dress, and then her wings snapped free and she didn’t care about the weather anymore. She took one more furtive look around for anyone wandering drunk too far from their bed. In summer, she went farther from the village before she took to the skies, but in winter, Gran worried if she strayed too far.
A balance, always. Gran and her own growing healer skills kept her safe, so long as she didn’t allow the villagers to look overlong at her differences. They’d grown used to her heavy cloaks, even when summer came to the high mountains. And only Mellie and Gran knew she took to the skies at night.
She had to. The sky had always called to her. In the daytime, too, but Gran’s eyes had always looked pinched and afraid when little Jae had forgotten and flapped herself toward the sun, so bigger Jae had learned to keep her feet on the ground and her wings safely bound up under her cloak while the sun was out.
She folded her cloak and binding cloth, leaving them in a neat pile by a tree with gnarled branches that were easy to see, even from the darkest night sky. Then she unfurled her wings, sighing in gratitude as they stretched out for the first time in three days. They didn’t cramp anymore since she’d stopped growing, but it still felt magnificent to reach them out as far as they could go, letting them flutter in the wind so her feathers all lined up properly. She stretched out her arms, too, and let the fierce mountain wind blow straight at her face.
The villagers might complain bitterly about that wind, but they’d never taken a ride on its magic. She laughed as a strong gust nearly lifted her feet off the ground, and then she let her wings move. Not flapping, really—with the wind this strong, it wasn’t needed. She just let the gust catch her and lift her up, tossing her into the sky for no other reason than it wanted to play.
She swirled on her way up, dipping and diving and weaving as the six mountains that rose up around her village all split and tangled and teased the air under her wings. It was a wild ride, one that spoke of midwinter storms coming, the kind that would keep even hardy high-mountain villagers wrapped up tight in their huts.
But it wasn’t storming yet. The skies were crisp and clear and full of stars. Jae reached up as if to cup them in her hands, and laughed as the air rushed through her fingers. Then she tucked her hands under her wings, deep in the warm feathers. She would spend as much of this night in the sky as she could, and she knew well what happened to villagers who let their fingers turn to ice. They were the one part of her that sometimes felt the cold, and she intended to be like Gran, who had managed to reach old age with all her fingers and all her teeth.
Jae felt her heart squeeze even as she reveled in the tumbling air of the night sky. The old woman who had raised her had talked once, deep in her cups, about touching the stars. She would love this, at least the parts that involved the beauty of the night sky. The rest was Jae’s, and hers alone. Gran was a woman who kept both feet firmly on the ground, and generally her eyes there too, looking for the plants that ended up in her brews.
Which was how she had found a baby left on the side of the mountain.
And insisted, firmly, that even a baby with wings on her back had the right to live and breathe and grow up to be a productive part of the village.
It had worked, mostly.
Gran had held the stories of demons and magics and curses at bay, and when Jae had grown old enough to understand the whispers, she had wrapped cloth around her wings and done her best to be a healer’s apprentice no different from Mellie.
Except for taking to the skies at night. That, she could not give up, even for safety. Jae tipped one of her wings toward the highest mountain, catching a draft rising up from the ground, slightly warmer than the deep winter chill of all the others. In summer, that wind would blow her right up over the peak, higher even than the mountain eagles that sometimes came to circle her in the night.
They never came too close. Wary, like all wild things.
And tame ones, too. The people of the village watched her with those same eyes, even those she considered her friends.
Cautious acceptance—but they never forgot.
Jae sighed. Even with stars beyond counting to keep her company, loneliness followed her to the sky. The knowing, deep in her bones, that she would always be other. Tolerated, yes. Welcomed, even, especially when she brought brews made from ingredients found far from the village. But she would never have bashful boys bringing flowers to her door or a babe of her own in her arms or a family to gather around and listen to her stories as she grew old.
The loneliness had sharpened this winter, watching Mellie’s belly swell with her second child.
Jae rolled over onto her back, coasting under a blanket of stars, her feathers chiding the winds trying to snatch her out of the sky. Gran would have no patience for her lonely talk. Life was about being useful, about fixing things before they broke, or after, if absolutely necessary. Gran had no patience for those who visited their cups overmuch, helped by a heavy dose of winter mead or not.
Jae let the wind tug her toward the ground and then swooped up again, laughing as her skirt blew around her ears. Entirely indecent, but there was no one in the skies to care.
She stretched her wings, riding the primary current down the valley toward the village. She hadn’t wandered tonight. Sometimes she flew straight for the nearest star, but this night, she had gone in circles, never straying far from the village that was the only home she had ever known.
She looked down on the collection of huts that always looked so small from the skies. So foolish of the people living there to think they could hold off a winter storm or the fury of the mountains, and yet they had. There had been a village in this valley for as long as anyone could remember.
She dipped down again. Perhaps she should head in. Get some sleep on this midwinter’s night. The healers would be called on in the morning, heads hurting from too much mead, and Gran’s bones weren’t as spry as they once were.
But as sensible as that sounded, Jae knew, somehow, that the stars didn’t agree. They tugged at her feathers. Pushed the wind under her wings, chasing her higher on a draft that wasn’t one she knew.
She frowned. She knew all the winds of these mountains, even the stormy, cantankerous ones.
A star, bright between two mountain peaks, caught her attention. It shone brighter and brighter until it was all she could look at.
And it spoke. Your life here is done. Come.
Jae could feel herself jerking. Flailing. Tangled in strange words in the sky that should not exist. Some part of her head, the part raised by Gran, knew this was foolishness. A figment or a demon, reaching for her through the winter storms.
But it didn’t feel like a demon. It felt warm, like the star saw through to her very heart and did not find her strange.
Strange matters not. You are just as you are meant to be.
It took everything in Jae not to fly toward those words. To their w
armth. To their impossible sense that Jae was somehow not other. “Gran waits for me.” She spoke the words out loud, trying to fight the fearsome hold the bright star had on her heart.
The wind whipped away her words.
“I can’t leave. I’m needed here.” Even as she said the words and dipped once more toward the village, Jae knew she spoke lies. Mellie was at least as good a healer, and the villagers trusted her.
Brews worked better when the one who offered them was loved without reservation.
There is one waiting for you.
The words pierced her, claws to her chest. No one ever waited for her. Not like Mellie’s man waited at the end of the day for his bride to come home. Not like the littles of the village waited for strong arms to pick them up and toss them into the sky and catch them again.
This wasn’t right. Everyone knew only evil treachery made promises like this. Jae flapped her wings hard, fighting the gusts. She pointed straight to the village, resisting the call of the demon star.
You are needed.
Jae gasped. She couldn’t leave. This was her home. And it was the middle of winter. She would never make it over the passes.
You will. I will lead you where you need to go.
Jae squeezed her eyes shut and aimed straight for the tree with her cloak and her bindings. The place where she could put her feet back on the ground and run away from whatever tried to pull her across the night sky.