by Lora Leigh
The blade—wicked, sharp-toothed, short-legged creatures that inhabited the Causeway, the swamplands between the magick lands and the human lands of Yarba—was prized for its meat and its hide.
Yet it was the dragon that shocked her most of all.
And terrified her.
Had he finally come for her?
Had the magick she knew this dragon possessed finally learned her deceit and come to destroy all that he might suspect threatened the land and the Sorceresses he was pledged to?
But there was no threat, she screamed silently as she stared up at him.
Fear did not hold her before him, still as stone, though it should have.
Nay, it was certainty and the battle to find the words to convince this aloof, vengeful creature that her loyalty was not in question.
Nor were her Wizards.
Proof she did not yet have in her possession. She had nothing but a Sorceress’ true knowledge of her natural Consorts, even if it was mixed with a furious sense of betrayal.
Garron tilted his massive head to the side as great dark eyes stared at her with the amused mockery he was so very well-known for. Yet he was not alone in that look, nor was he alone in the massive size and power projecting from him.
There was another, one of dark magick and malevolent design who had been impersonating this dragon whose presence was so trusted by the Sorceresses of Covenan.
Could she be facing the darkness the Sorceresses feared the Delmari had aligned themselves with? Could such be possible? Could she be so very wrong about the Consorts she belonged to?
Surely, the gods… Nay, ’twas the gods who had taught the Wizards—and the humans—all they knew of deceit.
Surely, the most powerful Sentinel, the One, would not have aligned her powers to beings who pledged themselves to the darkness rather than to His almighty hand?
Fingers clenched. The muscles of her body tightened as she called forth the power, the magick the land and the gods of Sentmar had bequeathed her and whispered the words that would call the truth to her.
Not just the truth, but a certainty of whom and what she faced. For she no longer trusted the love in her heart, or her beliefs in others. She had learned better at her dear mother’s knee.
The need for certainty was like a dagger slicing through her soul. Calling forth each crystalline spore of power that infused her, knowing that the one who faced her was Garron, then he would know the secret she had hidden since coming into the full measure of her magick. Should it be the dark one, then she and her Wizards would have a chance to escape before Garron and the Veressi could awaken.
Her hands lifted and magick in all the shades of the green of the forest began to surround her. Her hair whipped about her shoulders, caressing her with a warmth that reminded her of her Wizards’ touch. Heat engulfed her, infused her, and the spell she sought came from her lips with a strength she had not expected.
“I see a dragon, form and bearing, size and strength of the great Garron. Reveal to me light or should he be dark, magick true and magick deep, friend shall linger, foe shall sleep.”
Magick erupted from stone, spilling from even the smallest pores of it, seeping from the ground, exploding in light and fire as it suddenly surrounded the dragon, whipping around him.
Head tilting back, great wings extending majestically, the dragon stood before her. Magick seemed to infuse him, to fly from the stone, the air itself to pour into the dragon instead.
“Garron does not sleep when his charges face danger, little Sorceress.” The sound of power echoed and vibrated through the cavern’s walls as mighty scales shifted, hissed and steam emitted from flared, leathery nostrils.
No, Garron would not sleep. He would not leave undefended those he had pledged himself to when they needed him so desperately.
The magick of the land in all its heat and radiant power would have revealed the dark one though, if by chance her magick could have been deceived.
“Sorceress Keeper of the Mystic Lands.” Amusement returned to the rasping voice as the magick slowly receded. “’Twas great power you called forth.” His huge head turned, his gaze going to the Wizards before returning to her. “I felt no Joining.”
She had needed no Wizard to hone her magick.
She nearly snorted at the idea before remembering the one small secret she had always held to herself. A secret she dared not acknowledge, even in the privacy of her own thoughts, just in case one of the powerful beings in the cavern should discern it. One she would not tell even her Wizard Consorts unless it was a truth that could ultimately save their lives, or the lives of those she gave her loyalty to.
“There has been no Joining.” Bracing her hand on the hilt of her sword as it hung at her hip, she faced the dragon as ire flamed within her. “Can a Sorceress not have power without a male to give it strength? Or are you of the mind that a Sorceress can only exist if Wizards provide her protection?”
A shrug of mighty shoulders had her eyes narrowing. “It has been proven, has it not, Sorceress?”
Sliding her gaze to the side, lips parting as her jaw cocked with the slightest mocking tilt, she gave the dragon a haughty look. “Perhaps the One has awakened and decided otherwise?”
Legend said that his awakening would herald a greater magick bequeathed to the daughters he so cherished, and had gifted to the sons he had created to protect all of Sentmar.
She doubted such a powerful being existed now, but perhaps at one time he had. After all, legend began for a reason, and legend said the Sentinel would awaken when the Sorceresses’ need was the greatest.
What better time to awaken than now? When had their need been greater in the last millennium?
“Tsk tsk, Sorceress, fairy tales are for fledglings who have nothing better to do than to dream of all-powerful beings who will rescue them from their lives of tedium and uncertainty.” It was a Veressi who spoke, his tone more mocking, filled with such dark humor and lack of warmth that a chill actually raced up her spine.
It was the Delmari she watched though. Watched as their gazes seemed to flare with power at the inherent threat in their Guardian Wizard’s tone.
Suddenly, threads of pale and darkest-blue magick began to whip through the cavern, sliding around her, over her, warming her flesh even as she gave her eyes a delicate little roll and chose to ignore them. There were other matters that needed to be addressed. Matters of her Wizard Consorts’ safety and the plans of the Ruling Wizards to capture them.
“Your Sentinel Warriors are being freed.” She fought to hold back the shudder of pleasure that threatened to race over her flesh at the feel of their magick washing over her.
Bedamned warriors, she had no time for this pleasure now.
“We know this.” Torran nodded slowly. “The Sentinel Commander sent the message just before your arrival.”
“It’s a trap.”
A smile almost curled his lip. “We are aware of this as well, love.”
Then why in the hell had she raced back here to warn them then?
She had done naught but wasted her time, rather than staying at Sellane castle to aid her Keeper of the Lands.
“Do not call me love.” The words snapped from her lips before she could call them back, the agony of her choice tearing at her as she faced that once again they had not needed her. “You are traitors in this land and I have protected you long enough. We must now find a way to return you to your own lands, before you lose your heads.” And she lost her own. For surely there was no way to convince Marina, nor her Wizards, that the Delmari were not traitors to Covenan.
She glanced at Garron and knew her own fate was sealed there. He would never keep the knowledge of her Consorts to himself.
Why he had not moved to strike her in retaliation for her treason, she was not certain. He had always been fond of her, but he had been fonder of the princesses, as he should have been.
What was afoot here? The air of suspense and male conspiracy was thick enough to slice
with her sword.
“They gave up their lands to come to this place to find their Consort, but you do not see them weeping for their choice,” a Veressi allowed the words to slip past lips that turned in an arrogant curve.
“No tears fall from my eyes, Veressi. And why should they weep when it was at your command they came into our lands and began this farce?” Her finger pointed back at the warriors she would have called her own. “When they betrayed their natural Consortress when they sought another. Weep they should not, for I have no doubt you will compensate them nicely.” It was a sneer that shaped her lips this time as her glare turned on her Wizards.
“Think you I did not know when first my eyes touched theirs that our magick aligned?” she snapped with a surfeit of anger, the fury of their choice beating at her Sorceress soul. “Do you think I did not know the moment I betrayed my own land in saving their worthless dracas hides to have you do this!” Her arm extended around the cavern, indicating the Veressi, the dragon. “What conspiracy binds you that I find you here? Tell me, my Wizards.” She turned then to the great dragon. “Mighty Garron and the Guardians of lands, my ancestors fled in fear of their lives a millennium ago. Tell me what foul plan aligns you and has brought you together, in this place, this day?”
Her voice rose. Anger surged through her. Her magick beat through her blood, through each crystalline spore of power that infused her being.
She could feel the Wizard magick racing over her, stroking her, her Wizards’ need to soothe her infusing her magick as the Veressi and the dragon watched her as though in surprise.
Her Consorts’ magick whispered against her Sorceress soul, urged her to ease, to trust in their magick and a loyalty that came only with a natural Joining.
Yet how could she trust? How could she trust two who refused to trust in her? To give her the truth of the conspiracies she felt weaving about the cavern.
“They knew you to be their Consortress.” One of the Veressi stepped forward, black eyes solemn, the lean, powerful form filled with certain arrogance and power. “They did what was needed to reveal the Justice Layel before she could kill your Guardian of Covenan and steal the power of this land forever, Sorceress. That deserves more than your outrage.”
“We do not need you to stand for us before our own Consort, Guardian,” Torran spoke up, his tone a rasp of ire as she faced him and his Twin. “We do not need explanations from you. If her magick has revealed what she claims, then well she should know whether she can find faith in us by now.”
She did not know the reasons, no matter her attempts to scrye them. But what of her own actions? The reasons for them tore at her with a dagger of guilt, slicing at her soul as she faced the Wizards she had chosen over her people, her lands and her freedom.
No matter their innocence in the betrayal of the magick of the lands. Still, they had betrayed her in seeking another.
“It was such machinations that drove our Sorceresses from their Wizards so many centuries ago.” She bled with pain, with guilt and fear of the rising emotions overtaking her. “Forcing Sorceress to turn against Sorceress, mother against daughter and daughter against sister. It was these games, played by your male pride and besotted egos, that all but destroyed us before we had even the chance to live.”
“And perhaps, Sorceress, it was this distrust of their own power that the Sorceresses lent a hand to their own near demise.” Garron breathed out behind her. “Deal here with your Wizards, and find that place where truth and lie meet in understanding. When you have settled your choice and decided the side you fight on, truth or confusion, then perhaps your Wizards may reveal to you their own choices, and the reasons for doing so, even in the face of losing the one gift they came to this land to find.”
“She would first have to have the maturity to look beyond her own beliefs and believe in the purity of her magic,” one of the Veressi sighed wearily before she could reply. “Her ancestors could not do so, and I highly doubt the descendants of those runaway Consortress have matured any further.”
“And,” the other continued. “I grow weary of the argument concerning Wizards right or wrong. We are but men. Our power is but a part of us and does not make us infallible, no more than it protects Sorceresses from mistakes of their own. What none of our Sorceresses wish to realize is that they have a power much greater than even our own. Now, and a millennium before. Perhaps they cannot see that power, because they wish to be frailer than we. Perhaps their anger isn’t so much toward their Wizards as toward themselves and they simply do not wish to realize it.”
In a blink, the Veressi were gone. Their magick no longer filling the room, smothering all reason from it as they watched her with chilling disapproval. But she could say she had faced the Veressi with no harm done.
Unlike the stories her mother told her as a child, the Veressi truly were the bogeymen of the dark.
Nay, they were worse, if it were possible to be worse.
Astra turned to Garron then, her arms crossing over her breasts as she stared back at the beast. “So you raised ninnies?” she asked him curiously.
“I would never!” Such an expression of male offense crossed his leathery features and filled his widening, dark eyes.
“Evidently you have.” A shrug and lift of her brows indicated her uncertainty. “At least, according to the ever-arrogant Veressi.”
A dragony snort emitted with a whiff of steam from flared nostrils. “’Twas not ninnies I raised, my dear Sorceress, ’twas inherently stubborn young women given half truths and partial lies in which to build their futures,” he growled. “And I, above all perhaps, wished only to maintain both.” He heaved a sigh that lifted his massive chest as he expelled a breath of regret. “For I wished only to maintain the innocence that ensured their kind and gentle hearts.”
He turned then to the Wizards who had moved ever closer. “Into your hands I give this Sorceress whose purity is one I have always found solace within. Should it ever turn bitter, aged or filled with regret and pain, then it is I who you shall answer to.”
As quickly as the Veressi blinked out of sight, Garron was gone as well, leaving her to face those Wizards, herself and her future, with or without them.
“We have, since your earlier departure, been cursed to have dealt with the arrogance of not just our Keepers but also that infernal dragon. Not just once, but twice. Can you say, Sorceress, that your day could have possibly been worse?” Rhydan questioned grievously. “For I cannot but doubt that it could have been.”
Did he now? She knew far differently.
“Truly?” she whispered, the doubts, fears and abject pain of the day assailing her with heartrending force. “Today, I betrayed all I have held dear for Wizards who have already denied me once since they entered the land of the Sorceresses. I have denied my dearest friend, the Keeper of these lands, the truth she had demanded at a time when it seems our very lives are in danger because of your presence here, within Covenan. Tell me, Wizards, which day would you say has been filled with the greater darkness? Yours, in the weakening of your powers and such meetings with arrogant forms? For I can tell you are far stronger now than even when first I met you. Or myself, who must endure the fear of facing the same fate as Wizards suspected of treason, who may or may not be practicing such dark arts?”
Aye, she knew they were not, but her feminine anger would not allow her to voice that knowledge.
“Astra…” Rhydan sighed wearily.
“I believe it is a question I am fully capable of answering,” she assured them with no small amount of ire. “For it is I whose day has been the most weary, my Wizards. ’Tis I who must now face those choices, and I tell you now, they are not choices I would have wished.”
As far as Astra was concerned, she was finished with this argument, and she was finished with these emotions.
Turning on her heel, slinging off the magick that attempted to slide around her arm, to pull her back to them, she escaped the caverns and the Wizards.
; But there was no escaping the hunger, the hurt or the certainty that she would never escape her Wizard Twins.
Chapter Eight
The return to the castle was made mostly in the dark.
By the time Astra had grabbed a drying sheet and made her way to the bathing caverns, her need for the magick-infused waters was so great she was nearly in tears at the thought of sinking into its heated caress.
The twin moons had risen in the sky not long after she had made her way from the Wizards’ cavern. She had watched them rise, full and strong, their once-dimming rings of magick seeming not so hazy as they had in all the years of her life.
It was late enough though. There was every chance the other Sorceresses of the Brigade had already bathed and retired to their suites.
She could not face the small talk that normally filled the evening visits to the bathing caverns. Discussions of the Wizard Twins, who next would become Joined, though all Joining ceremonies of testings of Alignment of Powers had been banned until the Queen Amoria or Princess Serena, preferably both, were returned to their thrones.
Princess Marina had declared the ban in retaliation for the threatened enforced Alignment of Powers by the Veressi with the Ruler in Waiting, Princess Serena, at a time when her mother had been out of contact during her meetings with the Sentinel Priestesses of Covenan.
How things were changing. With the arrival of the Wizard Twins, so much had changed, and Astra was being forced to change with it.
She entered the bathing cavern with trepidation, the uncertainty of facing the other Sorceresses tightening her stomach as the stream and glittering emerald spores of power filled the room.
Steam and the heated waters carried the spores as few other things did, other than the blood of a magickal being.
Bleed, and the bright pinpoints of emerald energy could be seen glistening among the red. The spores infused all that was Sentmar, though it was rumored they had retreated from the human lands long before Wizard Twins had taken their first Sorceress between them.