by Kate Kelley
“Poppi must be a dormant,” Oriel said, his voice snapping the void of silence in half.
Lyra barely glanced at him.
Oriel licked his lips and wiped a hand over his mouth. “She’s, what, twenty three? Too young for magic for a Gem or Terrra born, but she’s from Ursa, and royalty. They get their powers earlier. But she’d already have shown signs of magic since infancy. Navi and her parents would have seen the magic and they wouldn’t have squelched her if they had.”
“What exactly is a dormant?” Lyra finally asked, her curiosity getting the best of her. Terrin and Oriel had both mentioned it before, but she didn’t understand the details.
“A dormant mage is someone who carries magic but doesn’t ever use it, unknowingly burying it instead. The magic might show itself somewhere in life, or it might not. I’ve heard of dormant mages suffering trauma and getting their magic back, but those were just rumors, hearsay. Or trauma being the reason the magic won’t rise into their aura to begin with.” His eyes shifted back and forth, his thoughts spinning their own web of possibilities.
Though she was intrigued by the revelation, the fatigue in Lyra’s bones wouldn’t allow her to care. She turned away from Oriel, wordless. The fatigue had less to do with the cleaning work and more to do with her emotional state. She was going to go home, run to her room, and bolt the door. She had to catch Terrin first before she went to bed to ensure he would be able to take her and Oriel to the priestess in the morning.
By the time they rumbled up to the castle’s first set of gates, the large stone archway, the night was black and the moon shone dull through a cataract of gauzy, cirrostratus clouds. She jumped from the cart and landed on her feet, ignoring Oriel’s outstretched hand. Oriel stopped her before they reached the doors.
“I do love you, Lyra. You must know this.” His eyes were darkened in the night but his voice revealed a mourning that matched his aura.
“I know,” she replied hollowly. He didn’t try to stop her again when she entered the torchlit castle, or when she made her way upstairs. She paused in the corridor between the opposite doors of her own and Terrin’s, silence stuffing the hallway air. She didn’t really want to speak to him, but breaking the bond was a necessity, so she knocked three times and waited. Her eyes flicked to the bottom slit in the door. No firelight shone from it. It was only eight o clock and Terrin wouldn’t be asleep this early. After three solid minutes of waiting, she tried the knob. It turned. After a moment’s hesitation, she pushed it open. The room was a yawning chasm of pitch black, except for the torch light from the hallway spilling into the doorway. She approached the direction of the bed slowly, blindly, and put her hand out when an odd sensation roiled through her.
“Terrin?” she whispered.
The beating of her own heart was all the answer she received. She lowered her hand to the bed, only to feel the hard, meaty feeling of a leg under her hand. Relief rolled through her. She didn’t know why she was so jumpy.
“Terrin, are you awake?” She reached for the nightstand for a candlestick, the cool metal of the holder greeting her fingertips. She felt for the wick and summoned her aura, lighting the candle with a flick of her finger. Light engulfed the immediate sphere in which she stood, casting the bed in an orange glow. Her eyes settled on Terrin.
Two black eyes stared at her in a greasy face full of lumps and scars. A fat nose drooped down the center of its face and a smile lacking lips cracked open, revealing tiny razor sharp teeth. Lyra stumbled back with a cry. The figure leapt out of the bed and lunged at her, knocking her down, her shock slowing her reflexes. The candlestick rolled away, the flame catching the corner of the tossed blanket, setting the room in light too intense. The creature leapt off of her to avoid being thrown into the flaming blanket and Lyra rolled before the creature tackled her again, kicking her legs straight into his chest, sending him backwards. He growled, a deep, sickly sound. He was the size of a child, which lent her an advantage over him if nothing else. The entire bed caught flame, the smoke billowing across the room, shrouding the creature. The sharp sound of metal on metal sounded over the roar of the fire. Lyra’s eyes and throat stung with the pungent clouds of smoke. She squinted, trying to find her way to the door.
The creature emerged from the thick billows and she moved to the right, but not in time. She cried out when a sharp pain sliced her shoulder, the thick pour of blood warming her skin as it welled and seeped. Fuck!
Her head grew fuzzy, her breathing labored. She dropped to her knees and crawled, sucking in relief on the less-caustic air near the floor. The heat of the fire burned her as it licked up the canopy, collapsing it, the sparks that flew into the air catching onto the window drapes. A sliver of soft light showed her the door. The door wasn’t on fire. Thank the gods! She stood and ran when two short arms clasped her middle and pulled her down.
“You’re wanted alive, witch! Stay still!” His foul breath made its way to her nostrils.
She wrenched away, turned, and blasted into the creature, eliciting a high pitched scream from it. It convulsed, then lay still. She grabbed the heated door handle just as she her vision tunneled, and focused all of her thoughts on Oriel.
“Oriel, attacked in Terrin’s room. Fire! Help!”
She collapsed on the other side of the door as the tunnel blackened to a pinpoint.
Chapter Twelve
She awoke to distant shouts in the pitch black and stood, feeling around her.
Smooth walls. A door knob, open!
She burst forth to find Iris and the other council members shouting at each other on the other side of the throne. Lyra jogged forward. A sharp pain lanced her arm. She glanced at it. Blood soaked her sleeve to the tips of her fingers. She’d need to bandage that soon.
“Lyra!” Iris exclaimed, as if not expecting to see her.
“Who put me in the closet?” she asked. She scanned the disturbed council member’s faces.
“I don’t know,” Iris replied, “The castle is under attack. There’s a beast, a giant, and--”
“A giant?!”
Iris nodded solemnly. “I only saw one in Eclipsa, and it wasn’t something I wished to relive,” her dark eyes flicked back and forth, “Terrin is gone when we need him home most and these imbeciles won’t let me out of this room to help the fight!” She threw herself down on the throne.
“It’s for the best, Iris. You belong on the throne, and we would be in an even bigger mess if you died.”
The council members visibly relaxed at Lyra’s logical answer.
“I, on the other hand, am expendable,” Lyra said as she strode to the door. Ten or fifteen Knights stood rigid in front of it, forming tightly packed lines, swords drawn. She quirked an eyebrow at them. “Let me through.”
“This isn’t a lady’s fight,” one of them said, though it was impossible to tell which since their helmets covered most of their faces.
“Good thing I’m not a lady,” Lyra retorted. Ire raced up her spine as she glared at them. She didn’t have time for this!
“MOVE!” she shouted.
Finally, the middle ones moved aside and opened the door, pushing her through and closing the doors again.
“You aren’t expendable, Lyra!” Iris called after her, but she was already running down the corridors, following the shouts. When she made it to the front doors, she met another brigand of Knights. She didn’t bother negotiating this time, she simply ignited her aura and held her palms out toward them, summoning her best maniacal glare as flames burst into her palms. They shifted a moment, their armor clattering, before moving aside completely. They must have recognized her.
“Good lads!” she exclaimed, dousing the flames and running out into the night.
She spotted Oriel immediately. He blasted another one of the creatures that had attacked her as it stood paralyzed, probably from Oriel’s mind magic. Knights flung arrows at a distant, hulking creature.
The giant.
It stood twenty feet tall, a
nd Lyra could make out wiry, thick hair that fell past its shoulders, leather armor, and a beastial face. The arrows were unrelenting, some sticking into vulnerable soft tissue, some glancing off. Either way, the arrows seemed to bother him as much as a mosquito would bother a normal-sized person. The giant punched and kicked the portcullis until a vociferous sound indicated its defeat. Rubble and iron exploded in a pandemonium of sound and the giant leapt over it in a single, earth shattering bound. Lyra cowered back slightly and scanned her immediate surroundings.
Terrin really isn’t here. That bastard.
The crater-forming footfalls of the giant were surely loud enough to wake the entire island. She watched it run toward her, though whether or not it could see her she didn’t know. Its beady eyes seemed vacant. At the last moment, she decided to hide behind a large hedge near the side of the castle walls. Her palms were slick with sticky blood and sweat.
How the hell am I supposed to take down a giant?
The giant approached the castle doors and kicked a bare foot once, twice, splintering the wood in the violence. Thick cries erupted over the clattering of armor. The giant growled, more vibration than any actual sound, and flung the knights off of his ankles, flicking them like bits of dried grass. They lay still, knocked out, or dead. Lyra silently cursed.
Two more of the ugly, short creatures ran through the doors with cackles on their non-existent lips and glowing red swords in their hands. She watched through the leaves while Oriel stepped over the body of the creature he had been fighting, and leapt in the direction of the clueless giant.
“Oriel, don’t!”
He stilled. “Where are you?”
“Behind the hedges on the right side of the castle. The short things are looking for either me or Terrin, I believe. One of them cut my arm and it hasn’t healed. I think it’s full of dark magic.”
“I saw that. You need to draw out the magic. Where the hell is Terrin?”
At that moment, two twin roars sounded above them. They both looked up and Lyra’s heart lurched as Freydis and Alec leapt from the battlements onto the head of the giant.
The beast roared, momentarily deafening Lyra, a ringing echoing in her mind like the sharp clattering of a fallen sword on stone.
Oriel joined her behind the hedge, watching Alec and Freydis stab the giant over and over again while it flailed and smacked itself in the head. Frey used each swipe of his hand as an opportunity to slice through his arteries on his wrists. The blood poured like the deluge of a macabre rainstorm, and soon the thing was swaying on his feet. The air reeked of a certain metallic scent.
Alec and Freydis both used their auras, strengthening the stabs and slices ten times over. Alec rose his sword and brought it down in finality into the giant’s right eye, twisting it and wrenching an ungodly scream from the beast.
The thing swayed back, toppling Freydis and Alec forward as they tried to keep their balance.
They leapt, twisting so they landed on the lawn, the soft ground cushioning the fall as best as it could though Lyra heard sickening cracks of broken limbs anyway.
The massive thud of the fallen giant vibrated through the castle, its toes turned up and its door-sized tongue hanging out like a mad dog’s as buckets of blood washed over his face and pooled into the ground.
Frey and Alec stood slowly and nodded to each other, Frey’s arm twisted back at an odd angle. Alec took hold of it and wrenched. Frey screamed, but recovered almost instantly except for a lasting grimace. Alec clapped her back and limped forward. Oriel and Lyra leapt out of the hedge and closed the distance between them.
“There are other creatures in the castle,” Lyra told them, readying to enter the castle.
Frey grabbed her arm. “We killed the trolls.”
“Trolls?” Lyra’s face paled.
“They can sniff out any kind of precious gem within a mile radius,” breathed Frey wiping sweat from her brow.
“Why were they here?” Oriel asked.
Alec shook his head, but his eyes lit on Lyra.
“The troll--the first one--was in Terrin’s room when he found me. I don’t know if he was waiting for me or for him But he said he came here for me.”
“Did you kill him?” Alec asked.
“Yes,” Lyra replied.
Alec nodded in approval, then ran back into the castle, his limp gone, and Frey following.
A whooshing sound lifted her ears, and the wind picked up. She looked up into the black sky. Against the backdrop of the near-black clouds, something dark moved--something large. It must have been just above where the portcullis used to stand. She squinted and ducked low, expecting an onslaught. Oriel tensed, eyes focused on the same spot. The wind churned heavier, cold air frosting her face. She and Oriel both blasted their auras out, lighting the sky. The dark thing backed up higher into the sky.
“Is that a…”
“Raven. A giant raven,” Oriel’s grim voice replied.
The bird’s glassy eye was the size of her head, and peered at them with a chilling directness, as if it was more intelligent than it should have been. Its beak was black, the glossy keratin of it shining along the sharp hook. It could impale her in one go and she would barely know it. It’s onyx wings shone with a blue tint, and flapped lazily, keeping it in place and stirring the dead leaves on the ground into torrential chaos. A pair of leather reins were fitted to the creature, swooping over the break to conjoin at the saddle on it’s back.
Lyra lifted her arms higher to light the sky, careful not to extend it too far into an attack. A man sat atop the raven, upright, finely dressed, and for all intents and purposes, civilized. His face shone the perfect gentlemanly, amiable countenance. If he weren’t sitting atop a giant raven, she’d expect to see a Lord like him sitting at a Gem court banquet.
Her stomach churned and bile rose in her throat but she kept her eyes steady on his blue ones. The blue didn’t show in the darkness, but she knew their color all the same.
“Good evening, Edwin,” she called up to him, willing her chattering teeth to still.
He smiled, flashing his dazzling straight teeth. “Good evening, Lyra. Might I say you look just as ravishing as the day I proposed.”
Lyra’s nostrils flared. Rage burst through her, but she dared not act. She needed answers.
“I see you aren’t wearing my ring,” Edwin pouted, “Does that mean the wedding is off?”
“You bastard,” Lyra growled, her voice guttural and deep. She couldn’t help it.
He ignored her curse. “Who’s your friend? Not my replacement, I hope.”
“I’m her bonded mate,” Oriel said, ice edging his tone. Lyra inwardly groaned. Just like Oriel to be truthful and put a target on his back.
Edwin’s eyes lit with something that sent a chill up Lyra’s back as his gaze settled on Oriel. “Then you’re as good as dead,” he said to Oriel.
“Where’s Ganymede?” Lyra asked, to get him to forget about Oriel.
Edwin’s sharp glance told her he hadn’t expected her to ask about him. “Oh, he’s here. He’s always here.” His voice took on a reverence and a fear that disturbed Lyra down to her core.
“So, you’re here to take me to him?” Lyra asked, her aura accidentally rising further.
Edwin backed up a pace, his brows twitching. “We will collect you soon. You can’t hide from me.”
Lyra raised her arms at her sides. “I’m here now. What’s stopping you?”
Edwin pinned her with a stare that she met and didn’t back down from. “I’m not to touch you personally.” His voice dripped with strained derision and he sniffed but didn’t elaborate.
So, him and Ganymede don’t always see eye-to-eye.
Edwin continued, “I thought the four trolls and the giant would be enough but it seems we have underestimated your defense team. No worries, what’s coming will be more than enough to bend you.” He dug his heels into the raven’s airborne body and the raven flapped it’s wings harder.
�
�Wait!” Lyra called. “How did you get these creatures?”
Edwin laughed. “You opened the portal for us, dear. We’re forever grateful.”
Lyra frowned and he surged even higher.
The portal hadn’t closed behind them.
“What does Ganymede want with me?” she shouted up into the sky.
Edwin smiled down at her, and she could almost imagine him lying in a field of flowers, humming a tune in the breeze. “You’ll be thanking him when you find out,” he said, and the bird dashed upward and out, it’s flared tail turning down to sail through the wind currents until it was gone, blending into the gloom.
Chapter Thirteen
Lyra stared at her arm in the mirror. It was still sore, and red and purple mottled the raised scar, trailing from the top of her shoulder to her inner elbow. It had been tricky to heal, Oriel said, as it was doused with dark magic. He had to suck in the dark magic and release it into a bird (a raven, incidentally). They put the raven in a cage and kept it in an isolated room to keep alive. Oriel had said that when the raven died naturally, the dark magic would vanish. If they killed it themselves, the dark magic would stick to someone else. The incident made her think of Galdr, her funny little lyrebird that she had tainted with the dark magic of Terrin’s Adlet bite. She wondered where Galdr was now, and if he was alive.
She sighed, and looked at the rest of her naked body. The other scar she bore was white, two shades paler than her regular skin tone, a two inch ridge over her heart. She knew the scar wouldn’t heal, and would be a part of her story now, the same as the gash in her knee. She’d fallen off a horse when she was twelve and split her knee on a half-buried scythe out in the field. Her childhood was like a lifetime ago. Even a few months ago felt like a different time altogether.