by Terah Edun
For a moment Ciardis couldn’t breathe as she tried to fiercely hang on to Sebastian and not be submerged in the gale.
Too late, she thought as she dropped deeper into the meld of magic.
She thought it would be over then; it felt like her body, mind, and magic were being subsumed. Not by his magic or her magic, but by the combined force of the two of them that made it feel so powerfully unique that it didn’t belong to either of them. Instead of Ciardis and Sebastian claiming the magic, it claimed them.
She felt them fall deeper into the spiral of magic, and she looked around to see their gifts intertwined as if they were born whole. In the back of her mind, Ciardis noticed Thanar’s gift still following the path of her and Sebastian’s new magic, but slightly separate, and then she couldn’t focus anymore because she splashed down into her own mage core, and from that moment darkness overtook her.
It was like floating in the depths of the still ocean. Nothing around her but the deep, resonating power within her. No sounds. No thoughts.
Just floating.
Then she heard cracking sounds. Almost like nuts being shattered in a still meadow.
She looked up from where she was floating in the magic to see streaks of light piercing the darkness. Like a cloudy sky parting before a rising sun, the darkness began to dissipate, and Ciardis knew that it was time to emerge.
She kicked to the surface and opened her physical eyes.
She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see, but she knew that Sebastian would see whatever it was as well.
Only seconds had passed since their hands touched. But it felt like a lifetime as she looked in the distance and saw a thin mage shield, almost like a translucent bubble, fall before her eyes.
Inside that shield was the last person Ciardis expected to see.
It can’t be, Ciardis thought as her stomach dropped in disbelief and she stared.
But it was. In front of her, the sleeping dragon opened one eye and stretched like a cat, and then its booming voice echoed in their heads.
Ciardis saw the shield around the dragon drop and heard the gasps of surprise behind her, as they too could finally see what had stood, or rather sat, in front of them the whole time. Thought Ciardis had to wonder how the water mage had known.
Emerald scales flashed in the sunlight as the dragon rose to all four feet and looked at them.
“Well, it’s about time,” Ambassador Raisa of the Sahalian Empire said. “I was beginning to think you lot would take forever to get here.”
Ciardis felt her jaw drop as she stammered, “Raisa, what are you doing here?”
She felt rather than heard Thanar walk forward to stand at her right.
Not exactly a reassuring presence to Ciardis, but at least a semi-threatening one toward a perceived common enemy.
The ambassador smiled. A disconcerting action coming from something whose head contained rows of razor-sharp teeth as long as Ciardis’s arm.
“Why, you didn’t think I’d let you journey to the first and last stronghold of the dragon race without me?” the ambassador said.
Ciardis stared in dismay.
“What does she mean by that?” demanded Terris from just behind Ciardis’s shoulder.
The dragon’s gaze refocused on Terris, and she sniffed the air like a huge dog.
The ambassador’s neck reared back in a snap, with a look on her lizard face that would have been almost comical if Ciardis hadn’t been focusing on what Raisa was doing on the road in the first place.
“A kith talker?” she said in astonishment.
Terris shuffled behind Ciardis. “It’s Kithwalker, actually.”
She sounded as nervous as Ciardis had ever heard her.
I don’t think she’s ever actually seen a dragon, let alone spoken to one before, Ciardis thought in bemusement.
Bemusement because up until this past year she hadn’t either. My, how times have changed.
“Kithwalker, kith talker,” the dragon said in excitement, “it’s all the same, and I haven’t seen one of your kind in ages.”
“My kind?” Terris squeaked. Ciardis put a protective arm around the darker girl’s shoulders.
Raisa sounded like she’d just found a delectable morsel and wanted to gobble her whole.
“Stop glaring at me, Weathervane,” the dragon said dismissively. “I don’t want to eat her. I just thought mages with the ability to control all manner of kith had disappeared along with so many others after the wars.”
“Well, that’s good,” Terris squeaked. “Because we need me to get that wyvern under control.”
The dragon looked at Terris through one giant eye. “My, my, the little Kithwalker has a high opinion of itself.”
Terris bristled and straightened her shoulders. “The Kithwalker would appreciate not being spoken to like a pet rat.”
Raisa snorted delicately. “I assume it would. Whether I’m inclined to agree is another matter.”
“But that is not the matter at hand,” Ciardis interjected hastily. “In fact, milady, we were on our way with great urgency. So if you’d please?”
The dragon turned her sinuous neck to peer down at Ciardis. “If I’d please what?”
Ciardis had a bad feeling about this. “If you’d please return to Sandrin, we’ll be on our way?”
She meant it to sound more sure than it did. But at least she’d gotten the request out.
She heard the shaman giggling in the shadow of Thanar’s wings, and she disliked her even more for it.
“I don’t think so,” Raisa said in amusement.
“What do you mean?” Ciardis said.
“I’m going with you.”
“What?” exclaimed Ciardis and Christian in shock.
“That’s not possible,” said Terris, rather firmly.
Thanar cursed a blue streak, while Sebastian stayed ominously silent and his guards didn’t move from their posts around the stagecoach.
Ciardis shook her head firmly. “This is a rather delicate mission and we can’t—”
Raisa cut her words off with a snap of her jaw inches from Ciardis’s face.
Stumbling backward, Ciardis felt Sebastian’s hand squeeze her own so hard that she feared he’d cut off the blood circulating to her fingers as he tried to edge her back.
Instead she held her ground. The ambassador wouldn’t hurt her.
She hoped.
It was just a warning snap of her teeth, Ciardis thought to try to calm her rapidly beating heart.
A rather rude one, but a warning nonetheless.
“I’m not interested in what you can and can’t do, Ciardis Weathervane,” Raisa said in a sure tone. “I told you before, the city is sacred to my people. I must be sure it remains so.”
Ciardis blinked as she thought back to their first conversation about Kifar.
Ciardis knew that she had told the ambassador about the princess heir’s possible plan to destroy the city with a hidden weapon. They’d learned only later that the weapon was a dormant wyvern, set to wake and wreak havoc weeks later.
Raisa had demanded in the strongest terms that they prevent the attack on Kifar, and when Ciardis had questioned what made the walled-off city so important to her, she had said, “It is where dragons first landed in Algardis.”
Swallowing harshly, she prepared to try again.
But Sebastian cleared his throat and dropped Ciardis’s sweaty hand from his palm.
“We understand how important Kifar is to Sahalia and we are going to do everything in our power to preserve it,” Sebastian said. “Which is why we must go there without hindrance or detection.”
“You have no idea what that city means to my people,” Raisa hissed. “This is not debatable. The sooner we leave, the sooner we arrive.”
Ciardis felt a knot in her stomach grow large. Raisa wasn’t listening. Time to find another way.
Ciardis turned to Sebastian and whispered. “Aren’t there rules about where the dragons can go in you
r empire?”
“I heard that,” snapped Raisa. “And no.”
Sebastian shrugged in resignation. “Unfortunately, she’s right. They have free will as long as they don’t kill, maim, or enslave our citizens.”
Raisa snorted. “A hard enough task that is. You humans are bloody annoying. Pesky little creatures, always getting in the way.”
“We do not,” Terris complained.
Raisa turned a lizard glare on her. “What other race is foolish enough to open the gateway to the gods so that they can wreak havoc on our soil again?”
“That was him!” at least three different voices exclaimed as Ciardis found herself pointing at Thanar like a child trying to deflect the blame in an accident.
The daemoni prince looked unfazed. Even bored.
Rachael, however, looked a little put out at the targeted anger toward her chosen suitor.
Ciardis nearly rolled her eyes at the look on the shaman’s face.
Meanwhile, Thanar said, “As I recall, it was the dragon race that thought they had the power to make the gods do their bidding in the first place.”
“We did,” said Raisa, a touch smugly.
“And it bit you in the ass, as I recall,” said Christian with his arms crossed.
The dragon’s eyes narrowed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Enough!” shouted Ciardis with her hands thrown up. “Fine, you want to come. You can come.”
Raise looked at her with dark eyes. “I wasn’t asking permission.”
Ciardis grimaced and squared her shoulders. “No you weren’t, but hear this, Raisa: we’re not going to save Kifar. We’re going to save Algardis.”
Raise flicked her tail. “One and the same, my dear.”
“No, it’s not,” Sebastian said flatly.
“It will be once we get there,” the dragon said.
Ciardis felt a chill go down her spine. “What do you mean by that?”
“You will see. I will answer no more questions about this,” Raisa announced. “We must go.”
Ciardis wanted to object further, but there was really nothing more to say. They had already lost half an hour on the road in arguments, and it was clear that Raisa intended to journey with them.
Sebastian sighed in frustration and turned to the guards. “Calm the horses. We must be on our way.”
It was true. The horses and desert mules had started screaming the moment they spotted the large and carnivorous predator in front of them. Ciardis had just been doing her best to ignore them.
“Calm them and set them loose,” Raisa said decisively.
Ciardis threw up her hands. “Then how are we supposed to get to Kifar without them?”
Raisa said, “Certainly not by going fifteen miles per hour in that monstrosity of a stagecoach. It will take you weeks to cross the country in that.”
Ciardis gritted her teeth. “We know that.”
Her tone was less than civil.
Christian stepped forward. “Please, milady, if you wouldn’t mind telling us how else we’d arrive at Kifar, we’d be much obliged.”
“And more likely to lose the horses,” added Terris brightly.
Raisa was silent for a moment and then she sighed. “I will carry you.”
There was absolute silence on the road for a moment, and then Thanar began to laugh so hard that he doubled over.
Raisa didn’t take kindly to that, and dragon fire was the last thing Ciardis saw before she dived under the stagecoach and watched the daemoni prince be engulfed in flames.
He wasn’t hurt, of course. Thanar could raise a shield in a blink of an eye, after all.
The same couldn’t be said for all of their supplies and the animals that didn’t get out of the way.
Chapter 21
With the smell of burning flesh in her nose, Ciardis rose warily from her crouch over the saddlebags that had survived the onslaught.
She looked around in awe. Awe tinged with disgust. Dark smoke rose around them from charred lumps of flesh and fur. Before her eyes could really decipher what she was seeing ... an arm or a hind leg, a piece of torn clothing or a flap of saddlebag ... she felt rather than saw Sebastian scramble up from underneath the two soldiers who had thrown themselves on top of him to save his life.
She calculated the aches and wounds on his body as if they were her own bleeding scrapes and fiery bruises. In fact, they did feel like her own. As if she and he shared one body again and hers was just an afterthought.
His chest hurt from where he’d been slammed into the ground on his back with the weight of a two-hundred-pound soldier riding him to the ground on top of him.
The back of his neck felt on fire from where a rock had scraped the skin off on impact.
His eyelids were narrowed as his fists clenched with the effort to not punch a six-hundred-pound flying lizard directly in the nose.
Ciardis walked over to the side of the road until she was equidistant between Sebastian and Raisa. She wasn’t going to interfere. Just watch.
“Sebastian’s battles aren’t mine anymore,” she whispered to herself.
Ciardis almost immediately grimaced as she opened her mouth to speak, feeling a fiery pain run down her bottom lip.
Raising a finger to her lip, she eyed her thumb and quickly wiped the soot-covered digit on one of the few clean spots she spotted on her tunic. Bringing her finger back up to her lip, Ciardis tapped it quickly and drew back.
“You split your lip,” said Thanar so quietly that she jumped a foot in the air.
Whirling, Ciardis snapped, “I thought I told you to stop doing that.”
He looked down at her with unreadable eyes. “You also told me we were through a long time ago. But here we are.”
“Yes, here we are,” said the female shaman while she stepped around Thanar and smiled at Ciardis.
Ciardis eyed her with a cocked eyebrow. She didn’t like the woman, and she had the feeling the shaman didn’t like her either. But she couldn’t prove it. The woman hadn’t said or done anything in the few hours since they’d met to persuade Ciardis of the notion. It was a just a feeling.
No, not a feeling, she decided. Intuition. She’s trouble, I know it.
When the shaman kept staring at her, Ciardis grimaced and turned to look back at Sebastian, who stood in dusty chainmail, tunic, and cloak in front of a dragon who was silent.
Well, at least she’s not trying to roast him like a pig on a spit, Ciardis thought while she wondered if she should go over to give Sebastian her support ... for old time’s sake.
As if reading her mind, Terris stepped forward to her left shoulder. “You know, for a man you’re about to marry he looks awfully ... alone.”
Ciardis cut her gaze to her best friend. “Your point?”
Terris glared at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be supporting him? Did I hear the legendary tales of your adventures together wrong? Didn’t you face down three different factions back to back just yesterday?”
“A lot could happen in just a day,” Ciardis murmured while turning her eyes back to Sebastian and steadfastly ignoring Terris’s perturbed gaze.
“If this is about that bat-winged idiot over there....” Terris said while nodding at Thanar.
“It’s not,” snapped Ciardis.
“I heard that,” said Thanar in an icier tone.
“You think I care?” Terris said while swinging an irate gaze on Thanar.
Ciardis was mildly impressed. She knew that Terris and Thanar had barely said two sentences to each other since being introduced, but the relationship between the two was clear from the start. Terris hated his guts. Unfortunately, Terris was also the least likely to emerge from a fair fight between the two as victor, let alone the type of fight he indulged in regularly. Thanar played dirty. Very dirty.
Ciardis didn’t want to see Terris hurt. She also didn’t want to string Thanar up by his balls if he attacked her. So she had done what she could to keep them apart, including assigning Terris
to posts halfway across the city and intervening when that didn’t work.
“Terris, don’t start anything,” Ciardis said in a wary tone while stepping forward to stand more clearly between the two.
Terris ignored Ciardis as she said looked directly at Thanar and said, “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Thanar cooed softly.
Ciardis frowned. She didn’t like where this was going.
“Knock it off,” she said over her shoulder to Thanar while keeping a wary eye on her suddenly feisty friend.
“I agree,” said a voice that, to Ciardis’s surprise, wasn’t Sebastian or Christian, or anyone who made sense and would normally back her up when Thanar got out of line.
Instead, it was the woman Ciardis despised on principle ... the shaman Rachael.
“What?” Ciardis said while twisting around so fast that she nearly unbalanced herself.
She turned to see Rachael peering at her innocently with a shrug of her svelte shoulders covered in silky fabric that still managed to look good despite enduring a firestorm. Ciardis didn’t have to glance down to know that her entire front was covered in dirt and her hair had soot and wood splinters in it from crouching under a stagecoach that had caught fire.
“I meant ... what did you say?” Ciardis said.
“I said,” Rachael continued after a pause, “that I agree, and I’m sure that the wagon driver could use our help.”
“He could?” echoed Ciardis and Terris.
“Yes,” said Rachael with a bright smile that didn’t quite reach her calculating eyes. It reminded Ciardis uncomfortably of a crocodile’s stare. All teeth ... wide open for a bite.
But who’s the prey? she wondered.
But then Rachael reached up to smoothly trail a gentle hand on Thanar’s right wing, which he had kept drawn close to his body. Keeping her at a distance, but close enough that she was still in his shadow.
Well, that answers that, Ciardis thought bitterly as she watched the lingering movement.
The fact that Thanar barely twitched in acknowledgement of Rachael didn’t make her any less irritated. He didn’t move out of the way, either.