by Terah Edun
“Shall we go now?” Rachael asked.
Ciardis shrugged. “Yep, if there are no other problems to deal with.”
“I have one,” Terris said dryly. “Where the heck are our knapsacks?”
“Our what?” said Christian with a grimace as he rubbed his lower back and stood up ... slower to catch on.
“Our knapsacks,” Ciardis with wide eyes, “The ones that held our clothes, the remainng food and all of our money!”
They all looked at her, looked around and looked back at the dragon who shrugged sheepishly. “I guess I forgot to bring those along.”
“Oh by the gods above and below,” Ciardis heard Terris say before she sat back down in the sand heavily.
“Well, it’s not so bad right?” Ciardis said with a dusty grin.
“You don’t seem to remember the ‘bat-winged idiot’ saying we’re out of food, water, and now the money to buy those things?” Terris asked crossly.
“It alluded me for a moment,” said Ciardis in a tense tone. She was damned tired.
“Of course, we could always re-appropriate some funds?” Thanar said.
“How?” said Rachael.
“Don’t say it,” said Sebastian.
Thanar shrugged. “Fine. Starve.”
Ciardis didn’t even think she wanted to know. If it had to do with Thanar, it usually involved two things ... blood and murder. Both of which they didn’t need.
“How about we get to those ruins and regroup there?” Ciardis said helpfully.
No one looked elated about the plan, but no one disagreed either.
They didn’t really have any choice but to rely on the knowledge of the shaman and the reluctant guidance from the Muareg, not if they wanted to get to Kifar within a reasonable amount of time.
As they began to walk off in the desert, Ciardis jogged up to Sebastian’s side. “Any reason we can’t ask Raisa to fly off into the distance and scout the path from here to Kifar?”
Sebastian didn’t look at her, just continued concentrating on putting one foot in front of another in the brown sand.
“Do you trust her to come back?” he said flatly.
“No.”
“There’s your answer.”
Ciardis sighed and grimaced. For a moment she mused about the desert around her until she spotted Terris sneaking up on the dragon walking ahead of them, both in human form. She didn’t think Terris intended anything nefarious, but they were all tired, hungry, and short of temper. If the dragon decided the worst, her friend would be an evening snack before Ciardis could snap her fingers in warning.
Sprinting ahead she caught up to Terris and asked breathlessly, “What are you doing?”
Terris looked over at her with faint amusement on her face. “Trying to talk to the ambassador?”
“About?” Ciardis asked.
“Why don’t you come along and see?”
With that Terris sped up her pace and caught up with the dragon. Ciardis wasn’t too far behind.
“What do you think about this Muareg?” Terris asked Raisa without so much as a ‘hi, can I join you.’
Raisa snorted and said, “He is as he said Kithwalker.”
“But do you trust him?” Terris pressed.
“That is an immaterial question.”
“Why?” blurted out Ciardis from where she was lurking on Terris’s other side.
“Because I am a dragon. The only beings we trust are our own race.”
“Other dragons,” Terris clarified.
Raisa nodded.
“Fine,” Terris muttered, “Then let me ask this another way. Can we afford to keep him with us if we don’t trust him? We don’t even know if we need him.”
Raisa hummed. “Why are you questioning me on this, little human? Speak to your friend.”
“Because,” Terris said sharply, “You got us into this mess. If you haven’t waylaid us on the road or transported us into the middle of the flipping desert we wouldn’t be desperate enough to pick up murderous hitchhikers that don’t show their faces and remind me of a creepy villain from a play in—”
“Terris, you’re rambling,” Ciardis interjected as she gently placed a hand on her friends shoulder and squeezed.
To Ciardis’s astonishment the strong-willed Terris didn’t brush her friend’s fingers off her shoulder, instead she let out a sound that sounded suspiciously like a sob.
“Terris?” Ciardis said beseechingly as she looked over the braided hair of her best friend into the foreign eyes of a dragon who didn’t seem inclined to show any emotional commiseration. And yet, Raisa didn’t leave either.
“Terris, talk to me,” Ciardis pleaded as she looked in her friend’s face and saw a lone tear traveling down her cheek.
Terris quickly rubbed the wetness away with a swipe of her sleeve against her cheekbone, shrugging Ciardis’s hand off in the process.
But she did answer the plea.
“I had a plan,” Terris said in a broken voice. “A plan to get us from Sandrin to Kifar. A plan to avoid brigands. A plan to keep us whole.”
“Well,” said Ciardis compassionately, “Sometimes plans go awry.”
“Not your plans,” Terris said in a sobbing voice, “This was my chance.”
Ciardis wasn’t sure which statement to tackle first, the outlandish one or the one that was heartbroken.
She decided to try to do two at once. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I was supposed to prove myself. Be a leader. Help the team,” Terris whispered, “Instead we’re lost, hungry, and fragmented.”
“None of that is your fault,” Ciardis protested.
“It’s all my fault. I could have taken charge.”
“Against a dragon?” Ciardis said astonished.
“Yes!”
Raisa, silent until now, scoffed. “You have a high opinion of yourself, Kithwalker. I would have reduced you to a burning pile of bones on the imperial roadside if you had gotten in my way. Just like your precious donkeys.”
“They were desert mules!” howled Terris loud enough to silence other conversations behind them.
Ciardis grimaced and said to Raisa, “Hush, you!”
She didn’t see the dragon give her a shocked and angry look. If she had, she might have tacked on a “please and thank you” to that admonishment.
“Terris, look at me,” Ciardis begged as she put her hand firmly on her friend’s chin and turned her head to look over at Ciardis’s own. “There’s nothing you could have done. There’s nothing any of could have done or did to dissuade Raisa from her course. Which is why we’re striding beside her right now, instead of lying on the road dead like roadside barbeque.”
Terris sniffed.
“As for us being lost and hungry—”
“And fragmented,” Terris supplied helpfully.
“And fragmented,” Ciardis added with a laugh as she let go of her friend’s chin now that she had her attention, “Well, that just comes with the territory. No mission I’ve ever been on has been without its problems or its perils. We work through it.”
“Work through what?” Terris said in despair, “We’re lost and don’t tell me we’re not all as contentious as a bunch of hens in a too-small chicken coop. Not one of us is being nice or even companionable to another person. It’s like being chained together with a bunch of people who hate each other.”
Ciardis didn’t really have a response to that. What could she say after all? She felt the same way.
To her surprise ... and no doubt Terris’s, it was Raisa who spoke up this time. “You all may intensely dislike each other right now, but that didn’t stop you from banding together to kill and defeat that group of Maureg mauraders. When it mattered, you came together despite your differences.”
“That’s right, we did,” Ciardis triumphantly.
Terris looked less than convinced.
“Look, Terris,” Ciardis said urgently, “I won’t lie. None of this feels right. The anger that’s si
mmering in the air like a constant heat wave. The jealousy that only needs a spark to flare up. The hurt that is like an open wound you can’t close. But right now that isn’t our focus. Our focus is opening the collar and stopping the pet wyvern. Our focus is on saving the empire. Everything else can wait.”
Ciardis reached out a hand and squeezed Terris’s shoulder. “Do you understand?”
Terris was silent and she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I do.”
“I know you, my friend,” Ciardis said gently, “I know you feel the emotions in the air and the tensions like you feel your own. You’ve always been more sensitive too it. Even back during our training days at the Companions’ Guild.”
Terris snorted. “Yeah, and you used it to your advantage as well.”
“Oh course,” Ciardis declared proudly. “But this is different and we know that. We just have to get through it.”
Terris looked over at Ciardis and nodded. “Alright, we’ll keep going.”
“We don’t have to go much further,” Ciardis said her eyes lighting up.
“I think we do,” Terris said unconvinced, “It’ll take a lot of work to bring us back together.”
“No,” Ciardis said eagerly, “I mean look. The ruins!”
Her eyes were pinned on stone columns rising from the desert in ruins. They looked like heaven to her. There was even a partial roof.
Terris gasped. “And just beyond those.”
Ciardis smiled. “The city of Kifar.”
She could see in the distance on a hilltop. It looked so close and yet so far.
Maybe we can get there tonight, she thought wistfully.
The dream was immediately struck down when she heard Sebastian shout, “Alright, looks like the ruins are a quarter of mile just north of us. If we keep going at this pace we’ll be there by nightfall. Thanar, if you could fly up ahead and secure it, maybe it won’t be such a bad night after all.”
Christian asked as he came up behind Sebastian. “And Kifar?”
A soldier answered the unspoken question on all of their mind. “I’ve looked at it with farseeing abilities. It looks tantalizingly close sitting on the vista as it is, but that’s at least a two-mile hike from the ruins themselves. There’s no way we’ll make it before the desert gets so cold that we’ll be shivering in our thin clothes.”
“Cold?” said Ciardis in surprise.
“Yes, Lady Companion,” the soldier confirmed, “It drops to near cold sea temperatures at night here.”
Ciardis looked at Terris and whispered, “Did you know this?”
“Didn’t have a clue.”
“Good,” said Ciardis in faint disgust, “Because mother told me that I’d be burning up.”
“Maybe she never travelled outside her temperature-controlled carriage at night,” Terris offered.
Terris and Ciardis looked at each other. Ciardis had the feeling Terris was imagining the same thing she was—the well-bred Lillian Weathervane exiting her carriage while on the road through the west ... at night ... for any reason. They both burst out laughing at the same time.
“There was no way she did,” Ciardis said with a chuckle. Her mother was tough but loved her luxuries and demanded them. No matter what persona she happened to be donning at the time—her real one or the act of Lady Serena Projectoris.
Shaking her head at the foolish humans walking by her side, Raisa called back to the prince heir, “I will help Prince Thanar ... scout ... the area for your arrival.”
“Very well,” Sebastian said with obvious reluctance.
Raisa pretended not to notice and began walking off into the horizon at a fast pace. Presumably to gain enough room to change into her winged form.
Just before she got out of shouting distance, she yelled over her shoulder at Terris, “Human, you’re worried about the wrong thing.”
“Oh?” snarled Ciardis—angry at the impudence of the dragon when she had just gotten her friend calmed down.
“No, Ciardis,” cautioned Terris, “What is the right thing to worry about, Ambassador?”
Raisa stopped and turned with a toothy smile. “How you’re going to control a war beast of the dragon race with the powers you’ve been given.”
Terris didn’t have any time to respond before Raisa’s human form dissipated and in her place was a dragon that took to the skies with a triumphant roar. Leaving behind two very disturbed humans. One uncertain. The other furious.
Damn you, Raisa, Ciardis thought in disgust.
She wasn’t sure if she was condemning the dragon in her mind because of what she said ... or because it now had Ciardis wondering if the dragon was right.
“Could Terris do it?” Ciardis said unthinkingly.
“Yes, I can,” Terris snapped.
Ciardis blinked with wide eyes and slapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize I said that outloud.”
Terris smiled sadly and shook her head. “We were both wondering it and now I’m saying it. I can do it. I can control the princess heir’s pet wyvern and when we find it, I’ll prove it to you.”
With that, Terris stalked off in the direction of the ruins. Ciardis stayed still until Sebastian joined her side and said, “What was all the commotion about?”
Ciardis grimaced and said, “Differences in opinion.”
In a small corner of her mind she was thinking, I hope you can, my dear. I do hope you can.
Because she was damned sure they couldn’t rely on Raisa to do it for them.
Chapter 30
By the time they arrived in the ruins, they were all bone-tired.
Terris tersely handed out shifts for night watch and Ciardis fell straight to sleep curled up in the corner grateful that her shift wasn’t for another three hours.
That was all she remembered before waking up to the sun in her face and a concerned koreschie standing over her with a steaming bowl in his hands.
Rubbing the grit from her eyes, Ciardis sat up and winced at the assorted aches that had accumulated in her body from curling up in a corner made of stone with nothing but her cloak to cover her bare arms and her hands as a makeshift pillow.
“What?” Ciardis said while yawning and stretching. “It’s dawn. Why didn’t anyone wake me?”
“Some of us were less tired than others,” Christian said gently.
Ciardis snorted and took the offered bowl from his hands. “Like who?”
Just then the Muareg caught her eye. He was sitting on a ledge with his legs drawn up under his chin and staring off in the stance. Alert.
Ciardis groaned. “Please tell me you didn’t set the enemy combatant on night watch in my place?”
“No,” Christian assured with a short laugh, “We’re not insane. He was watched over all night, though I’m told he did not sleep.”
“Then who?” Ciardis demanded as she began to slurp soup from the bowl. She was beyond proprieties right now. Thurst and hunger were her primary concerns and this would slack both aches.
“The soldiers in this guard were all assigned for their feats in endurance trainings and were provided with energy supplements which they kept on their person,” Christian explained, “It allowed them to stay up on a night’s watch without tiring.”
“Oh,” Ciardis said which quickly turned into an “Ahhh” as she got her first taste of the soup he had handed to her.
Soon Ciardis was busy slurping the soup and had closed her eyes in near ecstasy.
When she opened them, she looked up at Christian who was staring down at her moaning into the bowl with amusement as she cried, “Where did you get this? It’s delicious.”
Christian nodded to the Muareg. “One guess.”
Ciardis almost shook her head at the first idea that came into her mind. Glaring at Christian, she said, “Tell me it’s not who I’m thinking.”
Christian let out a mischevious grin.
“No,” Ciardis moaned. “He made this delicious soup?”
She put do
wn the bowl.
“He did,” Christian confirmed.
“With what?” Ciardis demanded as she looked down at her remaining soup with desire. It had a rich taste of meat in broth and she couldn’t wait to eat more.
“He hunts,” said Christian.
Ciardis looked around in faint disbelief. “There’s nothing but sand and more sand out there. Hunts what?”
Then suspicion clouded her eyes. “This isn’t human is it?”
“What?” said the koreschie while rearing back in disgust. “No, and I’m mildly insulted you asked.”
“What?” said Ciardis puzzled as understanding filtered into her eyes. “Oh no! I didn’t mean you would eat human. I would never say anything like that. I just meant ... oh I stuck my foot in my mouth, didn’t I?”
She must have looked so miserable that Christian laughed. “Yes, you did.”
“Again.”
“Again,” agreed her breakfast-bringer. “But I forgive you and yes, I ate some before you did. He found some small rodents and tubers from a plant that is apparently quite good at water storage.”
“Oh well, that’s great then,” Ciardis said awkwardly. “I suppose I owe him an apology.”
“No time like the present,” Christian said cheerfully as he took her bowl, “He’s on his way over.”
Christian walked away leaving Ciardis reaching after him feebly as she called out, “I wasn’t finished with that!”
But the koreschie ignored her as she scrambled to her feet to greet the Muareg, who true to Christian’s word, was approaching, accompanied by a soldier.
To Ciardis’s astonishment, the first thing he said was “Please sit.”
In an effort to be polite, she sat beside him facing out into the never-ending vista of dry heat, sun, and sand.
“Is there something you wanted?” she asked curiously with the soldier standing behind her.
“To know why you are here,” he said.
“We’ve already told you,” Ciardis said.
“Now who is being unhelpful?” the Muareg asked in a flat tone. Ciardis wasn’t sure if he was teasing or being perfectly serious, but she would go with the former. They both gave her the creeps however.
Swallowing deeply she spoke. “I’m here to protect the city from a mythical kith beast which is set to destroy it in a few days time.”