Nightfell Games (The Dashkova Memoirs Book 5)

by Thomas K. Carpenter

  "You guarantee my safety?" I asked.

  Chloris chuckled lightly. "Unfortunately, I can do no such thing. What you have in your head is a dangerous beast. If you don't want to find a way past the shield, you don't have to go through with it. I'm not even certain this will work."

  "Merde," I said, and slipped into the water.

  It was warmer than I expected. I hadn't had a bath in a week, so I took a moment to relish in the cleansing before wading over to Chloris.

  "Let's move to the deep end," she said.

  "I'll assume it's not to drown me," I said, a little too forcefully, resulting in a disappointed sigh escaping her lips.

  "The deeper the water, the stronger my powers," she said.

  She held out her slender hand and I entwined my fingers in hers, letting her tug me into deeper waters. Part of me was screaming to go back to the edge, to not trust the rusalka, but if it helped find an answer to our problems, it was worth the risk.

  When we were floating at the far end of the pool, the bottom a murky darkness beneath us, Chloris spoke. "I'm going to take you under. Don't struggle. While I have you, you won't drown. In fact, I think you'll find it quite pleasant."

  "Somehow I doubt that," I said.

  "You have to trust me and relax," she said. "If you fight, you might unleash your magic, or worse yet, the energy contained within the prophecies. You could kill us both."

  "Got it. Let myself be drowned without putting up a struggle. Sounds eminently simple," I said, still looking away from her.

  "Look at me," she said softly.

  Though every instinct yearned to keep my gaze averted, I forced myself to look into her sea-green eyes.

  I found myself studying the contours of her face, wanting to reach out and caress her cheek, run my fingers across her thin lips. She had a plain face—one eye a little larger than the other, a scar on her lip from some violent event in the past, and crooked bottom teeth.

  Yet, beneath the water, she was a goddess.

  We floated together like two strands of kelp, twisting and bobbing at the bottom of the pool, hair drifting around our faces. If I could have stayed there forever I would have; the blissful peace was a salve to the trials of the last few years.

  I wasn't sure how long we were down there before she started speaking to me. Her lips moved, but I heard her voice in my head, unfiltered by the water.

  "Katerina," she said. "Open yourself. You're blocking me."

  I am?

  "You're keeping us apart. We have to work together to find the answer. Let go, I'll keep you safe," said the rusalka.

  I felt the tension. I was hanging from a tree branch overlooking a cliff, clinging for life, while she was telling me to let go. One by one, I let my mental fingers loosen from the bark, until the oblivion beneath rushed towards me.

  The water turned inky black, boiling around us. Claws dug into my skin. Something was wrong. The water was in my lungs, choking me. The well of magic burned bright. I could let it out, obliterate the danger, and crack the walls of the pool.

  The rage caught in my chest, cutting like a thousand knives.

  Open yourself.

  I swallowed it back, the edges tearing my throat. Hot pain went down into my stomach as if I was eating lava.

  Open yourself.

  Eventually, I stopped fighting and let Chloris take control, remembering what she'd told me so long ago when we were above water.

  The prophecy hit me like an icicle shoved into the eye. This time it didn't come as a series of obscure phrases, but flashed across my consciousness like an unshakable vision.

  I saw the streets of Philadelphia in chaos. An oily creature with membrane wings, the tips hooked with claws, crawled towards a screaming family of Quakers trapped in an alleyway on their wagon. The horses lay in a pile of blood and rended flesh.

  A pair of hrevanti had a well-dressed gentleman in a tailcoat by his two arms. The tall, furred beasts tugged viciously, pulling the man apart. And though I saw the resemblance to the mythical lycanthrope, the werewolf, the differences were clear in a lack of a tail and the straight, upright back.

  Other monstrosities assaulted the populous, dragging them into the darkness, or plainly flaying them across the cobblestones, letting the blood pool between the cracks. Above it all, three bright moons hung in the sky like jewels on a necklace.

  The prophecy went on until I wanted to scream—I might have been screaming—but then I awoke at the edge of the pool, crouched on my hands and knees. I was coughing, retching, spitting water from my lungs, each watery vomit an ache in my chest.

  As the last of the vision faded from my mind, I sensed Chloris outside the water, crouched next to me. She rubbed my back and whispered, "I'm sorry, Katerina. I'm so sorry."

  I rolled onto my side, teeth chattering despite the warm stone. "Wh-what happened?"

  Chloris knelt over me. It was so strange to see her outside of the water. I found I could look at her without feeling overwhelmed.

  "You fought me," she said. "To stop you, I had to release you from my protection, let you drown for a while."

  On Chloris' side, between her ribs, a wound bled pinkish water.

  "I hurt you," I said, touching her side reverently.

  "Not as much as I hurt you," said Chloris, face draped in shadows. "Connected to you, I caught part of the prophecy. I too saw those monstrous beings assaulting the city."

  Sitting up with a grimace on my lips, I hung my arms over my bent knees. Water dripped onto the floor. We looked like a pair of survivors from a shipwreck.

  "But that prophecy doesn't help us," I said. "It only tells how important it is for us to get past the shield. I think they're planning on unleashing beasts from Otherland to attack Philadelphia in three months. That's what the three moons in the sky meant. So we have three months. What did you see?"

  An awkward little-girl smile formed on Chloris’ lips. Outside the water, she seemed so vulnerable, so delicate. Part of it, I realized, was how her ribs showed through her sides, how emaciated she was. The other was that she truly was weaker. So I understood her need to find a place of safety. She had no family, and her friends had betrayed her, or at least she thought they had.

  "I saw a path, though I don't know what it means," she said. "The answer came in two parts, both of them graveyards. The first was a tiny skeleton beneath a net of wood. The second was a green mountaintop. Rifles were stacked like a funeral pyre beneath a crown that hung in the sky."

  A moment of quiet reflection hung between us.

  "Do you know what they mean?" asked Chloris.

  "Unfortunately, I do," I said.

  Chapter Four

  The forest near the glass workshop was less imposing in the daylight, partly because the Gamayun no longer haunted it. The prophetic birds had come to our world intending to destroy it, but instead, I'd stolen their prophecies, which now resided in my head.

  I asked Franklin to wait in the steam carriage. I expected no trouble and wanted to accomplish this task alone.

  Before I climbed up the weave of roots and past the hanging moss, I gave a short wave to Ben, who was leaning against the shiny black vehicle. He looked like a young man considering his place in the universe, full of brooding thoughts.

  I climbed carefully between the cedars, placing my boots upon solid roots. Limbs hidden by the ever-present moss tugged at the dark woolen skirt that I'd donned in preparation for our journey. I could get away with men's attire in the cosmopolitan city of Philadelphia, but after this brief stop, we were headed down the coast to North Carolina. The folks of that region wouldn't cotton to my progressive attire.

  I wandered between the trees for a half hour before I found the spot. The raven skeleton had been picked clean. The bones lay over the roots like a marionette spilled out of a box. A lone black feather stuck to the tail of the dead bird, the rest having been scavenged or fallen between the roots to the buggy ground.

  Crouching over the skeleton, I lifted the
bird's slender neck, revealing the skull. Bits of dried cartilage stuck to the bone. The eye sockets were huge, empty spaces.

  "Why did Chloris send me here?" I asked the forest, expecting no answer.

  When the bird's jaw moved in my hand, I dropped it. My feet slipped off their perch and I fell hard on my backside, a knot jamming into my under-thigh. The skull bounced across the roots as its jaw levered out cries.

  "Get out of my eyes! Stop biting me! Ack! Away, foul spawn!" screamed the raven's skull.

  It went on for a while, screaming about the insects that ravaged it. Its caws echoed through the trees, sending birds in the upper canopy fluttering into the blue sky.

  When at last it grew silent, I said, "There's nothing biting you."

  Eerily, the slender vertebras lifted the bird skull like a serpent readying to strike. The head tilted in a very birdlike fashion.

  "There once was. The memory clings to me like mud," it said.

  I had a moment of dissonance as I realized I was speaking to an inanimate object, but then I remembered Aught and the other wonders of this new world and my uneasiness faded.

  "What is your name?" I asked.

  "Zora," said the raven's skull.

  It was a feminine name, which fit my memory of the noble bird with its glistening black feathers.

  "Have you been aware this whole year?" I asked, remembering that I'd first seen the great raven a year ago when Rowan had first arrived in Philadelphia and the Empty Men had attacked me. The bird had saved me with a warning.

  Its mournful squawk tore at my heart. Without eyes, the bird's skull looked appropriately desolate.

  "What can I do for you?" I asked.

  Zora craned her neck around, the slender vertebras crackling as they curled.

  "This body is useless," said Zora. "Break my head off and take me with you."

  "Why would I do such a thing? I don't know who or what you are, or why you're here," I said

  "Did I not help you when the Gamayun came to ensnare you with their prophecy?" asked the bird-skull.

  "You did," I said. "But these are dangerous times. I must be careful. Tell me what you are that I might trust you?"

  "I cannot," said Zora.

  "You cannot?" I asked, my eyes widening in surprise.

  The skull opened and closed its beak.

  "I was sent to help you by someone you trust, but I cannot tell you anything else," said the bird-skull.

  "You place me at a large disadvantage," I said.

  "You'll need my advice in the trying times to come," said Zora.

  "Give me something then. Impress me with your knowledge," I said.

  The skull rotated around for a moment. "You're standing in squirrel feces."

  "What—?" I exclaimed, but sure enough, the heel of my boot rested at a juncture of roots, a little hollow that contained a tiny pile of brown nuggets.

  I narrowed my gaze at the skull. "Give me something else. Something with meaning."

  The skull stared back, motionless.

  "Very well," I said, collecting myself to leave. "You shall rot in the forest for all eternity. Enjoy your days as a feast for the many-legged."

  I didn't make it two steps before Zora cried out. "You kept Catherine's fan. The one she gave you upon first meeting."

  My whole body suddenly felt like it'd been dipped in mint. I put my hand on a nearby cedar trunk to steady myself.

  "How could you know this?" I asked. "Only Catherine and I shared that moment, but not even she knew that I kept that fan as a keepsake of our introduction."

  "You asked for a demonstration," said the bird-skull.

  "Fine. Yes," I said, suddenly wishing to get back to the carriage. "I will take you. How should I remove your head? And will it hurt? Or maybe I don't care."

  "Pull hard," said Zora.

  The bony beak stilled as I grabbed it. A quick yank and the skull popped away.

  "Apologies," I said, before tucking it into an inside pocket. The skull mumbled something but I didn't care enough to bring it out to repeat. I wanted to get back to the steam carriage.

  The bird-skull—I had a hard time thinking of it as Zora—had unexpected knowledge, which unnerved me to distraction. It suggested supernatural abilities, which as I stumbled back through the trees, seemed rather obvious since it was a talking raven skull, but I'd expected that the fact that it was capable of speaking to be the miracle.

  The specific knowledge about that private moment did not ease my concerns, if that was the skull's intent. Rather, it suggested that my comings and goings in the Winter Palace had been watched, my personal effects rifled through. I wasn't naive enough to think that members of the court didn't have designs against me, but I'd thought myself cleverer than they. If they knew about the fan and the reasons why I kept it, it suggested that many other secrets could have been unearthed.

  I wasn't sure why it bothered me. That was long ago in the Russian court. I'd lived many other lives since then. Yet it felt like acid on my skin that these memories had been violated.

  When I climbed into the steam carriage, Franklin remarked immediately, "Is something the matter? You look like a mother hen who's had her eggs stolen out from under her."

  "Expend no worry for me," I said, motioning for Ben to put the vehicle into motion.

  "I assume you found what you were looking for," said Ben, eyebrow raised, "but it seems you encountered something unexpected."

  "We each have our secrets," I snapped back at him.

  Ben reacted as if slapped and then, with a reluctant shrug, put the steam carriage into motion. I leaned against the soft velvet headboard and closed my eyes, taking care not to brush against the bird-skull in my jacket pocket.

  The silence was maintained for half a day, a record for Ben in my presence. He fidgeted on his seat, frequently glancing in my direction, his chest rising and falling as he prepared to speak and then let that desire release.

  Finally, as daylight thinned and shadows crawled from the trees, Ben asked me the question that had been on his lips for the last hour.

  "What ails you, Kat? You carry an air of melancholy," he said.

  "There are some things so private we barely tell ourselves, let alone others," I said, rubbing the back of my hand against the velvet absently. "I learned my trust had been violated somehow and I don't know what to think."

  "Must have been quite a visit to the forest," said Ben, steering the steam carriage down a dirt road through the Virginia countryside. Sentinel trees stood on either side, occasionally blocking the sun and causing the light inside the vehicle to flicker.

  When I didn't answer, Ben probed further. "Did you meet a sidhe queen? Or faerie lord?"

  Though both Ben and I had come to the conclusion that encounters with the creatures of Otherland had been translated into myths of the fey, Ben still had the desire to meet such ethereal creatures. I think he must have been disappointed by Otherland's machinations; they didn't stray far from the power struggles of humans.

  "Maybe," I said, a reluctant smile finding its way onto my lips despite my efforts otherwise. "One can never be sure. The fey disguise themselves quite frequently."

  We shared a smile, which seemed to put Ben at ease. I wondered if I wasn't too far off when I said that the fey disguised themselves. Maybe this Zora was something else entirely, trapped in the great raven's bones. Much like Trisella's essence had been married to the pangolin automaton.

  When we camped that evening in a field next to the road, Ben asked me about our destination over a smoldering fire.

  Sitting cross-legged, I poked the glowing coals with a stick and answered him.

  "Kings Mountain was the site of a battle during the revolution. Many soldiers from both sides were buried there. I could think of no other interpretation," I said.

  "Do you have any ideas of what we'll find when we reach it?"

  "None, but I trust Chloris' vision," I said.

  He tilted his head. Ben seemed quite surprised. "
You trust Chloris now?"

  I thought back to our moment outside the pool. "About this, I do."

  As we sat in silence, I remembered what Chloris claimed Ben had done many years ago. I still couldn't believe it, but didn't want to ask Ben for fear of enraging him as Chloris had.

  Ben got up to check the steam engine on the carriage. I watched him patiently tinker with the levers and test the pipes with wetted fingers, pulling back when one burned him.

  I knew Benjamin Franklin better than I knew most anyone else, except maybe Catherine. Yet, it bothered me that I didn't know him enough to immediately dismiss the story Chloris had told. What a tragedy that we as conscious creatures cannot fully understand the mind of anyone else, and frequently not even our own.

  A restless sleep was all I could muster, and I moved around camp the next morning with an ache in my side from sleeping on the hard ground. I was doing better controlling the magic in my head, but at times it got the best of me, making sleep a chore. A week before, I'd found myself sitting in bed with hands aflame with purplish-black sorcery, my hands as translucent as glass. The experience shook me to my core and was warning enough that I wasn't yet in mastery of my powers and was in danger of them consuming me completely.

  The journey to Kings Mountain took the whole next day. We got lost around Salem, North Carolina, when we couldn't find a way past a flooded Muddy Creek. The pastor at the Moravian Church helped us with directions, which took us a roundabout way towards Charlotte.

  We reached the village of Gastonia before dark. The town was in the shadow of Kings Mountain. A few quaint buildings with long sloped roofs made up the central part of town.

  Some locals were hanging out on the street and watched us with interest as we parked our steam carriage. The streets had no gas lamps, so I couldn't see their faces in the dim light to judge the character of their interest.

  Surprisingly, there was a modest inn and tavern called the Patriot's Landing. It was timber built with a front porch as long as the inn. The inside had high ceilings that carried away the smoke from the generous fireplace along the wall. Few tables were occupied.