Sword Bearer (Return of the Dragons)

by Jacobs, Teddy

  My face must have just turned redder. She really had been prying in my thoughts. Or overhearing things.

  I’m just embarrassed about how young I am, and people say I’m not a man yet.

  Remember, age is relative. But listen, you have things to do. Remember to use me, when you need to, but not to rely on me too much. And let me tell you this: if we are ever separated, you can call me to you: think my name in your head, and call me to you with all your heart. I will hear your call and propel the sword to you, flying through the air like an arrow if need be. But try to keep me by your side — that would be wiser.

  You will always be able to hear me?

  You have my word. Now get back to Woltan, who’s staring at us.

  Carolina was right, of course. Had he been staring at me the whole time? Probably. Would I ever be able to see the people around me while I talked to Carolina? This time I hadn’t even closed my eyes. And yet I’d tuned everything else out. I guessed being aware of so many things at once came with practice, and Carolina would probably realize when I needed to focus on the outside world. I hoped so, anyhow. I trusted her completely, somehow, although I couldn’t say why.

  My hand had fallen from the sword.

  “Have you accomplished what you set out to do?” Woltan asked.

  I nodded. “I know how to contact her, now.”

  “Did she accept you? Was she friendly, or irritable?”

  I felt my face grow hot. “She was extremely friendly, actually.”

  Woltan stared at me for a moment. “She was flirting with you, or what?”

  My face grew hotter. I looked down at my feet in embarrassment.

  Woltan laughed. “Don’t be embarrassed. This is normal. It’s a good sign, actually. You are still very young, and have not had a lot of experience with girls, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “This is just one more way the pixie and the sword will test you, to make you stronger. You will find her advances more welcome and less disconcerting once you have found a real girl, here on earth. Until then, she is attracted by your loneliness, because she is lonely too. The faeries in our blades spent an enormous amount of time alone; even when they visit other realms part of their essence is left in the sword, and this part of her was left alone for a long time, I take it.”

  I nodded. “I don’t understand it, but for some reason my father never used the sword, and the last person to bear it was my grandfather.”

  “Perhaps you will need to talk to your father, to find out why.”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t think he would tell me, even if I could even talk to him.”

  “You think he’s angry you left him, without telling him anything?”

  “Angry is not the right word. He is either extremely worried, or furious. And I’m afraid of what that wizard Gerard may have done to him, or threatened him with.”

  Once I said it, I realized it was true.

  I hoped my father was all right. I hadn’t even thought about my parents for days. What if something had happened to them, and it was all my fault?

  Woltan nodded. “You have to contact him.”

  “I want to, it’s just...”

  Woltan shook his head. “No, now. Before we go any further with your training. I expect your pixie can help, if need be.”

  “But they are thousands of leagues away!”

  Woltan smiled condescendingly. “Anders. You’re Kriek. You can contact them, as Kara contacted you.”

  “But I don’t know how!”

  “You managed it very well, when you contacted Kara, didn’t you?”

  Now I was angry. He was mixing everything up, like he always seemed to do. Making it all seem so simple.

  “She contacted me! I didn’t even know what I was doing. Everyone tells me I’m a prince and I can do all these things, but I don’t know how to do anything!”

  “She told me differently. I had a long talk with her while you were sleeping. Perhaps you thought she was contacting you, but she thinks you contacted her. And since she is the more experienced Kriek, I tend to think she knows what she is talking about. Are you implying that she lied to me?”

  I shook my head. Why was everyone telling me I knew how to do things I didn’t?

  “Do you think she doesn’t know what she’s talking about?”

  I shook my head again, my face still hot.

  “In that case, would you be willing to try?”

  I swallowed hard. I was scared. I had been scared of this moment for a long time, somehow, and had avoided it until now, but I didn’t know why. “I have to try, I guess. Maybe part of me was happy to get away from my parents. Sometimes it seemed like they never let me do anything. But maybe they didn’t want me to get hurt. Maybe they were trying to protect me. And now it’s they who might get hurt. I love them, even if I don’t always like them. I have to try.”

  “Let’s try to recreate the situation when you contacted Karla. Were you seated, or standing?”

  “I was seated, drinking this special tea my mother made me, and smelling this incense my tutor had told me to buy.”

  “Sit down at this table, here. I will go fetch you some spiced tea. For now, try to relax, and forget about everything. Try to concentrate on your father, or your mother.”

  Woltan walked out of the room.

  I sat down. The table was large, made out of some hard dark wood. There were runes along the edge of it, and I had to work hard to resist running my fingers along them. Still they spoke to me, whispering words in languages that only my blood knew, that just escaped my hearing, blending into a murmur that hinted at power and knowledge. My fingers itched and prickled with desire to touch them.

  I distracted myself by looking across the room. It was much larger than my study back in the castle. I tried to remember what it had felt like, being locked in that room. It came back easily. I had spent years studying in that small room, locked up with spell books, geography and history tomes. I closed my eyes. I remembered the room, smelled the spicy incense, tasted the tea in my mouth...

  I opened my eyes and I was staring into my study.

  The door had been blasted open, and everything was turned upside down, broken, burned. I could smell the acrid smell of burnt wood, burnt rock and burnt books.

  There was no incense burning here. Just old scorch marks. No one.

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, the vision was gone.

  Perhaps this was not what I needed to be thinking about. I needed to see my parents, after all, not my old study that had seemed like a prison cell much of the time.

  So I concentrated on our salon: where my parents had sat and read and talked to their friends, where they had sometimes even let me sit on a chair in the corner and study, while they entertained guests and pointed at their pimply son, reading in his corner.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in, then let the air out. I could see the image in my mind’s eye. The room was full of people, laughing, eating pastries from large silver trays and drinking coffee out of china cups. I opened my eyes.

  I was looking into the room, but it was not full of people.

  It was empty.

  I almost closed my eyes again, but something made me stop and look. Something was wrong with the room. The furniture looked twisted, melted, burnt. There were scorch marks along the floors, along the walls. A burnt smell reached my nose. Several chairs were toppled over. I leaned in to look more closely at something on the floor. There was a stain there. A dark black stain in the carpet. And I didn’t need to reach forward to touch it, to know what it was, but I did, anyhow, feeling the gateway pull at me as I reached my hand through.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, and opened them again, and found myself back totally in the room where Woltan had left me. He was walking in the door with a tray of tea and biscuits. My hand was wet and I stared at it. A dark brown stain was on the tips of my fingers. I could smell it even before I brought it to my face. The iron stink of it. L
ike rust, but it wasn’t rust. It was drying blood.

  Woltan put the tray down, and stared at my hand.

  “What is it? What happened?”

  I looked up at Woltan. “I don’t know. There was blood, and all the furniture was broken, and there was no one there, at all.”

  “Where?”

  “In my parent’s living room. There was no one in my study room either.”

  “I thought you were going to wait until I got back.”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t really do it on purpose. I was just imagining those places with my eyes closed and then I opened my eyes, and there was no one…”

  Woltan frowned as he sat down in a chair to the side of the room, and sighed. “You should have waited until I got back with the tea, Anders. Had anything happened to you, Kara would have had my head. I won’t leave you again. Drink your tea, and then try concentrating on people, instead of places. That may give you better luck.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I felt drained already, even though the two gateways had only been open for a few short moments. I drank some more tea and took a bite of a biscuit. The food radiated warmth out from my stomach, and my head felt a little clearer.

  “In that case, I’ll picture my father. He’ll tell me what’s going on.”

  He wouldn’t keep secrets from me now, after all that had happened. Or would he?

  I took another bite, another sip, and then closed my eyes. I tried to remember my father, his smell, the smell of his sweat, his hair, when he had hugged me, which was not often. I remembered my father hugging me right before they hired my tutor and pulled me out of school. I held onto that memory, and opened my eyes.

  Nothing. I was staring across the room. I took another biscuit, chewed mechanically. Think. I needed to find something more powerful, a stronger, clearer memory.

  I tried to remember my mother instead.

  It came to me suddenly, like a slap in the face. Well, it was a slap in the face. I had been in a conference with my tutor and my mother. I admitted it now, I had been fresh. Sick of Herr Hansson, who taught me nothing, I had been rude, laughing at something he had said. Herr Hanson told my mother how rudeness could not be tolerated, how the young needed to learn from their elders, how he couldn’t be my tutor if I didn’t show respect. My mother asked me to apologize: seated right next to me, in an armchair, she’d said: “Apologize to Herr Hansson, Anders, and let us put this behind us.”

  Now I realized that she must have been as tired of the whole thing as I was. She’d probably realized why I was frustrated, why I was rude. But at the time I didn’t understand her at all. She just seemed one more person putting me in my place. And that place was boring.

  “This is so pointless,” I had said.

  My mother slapped me.

  I felt the stinging imprint of her hand even now, as if the blow had left a permanent mark on my cheek. I remembered the look of surprise on everyone’s faces, even my mother’s. I remembered the shock, the embarrassment, but most of all the pain on my mother’s face. The shame. The tears. I closed my eyes. I felt my face burning once again.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was staring at my mother’s face, and she was crying.

  But where was she? I did not recognize her room. It was no room of the castle, at least that I knew. There were bars on the windows. There were bars at the door. She was sitting on a little wooden chair, and she was weeping.

  “Mother? Mother what’s wrong?”

  She looked up then, and she saw me. I saw shock on her face — then wonder, surprise and finally fear. She shook her head, put her finger to her lips.

  “Mother, what’s happened?”

  When I had been a child, we had played a game. Read My Lips. We had taken turns until I could read everything my mother said, without any sound.

  Now she was telling me something. She was completely silent, but her lips were moving, and I read them.

  “Your father... is in danger. Get him first, then me. Get him first, then me.”

  I shook my head. I mouthed:

  “I’ll get you now, and then we’ll get him together.”

  She shook her head, but what did she know? I had no time for her self-sacrificing.

  I reached out my hands and grabbed onto her, and felt the strange feeling of being in two places at once. The air was much cooler and damper in the cell than in Woltan’s chamber. I felt Woltan standing up behind me, and then I was pulling her through. There was a great deal of resistance, and I spoke a word.

  Durch.

  Woltan’s hand was on my shoulder, and power flowed through him into me. We pulled at her together. There was a noise, and then we had her through, but the gateway was open.

  I looked back at the gateway. There were other faces there now, angry old faces with eyes that glowed with rage. They stared at me and one of them spoke a word of power that hit me like an ice cold hammer. I felt myself falling as Woltan tried to hold me steady. Still, I fell, but I got out one last word

  schliessen

  and then all went black.

  When I woke again I found myself in a chair, a wet cloth on my forehead. “Mother?”

  But she was nowhere to be seen. I was still in Woltan’s study. Woltan was there, though, and Kara too. It was Kara who spoke. “She’s been taken to a healer. She’s alive, don’t worry, but dark magic has been worked upon her. The same spell hit you too, but I think she took the brunt of it.”

  “I just feel groggy.”

  Kara looked at me. “Your mother is unconscious, and we can’t wake her up. It may be that you have more magical resistance; or perhaps Kalle’s cloak came in handy. It could have been your merpeople blood. They have a special resistance to malicious spellwork, and their blood runs in your veins too.”

  It was all my fault. If only I had listened to her. “Will she live?”

  Woltan nodded. “We can keep her alive, I have no doubt. How soon she will regain consciousness, however, I have no idea. It may be hours, days, or...”

  “Or what?”

  “Or months, I’m afraid.”

  “Why can’t you be sure?”

  Woltan shook his head. Kara spoke. “It depends on the wizard who cast the spell, Anders. Until he is destroyed, or the spell fades, we can only keep her alive. We can’t bring her back to consciousness, to true life.”

  I stood up suddenly. I felt like such an idiot.

  “My father! She told me to get him instead. She must have known this would happen.” I felt suddenly weak. But before I could fall, Woltan and Kalle were there at my sides, guiding me back down into the chair.

  “He will now be heavily guarded, I’m sure,” Woltan said. “You disobeyed your mother but followed your heart when you pulled her through the gateway. Even as she was following hers when she told you to take your father first. Love is an admirable thing, even when it leads us into trouble. It’s good to follow the love in your heart, in times of so much difficulty.”

  There was Woltan twisting the truth again, making life seem simpler than it was. I shook my head.

  “She always told me I should listen to her, and to my father. And I always thought I knew best. You may say that I acted with my heart, but I was just being like I’ve always been. Thinking I knew better. And now she’s unconscious, and my father is ...”

  I bit my lip. I couldn’t go on.

  Kara looked at me searchingly. “Your father is what?”

  “I don’t know. Heavily guarded? Dead?”

  Kara’s face looked grim. “You can’t know any of that for certain, Anders. Maybe that’s why your mother wanted you to get your father first, but that doesn’t mean she was right. They may now think they’ve killed you, or at least spelled you out of commission, and their defenses may be down. I’ve just spoken to my uncle. He said you must contact and try to save your parents.”

  I stood up. “It’s settled then. I’ll try to contact him now.”

  Woltan nodded. “But only with Kalle and me at your sid
e, to protect you.”

  Kara frowned. “What about me?”

  “You will stand to the side, and back us all up. Anders and Kalle may need your help in closing the connection.”

  I walked back over to the table. “I need to do one more thing.” I took a sip of tea. I sat down, and sighed. Then I ran my fingers over the runes of the table until they were all glowing, and I started to speak. The words flowed out of my mouth, words my mind couldn’t understand. Soon the whole table was glowing and vibrating.

  I closed my eyes and tuned everything out. My mind had only one thing present, and that was my father. But what, exactly, should I remember about him? Who was my father really, and had I ever really known him?

  If I was a three-blood prince, what did that make him? More than a diplomat, that was for sure. And why had he never carried the sword? The sword that lay at my side? I pushed these thoughts aside. Right now I needed a memory, something strong, to pull up my father in my mind.

  My father needed me.

  I needed him too.

  I closed my eyes, and I remembered the ocean.

  The ocean and my father were always intertwined in my memory. It was my father who first told me about the sea, and my father who first took me there. It had been a three day journey, and I could not have been older than eight. I sat behind him, on his horse, and we rode every day from dawn to dusk, stopping only to water and feed the horse, and then to sleep and drink and rest ourselves at night.

  I remembered my father’s smell, as he sat on the horse in front of me, remembered the soreness from so much riding, remembered the clear clean smell of the sea on our last day of riding as we approached the ocean and the dirt gave way to sand. What had father’s business been that day? At the time I hadn’t even thought to ask. My father had never told me much, and probably he wouldn’t have confided in me even if I’d asked him to.

  There was something sealed and secret about father, then as now.

  But I tried to put that out of my mind, and concentrate on my father’s smell, on the feel of his hand holding mine as we walked together into the ocean.