Scorch’s skin was burning hot, heating the grip of his sword all the way up to the blade. It roiled inside him, flames sloshing up the cavity of his chest, reddening his vision. The creatures were a finished circle around them now, and they lifted their blind heads to the night sky and wailed in unison, one piercing, terrible sound. Then they attacked.
Scorch slashed his sword to keep them back. He could hear Kio’s grunt as she did the same. He could see Vivid in the corner of his eye, daggers flying in front of him, slashing and hacking and fighting to keep the monstrous things away. But they were too many and they were too hungry. They were a wave of flesh and teeth, surging forward and smashing Scorch against Kio. Vivid was pulled away from them. Scorch watched, horrified as deadly white arms wrapped around Vivid’s chest. He screamed as the sight of Vivid’s dark hair was swallowed up by a gyrating mass of cannibals.
Then, it was happening.
Scorch felt the heat melt through his fingertips, sluicing through his veins. His body bent, burning so hot that the creatures clawing at his flesh scampered back. His marrow was molten fire, molding his muscles and stretching his shoulder blades until barbs of searing bone burst through his skin. Scorch screamed, but instead of sound, smoke billowed from his lungs, choking him with white-hot ash. Fire churned inside of him, hardening his flesh into crimson scales. His amber eyes glowed like liquid gold and his jaw thrust forward, teeth extending, everything roughening and sharpening and sparking. His fingers curled into slicing, ebony talons. His pulse pounded a fire dance through his heart, and the bones sprouting from his shoulder blades stretched up and up, leathery skin spreading and splaying like so many ripped shirts in a sail. It had been such a long time inside him, years and years since it had been released, but it burst free of him now, and he beat his wings against the cool night air and lifted onto his haunches. He slammed down, shaking the desert, and the cannibals wailed in confusion, smelling smoke but hearing no fire. Not yet.
Scorch turned his long, spiked neck, seeking out two small figures in the dark. He stepped over them, his belly hanging protectively above their heads. The fire was inside of him. All he had to do was let it out.
He screamed and it was a roar, deafening and powerful and full of fire. Flames blazed from his throat, drowning the cannibals in an inferno of scorching yellows and reds and oranges. They burned, their bodies melting and falling, and the light of the fire sent the others running. Scorch let the heat build up again, could feel his entire body tingling with it, and then he released another bellow of fire, turning in a great circle as it streamed from his mouth, until they were surrounded by a ring of light.
Beneath him, he felt hands rubbing at his scaled stomach. Tendrils of smoke curled from his nostrils as he ducked his head to watch. Vivid was pushing Kio up, holding her until she grabbed onto the spiked ridges of Scorch’s spine, and then he leapt up, climbing shiny crimson scales until he swung his leg over Scorch’s back and grabbed hold of another spike, as easy as if mounting a saddled horse. Vivid’s face was lit up by flames and his eyes were wondrous, long lashes casting thick shadows across his cheekbones. He leaned forward, one hand gripping a stone-smooth spike while the other pressed against Scorch’s scaly skin.
The need was burning Scorch. He couldn’t wait any longer. As a great gust of wind caught the fire and carried it further across the sea of burning monsters, Scorch lifted from the ground, wings pounding the air like drums, sending him high above the burning desert. He could feel Vivid’s hand pressed against him, feel his thighs squeezing tight, feel his fist around the spike of his back, and he could feel Kio, too, her body cool and balanced against the heat of his scales.
Soaring high above the disorder of the desert, Scorch could focus. He didn’t need to find the moon or look at the stars, because his body knew the way. He pivoted his great wings in the air and flew east.
He had almost forgotten the feeling of wind beneath his wings. He had only felt it once before in his life, and it had been so long ago. The sand below was a blur, and the sky above was sparkling with stars. And most spectacularly, the heat inside him, the heat that always threatened to explode, was satisfied. It fueled him for the length of the desert before it began to taper out.
Scorch stalled his wings when the time came and descended in a controlled spiral until his clawed feet landed on prickly grass. He was vaguely aware of the bodies clamoring down from his back, and then of a cooling sensation rushing through him. He curled into himself, lying down on his side. His wings shriveled up into his back, his talons shrank into calloused fingers, and his teeth receded into his shortening jaw. He sighed, nuzzling his face into the grass, and a pillow of smoke puffed from his lips, followed by an exhausted moan.
He heard whispers in his ear and a hand against his cheek, but he was too tired to open his eyes, too tired for anything but oblivion. Fingers combed gently through his hair and Scorch began to drift, falling into a sleep so deep, not even his nightmares could reach him.
Forts
9
Scorch’s throat was dry and he was naked; those were the first two things he noticed upon waking. He was lying beneath the shade of giant, star-leaved tree. A hodgepodge of clothes, consisting of Scorch’s own underclothes and a handful of soft things he recognized as Kio’s, were thrown over his vulnerably bare bits. A full canteen of water sat at his side, and by the time Scorch had guzzled down most of its contents, he finally remembered.
A panicked glance around told him that Kio and Vivid weren’t there, so they had either left him—which would have been a mercy—or they were preparing for their second option. But why would they not have done it while he was sleeping? Maybe they just weren’t coming back, had gone ahead without him, hoping the Heartlands would finish the job.
He groaned miserably and sat up, every muscle in his body protesting. He didn’t remember it hurting so much, but then, he had tried to forget everything about the first time. His clothes must have been ripped to shreds, he surmised, looking down at his bare chest. Even his boots were gone.
His hands raked through his hair and flakes of ash sprinkled free. He reeked of smoke, and his beard, he noted after speculative prodding, was singed. Never had he felt like such a wreck. He slumped back down beneath the tree and sighed.
A moment later, there was a rustling in the brush and Scorch reached for his sword, but it was gone. They had taken his weapon. He picked up a rock instead, but then set it back down. He wouldn’t try to hurt them. They were just doing what everyone did. They were just upholding Viridorian law and protecting themselves. From Scorch.
Kio emerged from a wall of foliage. She held a bundle of fresh flowers and herbs in her arms and her face was sooty. She studied him a moment before stepping closer. He shrank away.
“Scorch?” she asked, kneeling cautiously at his side. She set the bundle on the ground between them and extended her hand. Scorch flinched from her touch.
“He thinks we’re going to kill him,” came a voice from around the star-leaved tree. Scorch looked up as Vivid stepped around the thick trunk, his arms crossed casually. He had been there the whole time.
Scorch tried to glare at him, but he didn’t have the strength. He could only watch helplessly as Vivid sat beside Kio on the ground, his legs folding up beneath him. Scorch was sure only Kio and Vivid could manage to look elegant perched on the ground, filthy, in the middle of the Heartlands. Vivid’s face was darkened by soot like Kio’s, but beneath the black, his cheeks were pink from the desert sun.
“I found some useful plant life,” Kio said, her voice gentle and melodic. “This one can be made into a balm to encourage recuperation.” She held up a fluffy brown bushel of weeds. When she gave it a shake, gold, shimmery dust floated to the ground. “I don’t have any experience with . . . but I think it might help you feel better.” She scooted back a bit and started digging around in her pack. After a moment’s searching, she came out with a mortar and pestle.
Scorch studied her as she began b
reaking up pieces of the plant and grinding it with a meticulous hand. For once, Vivid seemed interested, but not in Kio’s ministrations. He was looking at Scorch as if he’d never seen him before. Scorch thrummed beneath the attention, thoroughly confused. Why had they not killed him yet? Had they somehow missed what happened in the desert? Had they hit their heads and forgotten?
Scorch cleared his throat and shifted, extremely aware of the scant clothing hiding his nakedness and trying his best not to uncover anything best left covered. He forced himself to look Vivid in the eye and said, with a voice that trembled, “I’m an elemental.”
Scorch had never spoken the words aloud. He had tried to not even think them. Kio didn’t look up from her mortar, but Vivid continued to stare at Scorch. His lips, usually drawn thin and straight, were slightly swollen from biting, and Scorch watched him suck his lower lip between his teeth before releasing it again, pink and shining.
“Fire,” Scorch added, and one of Vivid’s black eyebrows arched high on his forehead. It was the most expressive Vivid—or Vivid’s eyebrows—had ever looked.
Vivid remained sitting in silence across from Scorch, tucking and re-tucking the hair behind his ear. The daggers at his wrists were firmly inside their sheaths. Vivid wasn’t attacking, and his body didn’t look primed for attack, didn’t look primed for any action besides staring. The idea crossed Scorch’s mind that Vivid might be in shock. After all, it wasn’t every day one stumbled upon an elemental. Maybe, once the initial surprise wore off, Vivid would remember himself and do what was always done. Scorch thought of the man from the village dragging the sack.
Maybe the balm Kio was concocting wasn’t a remedy at all, but a poison.
Scorch clutched a hand to his tired heart. He couldn’t handle Vivid’s stare any longer, so he closed his eyes, leaned his head against the tree, and let himself think about his parents.
He remembered that morning with murky detail, how his father had woken him from sleep and shoved him into the bushes. Scorch had closed his eyes, but he heard everything. They’d put up a fight, but they hadn’t won. When Scorch had sensed the fire, he opened his eyes and peered through the dense leaves of the bush, twigs scratching at his face. His parents were in a pile in the center of their forest camp, and their tents were on fire, the flames creeping closer and closer to their bodies. When their flesh began to burn, Scorch knew they were dead. It was the only way the fire would have hurt them. He ran, trying to escape the smell. He ran and ran, until someone stopped him. Master McClintock.
Scorch had been five.
Now he was twenty. Fifteen years he’d gone undiscovered, and it had only taken a few seconds to throw it all away.
“It’s ready.” Scorch opened his eyes. Kio had scooted closer to him, and her fingers were dipping into the mortar’s gold cream. “I need to rub this on your pulse points. May I?” she asked.
Scorch nodded. If she was about to poison him, at least she was being polite about it. Her fingers came forward and she dabbed the balm at his temples, his throat, and his wrists. It was cold against his skin. He waited for its toxicity to sink into his bloodstream, paralyze him, or stop his heart, but nothing happened. Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. The instant the balm touched his skin, Scorch’s muscles released a great tension, and his shoulders slumped with a pop. He still ached all over, but it was a quieter ache that was steadily growing smaller as he sucked in deep, slow breaths. Maybe the poison would make him fall into such a state of comfort that he’d be too relaxed to breathe, and too calm to care if he was dying.
“Better?” Kio asked and Scorch nodded, slinking further down the tree. The bare skin of his back scratched against the bark and his head lolled.
“Lie down before you hurt yourself again,” Vivid ordered. Scorch looked up at him, and his face was like stone. “You’ve slowed us down enough as it is.”
Scorch’s head felt heavy, not in an overstuffed, throbbing way, but in a warm, sweet way. He pried his back from the tree trunk and lowered himself to the grass with a sigh. His hand roamed down his body in a halfhearted attempt to keep his coverings in place, but he was suddenly too tired to care.
“Go to sleep, Scorch,” Kio hummed. “You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
He felt sure he would never wake up, but he was thankful to her for making it so painless. “I wish,” he muttered, voice drunk with exhaustion, “my parents had died so well.”
The last thing Scorch saw was a glint of amethyst, and then his eyes fell shut.
***
“The mountains will be cold. These will have to do.”
“Leave him naked. What bother is it of mine?”
“You don’t have any other clothes he could wear?”
“You think he could fit in them if I did?”
“If you hadn’t torn up all of his shirts—”
“In retrospect, I suppose I should have killed Julian sooner. We could have used his clothes for our sail and I would have been spared his whining.”
Scorch cracked his eyelids. He was lying beneath the tree, it was daytime, and Vivid and Kio were standing a few feet away.
“I’m not dead?” he asked, sitting up. He didn’t feel dead. Actually, he felt pretty good, beside the smidgeon of embarrassment when he noticed his coverings had slipped off him as he slept. He put them back in place and looked entreatingly up at his companions. Kio was holding a bundle in her arms that looked like furs. Vivid raked his eyes up and down Scorch’s body, unimpressed.
“Are you always this useless afterward?” Vivid asked.
Scorch blinked the remaining sleepiness from his eyes and tried to suss out what Vivid was talking about. He paused when he saw the streak of black soot at Vivid’s hairline, like he’d tried to wash away the evidence but left a trace behind, and then it all came rushing back. The sated feeling Scorch had experienced when he’d been flying was gone, and he could feel the familiar fever smoldering beneath his skin in panic. “I don’t know,” Scorch answered at last, a bit breathless. “I’ve only ever changed like that once before, and it was a long time ago.”
Kio nodded, intrinsically tranquil. “Will you tell us what happened?”
Scorch still wasn’t sure why he was alive. The urge to stand up and pace was strong, but he’d not forgotten that he was burdensomely naked. “I’ll tell you what I remember,” he agreed, “if I can get dressed first.” He nodded at the bundle in Kio’s arms. “Are those for me?”
She smiled and handed him the furs. “It’s all we could do. The land is sparse of wildlife.”
Scorch couldn’t help but focus on the usage of we as he accepted the bundle, but one glance at Vivid told him not to mention it. At close inspection, they seemed to have hunted and skinned a white-furred creature, though the texture felt unfamiliar to any animal Scorch had ever seen. The fur was long and silky and he stroked his fingers through it. Soft as it was, there wasn’t necessarily much of it, and he wasn’t entirely sure how to go about putting it on.
After a few minutes of blushing and unsuccessfully trying to wrap it around himself like a cloak, Kio took his hand and led him around the tree. Scorch could hear Vivid sharpening his blades on the other side while Kio manipulated the furs with a knife and needles from her pack. They fashioned him a piece of clothing similar to his usual leather jerkin. It rather looked like he was wearing a thigh-length, sleeveless, furry dress until she handed him his belt and sword. His eyes glistened at the sight of his Guild weapon, and he buckled it around his waist immediately. In the end, he probably looked more ridiculous than he’d have liked, but the good news was that he had his sword, and really, what else did he need? Shoes might have been nice, but he wasn’t about to complain. But, of course, because she was Kio, a moment later she presented him with white leather strips from the animal’s hide, and commenced wrapping his feet, tying them up with a strong cord that looked suspiciously like the roots from the lakeside trees.
Scorch looked down at himself, at the clothes she ha
d made for him, and felt an overwhelming abundance of affection. She led him back around the tree where Vivid was glowering at nothing in particular. His eyes cut to Scorch’s furs for only a second before casting their severity elsewhere. Kio crossed to the star tree and sat down beneath its shade.
They were waiting for him to start talking.
“The last time this happened was the first time,” Scorch began. He felt exposed and stupid, so he started pacing while he talked. Vivid was standing, watching him with his arms crossed. Scorch tried not to look at him too often as he spoke. “I was thirteen and had just left the Guild walls for my hunter’s test. We train in the Guild forest, but for our test, we have to go into unfamiliar territory. Everything was going well until a boar charged me. It came out of nowhere, scared me. Before I knew what was happening, I had—changed. I guess instinct took over and I flew. But I ran out of energy fast, and when I landed back in the forest, I was lost.
“I didn’t want to be found. I didn’t understand what had happened to me. My parents told me they were different, but I’d never seen them become—that.” He thumbed the hilt of his sword nervously. “They found me eventually, two weeks later. They thought I might have died in the forest, because, you see, it had caught on fire.” He remembered Merric’s face when he’d returned, the way he’d sneered and accused Scorch of trying to burn down the forest. “That’s when everyone started calling me Scorch.”
Vivid’s lips parted on the beginning of a question and Scorch paused to let him ask, but no words came. Vivid gritted his teeth and ducked his head. Scorch continued.
“After that, I was aware of every flare of heat, every burning candle. I realized I was the same thing everyone feared, an elemental, and that my parents were, too. I was scared to death it would happen again, that I’d be overwhelmed and change in the middle of the Guild. But it didn’t happen again, and I learned to shut those feelings down. They still come out in bursts here and there. Sparks, fevers. The threat’s always here,” he placed a hand over his abdomen, “but I’ve kept it down for so long. I knew if anyone at the Guild found me out I’d be killed, like my parents, so I hid it as deep as I could. What happened in the desert was an accident.”
The Sun Guardian Page 14