The Crescent Stone

by Matt Mikalatos

  Yes, of course she remembered. Lily, deceived by Kotuluk, thought her friends could only survive the flames of the firethorns if she turned her back on the Eagle King. She couldn’t tell them what she was doing, or the magical agreement keeping them safe would be violated. Terrible consequences came as a result, and Lily was banished from Meselia. But her friends were safe, and as she left Meselia for the last time, she said she had no regrets. “I remember,” Madeline said.

  “Everything I’ve done has been for your protection,” Darius said. “Or to protect the Scim. If that means I’ll be punished, so be it. But I did it all with good intentions, just like Lily.”

  She knew that. She knew it before he said it. It didn’t make her happy about things, but she knew he had a good heart. She crossed her arms. “Okay. Explain it to me, Darius. Help me understand.”

  He held his hand out to her, but she didn’t take it. He nodded, put his hand back at his side. “I’d like to show you something,” he said at last. “You should know both sides of the story before you make a decision. I won’t take the sword away from you. If you want to go back to the Elenil, I’ll take you myself. You can return the sword, stay with them, do whatever you want.”

  She looked him in the eyes. He was telling the truth. “And you’ll go with me?”

  His face hardened. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go.” He didn’t say he would go with her, though. She knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t making that part of the promise.

  “Okay,” she said. “Show me.”

  He stowed the stools and the sword on the saddle. He had repaired it while she was unconscious. He mounted and she slipped on behind him. “I have to wear my helmet,” he said. “So I can fly the owl.”

  “Okay.”

  He settled the helmet on his head, his horns sharp and silhouetted against the risen sun. She wrapped her arms around his body and turned her face to lay it against his back. He ordered the bird to fly, in the fearsome, guttural voice of the Black Skull. They lifted into the air and headed toward the dark night of the Wasted Lands.

  30

  THE STORM

  The desert claims the land, and so we,

  we must claim the desert.

  FROM “THE DESERTED CITY,” A KAKRI LAMENT

  “Faster, Jason.” It was a mantra Baileya repeated endlessly. His legs felt like bags filled with sand, which for all he knew they now were. All he could see in any direction was sand. Sand dunes ahead. Sand dunes to the left and right. Behind them, the other sand dunes they had passed and, sometimes, the sand clouds created by their Scim pursuers.

  They had lost the Scim for almost nine hours in the Tolmin Pass. Baileya knew a shortcut that required confronting an eleven-foot-tall knight with glowing eyes and a scary sword made of flaming night. Apparently she had some sort of deal going with him, though, because she said she had already paid her toll, and he let them through. The monster knight wasn’t so sure about Jason, but Baileya convinced him that Jason was part of the deal.

  Jason didn’t know if the Scim went around or through the scary toll road, but it didn’t take them long to get on his and Baileya’s trail again. He wondered aloud how the Scim were surviving. Baileya knew every trick. Certain plants hoarded water in the mornings. She poured it along the leaves and into their mouths. She had hollowed a gourd for a canteen and saved some water for the evening. She made a sweet mashed food out of a certain cactus. It had tubers that grew among the roots, which she smashed and mixed sparingly with water. It had the consistency of paste, but the taste had grown on him. He was still getting his daily delivery of pudding too. He shared it with Baileya, and she seemed genuinely impressed by his ability to find a new cup of “this food you call pudding” every morning.

  She warned him of the various dangers of the deserts. Sandstorms, naturally. Most of the nasty desert animals you could think of from Earth. Plus something called a ghul that changed shapes to look like your friends and then ate you. And something that sounded like a hyena, sort of, except she said it was “as smart as a woman.” He wasn’t sure if that meant smarter than a man or not, but he knew not to ask. Either way, it was a hyena that was smarter than a hyena. He was glad to hear it didn’t have opposable thumbs, but she said it would lay clever traps and had to be avoided.

  The Kharobem, too, should be avoided—a strange, magical race of creatures who changed shapes (“a common power for desert folk,” Baileya said) and were known for interceding in the business of the people of the Sunlit Lands. Massively powerful, with a magic more formidable than any other, they could settle a dispute between warring peoples in a few minutes. They rarely intervened, but when they did, it was the stuff of legend. The last time had been hundreds of years ago, when they had destroyed a Kakri city called Ezerbin.

  “Why is their magic so powerful?” Jason asked.

  “The Kakri trade in story,” Baileya said. “It is the foundation of our economy. Do you understand? It is like money for us. The Kharobem are made of story.”

  Jason snorted. “Okay. Thanks for clearing that up.”

  “They are world shapers. They alter things in a way no other magic can. They tell the world the way it should be, and it is.”

  Jason’s tongue felt thick. They hadn’t stopped for a drink in hours. The sun squeezed the sweat out of him. “Still, that’s not the same as being made of story. That’s like, I don’t know, word magic or something.”

  “Faster, Jason,” Baileya said, and for a while he didn’t speak at all. Keeping up with her exhausted him, and she was going slow for him. He would be embarrassed by how easily she outpaced him if not for the fact that he wasn’t sure any person he knew would be able to keep up with her. She seemed to be on a casual holiday stroll while he was doing the most strenuous march of his life.

  Sometimes she would stand beside him and mark out a certain landmark. A thorny tree, maybe. She would tell him to walk to it as quickly as he could, and then, if she wasn’t back, he could rest until she returned. She would disappear then, for spans of time as long as twenty minutes. He would stand beneath the thorn tree (or lie in the narrow shade of a boulder or rest at the bottom of a dune), sweat rolling from his face, his tongue thick and dry, waiting for her to return. When she did, she would say, “Quickly, Jason.” They would set off again, sometimes in the same direction, sometimes in another. She never explained why she made the choices she did, but he accepted them with mute appreciation.

  This time she left him in the shade of a rock jutting up from the desert floor. It angled toward the horizon in a way that let him sit beneath the overhang in the relative coolness of the shade. Baileya disappeared, telling him to be silent and conserve his strength. She would return in time.

  Drowsy from the heat and exhausted from walking, he fell asleep in the shade of the stone.

  “—somewhere near here,” a guttural voice said.

  “Climb up on the rock there,” another replied. Jason shook himself awake. Those were Scim voices.

  “So the Kakri woman can fill me with arrows? Do it yourself.”

  The second Scim grunted. “The Kakri are fearsome, but the boy . . . How could he have killed Night’s Breath? Did you see him with the bow upon the walls of Westwind?”

  They both chortled.

  Apparently everyone had seen Jason’s spectacular failure. More concerning was that the Scim—at least two of them—stood on the opposite side of this rock. He wished he had somehow walked faster all those times Baileya had told him to do so. He had to hope these two wouldn’t want a break in the shade. What should he do? Make a run for it? He didn’t think he’d have much of a chance. Maybe he could bury himself in the sand if he did it slowly so it didn’t make too much sound.

  “This accursed sun,” one of the voices said. “Oh, for the cool embrace of night.”

  “I can barely speak, my throat is so parched.”

  “Could we sit in the shade of this stone, even for a few moments?”

  “But if on
e of the war chiefs finds out—”

  “I will not speak of it.”

  “Nor I. But how far behind is the rest of the war party?”

  There was a pause. No doubt they were looking back, trying to judge the distance. Jason began to carefully pile sand in his lap. He didn’t think he would get himself buried in time, but he had to try something.

  The Scim came around the stone, still speaking to one another, and stopped, still as statues, when they saw Jason sitting in the shade. He sat up straight, doing his best to look like he had known they were coming and had been waiting for them. “Hello,” he said.

  The great shambling soldiers looked at one another, uncertain what to do. One had his hand on the handle of his ax, the other stood with his mouth wide open.

  Jason almost laughed. “When someone says hello, it’s polite to say hello back.”

  “Ehhhhhhh,” said one of the Scim. “Hello?”

  Jason smiled broadly. “That’s better. Now. If you don’t mind being a little crowded, all three of us should be able to fit in the shade of this rock.”

  “We have captured him,” one of the Scim said. Jason decided he would call him Fluffy, because his thick black hair was in a braid that had come loose, giving him a fluffy halo.

  “Not true,” Jason said.

  The second Scim (Jaws, Jason decided, because of how far his jaw had fallen open upon finding Jason sitting serenely under the rock) said, “It is true. You have no weapon. We are heavily armed. We will be joined by our army in a few minutes’ time.”

  “Then we might as well sit in the shade and wait,” Jason said.

  Fluffy gave him a sour frown. “We will not sit with the murderer of Night’s Breath.”

  Jaws said, nearly in the same moment, “It is a trap.”

  “A trap?” Jason laughed. “How could an invitation to sit in the shade be a trap?”

  “If we could see how it worked,” Jaws said, “it would not be a trap, would it?”

  Jason acknowledged his point, while racing through a plan to get himself out of this mess. He might be able to hold these two off, but he couldn’t expect the whole Scim army to stand in the sunshine for fear of a nonexistent trap.

  “You are too clever for me,” Jason admitted. He turned away from them, and when they could just barely see his face, he smirked.

  “Wait,” Fluffy cried. “I saw the look on your face!”

  Jaws said, “Tell us, have we stumbled into your trap already?”

  “There is no trap,” Jason said truthfully.

  Jaws pointed at him accusingly. “Precisely what someone would say if they had set a trap!”

  Baileya descended on them from the top of the rock, twisting her body so that each of her feet connected with one of their jaws. They fell backward, and she snatched the ax from Fluffy’s belt, flinging it toward Jason. “Catch!” she cried.

  He barely avoided getting brained with the ax. He grabbed the handle and tried to lift it, but he could scarcely get it up to his shoulder. Baileya had her staff in two pieces, and she whirled like a desert wind, meeting Jaws’s blade and keeping Fluffy at bay. Unable to do anything else constructive, Jason dug a hole and buried the ax.

  Distracted by Jaws’s sword, Baileya didn’t see Fluffy reach for her hand, crushing it. She cried out and dropped half of her staff. She tried to wrench away from Fluffy, but he held her hand fast, making it nearly impossible for her to parry Jaws’s blows. Jason scrambled to them, snatched up the fallen half of the staff, and drove the bladed end into Fluffy’s knee.

  Fluffy yowled and released Baileya, who brought the haft of her staff up into Jaws’s face, hitting him hard enough to knock him, stunned, to the ground. She yanked the other half of her staff from Fluffy’s knee and said, “Quickly, Jason!”

  “Sorry about your knee, Fluffy!” Jason called as they scrambled over a dune.

  “My name is not Fluffy!” the Scim warrior roared.

  Baileya made him run for almost thirty minutes. Finally she let him collapse at the top of a dune, the sun burning his face. She crouched, facing the direction they had come. “They are craftier than I supposed. The larger part of their forces was closer than I knew, while they left another small group behind to kick up dust, so we would think them in the distance. That was a close moment, indeed.”

  “Thirsty,” Jason said.

  Baileya stood over him and shielded his face with the sleeve of her flowing shirt. “There is a small oasis near here. I will need to check it first for wylna.” Those were the hyena things. Wylna. Jason thought he could fight off a pack of hyenas to get a drink of water. “First,” Baileya said, “I need you to bind my hand. I fear it is broken.”

  Jason sat up immediately and gingerly took her wrist in his hand. A nasty bruise spread beneath her golden-tan skin. The fingers were swollen, the center of her hand like a balloon. With her good hand she unwrapped a long piece of cloth from around her waist. It held her loose garment close against her body. She tore a strip of it with the blade of her staff and handed it to Jason. “Bind it tight,” she said.

  He wound it around her hand.

  “Tighter.”

  He yanked it, hard. He winced. Her face had gone pale. He didn’t like to see her in pain, certainly didn’t want to be the one causing her pain. But it had to be done.

  “Still tighter,” she said.

  She gritted her teeth, and he pulled as hard as he could. Sweat beaded her face, and she gasped. “Good. Now we find water. Then we run.”

  He helped her to her feet. She stood, weak with pain for a moment. He gripped both her arms, keeping her steady. He carefully wiped the sweat from her face. Her eyes met his, and her lips parted, but before she could speak, Jason said, “I know, I know, ‘Run faster, Jason.’”

  She leaned on him while they walked down the dune, but by the time they climbed the next, she had transferred her staff into her wounded hand, flexing her hand and spinning the staff lightly. She sent him up one dune, the wind blowing so it obscured his footprints, and she went in another direction. The Scim were close enough, she said, that it was wise to give them a false trail. He objected, but she assured him her strength had returned. He didn’t know how that was possible, but it was true that she looked better. He felt dehydrated, light headed, and exhausted, but she looked like she could run again. She slipped away to make the false trail.

  After she rejoined Jason, she pointed out an oasis.

  Oasis. The word made him think of a palm tree with coconuts next to a pure stream. This was a muddy puddle. An animal stood beside it, lapping water.

  “Is that . . . a lion cub?”

  “Perhaps.” Baileya squinted her silver eyes. “Not all is what it seems in the desert.”

  Jason was reminded of her stories about the many creatures of the desert who could change their shapes.

  The sand around the water hole quivered. “What’s that?”

  Baileya froze. So did the lion cub.

  A dog-sized creature shook itself free of the sand, its jaws clamping onto the cub’s rear leg. The cub cried out in panic, and two more of the creatures leapt out of the sand. They looked like wild dogs with thick, cracked lips and white patches in their sandy fur.

  “Wylna,” Baileya whispered. “We must go. Quickly, Jason.”

  “They’re going to eat that cub,” Jason said.

  “Better than eating us.”

  “Give me your staff,” Jason said.

  “No,” Baileya said. “We will not stop to fight three wylna with a battalion of Scim at our backs.”

  A faint sound came to them on the wind. “The Scim,” he said. “They’re nearby.”

  Baileya listened. The wylna had paused, their pointed ears pricked toward the Scim army. “They’re following the fake trail,” she said. “We must go now.”

  Jason had another idea.

  He jumped to his feet and shouted as loud as he was able, “Hey, Break Bones, we’re over here!”

  He ran to the oasis.
The wylna crouched down, watching him warily. He ran full speed toward the wylna with its maw latched onto the cub. He aimed a terrific kick at its head, but at the last moment the wylna let go, skittering away and growling at Jason.

  The wylna triangulated Jason the moment he stopped moving. No matter how he turned, there was one he couldn’t see. “I was a kickball champion in eighth grade,” he said. “Get close enough, and I’m gonna send you sailing over the fences like a red rubber ball.”

  The lion cub slipped away, limping, the wylna distracted by this new, larger prey. Jason kicked toward his blind spot, hoping the third wylna wouldn’t get a bite in. He turned in a circle, trying not to let any of them out of his sight for more than a second. “The Scim are gonna come over that hill soon,” Jason said. “When they do, we’re all going to want to run. But if you want to attack them, I won’t complain.”

  The Scim were shouting some sort of battle march. They were close. The wylna listened, backing up slightly from Jason. The chanting grew louder, and the wylna trotted away, one of them watching Jason over its shoulder. “This way,” Baileya hissed. She had crossed to the other side of the oasis. Jason fell to his chest and slurped up three quick gulps of water.

  Baileya was already running.

  The wind had whipped up. “I outsmarted those dog things!” Jason shouted.

  Baileya’s eyes flashed. “You are a fool.”

  That stung. She was one of the only people who had never called him a fool. “At least I’m consistent!” he shouted back. He had saved the lion cub, at least. That was something. The wind whipped past them, kicking up sand.

  He heard his name and, looking back, could see the Scim loping behind them. They were much too close, and there were at least twenty of them. An arrow whistled past his ear.

  “They are within bow shot,” Baileya said. “Run twenty paces ahead, then turn to the left. Run until you find a garden of stone. Climb to the top of the stones and wait for me.”

  “But what if you don’t—”