by Marc Secchia
“What? You calling me old?”
He could not let that pass. “Thou, o dusky Western Isles beauty?”
The matron clipped her gawping student efficiently over the earhole. “Ignore his honeyed lies, girl. And you, I’ll have none of your drivel and windroc-jabber. For shame, a grizzle-bearded old vagabond like you hooking up with that sweet fireflower blossom?”
Kal tried his signature grin.
The matron flounced off with a toss of her long, intricately braided black hair. “And keep your grubby paws off my students, hear?”
Just then, Kal heard thunder outside the cavern. Odd. Usually his weather-nose would inform him of approaching storms. He pulled up his trousers, trying to decide if it was worth risking the Matron’s wrath just to tease this student. Then he saw who was storming toward him, face set like the thunder without, and Kal managed to pinch the wrong part of his anatomy quite neatly as he fumbled to look at least partly decent for the Queen of Immadia.
“You!” Aranya’s voice shook the cavern. “Did I or did I not order you to stay away from that Dragoness?”
Tazithiel stirred; Kal knelt at once by her side, while from the back where the stores were kept, Yozora bugled, “Silence! Who dares disturb my patients?”
If ever he had seen a storm in motion, Aranya was that storm as she crossed the cavern with a snap of wind and a growl of thunder attending her queenly train. She wore a modern Fra’aniorian lace gown in Immadian violet, with an intricately-worked lace bodice depicting dragonets dancing over a volcanic lake, set off by a darker under-shift, with a train of just three feet. A plain golden circlet adorned her brow. Her hulking Dragoness prowled behind, the ghostly Shifter-Dragon’s emotions reflecting and amplifying those of the Human woman. But Kal had neither risked his neck nor his precious, throbbing buttock to be stomped upon, bullied or chargrilled by a stray royal lightning bolt.
Drawing himself up, he said, “Before you keep your vow by kissing my thieving backside, o Queen, I need to draw your attention to a bigger problem.”
Aranya snapped, “I saved that Dragoness’ life!”
Peaceably, Yozora put in, “Actually, his was the magical signature I found inside Tazithiel’s heart. He healed her first.”
“I did?”
The Queen did not even blink. “Nonsense, he’s a filthy thief and the leader of an outlaw rabble. I have not placed a price on his head and signed a death warrant to see my orders flouted, Yozora. I want him tossed out of my Academy, preferably into the nearest volcano. Now.”
Aranya spat sparks, but Kal did admire a beautiful woman in a towering passion. He could stir them up, couldn’t he? He began to speak, but the aged Blue cut him off effortlessly. “He and the Indigo Dragoness are oath-bound. I say he stays for her healing. Look into the Dragoness, milady, and know it for yourself.”
Aranya’s eyes dipped. Kal had no need of the tremor of her hands, nor her soft gasp to betray the moment of recognition, for the peal of thunder that shook the school had to wake every man, woman and child for miles around. Tazithiel’s eyes snapped open. Focussed on Aranya’s face. The thief caught his breath. In a second, there came a second crash of thunder, a smaller daughter-echo of the first.
A silence developed which was so deep and powerful, it was as if a Dragon had taken them each by the throat and squeezed with its paws. Mirror-souls, mirror-persons. They were unquestionably of the same lineage, for Kal perceived Aranya and Tazithiel as identical twins in feature and form, the only differences being the hair and eyes, and Tazi’s dusky skin-tone to Aranya’s much paler Northern looks. Indigo eyes locked with amethyst. Tazithiel’s distinctly night-blue locks, identical in abundance and the exact same volume of wave and curl, matched Aranya’s multi-coloured Shapeshifter heritage. Otherwise? Not even a master gemstone assessor could tell these two jewels apart. Kal found the effect disconcerting.
Tazithiel’s fingers rose, wondering, to touch Aranya’s cheek. “How?”
The Immadian was humbled. Broken. Tears welled and spilled. “I never imagined my lost egg would come home,” Aranya whispered.
Yozora said, “This is what your Balance power suspected, great lady. The harmonies between your magic and hers now blaze before me. Shell-mother to shell-daughter. Tazithiel is your kin, the offspring of your loins.”
Deep puzzlement creased Tazi’s brow. “I don’t understand. Kal … oh Kal, what does this mean?”
He cleared his throat. “I rather suspect you’re a long-lost Princess of Immadia, Tazithiel. You do look weirdly alike, almost royal sisters. I imagine that your Mejian shell-parents always knew you were not their egg, or someone switched … eggs? Is that possible?”
“Aye, your heritage is of Immadia,” said the Queen.
The Indigo Dragoness’ knuckles whitened against her blanket. “And you signed a death warrant for my Rider–did I hear right, mother, if a creature like you may be called ‘mother’?” Yozora tried to hush her, to calm her down, but Kal could have told the Blue he might better have tried to bottle a Cloudlands tempest. Tazi snarled, “How exactly does a Dragoness lose an egg? Just what kind of a mother are you, mighty Star Dragoness?”
Aranya choked out, “One who has laid fourteen children untimely in the grave, child, and seen many more pass on. A mother soul-shadowed by grief.”
“And you lost me?” Tazi coughed, choked and clutched her stomach with a low groan. Sweat broke out on her forehead; Kal tried to hold her, but she shoved him aside with strength born of fury. “Answer … how could you not have known?”
“I remember that day.” The Queen’s whisper was a desert of desolation surrounding a green oasis of hope. “One hundred and twelve years, three months and four days ago it was. In Herimor. I know not how your egg came to join us north of the Rift, shell-daughter. I was gravid with my seventh clutch of nine. A double-clutch.”
“How many children do you have, lady?” Kal blurted out.
Muted now, Aranya’s tones took on the lilt of her native Immadia. “Thirty-six, I thought–but now I know the number for thirty-seven. Thirty-six have passed on to the eternal fires; one was lost, but now she is found. There is a beast of Herimor they call the guzzar-guzzak, which translates as–”
“The egg thief.” Tazithiel turned her head away.
“It’s a type of Dragon which possesses a magic ancient even among the Dragonkind, a magic of shadow and deception, as is so much of Herimor’s magic and heritage. It’s odd.” She smiled, but there was such a well of sorrow in her expression, Kal feared he might drown. As he encircled Tazithiel with his arms, she shook as though a hammer had tapped a knell upon her spirit. Aranya said, “If you cast your mind back to your eggling-dreams, Tazithiel, you’ll probably remember that moment. I was never certain about the number of eggs in my clutch. Dragonesses lay three eggs in a clutch, you see. A double-clutch is highly unusual. Seven? Unheard-of … yet it must have been.”
The Indigo Dragoness seemed frozen. Kal could not imagine what she was thinking.
“At the time, I was struck down by a magical Shapeshifter illness. That is when the creature discovered me. I was never certain what I dreamed in my fever-dreams, for I sensed an unborn eggling cry out to me, just once. Then it vanished.”
Aranya touched her sleeve to her eyes. “My late husband, the Shadow Dragon, thought me mad. He was too old to join me, but I searched fruitlessly for seven years.”
“So, I get to call you old woman?” Kal touched Tazi’s cheek tenderly.
“Don’t! Don’t believe her lies, Kal!” Tazithiel cried. Aranya twitched as though struck across the face. “She abandoned me. As if a Star Dragoness couldn’t find her own egg!”
The Immadian Queen began to say, “Star Dragon eggs have a way of–”
Tazithiel screamed a word in Dragonish; a word that burned Kal’s mind with dark fires, bitter on the tongue and bitterer on the soul. He had never heard a Human throat utter such a sound, for all intents and purposes, a death-rattle.
“
Tazi!” Kal clutched her close.
Her chest heaved as though she intended to vomit. Instead, Tazithiel shrieked, You’re no mother of mine! Get out of my sight! OUT!
The blast of her Storm power knocked Aranya off her feet, but Kal suspected she had chosen to accept the blow as a kind of penance. Tazithiel began to scream again, but a bloody froth blew off her lips. Yozora, swooping with startling speed for a venerable Dragon, laid his paw across her back as his power poured forth. Tazi slumped in his arms, unconscious.
Kal stared at Aranya. The woman looked haunted, as though that scream had ripped her soul from her body and tossed it into the Cloudlands. She scrambled to her feet, turned and fled.
He thought to feel vicious satisfaction. Instead, there was only grief.
* * * *
The following day, he and Aranya met briefly at the entrance of the infirmary.
“How is Tazithiel?” asked the Queen, as grey as the cloudy skies. For the first time, she threatened to look her age, Kal thought uncharitably.
“Better. Yozora’s pretty upset, though. He says you had no right–”
“I have every right!”
“Do you?”
Aranya’s hands clenched at her sides. Her definite chin lifted, so much a mirror of Tazithiel’s mannerism, Kal wanted to laugh. Stubborn as Island-foundations, the pair of them. “I will not rescind my death warrant. Step outside this cavern, and I will have you executed.”
“I spared your life, in case you hadn’t noticed,” said Kal.
“Couldn’t find the courage?” Aranya jeered. If only she knew, but he could not say it. She already thought the worst of him. “I spared yours, which makes us even. You don’t want me as an enemy, Kallion of Fra’anior. I remember that boy from Immadia. You stole something indescribably precious to me and by all reports, you have not been a good man for a single day since. Quite the opposite.”
Kal bristled, “Who appointed you Justice of the Island-World and arbiter of good and evil? Besides, if I want to leave this cavern, I will. A hundred Dragons including you and all your Star magic couldn’t stop me, as already proven.”
“You … Gi’ishior?” she gasped.
A smirk played about his lips. “I decline to answer your baseless accusations, o Queen.”
“I will not stand for these insults!” Lightning haloed her hands; but Aranya did not strike. “For my daughter’s sake alone, Kal, I will swallow your disrespect. You have her ear. You will convince Tazithiel that she requires training–with me. Or that filthy Green will have his filthy way with her again, and there’ll be nothing I can do to stop him.”
His blood boiled. Insults, aye. But the mention of Endurion made all manner of murderous, vengeful feelings swamp his rational mind. Words spilled out. “I’ve been the one training your daughter. And, I’m pleased to report, she is truly talented on the pillow-roll. An exceptional student.”
Freaking windrocs! That came out so obnoxious, he impressed even himself.
The colour of Aranya’s rage threatened to overwhelm the rather fetching shade of her amethyst-coloured Helyon silk dress.
But he did need information. “Sorry,” he growled. “I’m just riled. Look, lady, can we reset this whole business? I do respect who you are but I don’t know you, and you don’t know me.”
The amethyst eyes bored into his. Beauty, power, majesty–Aranya really was all the legends said she was, Kal decided. He began to feel a feather-touch upon his mind, but it seemed the Immadian Enchantress withdrew. Perhaps she knew the temptation of power. She must know it better than any person alive; the restraint of that power, he could also respect.
“I will offer you a boon,” he said. “A peace offering.”
“In exchange for what?”
Kal swallowed as new-model Kal’s mind served up an option the King of Thieves would have laughed off the Island in an instant. Curse this conscience that kept intruding at the most inopportune moments! He wrestled with the idea, beat it with a mental stick and booted it brutishly in the tender parts where such ideas deserved to be booted. Bah! The notion only surged to the fore, tenfold stronger.
“Goodwill,” he gritted between clenched teeth.
“Done and bargained for,” rapped the Queen. With her ability to mask her emotions, Kal decided, she could make a master card-player. “What do you offer?”
He hauled a Fra’aniorian bow out of the threadbare closet of those manners he reserved for moments of genuine emotion. On second thoughts, he sank to one knee and bowed his head. “O great Queen, I offer you the scale of a White Dragoness.”
Aranya’s expression registered only disdain, but her hand shook so hard she could barely accept the gift. With a nod, she withdrew.
Following after the Queen with his eyes, Kal believed she was crying.
Chapter 20: Thief at School
TRY AS HE might, Kal could not shake the spectre of an Amethyst Dragoness who had shouldered her way between him and Tazithiel. Shell-mother and daughter passed terse messages to each other through Kal or by messenger monkey until Tazi ordered him not to leave her side again. Kal felt like a sliver of meat mashed between a huge slice of sweetbread on the one side and a titanic one on the other. Despite the fact that Aranya’s Dragoness was three hundred and forty feet long and could peer into the twelfth story of an Academy building without trying, Tazithiel stymied her mother’s every action or overture. How alike they were in verve, obduracy and beauty!
The feud developed with the speed of a Dragon hatchling learning to fly. The mere mention of Immadia became enough to tip Tazithiel into a towering rage. She chafed at the speed of her healing. She suffered Aranya to apply her healing power, only to find snide ways of snubbing her mother every time the Queen attended her bedside.
Kal wore as thin as an aged scrolleaf.
Thus, it came as a huge relief to him to receive a message hawk from Riika nine days after he had burgled the Academy and apparently enflamed every Dragon within a hundred leagues as the story of his daring stunt leaked out, triggered by a Dragoness fishing the stinking, bloating corpse of a ralti sheep out of an ostensibly sacred lake. Kal shrugged. “Oops.” Aranya, who had come by one evening to lay the charge, stalked out of the infirmary, ripped her priceless dress to shreds as she transformed, and lit the entire league-wide caldera with a fireball that had to rival an erupting volcano.
Kal yelled something snarky about her still owing him a butt-kissing; Tazithiel laughed so hard that Yozora had to come and administer painkilling herbs and magic.
Aranya’s Dragon-rage was a phenomenon of majestic intimidation.
“Back before you know it,” said Kal, patting Dragon-Tazithiel next to her eye. “Rest up while I go smuggle my daughter into this den of fiery conceit.”
“I am rested.”
Knowing better, he still had to try. “Tazi–”
Low, volatile fires rumbled in her belly. Finally. He had not heard that healthy sound since Endurion had struck her down. Yet Kal knew her anger burned against him, never far from the surface, for Tazi knew he meant to mention Aranya one more time. Never had he imagined that discovering her true mother would affect the Indigo Dragoness in this way.
He waved casually. “May you drool over naked thieves dancing through your dreams to filch your incomparable scales, thereby furnishing a new industry in jewellery-making.”
Tazi pushed him along with a waft of hot hair. “Fly strong and true, my Rider.”
Kal flew as far as the entrance to the Dragonship landing field, where a smirking soldier informed him that a certain Kallion of Fra’anior was banned from leaving the volcano. Queen’s orders. Oh, and she was away for a week. Kal flung a stone at an unsuspecting purple-banded parakeet on his way back, and felt a crass fool for doing so. The bird was only singing. What he needed was a bigger bird.
His gaze veered to the smaller trio of volcanoes–smaller being relative, since their peaks had to be at least a mile tall–with alert interest. Aye. A bigger bird.
Late that evening, a troupe of sweating labourers lugged a cart full of ralti furs, which by marvellous coincidence just happened to be destined for Jalfyrion’s roost, all the way from the complex of storage caverns beneath the Academy buildings, across the field, down the winding path, past the green lake and four thousand feet up the mountainside. Kal rode inside like the King he was. He liked this method of stealing about. Much better than actual exertion. And so he passed once more beneath hundreds of unsuspecting draconic noses.
“Sheepskins?” Jisellia sounded puzzled. “Jalfyrion’s sleeping–I guess he placed the order.”
“You did. Says so on this scroll,” said a male voice, the one who had griped his way up the mountain with a never-ending, never-repeating stream of invective. Kal thought he had heard every colourful curse known to a Jeradian, including all its surrounding Islets. He had thought wrong.
Jisellia said, “Park your cart. I’ll deal with it.”
“Sign here, lady.”
Quill scratched on scrolleaf; the men departed.
Silence. Hmm. Kal contemplated wriggling out from beneath the load, but he needed to be certain those men had truly left. Perhaps a nice nap was in order. He could sneak up on Jisellia at his leisure.
That was when a Dragon’s paw tipped out the cart, dumping Kal on his head.
“Aha!” shouted the Rider. “Caught.”
“Ouch. What way is this to greet a friend?” he complained.
Jalfyrion’s expression suggested he had discovered a rat hiding in his bed. “You’re like a curl of sulphurous smoke, impossible to grasp in one’s paw! We Dragonkind plan to teach you a long overdue lesson.”
“If you Dragons weren’t all sleeping with your fire-eyes open–yie!” The clash of fangs almost trimmed his stubble.
Jisellia leaped between them. “Stop!”
The Red Dragon snarled, “By the First Egg, he dares insult the Dragonkind.”
Perhaps insolence was not the most advantageous way to ask for help. Bowing very deeply, Kal gripped his dignity by the scruff of the neck and essayed, “My esteem for the Dragonkind grows hourly in this place, o formidable Red Dragon. The wiles of a master peculator with four decades of experience have barely sufficed to succour my insignificant Human presence from the raging splendour of all the fire-souls which surround me.”