Land Keep

by J. Scott Savage

  He looked around the cavern. Lots of bones. A bed of smelly, dried grass. Shards of rock. None of that seemed to appeal to a fairy. But what if the thing she was searching for was hidden? Marcus couldn’t climb a mountain. But maybe finding what the fairy had been looking for could help anyway. Sorting through the sticks and logs, he found a branch just about the right size to work as a crutch.

  “Let’s see what this tribrac was up to.”

  Chapter 32

  Heart

  Kyja eased to within three feet of the icy chasm standing between her and the summit she’d been climbing toward for the last hour. Her stomach clenched. “There has to be another way.”

  There is no-o-o-o other path which will let you-u-u-u reach the peak before sunset. Frigid air swirled across the snow-covered ground, creating whirlwinds of ice biting at her arms and legs.

  Chewing her lip, she stared into the drop. It was at least ten feet across and hundreds of feet down. The ground on both sides was covered with ice and snow. She couldn’t possibly cross it. Even standing this close made her head swim.

  She couldn’t count on the North Wind for help. He’d been nothing but a nuisance the entire climb—blinding her with flurries of snow or rocking her balance with micro-bursts of cold wind. It was as if he wanted her to fail. Why couldn’t the South Wind have joined her instead of staying with Marcus?

  Thinking of Marcus brought back the guilt of leaving him. He was so sick. He shouldn’t be alone in that dank cave. But what choice did she have? If she wasn’t back with the fairy’s heart in—she checked the horizon where the sun was sinking dangerously low—in an hour and a half at most, they would fail this test and lose their chance to reach the Augur Well.

  If only she had Marcus’s courage. He would take one look at this opening, tuck his staff under his arm, and jump. And the crazy thing was, he’d find a way to land on the other side. He was the kind of person who saw a challenge and immediately overcame it. She, on the other hand, needed to look at things from a dozen different angles—questioning herself about which was the best choice.

  The only time she didn’t hesitate was when she acted impulsively—out of emotion instead of logic. Like when she’d seen the fairy in the grip of the tribrac. She hadn’t thought that through—hadn’t considered that the creature would tear her apart. And she certainly hadn’t known she had magic at the time. She’d just acted.

  Was there any way she could do that now? Could she set aside all of her fears and doubts and let her instincts carry her across the chasm? Physical strength alone wouldn’t be enough. She didn’t have the muscles or grace to make that kind of a jump.

  Which left magic.

  Magic. The thought made her giddy and terrified at the same time. She had magic. The thing she’d longed for her entire life. Marcus was surprised she’d mastered it so quickly—without even knowing she was doing it. But it came as no shock to her. During all those years of studying, of seeing other students succeed while she failed, she’d known—known—that if she ever had the chance, she could do magic better than all of them.

  She’d studied so hard, practiced so diligently, instinctively understanding how the elements combined and merged. Up until the point where she was asked to leave the academy, she’d mastered every part of magic—except actually having it.

  And now that she possessed it, she was terrified she’d been wrong. What if she could finally use magic, but still failed miserably?

  Time is-s-s-s pass-s-s-ing, the North Wind said. Whether he was happy about that, sad, or indifferent, she had no idea. But time was passing, and standing here wasn’t going to solve anything. She needed air magic to get across—the most unpredictable of all magic, whimsical and light. Exactly the things she wasn’t. Could she call on air magic when she was facing one of her greatest fears?

  “You have to do it,” she told herself.

  A gust of cold wind blew at her back. Was that encouragement?

  She set her feet and stared not into the chasm, but across it, to the other side, marking the spot where she would land. She began to rehearse in her mind what she would do, where she would jump, when she would use magic, and realized that was exactly the wrong thing to do. If she was going to succeed, she had to do it on instinct alone.

  “For you,” she whispered, and surprisingly she didn’t see the fairy in her head, but Marcus. Tensing her muscles, she took three deep breaths, leaned forward, and ran.

  Snow and rocks passed beneath her feet in a blur, but she wasn’t watching them. Her eyes were fixed on the spot she’d jump from and where she’d land. Three steps, two, one. She set her foot to leap and her boot slipped on the icy ground. Flailing her arms, she tried to push off, but she had no traction.

  She clumsily launched into the air. Her speed wasn’t enough; she wouldn’t reach the other side. She looked down. Icy rocks hundreds of feet below jutted up like spears. Fear surged through her body, and with it, desperation. Like a scream in the night, she called on air magic with every ounce of desire in her body. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a gust of air rose out of the chasm, lifting and pushing her. The thrill was intoxicating.

  But would it be enough? She stretched out her arms, clawing for the other side. She was still going to be inches short. Her fingers would just miss the far cliff. Like a giant hand, a blast of arctic air slapped her forward. Her hands caught the edge, slipped, pulled. She was across, rolling on snow-covered ground. She’d made it!

  Laughing and screaming like a little girl, she raised her hands and danced in the snow—her feet leaving a pattern of crazy circles in the white powder. She’d used magic under the most trying of circumstances. Maybe not perfectly, but well enough. Who knew how good she could become with practice? She held her arms out wide and shouted at the top of her lungs, “I. Have. Magic!”

  Magic, magic, magic, her words echoed back to her.

  The rest of the climb was surprisingly easy. Whether it was because she was unconsciously using magic or because she’d finally managed to set aside her fear, before she knew it, she’d reached the top of the peak. Standing on a granite outcropping several feet back from the edge—she hadn’t lost her fear of heights completely—she stared in awe at the amazing view. Through the crisp, blue air she could see forever—hundreds of miles of woods, meadows, valleys and rivers unrolled before her eyes.

  She could have stood there marveling at the majestic vista for hours, but the lower edge of the sun was nearly touching the horizon. “Where’s the sanctum?” she asked.

  A gust revealed a tiny rill in the fresh snow. Digging into the bank—using a small amount of fire magic to keep her fingers from freezing—she found a crevice in the rock below. It was a tight fit, clearly designed for a body much smaller than hers. But she managed to wriggle into the crack.

  After the blinding light of the afternoon sun reflecting off the snowy ground, it took her eyes several moments to adjust to the dark opening. Finally she could see enough to make out the confines of a small cave. Unlike the tribrac’s den, this cave seemed homey. Delicate shelves held shiny rocks, vases of flowers, a nest of fresh grass, and even a small, perfectly formed pinecone.

  In the very back, Kyja saw something glowing blue. She reached out, and her fingers closed around a glass bottle no bigger than the tip of her thumb. It seemed to tingle in her hand. She looked around the rest of the room, searching for some hint to the fairy’s song, but nothing stood out.

  After struggling back to the surface, she checked the sun. It was now touching the surface of the horizon. She had half an hour at most before it set completely.

  “Which is the quickest way back?” she asked.

  The wind swirled for a moment before blowing straight down the side of a nearly sheer slope. It would have been impossible to climb, even with magic. But she might be able to make it down. Holding the bottle tight in her fist, she spread her arms for balance. She ignored the voice inside her head that told her she was crazy and raced along the side of th
e mountain.

  Somehow, between air magic and the guidance of the North Wind that now seemed to be rooting for her, she made it to the bottom of the slope with only a few falls and no broken bones—and the crystal bottle intact. As soon as she reached the edge of the woods, she broke into an all-out run. Only a sliver of sunlight still showed in the western sky when the tribrac’s cavern came into view.

  Racing through the trees, the bottle clutched in her hand, she was nearly to the entrance when an ear-splitting roar echoed through the opening.

  Chapter 33

  Song

  Marcus pressed his face to a crack so small he could barely get his finger in it. He had no idea how something as clumsy as the tribrac would hide anything there, but he’d looked every other place the creature might have stashed something important enough to tempt the fairy. “Can you see anything?” he asked the South Wind.

  A warm breeze blew out from the crack. Nothing but a set of lizard bones.

  “Terrific.” Marcus hobbled to the fire and collapsed on the ground. That would make a great song—Ode to a Dead Lizard.

  He rested his aching head against the cave wall. “Don’t know why I thought I could do this anyway,” he muttered.

  If you have done your bes-s-s-t, i-i-i-i-t is all you can ask, the South Wind said.

  “I have done my best.” Not that it was much to talk about. He’d hobbled around the cave like a ninety-year-old man with arthritis, sifting through animal bones, bits of dried meat, and other things too disgusting to think about. Big deal. If his life were ever on the line, he hoped there would be someone better than him on the job.

  Someone like Kyja.

  She’d stare at the fairy, create some kind of psychic connection, and discover her song with hours to spare.

  He didn’t realize he’d spoken out loud until the South Wind asked, Your friend?

  “Yeah, my friend,” he said, staring gloomily into the fire. “She’s good at thinking things through and understanding people’s feelings—all that touchy-feely stuff. I’ve always been an act-first, think-later kind of guy. Maybe I’d have had an easier time on Earth if I’d have been a little more like her.”

  A small gust dried the perspiration from his sweaty forehead and kicked up the fire. Perhaps-s-s-s you can cha-a-ange?

  Change. That was a laugh. He was always telling other people to change, when that was one of the hardest things for him to do. Of course, he knew why he had trouble showing his feelings. They’d been hurt too often. Every time he started to make a friend, he’d moved or the person turned against him. Or, in the case of Elder Ephraim, died. Eventually Marcus had covered himself in a hard shell. If you didn’t feel, you didn’t have to worry about getting your feelings hurt.

  Could he change anymore even if he wanted to? Or had he become so fixed it was like he’d encased himself in concrete? The idea gnawed at him. He hated anyone telling him he couldn’t do anything. So why was he telling the same thing to himself?

  “What should I do?” he asked.

  Put yourself-f-f-f in her pla-a-a-a-ce.

  “Whose? The fairy’s, or Kyja’s?” He knew what Kyja would do. She’d try to see things from the fairy’s perspective. So he guessed the answer amounted to the same thing anyway.

  Looking at the fairy’s miniature features, he asked himself what she was doing here. What had drawn her? He gently ran a finger across the singed edges of her wings. They looked like they would go up in flames at the slightest heat. If he had wings like that, the last thing he’d do was go anywhere near a fire.

  Yet, when Marcus and Kyja arrived, she’d been practically right in it, bobbing and diving around the dancing flames as if . . . as if . . . a chill ran through his body, chattering his teeth.

  “Can you blow out the fire?” Marcus asked the South Wind.

  He could have sworn he heard her laugh. A moment later, a hurricane-force wind snuffed out the burning logs like a child blowing out a candle. Quickly, he snatched up a thin branch and began sifting through the embers. Something glinted amidst the blackened chunks of wood. He reached to touch it, sure it would burn his fingers, but the tiny object was cool. It looked like blown glass—the sort of thing you saw people making in malls back home—and he wondered how it had survived the heat.

  Tweezing it between his fingers, he blew away the ashes and sucked in his breath as he realized what it was. “A dawn chime,” he whispered. One of the little purple flowers that sang every morning as the sun rose. Once, Master Therapass had told him that, according to Tankum—the man who saved Marcus’s life at the cost of his own—dawn chimes were actually fairies who put down roots so they could be the first to welcome every new day.

  Master Therapass had urged him to listen to their song and try to understand it. At first, he’d wondered if the old man was crazy. The dawn chimes’ song sounded like just a bunch of notes. But the closer he listened, the more words he’d been able to make out. Later, after Master Therapass had been attacked by the Summoner, he’d actually thought he could hear the wizard’s voice in their song.

  “That’s what you came back for,” he said, holding the tiny glass flower in front of the fairy. “It must have been really important for you to risk the tribrac and the fire.”

  Could the glass flower have a song of its own? And was it possible to hear her song in it? Sweat dripped down his face as unnoticed as the shivers that were racking his body more and more. Gazing at the fragile purple petals, he tried to hear.

  First there was nothing. It was so hard to concentrate. His mind seemed fuzzy. As he was about to give up, a single note seemed to issue from the glass, as clear as a stream running fresh from a mountain spring. Another note joined in, and another.

  Something rustled around outside the cave entrance, but he couldn’t lose his focus. This was the song—her song. Only it wasn’t sung in human words, and it was going to take every bit of his concentration to understand it.

  It was a song glorifying the sun. That much he got. Celebrating the change from darkness to light. But it wasn’t just talking about day and night. It was talking about a battle between good and evil. The Dark Circle and . . . Sweat flooded out of his pores as he strove to understand.

  There had been a battle between the Dark Circle and the fairies over a thousand years ago. An army of dark wizards attacked during the spring equinox, when the fairies were least expecting it. The battle raged for days. Some of the fairies gave in, allowing themselves to be turned from creatures of light to something dark and terrible. But the rest fought on—even though they knew they had no chance of winning, even as they saw their ranks slaughtered by the bloodthirsty horde. The music resonated in his soul as unnoticed tears streamed from his eyes at the bravery of the fragile but indomitable creatures.

  At last, when all hope was lost, the last group of fairies—

  Something growled only a few feet away. Marcus looked up—and into the eyes of a tribrac. It bared its fangs at him, roaring with rage when it saw what he was holding. He had to run. But if he did, he would lose the rest of the song. The fairy would die. He didn’t know what made him do it. Maybe it was the fever. Maybe it was the song of the brave fairies still filling his heart. But on trembling legs, he rose to his feet, opened his mouth and sang the fairy’s song.

  He didn’t do it well. It was hard to translate some of the words, and his voice was rusty, with none of the bell-like clarity of the dawn chimes. But he sang true to what was in his soul.

  The tribrac should have killed him, but something in Marcus’s voice seemed to hold it back. In his hand, the glass flower began to glow. Other voices joined his. First, it was only the South Wind, picking up the melody and words where she could. Then new voices added to the song. The dawn chimes were supposed to come out only when the sun rose, but one by one, they raised their purple heads outside the cave entrance and united in chorus. Their voices strengthened his, helping when he stumbled, correcting when he translated wrong. In his hand, the flower shined with
a brightness that forced the tribrac backward.

  He sang of how the fairies fought until no hope was left. How, at last, rather than surrender and be turned to creatures of dark magic, they put down their roots and committed to fight evil for the rest of their days as the flowers that glorified light every morning.

  “Her mother was one of those,” Marcus sobbed. With the last of his energy, he sang a tribute to the fairies who’d given their lives. He never saw the tribrac turn and run with a roar of frustration. Never heard Kyja scream his name. Never saw her pour the shining blue liquid into the fairy’s mouth, or watched as the tiny creature sat slowly up, marveling at the field filled from end to end with purple flowers singing her song.

  He had used the last of his energy, and before the song ended, he collapsed and passed out.

  Chapter 34

  The Last Choice

  I have to say I’m astounded,” Mr. Z said. They were in his study for the third time. But something was different. The room was still filled with books, but the light seemed brighter, the books less messy. And the dust was gone, as if someone had tidied things up while they were away.

  Kyja knelt on the floor, cradling Marcus’s head in her lap. His skin was sickly white, and while a moment before he had been burning up, now his cheeks felt cold and clammy. His breathing was so shallow she could barely see his chest rise and fall. ““You have to help him. He’s dying.”

  “He’s sleeping now,” the man said. “But he will expire soon if something isn’t done.”

  “Then do it!” Kyja snapped.

  Mr. Z seemed unexpectedly solemn. He wore none of his ridiculous glasses, and his hat was settled straight on his head. Even the stack of books he sat on looked solid. “That is up to you.”

  “What do you mean?” Kyja asked, holding Marcus’s hand. “If this is another one of your tricks . . .”

  “No trick.” The man laced his fingers together, opened and spread them flat on the desk, then folded them again. “I’m completely sincere when I say I am astounded, amazed, flabbergasted. Less than three percent of the applicants make it through the second test. And none came to me with your inherent . . . weaknesses.”