“No, don’t be a weakling, do it like THIS,” she laughed, kicking a foot full of mud at him.
Dev’in gasped as the cold slop hit him in the face. He coughed and gagged, flicking his head about.
The young girl laughed so hard she fell backwards onto the hard floor of the cave, holding her tummy and rolling around.
“It’s not funny!” he complained, splashing water on himself and twisting his whole body like a towel to wring himself out.
“Yes it is,” Mariss nodded as she gave a deep belly laugh. “It’s very, very funny.”
He flicked the mud off his hands and sat down, looking up at the sorrowful stalactites dripping above them. Off in the distance, the other changelings had risked a small fire to cook some more of those foul-smelling roots they had dug up. Dev’in watched their mournful faces, their sorrowful eyes. He could not remember the last time he had seen one of the adults smile.
“Why do we have to stay here?” he wondered. “It’s cold, I don’t like it. Why can’t we go home?”
Mariss changed her body into a crab and practiced walking sideways up the cave wall.
“My mom said it’s because Valpurgeiss was killed.”
He looked at her angrily. “No he wasn’t. Don’t say that. He’s our father god. He can’t be killed.”
She shrugged. “Mama said the other gods killed him. That’s why he can’t protect us anymore.”
Anger flashed in his young heart, and he stood up defiantly. “I said, don’t say that!”
Pulling his foot back, he clumsily kicked her in her armored side, knocking her over onto her back.
“Hey! I can’t get up,” she complained, her many legs kicking about fecklessly.
She changed back into a young girl, unsure of what she had done to upset him, but he had already run off.
Dev’in ran past the adults as they sat there, silent and stony, and threw himself into his mother’s lap.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
He looked up at her, his young eyes growing moist. “Mariss said a fib. A bad fib. She said that Valpurgeiss is dead. It’s not true, right mama? A god can’t die, right?”
The other adults turned away, their faces pinched in grief.
Mother’s eyes became moist as well, and she looked away. “Come on, honey,” she said, her lip trembling, “let’s get you some dinner.”
* * *
(Present Day)
Dwale hazily opened his eyelids, but saw nothing. After having been sightless for so long, only to see again for a time, he had reacquired the habit. He could of course, sleep with his eyelids open, but it just felt wrong somehow.
Closing his eyelids again, he turned his attention on his other senses. The air was cool, with a hint of salt to it. He knew right away he was no longer on Wysteria. The spicy scent of the trees was gone, but the familiar musk of Wysterian men was everywhere. The deck beneath him creaked, the whole room rocking gently from side to side. He was on an airship. He could make out hushed voices. Although he could not make out the words, there were tones of anticipation and excitement, not something he normally heard from other men. In fact, the only Wysterian man he had ever known to sound excited was his older brother, Privet.
Dwale moved to wobbily sit up, and caught the attention of someone nearby. Dwale heard him approach with the swip-tap, swip-tap of someone using a crutch.
“Be still, it’s all right, brother,” came the hushed voice. “My name is Willowood, and you are safe here.”
“Why have you taken me from my matron?” Dwale demanded, trying to shake the fog out of his brain.
“That leaf-witch had you drugged,” he answered. “We couldn’t leave you behind.”
Dwale flinched visibly at hearing Madam Freesia so boldly vitiated. “You should not speak of my lady that way.”
A strong leathery hand patted him on the shoulder. “It’s all right, son. You don’t have to pretend. She can’t hurt you anymore.”
Without thinking, Dwale reached up and touched the scarred flesh around his eyes. The venomous vines had been removed, and the skin was beginning to heal. “She never…hurt me…” he said weakly, trying to defend her honor.
The next footsteps that approached were confident like a woman’s but heavy like a man’s. “Ah, so he’s finally coming out of the fog,” the man said happily. “Uni’amat root is powerful stuff. Great for breeding, bad for your head. She must have given you a bucketful.”
Her fertile cycle was approaching,” Dwale explained, overwhelmed by all that was happening. “She wanted to get a head start on the breeding season.”
“This is Akar,” Willowood said proudly.
Dwale moved to greet him, but realized he didn’t know which level of bow to use. “Pardon me for asking, Mister Willowood, but you didn’t state the class of his family.”
There was a thud as Akar took a knee, and he cupped Dwale’s hands in his to prevent him from paying homage. “That’s the best part,” he said excitedly. “There are no more classes here. No more tribute, no more deference.”
Dwale’s eyebrows rose in dismay. “Where are we?”
“We are on a great exodus, brother. To a new homeland, where we will live free at last.”
The bosun took up the call, and the men became excited. “Land-ho!”
Hundreds of footsteps ran towards the front of the ship. Dwale could feel the prow dip down from the weight of them.
“Come, brother,” Akar bade, taking his hand in his. Dwale could feel the scars running across the man’s skin. “Our new home awaits us.”
Dwale was helped to his feet, and carefully led outside. He could feel the sunlight caress his face, he could feel the air become moister as they passed thought a cloud.
The men hollered and cheered. Hands slapped against backs and shoulders. Many wept openly. Some moved to pray, but then caught themselves and simply sang instead. More voices drifted in from above and below, and Dwale realized there were a great many airships around them, moving in formation. Their sudden appearance to his awareness was a bit startling.
Dwale grabbed Akar’s shirt to maintain his balance. “What do you see?”
“I see great docks like a hedgerow maze, floating in the air like a chandelier above a marble city. There are ships everywhere, so many they swarm like butterflies.”
Dwale’s brow pinched. He recalled Setsuna speaking of this place.
“Madaringa,” he whispered. “Home of the Time Benders.”
* * *
There was a flash of lightning, and for the briefest of moments, a black ship was silhouetted against the night sky, before vanishing again amidst the storm clouds.
“Drop canvas,” Mandi shouted, her soaked hair clinging to her back as she spun the ship’s wheel.
Margaret and Molly grabbed the bunt line and jumped off the drenched yardarm, allowing their bodyweight to fold up the remaining sail as the ship approached the unlit dock.
Lying ahull, the ship came to rest and floated there silently in the dark rain.
Margaret tied down the line and ran beneath the awning of the captain’s cabin, her glasses fogging up from the exertion.
“Kay, we’re all locked down,” she reported, trying to sound useful. “The rain was getting in from underneath the broken front part…
“The draft.”
“Yeah, that thing. So, I put up a couple of sheet things to keep the water out.”
Mandi wrung out her blonde hair as best she could. “Secured,” she corrected. “You really need to learn what stuff is called.”
Margaret snorted and pushed her glasses up. “Yeah, sorry. I’m going to go get some water out of the barrel thingy.”
“The scuttlebutt.”
“Yeah, that thingy.”
Mandi looked on in disbelief as she watched Margaret walk off. “A
mazing. I spent months trying to track the Dreadnaught and her crew. I thought they must be some sort of geniuses for evading me for that long. I feel like it’s a big hit to my pride as a professional to find out how stupid they are.”
Molly came in out of the rain, and Mandi pulled out a towel.
“We’ve got to keep you dry, kid,” she said, wiping her down. “Don’t want you to catch cold.”
Molly looked up, her little wet pigtails drooping. “I’m tired. How many more islands are we going to visit?”
“As many as it takes. Right now, all we can do is hope they notice one of our messages and come out to meet us. We’ll wait an hour, then make sail for Mertrion.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t just call them on the crystal array,” Margaret commented, fishing a ration packet out of a sack.
Mandi blinked. “Seriously? Athel’s group can’t go within half a mile of a crystal array anywhere in the world. They’d be caught before they finished saying hello.”
Margaret vapidly took a sip of the packet. “Oh.”
Mandi pinched the bridge of her nose. “How in the world did you people ever escape from me at Thesda?”
Margaret shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”
“No one’s that lucky; clearly it was your skills that beat me.”
“Thanks,” she said happily.
Mandi rolled her eyes. “That was sarcasm, Margaret.”
Margaret leaned to look over the side of the ship. “You mean to the right?”
“No, that’s starboard, not sarcasm, you…you know what? Never mind.”
Molly covered her mouth and giggled. “Kitty is mad.”
Mandi sulked and pulled out a ration packet.
Margaret reached out and tugged on Mandi’s sleeve.
“Not now, Margaret.”
Margaret tugged again, looking out over the side. “You’re right, something really is on the sarcasm side.”
Mandi smacked her hand away. “I said, not now!”
Mandi turned and saw something that gave her pause. Something that should not have been there. A huge Nallorn tree standing just inland of the docks, a small group of people standing around her base. Her great branches shimmered dimly in the flashing rain.
“I don’t think we need to go to Mertrion.”
“Captain!”
Margaret opened the cargo doors and ran out into the rain, flinging herself into Captain Evere, wrapping her arms around him.
“It’s good to see you, lass,” Evere said, setting a strong hand on her head. “When we heard you were captured we feared the worst.”
“It was awful,” Margaret admitted, burying her face in his rain jacket.
Rachael took off her cowl and motioned to the men. They laid down a gangplank, and began using wheelbarrows to load the cargo area with soil for Deutzia.
Mina stepped up and gave Margaret a hug. “It’s good to see ya, sweetie,” she praised. “That was really clever, sending us a coded message like that.”
“Oh, that wasn’t my idea. It was hers.”
Margaret stepped aside, revealing Mandi as she stood there.
“Hi,” Mandi said awkwardly.
Mina’s jaw dropped open. “It’s you.”
“Yes,” she said apologetically.
Captain Evere drew his rifle and leveled it at her head.
“No, no, it’s okay,” Margaret soothed. “She’s the one who sprung me free.”
Ryin came by with a wheelbarrow and was so shocked he snagged his wheel on a buntline and toppled over.
“You!”
Mandi rolled her eyes. “Yes, still me. How many times are we going to play this game?”
“I knew it! I knew it!” Ryin said, coming up to his feet. “I said, huh? Didn’t I say? Didn’t I say we should go down there to the bottom of the waterfall and check to make sure she really died?”
Evere didn’t lower his weapon, the black orbs in his sockets looked Mandi over, searching for any excuse to fire. “Aye, perhaps we should have, at that. Then she’d be dead already.”
Mandi held up her hands. “If I was any normal person that fall would have killed me. But, I’m not. My body was saturated with void magic, it’s not something that can just be easily destroyed…”
She trailed off and looked at her hands. “At least…it used to be.”
Rachael stepped forward. “Alliance intelligence intercepted a lot of communiqué that didn’t make sense to us at the time. Explosions at sea, far from the shipping lanes, recently destroyed towers no one knew had existed. People discovering the crumbled remnants of underground facilities that had never been there before. That was you, wasn’t it?”
Mandi stepped aside to allow the wheelbarrows to pass. “Yes. I fought against the Kabal as best I could, to try and right the wrongs I had been a part of, but I failed. They stripped me of my powers, and now I’m too weak to do anything.”
Mina looked away, hiding her face in Evere’s coat.
Captain Evere pulled back the flint lever on his rifle. “We should get everyone loaded as quickly as we can. This whole thing reeks of a trap.”
Rachael nodded, and signaled to the men to hurry the process.
“The changeling stays here,” Evere said coldly.
“But…she helped me find you,” Margaret said, hurt.
Molly tugged on Mandi’s pant leg.
Mandi wrapped her arms around herself. “No, it’s all right, Margaret,” she said regretfully. “They’re right not to trust me.”
She lowered her eyes. “I wouldn’t trust me either.”
“Can you check the ship for booby traps or trackers?” Evere asked his wife without turning his eyes away.
“I lost my magic, not my ears,” Mina affirmed, running inside.
Molly tugged on Mandi’s pant leg even harder. “Sis…”
“Geiss’ teeth! Kid, will you please stop tugging on me?!”
Molly pointed out into the night. “Are they going to come too?”
“They?”
Ryin spun around, Evere kept his target in his sights.
There was a flash of lightning, illuminating a dozen large figures gently rocking from side to side as they luffed up to the edge of the bluffs through the rain. Each of them as large as a building, thick scaled hides, with long trunks coiling before them.
Ryin’s eyes went wide. “War elephants!”
“It’s the Ronesian army,” Rachael realized. The men began panicking, loading everyone up as quickly as they could. The last of the soil was loaded. Alder was taken inside on a gurney. Privet was wheeled up the ramp in his chair.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Ronesian soldiers came crawling over the ridge, their leopard spots dimly glowing in the downpour.
Rachael looked around. “How did they find us? Who blabbed?”
Evere pressed the barrel of his rifle against Mandi’s neck, the rain pattering off his weapon. “No one blabbed, lass. The shape shifter brought them here.”
Mandi swallowed. “Don’t be an idiot. Ronesian magic can give visions of the future. A really skillful one could have divined that you’d be here tonight.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Look, I’m not a soldier, I’m an assassin. I don’t stick my neck out when I don’t have to. Think about it. If I was trying to trap you, I wouldn’t be down here with a gun to my face, I’d be up there safe with them.”
“Perhaps you’re just not that good at your job,” Evere accused, adjusting his stance.
“I did catch you when you were a kitty,” Molly giggled.
“Stow it, kid,” Mandi snapped.
Evere shouted up without taking his eyes off her. “Woman, how’s the search going?”
Mina stuck her head out of a porthole above. “By the throne, Allister, how fast d
o you think I can do this?”
Evere ground his teeth. “I told you to call me Captain in front of the others, woman!”
Molly covered her mouth and snickered. “His name is Allister?”
Crystal spotlights roared to life, illuminating the dock and the black ship in blinding light.
“Stop right there,” came a loud feline voice.
They all had to shield their eyes. A decorated officer on the ridge stepped out before of the one lights, his shadow casting over them all as they backed away.
“I am Captain Tommit Henen of the Royal Guard,” he announced in his accented common. “Lower your weapons or you will be fired upon.”
One of the war elephants raised its massive trunk, which glowed from within, illuminating clusters of pulsating veins. With a clack of tusks, a beam of sorcerous red energy struck out across the dock, crackling across the bow of the ship and streaking out into the night.
Everyone crouched away, their skin stinging from the heat.
“You didn’t give us a chance to throw down out weapons!” Ryin shouted back. “You don’t just make the threat, then fire!”
“That was a warning shot,” Captain Henen said. “The next one will not miss.”
Both sides froze, everyone waiting for the other to make a move. The Ronesians waiting for the order to open fire, those at the docks waiting for an indication from Evere as to what they should do.
“You’re here for me, right?” came a hoarse voice.
There was a clattering of chains as Athel stepped forward, soaked to the bone from the pouring rain.
Henen looked her over and checked with his lieutenants, who each nodded in verification.
“Yes,” he announced.
“Your uncle, Seer Alifan, was a good man. He spoke very highly of you.”
“As he did you,” the captain returned. “I regret to meet you under these circumstances, Queen Forsythia.”
Privet wheeled himself a little closer, careful not to make any sudden movements. “Athel, what are you doing?”
She answered flatly without looking back. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
Athel took another step forward, as far as her shackles would allow. “If I turn myself over willingly, Captain, will you let my friends go?”
Isle of Wysteria: Throne of Chains Page 5