“We will be on horseback, in frigid temperatures, dangerous terrain, almost two weeks one way, again,” he explained. “That child might not survive. Can you live with that? Can you live with endangering yourself to the point of miscarriage?”
Veria didn't answer.
“What if that child is Andon's?” he asked. Veria's stomach churned and her chest went hot at the thought, as it always did. “That's what you want...I know it. I hear it all the time. I'm sure you would never admit to wanting him. Wanting to settle down and leave all this. But I'm starting to think that you're right. You've been right all along.”
“About what?” Veria asked.
“Get out. Settle down. Leave this power behind and go live a normal life, Birdie,” he replied in a somber tone, “before you get yourself killed.”
“I am not leaving you,” she scoffed. “And there is no way for me to get out. He expects both of us to do this.”
“Then tell him you're pregnant with his child and he won't!” Strelzar rebutted.
“How will that help me 'get out'? It just leaves me stuck with him in a different manner. I'm not ready for that.”
“You need to get ready for it quickly, Birdie, because you don't have much time before it becomes obvious to the world, which includes Browan.”
Veria felt a sob form in her throat. She wanted to see Andon first. She wanted to tell him first. She wanted to tell him everything...first.
“Ah...” Strelzar hummed in recognition. “I see.”
“If I go, it buys me more time,” Veria argued. “He'll be back from Esperan by the time we're back from Govaland, and—”
“Oh yes! And I'm sure he'll be so pleased that you murdered his beloved Master!” Strelzar uttered sarcastically.
“He won't know,” Veria muttered.
“Maybe not, but you will,” Strelzar pointed out. “Don't think that guilt won't eat you alive until it destroys every corner of the happy little life you wish to have.”
Veria dropped her head in embarrassment, her hand instinctively caressing the tiny new bump at her middle.
“And if I know anything about secrets, Birdie, it's that they never stay hidden forever.”
Veria sighed. “Strelzar...I don't have a choice.”
“You always have a choice.”
“No, I don't! And don't tell me that when you are also trying to tell me what to do!” she rebutted.
After a few moments of thoughtful silence, Strelzar slumped forward in defeat. “You are right...” he sighed. “So what do you want to do?”
“We are the Twin Dragons,” Veria said softly. “We go together, or we don't go at all.”
“Your loyalty is flattering,” he mumbled with a slight grin.
“Well, it's earned, so deal with it,” Veria snapped facetiously.
“You want to kill Ellory Mielyr?” he asked.
“I don't want to kill anyone,” she replied, shaking her head. “But maybe we can talk to him?”
“It's worth a try, though I know him quite a deal more than you, and I'm not optimistic.”
“Well...do you want to kill him?”
“I may have joked about it in the past, but certainly not. I also don't want harm to come to you, which is exactly what will happen if we fail. It might happen if we go. But it will certainly happen if we don't...”
Veria swallowed nervously, heat bubbling up from her stomach into her throat.
“Our best security is for you to tell him,” Strelzar said quietly. “But if you don't want to, I understand.”
“I can't, I just...”
He pulled her into his chest in a comforting hug. “I know. I know, Birdie.”
“Let's just get this over with,” Veria muttered into his hard chest, a cold indifference suddenly washing over her.
Her eyes met her dear friend's, and she recognized the icy numbness in them, too.
It was what they had to do to be alright with all of it—what they had done, and what they had to do next.
They took simultaneous deep breaths, steeling themselves further against the emotions that threatened to break them. Veria always told herself the Twin Dragons were different people from them. Separate.
She usually tried to put some distance between who she felt she was and the version of herself that killed two hundred people half a year ago. But she knew the time would come again when she'd be asked to kill, and here it was. So now, she'd have to embrace that person—that part of her who killed on command. Shutting off her emotions was the easiest way to turn into that person.
No, not a person, she thought. Not a person—just a vessel for death and destruction.
Like the stone dragons themselves.
The peaks of Govaland were exactly how she remembered them. Of course, they wouldn't change. Not in her lifetime anyway, she thought. And probably hadn't changed in Strelzar's lifetime, either. She closed her eyes atop her confident, practiced mare, and wished to be a mountain. The energy of the ancient earth they traveled filled her to the brim, calling to her, begging her to connect, settling in her ears and lungs and bones with a warm, familiar thrum.
On either side of her, small stones lifted from the ground and hovered in the air next to her horse, following the mare as she plodded along.
“Bored?” Strelzar teased.
Veria didn't respond, just kept her eyes shut and enjoyed the feel of the massive wealth of earth energy surrounding her, and began twirling the stones, then added larger stones to the mix. Barrea, the mare she rode, started to spook a bit, huffing through her snout and shaking her mane, so Veria took her stones to the sky where the horse wouldn't be able to see them in her peripheral vision.
A second set of stones joined hers, twirling in the opposite direction, an intricate and complex interaction of movements that looked like a dance.
Veria felt the small, sleeping cores of fire energy in the rock, their tiny little pasts as molten lava from long dead volcanoes. She latched on to them, feeling her bronze bracelet warm the skin of her forearm, and she brought them to life, turning the stones smooth and pliable to her will. She formed them to the shape of a person, a maiden in a dress. Strelzar followed suit, and his stones turned to a dragon in a man's proper formal attire.
Veria giggled as they made their stone figures dance in the ice blue sky above them. But it wasn't long before a familiar hot lump formed in her throat. She morphed her maiden into a dragon—a dragon wearing a dress made of leaves and flowers, and she spat fire into the air in a spout of blazing orange.
Strelzar's dragon joined her with a small spray of flame, first into the sky, then right at her stone formation. She shifted her fire, directing it at his dragon until they both let their figures melt and fall to the ground in front of them. They cooled into a heap of solid, black, glassy rock in the middle of the trail in front of them, which irked Barrea as she had to trot around it. Strelzar's horse didn't seem to appreciate the roadblock either, sounding a displeased snort through his nose.
“We are almost there,” Strelzar murmured softly behind her. “We can take the horses all the way. We will never meet another human up here. Unless he's got a new apprentice, no one comes to Kortamant.”
“Sounds familiar,” Veria muttered jokingly.
“I had plenty of visitors,” he rebutted. “I'm not as much the hermit I was made out to be. Obviously. Honestly, the location of Plazic Peak isn't that secret. It used to be the Morenet Mining Guild office. I did some remodeling, added the training chamber. Home sweet home.”
“Why keep it a secret?”
“Simple. Didn't want the Londess Miners League staking some claim to it. I was already quite fond of it. I mean, the Castle of Morenet was comfortable, but it was too much for me, and I did feel a twinge of guilt every time I passed the portraits of Tresslyn.” He sighed heavily.
“The Queen?”
“Yes.”
After moments of silence, in which Veria watched her breath turn to steam in the frigid air, she final
ly asked the question that filled her brain. “Did you love her?”
“Of course not,” he answered plainly. “I thought I did, but, would I have done that to her if I did? I used her for entirely selfish means. And still somehow thought...”
“You'd have a future together?” Veria attempted to finish his thought after he trailed off.
“I was naive. At a hundred and sixty years of age, I was still completely naive. It's just too hard to navigate a relationship with someone you've used your powers on, Birdie.”
Veria let the words sink in. In her life, that was most relationships.
“You love me,” she said finally.
“Yes,” he declared. “As a sister.”
“Ew,” Veria groaned, then laughed.
“Okay, a daught—no, that doesn't work either,” he laughed. “Well, you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do,” she said softly.
“And I should clarify that I mean using your powers for your own gain in a relationship,” he said, and his tone was pointed and knowing. “So, if someone used their powers in a selfless manner...to protect the other...”
“I know what you're talking about, Strelzar,” Veria said. “You can stop. It doesn't make it better.”
“It should,” he argued. “Andon, as much as I think he's simple and less attractive than yours truly by a quite a lot—but who isn't?—did what he did to protect your feelings.”
“I don't want to talk about it,” Veria snapped. “I hate the whole skill. I hate this man who created it.” She gave a nod of her head toward the large castle that lay directly in front of them, hanging precariously onto the side of a peak, jutting out unnaturally into the ice blue horizon.
“Well, hold on to that feeling,” Strelzar sighed. “You might need it.”
They took the rest of the ride to Kortamant in silence, Veria watching the monstrous castle grow larger and larger in front of her as they neared. When they were right at the gates, her stomach suddenly lurched into her throat, realizing that he was certain to know they were here. He had probably seen them coming long ago. Ellory started as a Sand Mager, the seers of truths in time, which included the future.
She didn't know why it made her nervous, other than he would be prepared. He could have traps, or be ready to attack as soon as they found him.
Veria took a deep breath to calm herself. She had faced and conquered worse than one old hermit who probably didn't even practice hard elementals anymore.
Once secure in the large, open courtyard, they dismounted their horses and tethered them to a post. Strelzar gestured to a staircase that led to a door in the side of a tall spire, which they took. Once in the door, the stairs continued, spiraling upward as far as Veria could see. It exhausted her just to look.
“Take your time, Birdie,” Strelzar said comfortingly.
She sighed in frustration, lamenting how quickly the loss of energy set in when carrying a child. Memories of her trek through the caverns of Tarddiad flooded her suddenly, and she reminisced how tired those flights of stairs, miniscule in comparison to the ones before her, had made her when she was early on with Irea.
Irea...
She missed her. And she wanted to see Andon, and tell him...
“We finish this and you can ask Browan for a leave to visit your family,” Strelzar said, reading her desires, as usual.
She nodded at him, swallowing through a warm stone in her throat.
“He won't object, I'm sure. You will deserve it after this. And maybe it will buy you some more...time,” he gestured toward her middle.
“Okay,” Veria said, taking a deep breath before starting up the arduous spiral before them.
After what felt like an hour of just climbing the staircase up the tower, they reached a door, and Veria's heart started to pound with nervousness on top of the heavy thump that had been induced by the physical effort she'd just endured.
“He won't hurt you,” Strelzar said to her as she stalled in front of the door.
“How do you know?” she whispered.
“Because I can hear his desires. He wants to meet you,” Strelzar answered. “He wants to meet the Daughter of the Diamond.”
-III-
Veria pushed the door open slowly and entered the round, windowless room before them even slower. Her eyes snapped immediately to a man sitting calmly on a plush golden cushion at the far end of the circular room.
So much like Daloes always had...she thought. Must be an Earth Mager habit, wanting to sit closer to the ground. She thought about herself, and how she often chose to sit cross legged on the floor in front of the fire, a combination of being close to both her elements.
The man looked old, like Virro, but he looked sharp, lively, alert, and like he took as much pride in his presence as Strelzar, just not in the youth department. He sported a clean, white, neatly trimmed beard, shaped into a distinct point just above his collarbone, and his matching white hair was slicked back into a proper ponytail and tied with a luxurious silk ribbon. His clothes were made of golden silk, a sharp looking button up smock and loose, flowing pants, and he wore pointed golden slippers to match. Every button held a tiny diamond, and he wore large diamond cufflinks at the end of this sleeves, which were rolled back once, revealing a thick solid gold cuff on his left wrist, inlaid completely through the middle with sizable square-cut diamonds.
“Birdie, I can tell you one thing about Ellory Mielyr,” Strelzar drawled with a curled lip as his eyes fixed menacingly on his old colleague. “He understands flair.”
Ellory threw his head back and cackled. It almost completely mirrored her first meeting with Strelzar, she thought as she watched the man grin wickedly once he brought his head back up to survey them after throwing it back to laugh.
“As do you, Strel,” Ellory said, his wide smile revealing perfect white teeth that matched his stark white hair. “Rubies everywhere. Well, not everywhere...how this one talked you out of another one is beyond me.”
“That's because you've never understood respect, or friendship,” Strelzar snarled. “You've only ever cared about yourself.”
“That's not entirely true,” Ellory countered, taking a puff from a long golden pipe. “I had a lot invested in Gordon.”
Veria shivered at the mention of her father.
“You had a lot invested in him for entirely your gain,” Strelzar snapped.
“And why have you invested so much in his daughter, Plazic?” Ellory pressed, cocking his head. “If not for your own gain? The Strelzar I knew did most things for his own gain.”
“I'm invested in her for her sake. She needed a mentor after your star pupil used her as an experiment for you. And she is the future, Ellory.”
“Don't talk of things you know nothing about,” Ellory warned with a devilish smirk wrapping around the pipe he had perched between his lips. “It’s not flattering to that gorgeous young face of yours.”
“Have you not seen the future?” Strelzar rebutted.
“I certainly have,” Ellory said. “But I know you have not.”
“And what of Daloes?” Strelzar said. “What has he seen?”
“We don't talk. You know that,” Ellory stated plainly, with a subtle roll of his eyes.
“Well, I certainly don't blame him on that account. Did you pull this blackmail nonsense just to get me face to face with you, since none of us ever wanted to see you again after your disgusting 'innovations', if it could even be called that?”
Ellory cackled again, this time filled with more ice and malice.
“You flatter yourself, Strelzar,” he replied. “I really just want the money. My diamond supplier did a number on my funds fifty years ago, and my newest apprentice is on a...family scholarship.”
Andon, Veria thought, and her stomach flipped at the mention. Then, she felt the burn of the lie on her ears, in her head. He didn't just want the money...
“I cut you a fair deal on those diamonds,” Strelzar defended, a smirk finally creeping acr
oss his lips. “Your wrist is decorated with the Last Diamonds of Morenet. Quite poetic, actually. And also insanely valuable.”
“How kind of you,” Ellory groaned, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I'm surprised you parted with them. I generally pictured you as a slimy black dragon, sleeping amongst your hoard of treasure you plundered from that poor little kingdom.”
Strelzar laughed at the mention of him as a dragon. Veria would have found more humor in it except she was still feeling the burn of Ellory's lie in her head, and remembering that Strelzar had said he wanted to meet her.
“Well, you were right about the dragon part,” Strelzar said. “Which I suppose is why we're here. So let's talk.”
“What a fun pastime you two have chosen,” Ellory mocked. “Slaughtering hundreds of people for sport with your little party tricks.”
“You are truly every bit as vile as I remembered you to be,” Strelzar spat.
“And I don't even recognize you, even though you look exactly the same as you did at that reception,” Ellory replied in a gravelly voice as plumes of smoke poured from his lips with the words.
“I would hate to think I'd been in this world for over two hundred years and not changed at all,” Strelzar said plainly.
“Surely, but doing Browan's dirty work? Once upon a time, it would have been you doing the blackmailing, without a second thought. And this subservient guard charade. Ha! Lieutenant? To a...a woman?” Ellory chuckled to himself and shook his head and Veria felt rage start its boil in her chest.
“Even if you had half the talent she has in her little finger I still wouldn't sit and listen to this drivel,” Strelzar said, dismissing Ellory's statements with his hand as if he was swatting away an obnoxious insect.
“Yes, I always forget how much you prefer your female students...” Ellory sighed, his voice tinged with distaste.
“And I forgot how you've never had one,” Strelzar snapped, disgust evident in the curl of his lip and the daggers in his eyes.
“I never saw it worth my time,” he responded with a dismissive shrug.
Strelzar turned to Veria, his eyes wild. “Forget everything I said the past ten days about not wanting to kill him.”
Daughter of the Diamond: Book IV of the Elementals Series Page 2