by Jenn Polish
And to think that dragonkind
Has spent all this time
Under the dreadful misimpression that
We serve the king best when we’re dead.
She plays along, somehow affecting a Highlander accent into her dragon song. The ground under us rumbles. I drag my foot out from under my kneeling body so it rests behind me on one of Jorbam’s roots, and the rumbling slows to a low tremble.
“I know,” the swiping of my toes onto her roots tells Jorbam. “I got scared too.”
Are the faye and the Lunavad singing
About the dragon?
I may have my eyelids closed
But that doesn’t mean I can’t sense you.
Zaylam reminds us, and I laugh aloud as Jorbam rumbles some more, this time humorously.
“How’s it feel, Zay?” I ask her, mock Highlander accent gone. She opens her top two eyelid layers.
Like they cut out my air bladder
And any hope for life in
The Flowing
That I had,
she sings to me, her voice quavering. I put my forehead to her tail, furled near my lap. “I know,” I murmur. “I know.”
I tug on the Energies tighter, trying to heal her better than I did last time, wishing not for the first time that I had Mom’s skills instead of my own. My paltry attempts at making stitches strong enough to hold together dragon flesh are definitely better than the first time I tried to conjure them.
But I look down at Zaylam’s re-opened wound now and realize it didn’t help enough. I yank at the Energies angrily, my hands shaking even harder than they had at the Lethean Inn last night.
I don’t register the sound of small paws padding on dry ground until que stamps out quer words. “Well you two are a dysfunctional burrowful of laughs. Are you going to spend the entire Rest day on the ground like this, after after after all your promises to spend the day preparing for Lunamez with the others?”
“Morning, Osley,” I singsong without looking up, and Zaylam fully opens her eyes. She lifts her head at the neck, keeping the rest of her curled up body perfectly still so I can continue restitching her wound, trying to remember everything I ever learned from Mom and from my too-short time in the healing learning pod.
The hatchling mates have had
An eventful sunup.
The faye woke the dragon
By smacking her across the face
And somehow came to land
On this rather uncomfortable
Earth.
I cannot say I comprehend how
Rabbitkind stays down here
All the time.
Gimla, circling low above us, hums with relief that Zaylam is strong enough to be singing full verses. He flies higher, his neck still craning down to monitor us.
Osley’s nose twitches and que paws at me. “You smacked Zaylam in the face? That seems more like something Tacon would do, now doesn’t it?”
I thrust my hands up from my ministrations to Zaylam’s wound. “It was an accident!”
“You’re still a danger to your hatchling mates,” Jorbam chimes in with her rumbles. “I would never smack you, Zay.”
“To be fair, you have no moveable limbs,” Osley stamps out, and I smirk.
I finally release the Energies as the last magical stitch tugs through Zaylam’s broken hide. “How’s that?” I ask as she sighs deeply in relief.
“Hopefully better than your last attempts, since it keeps busting open. Sometimes it’s hard to believe you’re Faye’s near,” Osley interjects.
“How is that, Zaylam?” I ask again, with emphasis, glaring at a trilling Osley.
It isn’t your fault that you are
Not the healer your mother is.
She pauses, letting the distant songs of the other dragons provide the music to bridge her own together.
Sorry to Osley:
My little faye’s stitches
Saved my life
Even though it is fun to
Tease you,
Sadie.
I touch my forehead to hers, exhausted again, the rush of necessity sapped from my body. Osley’s furry head nudges at my leg.
“Sadie, I know you’re tired, but Kashat is eager to see you. He wants you to share sunup meal with him and Lerian in the Underland. And um…your moms realized you didn’t spend the night in the Underland. Faye isn’t too happy with you.”
I groan loudly but lift my head, not sure if I’m more upset about Mom being upset with me or at Kashat’s early-sunup eagerness to see me. If the roles were reversed, I know I’d be desperate to see him too. But I know coming to the Plains makes him miserable; he doesn’t even have a hatchling tree, let alone a hatchling dragon, because he didn’t Dream quer before his Slicing. That’s probably why he’s trying so hard to restore his ability to begin with.
“Will you be all right, Zay?” I ask with my body.
Zaylam hums wordlessly in reply, already drifting to sleep cuddled next to Jorbam’s trunk, exhausted from the fall and all that bleeding. I sigh deeply and drag my body up. “Os, Jor, take care of her, okay?”
They promise to, and I set off for the Underlands drearily.
I fly around the outskirts of the Gathering, my wings so exhausted they can barely hold me up. I pause when I reach the Dropoff, the sharp Forest cliff that looks out over the Underland. Even though this was the spot where I hovered at the beginning of the massacre, I still love the way the soft, rolling hill of the Dropoff slips out before me, like someone had cleanly cut away the land with a giant hatchet. It’s a dangerous cliff for groundlings that don’t fly and don’t expect it. Centaur young ones are taught never to gallop up the Dropoff, for fear that they’ll get carried away and fall off the cliff. Lerian never used to listen to the centauric urgings to stay away. We used to get in so much trouble from the Underlandic Council.
The bottom of the Dropoff sharply enters the rolling Underland. More like the Gathering than the Forest, the Underland has open fields of exploding oranges, sun yellows, and the richest reds I’ve ever seen. It’s open to the sun in ways the thick Forest isn’t, and has more shades of green than most faeric dialects have expressions for.
The blooms of the short, squat skyflower trees open up into soft lilac petaled, star-shaped flowers. Each one is so enormous I can count their sharp petals and see their ripe, red fruit centers from all the way up here. Far ahead, the grasses grow longer and longer, until they stop completely. They open out into a short stretch of gleaming burnt-orange silt, lapped by the sparking blue Flowing.
A wave of dizziness tugs at me as I fight to keep my eyes open to take in the view. I blink heavily, the combination of lack of sleep last night and all that Energy twisting for Zaylam this morning convincing my eyes to stay closed. Convincing my wings to still.
I don’t even flinch when I find myself crumpled on the ground. I’m just relieved to be curled up again, to have my eyes closed.
I jump when a calloused hand touches my shoulder, jarring me from what might have been a blink or a nightlong sleep. I twist around, my arms raised groggily, in attempt to be ready to call on the Energies and conjure a spell.
“Hey hey hey faerie, it’s me. It’s only me.” Lerian. Both her hands are raised in mock surrender while I blink back rapidly, my eyelids still heavy. Her gaze is steady, her gray eyes soft. She keeps her hands up until I calm down. I grunt a little in acknowledgement. In thanks.
“How’d you know where I was?” I breathe out, shakily.
“Tamzel saw you fall out of the sky,” Ler tells me, her voice deliberately casual. “Sorry it took me so long to get up here—had to take the long way, you know, through the tunnel. No wings to take the shortcuts you’re all so fond of.” She whispers in my ear. “Kashat says you went rogue to help P’Tal last night.”
I grumble in the affirmative, whispering the story to her as we head back down the Dropoff and loop the long way around toward the Underland, where Kashat is playing with a bunch of
centaur young ones. Instead of the enthusiasm I’m used to from her, Lerian’s face stays neutral while I talk. She turns to me when I’m done with my story, her expression completely unmoved.
“You think forming a plan with someone who’s barely even a near was such a good idea, Sade? You could have come to me, to your growns, come on. I mean, it sounds like you did all right, but it was a pretty easy-to-mess-up plan. Like, what if he didn’t care that you were drunk? What if he did but he caught you snooping around his room? Don’t do something stupid like that again, Sadie. I thought you were smarter than that.”
“Ler, I—”
“Whatever, don’t worry about it, we shouldn’t talk about it here anyway. Look, Kashat wants to talk to you.”
I look around the Underland for Kashat, but I don’t find him amongst the playing centaurs or the faeries splashing each other in the Flowing’s waves.
What I see is a small invasion force.
Soldiers.
Chapter Nine
KING’S HANDS, DOZENS of them, point their arrows toward a growing crowd of centaurs, but mostly all I see is an arrow less than a flutter away from the temple of a centauric young one, barely six harvests old. She must have been playing near the mouth of the tunnel when they emerged. My eyes search for Tamzel, the leader of the Centauric Council and another old friend of Mama’s. She’s standing next to P’Tal, who’s got his arms completely folded around Kashat, keeping him from rushing at the Hands. Tamzel won’t meet my gaze, looking more pained than surprised. I furrow my brow and wish I had my labor axe.
“The young one doesn’t have to be harmed,” announces a red-headed, bearded non. There’s a solid, thin red stripe down the side of his uniform, marking him as the Controller’s second-in-command.
“Faerie,” Redhead continues, tossing his head at me before gesturing toward a wing-shaped metal contraption that a fellow Hand is holding. My stomach lurches. It’s like the wing clamps they put Leece and Mara into. Redhead’s thin pink lips curl like he’s enjoying holding a weapon to a young one’s face.
“The Controller requires your presence in the Gathering. Now. You can come with us without a struggle, or this…” He tightens the string of his already taut bow even more.
“All right, all right.” I fly forward, my hands out in front of me, palms up.
“Sade,” Lerian whispers, her voice strained. I lower myself to squeeze her arm as I flutter past her. Each movement feels mechanical, like I’m Dreaming myself, as if it were happening to someone else. I wish it was.
But no, it should be happening to me. I wonder how they found out about how I tampered with the vials so quickly. Maybe the Head Slicer realized something was up when I just left without saying goodbye. I curse myself for taking the easy way out.
Or, Evelyn could have told them I’m a spy. Or, someone could have tipped off the Hands that Mama had kept me awake during the Dreaming test, that I wasn’t really asleep so the test wasn’t true.
It could be anything.
I don’t want to go off to the Pits. I won’t survive. Other people do, sometimes. But me, I won’t. Not with no light, not with no hope.
I’ll be one of those sad stories who breaks, just from being there.
I swallow. They’ve still got drawn arrows pointed at people I care about.
I land in front of Redhead, turning so my back is facing him. For Grovian faeries, that gesture is typically to be a sign of respect, of trust. Of a willingness to be vulnerable.
Right now, it’s just a plain old surrender.
Murmurs rise up amongst the centaurs, and Kashat whimpers. His eyes are so wide, so wild, that it threatens to break me to look at him. P’Tal’s whispering in his ear, soothing him.
I scan around the crowd and find Tamzel, her strong shoulders hunched, head down, jet-black tail steady. Refusing to watch me get arrested. I do not scan the crowd for the rest of the Centauric Council members. A lot of them are part of the resistance. I do not, for now, want to know whether they endorse this, or whether they’re being forced to endure it.
My eyes switch to Lerian’s face as cold metal slips over my wrists, wrenched behind my back and bound together. It hurts. A lot. But the hardest part—the hardest part before they kill me, the wild part of my mind thinks desperately—is next, I know. Lerian knows it too; her eyes are wet, and I haven’t seen her cry since the night we met, the night of the Attack.
Metal wing clamps creak open behind me, and I make sure not to move. Not to panic. Not to twist and resist and scream. Lerian holds my eyes like she’s holding my body, and I am acutely aware that there are young ones staring at me. That Kashat is watching. I keep my face blank.
Redhead roughly gathers my wings into his fists. They crumple and I bite the inside of my lip until the soft flesh tears. Redhead stuffs my wings into the clamps, and every muscle in my body tightens, fully prepared for the metal clamps to close over my sensitive wing tips. I’m surprised when they don’t.
But I’m dizzy without them fluttering freely behind me. If I’m in these clamps for much longer—and they only just snapped closed—I too will snap.
Lerian knows. She whinnies and surges forward.
Before I can even move, a thin thwack zips past my ear and Lerian’s hot blood splatters onto my face.
An arrow is buried deep in her bare torso.
I don’t make loud noises. I don’t even really raise my voice to sing with the dragons in the Plains. But I yell now, her name, over and over, as the Hands make a wall with their bodies, pointing with their arrows between me and the centaurs and Kashat, between me and Lerian.
Kashat is screaming and P’Tal can’t keep him from surging forward to her, because P’Tal too is now at Lerian’s side, holding her up. Within seconds, his hands are thick with her blood.
A nearby Hand switches from bow to club, raising it above his head, preparing to strike at Kashat and P’Tal.
“Stop it!”
I recognize that scream, that very same plea.
Iema rushes forward, her back still arched with the exaggerated discipline of a Hand, but her face is a mess of emotions. My jaw tingles absently, my body remembering when she stopped that soldier, Reve, from beating me senseless.
But Lerian’s already got a Palace arrow lodged in her torso, and Iema’s eyes find mine briefly. I think there’s an apology in them, but the next moment, her eyes are steely again, and her voice is commanding. “The Controller specifically instructed us not to harm any of them!”
Redhead leans into her way too close, leering. Her eyes snap straight ahead; the dotted purple lines running down the sides of her uniform remind everyone that she might be higher ranked than most of the other Hands, but Redhead is Evelyn’s second-in-command, not her. If she wants to flinch away from his lips, not even a full flutter away from her ear, she does a good job at resisting.
He whispers to her, but he throws it loud enough so we can all hear him, even above Lerian’s soft whimpers. “Can’t be scared of a little centaur blood in a place like this, soldier. And the Controller’s not here, now is she?”
“She is, as a matter of fact,” Evelyn’s voice rings out across the Underland.
I look around wildly, as much as I can in the wing clamps and cuffs. My eyes finally find the Controller, standing breathlessly at the mouth of the tunnel leading up to the Forest, her white cloak askew.
All the Hands stiffen into attention, and her eyes narrow once as she takes in the scene in front of her. Me in wing clamps and chains, Lerian with an arrow in her torso, a blood-covered P’Tal holding a still-struggling Kashat back from flying toward the Hands who are pointing arrows at the temples of three centauric young ones, who are all sniffling but standing straight up, their eyes fixed dead ahead like they’re standing at attention too.
The Underland falls silent, like it’s awaiting her judgment. The waves of the Flowing behind us mark the slow passage of time.
My mouth runs dry as I watch the Controller, and shame floods i
nto my stomach, because I should hate her. No, I do hate her. Lerian’s been shot. I’m being arrested. Both are her fault. Of course I hate her.
And yet, seeing her only fills my body with relief.
And I call myself a faerie. I blink slowly, and by the time I open my eyes, the Controller is in front of Lerian, her eyes liquid with concern.
Kashat yanks out of P’Tal’s arms, placing his body in front of Lerian, his round face full of rage, full of defiance. His fingers are flexing at his sides; he’s ready to use magic. “I won’t let you hurt her.” He doesn’t even bother to use Highlander.
Evelyn rolls her eyes impatiently, moving Kashat aside with a sweep of her hand. He relents, looking bewildered. She leans in toward Lerian, and I struggle forward. She rolls her eyes at me too. “Save your strength, faerie.” She disregards Kashat’s use of faeric, responding in Highlander non.
She scrutinizes Lerian’s bleeding torso while Lerian hisses through gritted teeth and my blood boils.
“She’ll be fine, the wound is superficial. Take her to her healer, and mind you don’t disobey me again or the arrow will be buried in your flesh, Richard. Do I make myself quite clear?”
She sweeps away and back up the tunnel without waiting for a response, her cloak whipping dramatically behind her. Redhead—or Richard, I guess—gives me a rough tug, following the Controller.
I keep trying to twist around to see Lerian, to see if she’s all right, if the wound really is superficial. I hear her hooves trotting unsteadily behind me, and I content myself with that for now.
I focus on anything, everything, even the fact that the wing clamps are somehow dampening my ability to reach out to the Energies and use magic, except the tunnel as I’m marched up to the Gathering. The smallness of it makes my skin crawl. I try to move my wings in the clamps. No luck. I almost scream. I resist.
Barely.
Until we emerge into the Gathering.