Dragonoak: The Complete History of Kastelir

by Sam Farren

  I nodded firmly, waiting for her to set off first. Two days ago, I'd been able to talk to her, yet I was rooted to the spot, teeth fusing together.

  The trek down the mountain was worse than the journey up. It was difficult not to look down when we were heading that way, and at some points, the path seemed so steep I was certain I'd tumble straight down. My feet slid on the rocky path, and I kept my hand pressed to the side of the mountain where I could, heart in my throat. Kouris walked ahead of me, feet perfectly adapted for the terrain, moving slowly, that I might crash into her if I fell.

  Once we finally reached the clearing with the horses, I crouched down, head buried in my arms. Charley wandered over, bumped his muzzled against the top of my head and sniffed, concerned. I groaned, and that was enough for him; he knocked my arms back and went for the carrots.

  Kouris chuckled and I grumbled, “Stop it—I'm used to climbing trees, not mountains, alright?” in an effort to defend myself.

  “No judgement from me, yrval,” she said. “Those feet of yours weren't made for this life.”

  I tended to Charley, Calais and Patrick, telling them that they wouldn't have to be there for much more than a few hours. It was vital they knew Queen Kidira was travelling back to Isin. Vital I said so loudly enough for Kouris to overhear. She left me to fuss over the horses, pointedly not looking at me. She gave me all the time in the world to speak up, but time crept on and the words didn't come.

  “Back to Kyrindval, aye?” she said when I gave Charley one last pat, murmuring my goodbyes.

  I tilted my head back to take in the mountain we were going to have to climb, and said, “Higher—I want to go higher.”

  The Bloodless Lands rested over the range, and blood pounded in my ears at the thought, some part of me being drawn closer and closer.

  Kouris didn't ask if I was sure about it, though the urge didn't escape her. Her ears flattened against her head, and with a thoughtful nod, she said, “Alright, yrval. Reckon I know just the place.”

  Scaling the path back up the mountain was no more fun the second time, but I felt less resistant to the idea of being caught by Kouris, should I stumble. She walked behind me, directing me on, but for all I could tell, we were heading straight back to Kyrindval. Our route only altered before the last turn came into sight.

  “Here,” Kouris said, looking up at a sheer rock face. I thought she was teasing me, until she started pointing out the hand-holds, the protruding rocks I could dig my toes against.

  “Don't be worrying yourself. I'll be right behind you,” she promised.

  Well.

  I was the one who wanted to go higher.

  Climbing the side of a mountain was nothing like climbing a tree. I couldn't wrap my arms around it; I could only press flat against it, having to stop for minutes at a time with every few steps I took, every time I grasped a rock and it came loose. Kouris was endlessly patient, but having her beneath me didn't reassure me as it should've. I kept seeing myself falling back and knocking her off the rock face, onto the hard ground below.

  You're a necromancer, I told myself. You'll be fine.

  But treating injury and agony as a frivolous thing didn't spur me on as it ought to have. When I reached up and felt a cluster of grass beneath my hand instead of more jagged rock, I scrambled up the last few feet as though I was possessed, certain that the mountain would choose that very moment to tip over.

  I crawled over the edge, clinging to clumps of grass, letting out a long, shaky breath.

  Kouris poked her head over the ledge, arms folded in the grass, still pressed against the mountain face.

  The area she'd brought me to was hardly expansive. My bed back at the cabin was bigger, and the view was about as good. All I could see was the side of a mountain, and I'd been able to see that all the way up the path.

  “We're not quite there,” Kouris said, abating my disappointment.

  She pointed to yet more rock face behind me, and I immediately regretted wanting to get a better view. I stepped forward, looking for hand-holds, and only then did I see what she'd been gesturing towards. Behind the shrubs and ivy, there was a gap in the mountain, big enough for a pane to crawl through, but not much more accommodating than that.

  I reasoned that a dark, ominous tunnel through a mountain was better than another climb, and so I stepped in, doing what I could to ignore the spider webs that brushed against my face, the clatter of scurrying insects. Light wasn't far off. At the end of the tunnel, there was a second, smaller ledge, but the whole landscape opened up before my eyes.

  We were perched along the inside of a ring of mountains, edges sloping down and down, to a lake that to me looked as an ocean should. It went on forever, reflecting the whole of the sky, and the surface only shattered when dragons flew out. Kraau shot in and out of the water, no bigger than dragonflies, from where we were, fish speared on the ends of their tails.

  I couldn't bring myself to be disappointed that the Bloodless Lands were out of sight, sheltered by yet more mountains.

  “Remember that being a lot easier to crawl through the last time I was here,” Kouris said, grunting as she straightened, rubbing the curve of her horns. “... ah. Here we are. Not so bad, is it?”

  I shook my head, clinging to Kouris' arm as I slowly sat down, legs hanging over the edge.

  “I thought dragons were scared of water,” I said, watching a dozen of them soar through the sky, throwing out rings of fire and darting through them before they faded into nothing; they were actually making a game of it. “I thought that's why they didn't go south—because they could smell the sea.”

  “Humans are always saying the strangest things,” Kouris said from her place beside me.

  As we watched the dragons hunt and play, scales gleaming from hundreds of feet away, I picked out other pane tribes amongst the mountains. There were ones smaller than Kyrindval, ones far larger, and while I took in as much of the landscape as I could for the first time, Kouris was counting all the ways it'd changed over the last three decades.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked, now that there was nowhere left for me to run.

  Kouris didn't consider acting as though she didn't know exactly what I meant.

  “You've never lived through a time of war, yrval. If you lot thought praying to the gods did any good these days, I'd do just that, if it meant you'd never have to,” she said solemnly. “What you need to be understanding is that we were all murderers, back then. Me and Kidira. Jonas and Atthis. Our armies. No one came out of that looking good.

  “I wish I could tell you that I wasn't like the other pane, growing up. That the elders always knew there was something off about me; that I'd stared into the Bloodless Lands for too long and was never the same after that. Truth is, I was just like everyone else. Spent a lot of my time working as a tailor, if you'd believe it.

  “But the war, it wasn't just a human war. They were killing us, yrval. I know what they're always saying: a pane will never strike first, but they will strike hardest. Turns out that there's no chance to retaliate if you've got an arrow through your throat. And even then, even the ones that weren't knocked down straight away—not all of them fought back. It's not something we do.

  “I was begging Zentha. Asking them to let us gather forces for a defence, if nothing else. To round up the pane who were travelling far from the mountains. Ever since people fled the Bloodless Lands, we'd been losing our territory, bit by bit. The humans still go on and on about what our dead were forced to do in the Necromancy Wars, and back then, it was worse than ever. They got so confused about what they were fighting for that they wanted to wipe us out. Thought we were their enemy, if we wouldn't side with them.

  “So I did what I had to do, yrval. I marched down from the mountains and took matters into my own hands. I protected what pane I could, herding them back to the mountains. Letting the humans know that I would fight back, even if none of the others did. It took months, but it started happening. I started to gain fol
lowers. Human followers. I don't know if they thought having a pane at the front of an army would scare off the other territories, or if they were just that desperate, but before I knew it, I was a leader.

  “I did what I thought was best. I went to them—to Kidira, to Jonas and Atthis. I didn't speak a word of Mesomium at the time, not really, so I surrendered. Handed myself over. Let 'em know that I didn't want to fight, not anymore, and trusted that they'd feel the same.”

  Kouris kept her eyes on me the whole time she was speaking, while I stared out at the lake. It wasn't one of Michael's stories. It wasn't another tale about the ruthless Queen Kouris; this was the truth. Her truth, if nothing else.

  “You killed people,” I said. “You still killed people, didn't you?”

  “Aye, I did.” Kouris didn't miss a beat. I'd expected excuses, but she let her agreement linger in the air between us. “Never anyone that wasn't standing against us, though. And I never made banners out of human skin, never clawed anyone's eyes out—those stories were the doing of the other territories. A way to smear the name of the north. They drifted down through Felheim, and you lot really got some strange ideas into your heads.”

  What did I expect? For her to tell me that no blood had been spilt throughout a time of war? Even I wasn't naïve enough to believe that the battles had been easy for Kouris, just because she'd won. It wasn't the killing that had created a void between us. Claire had killed, she'd told me as much herself, and my father had been a soldier; I had allowed people to die on my table, people I could've saved with a thought.

  I'd let myself believe in the legend built up around Queen Kouris, yet the woman sat next to me wasn't parchment and ink, wasn't a rushed whisper. I wrapped my arms around one of hers and she was all flesh and blood. She bowed her head, kissing my hairline, and she was warm.

  “I should get back to Kyrindval,” I told her. “Queen Kidira wants to return to Isin.”

  I gripped one of Kouris' horns, ensuring I didn't slip as I got to my feet. I went first through the tunnel, and on the other side, scrambled onto Kouris' back when she knelt in front of me. She near enough walked down the rock face I'd struggled to climb; her clawed toes hooked into the crags, and she barely had to use her arms for balance.

  I remained on her back until Kyrindval was in sight. I was just in time: Queen Kidira was making ready to leave, along with Akela and Claire. Kouris lowered me to the ground, waiting a short distance away as I jogged over to the pane who'd gathered to see us off.

  “You left this behind,” Claire said, holding my helm out to me. She wasn't particularly short with me, nor did she avoid looking at me. “We're waiting on your brother.”

  The pane were eager to offer us all sorts of supplies for our journey back, none of which Queen Kidira considered politely declining. She gestured for all that was brought to us to be handed over to Akela, who was holding a mountain of meat, fruit and bread in her arms.

  “My Queen, I am thinking, too much they are liking you!” she grumbled through a grin, whistling out a phew when Claire held one of our empty bags open.

  There was no sign of Michael. Queen Kidira fixed her eyes on me as though I was to blame for his tardiness, and I told myself that she was only staring at me because her only other option was to look Kouris' way. Claire looked back into Kyrindval, frowning, and the pane were in danger of running out of parting pleasantries.

  Queen Kidira was on the verge of opening her mouth to say something when Michael came running over. He skidded to a stop in front of Claire, saying, “I know, I know, I'm running late! But I was thinking: I can't leave yet.”

  “What do you mean you can't leave yet?” I asked.

  Michael's shoulders rose, irritated by the interruption, and he proceeded to talk to Claire, as though she'd been the one to ask the question.

  “I feel as though I'm finally doing something—or as if I could finally be doing something. There's so much for me to learn here. I could write something of importance, rather than spend my life echoing other people's stories,” he said, “I've found a few pane willing to take me in. They're a very generous people, you know.”

  “I'm not certain I can simply leave you here,” Claire replied, though she looked as though she was considering it.

  “It won't be forever. Queen Kidira, Your Majesty, I believe a few representatives will be heading to Isin in the near future...?” Queen Kidira didn't answer him, and he went on speaking regardless. “I'll come back with them. Have them take me straight to the castle. What do you say, Sir?”

  My brother started projects and abandoned them as quickly as he found something new to move onto, and for all that he'd learnt and all that he'd tried to teach me, I'd never seen him care about something so much.

  Claire turned to me. “Rowan?” she asked, giving me the final say.

  If we made him come back to Isin, we'd never hear the end of it.

  Michael scoffed at the notion of his fate being in my hands, and I said, “We'd have to drag you back, wouldn't we?”

  It was decided. Michael beamed, thanking Claire heartily, shaking her hand and telling her how he'd never have got this far, if not for her. He threw an arm around my shoulders and shoved his bag into my arms, saying, “I probably ought not to have taken these—see that they get back to the castle, won't you? And keep out of trouble, Rowan. You aren't going to have me to watch your back for a while, you know.”

  I slung the bag over my shoulder, and slipped my helm into it, alongside the books he'd pilfered.

  He waved us off, and I wound my way back down the mountain for the second time that day, wishing I'd just stayed with the horses. Patrick whinnied when we left him behind, clomping his hooves against the ground as a pane who'd accompanied us down tried to lead him up to Kyrindval. It took some kind words from the pane, but Patrick reluctantly followed him around a second path.

  Queen Kidira and Akela's horses were brought down the same way.

  “There's another way up?” I asked Kouris in a whisper.

  “That there is. Much easier for the horses—takes a few more hours, though,” she replied in a low voice, lest Queen Kidira overhear her.

  On the way down the mountain, Kouris took the lead. She was always in Queen Kidira's sight, but they both acted as though the other was a ghost; as though only they could see each other, and so were unable to acknowledge one another, for fear of how it would seem to us.

  The journey back to Isin was going to be a long one.

  Over the days that followed, we didn't always move as a group, though we were never more than half a mile apart. I stuck close to Kouris' heels and Claire drifted between us and Queen Kidira and Akela, intent on watching over us all. The further south we travelled the warmer it became, but Claire's face darkened as though we were charging into storm clouds.

  “Being in Kyrindval is like being in another world,” she told me one evening over dinner. I understood the implication behind her words, and couldn't pretend to be happy about all we were to leave behind. I spent that night by Kouris' side, not saying anything, staring out into the darkness.

  Between Claire returning to reality and Queen Kidira and Kouris making it impossible for the five of us to slip into conversation, comfortable or otherwise, I couldn't wait to be back in Isin, locked away in the castle. Akela made a few failed attempts to rope me into conversation, and while we sat in silence, she would idly remark about the weather or the sunset to Queen Kidira, who never answered but always listened.

  Restless, Kouris took the books from my bag and scrutinised the covers.

  “Hm—The Complete History of Kastelir,” she said to herself, because talking to no one in particular around the fire seemed to be permitted. “Let's see what I missed out on.”

  I hoped she'd read out loud, but had only the remnants of my dinner for entertainment. Isin was three days over the horizon, and I found myself envious of Michael. Perhaps I would've been wise to stay behind with him.

  “Hmph. I'm three pages in
, and already I'm finding a mistake,” Kouris muttered to herself.

  Not wanting to leave the words hanging awkwardly in the air, Claire asked, “What is it?”

  Kouris cleared her throat, scanned over the paragraph once more, and read aloud from a page towards the end of the book.

  “... and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kastelir's founding, a memorial service was led by Kouris—yet I'd been gone for twenty-two years, by that point.”

  Claire hummed, unable to offer her an explanation, and Akela cleared her throat on the other side of the fire. We all looked at her, but it was Queen Kidira who spoke.

  “There is no mistake,” she said plainly. “Kouris is the name of my daughter.”

  The fire crackled, wood twisting with heat. Queen Kidira stared straight through the flames, daring Kouris to blink. All she could do was snap the book shut in her hand. I couldn't bring myself to look at her, but I heard her shift uncomfortably, cracking her knuckles, searching for something to say. She stood, eventually, slinking soundlessly into the shadows.

  I should've gone to her, of course I should've, but I hesitated and lost my chance. Claire followed her, and when I dared to glance back, I saw that she'd placed a hand on Kouris' shoulder and was offering her more words than I could've thought to.

  “She ought to be back from Thule by now,” Queen Kidira said to Akela. “Do you know what date she was due to arrive?”

  “Ah—Lady Kouris, she is returning home three days before we are leaving Isin,” Akela explained. “But you are very busy, yes, so it is not surprising when you are not running into her.”

  Queen Kidira poked her empty bowl with her fork.

  “I do not trust them. For thirty years they hide behind their wall, intent on ignoring our existence, and suddenly, they wish to marry my daughter off to some Prince,” Queen Kidira said, as though there were none so despicable in all of society. “I would not abide it, but—do you think she seems happy?”

  “Very much so, yes! Every time she is returning or reading a letter, she is always beaming. If they are planning something, then I am going over and sticking my axe in their heads, yes?”