by Ophelia Bell
Exhausted and full from the meal, buzzed from copious amounts of delicious wine, he sat staring off the edge of the porch into the snowy night.
White flakes still filtered down from the sky in lazy, floating paths, and the forest around them looked like a winter wonderland. Its meaning might not be good, but it was certainly a beautiful sight.
A gentle touch roused him from his reverie and he looked up into a face that somehow seemed familiar to him.
“Mama?” he asked suddenly, then blinked in confusion.
The the beautiful older woman smiled at him. “Mona, actually, but I understand why you’d be confused. I’m your mother’s younger sister. Come with me, Nicholas. I have something for you.”
He rose and followed her into the lodge, up a massive staircase built from rough-hewn logs worn smooth from constant use.
They reached a large sitting room with a huge stone fireplace, the fire in it crackling with comforting light. Mona shut the door behind them and walked across the thick, woven rug to a chest on the other side.
“Nicholas … ” She said the name thoughtfully and looked back at him. “Who gave you that name? Was it the Ultiori?”
“Ah … Their leader did. Nikhil. He saw himself as a father figure to me, I suppose, and since I never knew the name my mother gave me, that’s all I’ve ever known.”
Mona scrunched up her nose in distaste. “Not an ursa name, by any stretch. Is it true what we’re hearing from the outside? That he’s no longer in control of the Ultiori? He’s turned sides?”
Nicholas faltered, remembering the last night in his cell when Nikhil had offered to release him and Calder along with all the other captives.
“He is an honorable man, if that’s what you want to know. Something else has been controlling him all these years … taking advantage of the power he had.”
“And you believe that?” she asked.
“I do. I saw the change in him when he regained control of his mind. He’s not a petty man … I wouldn’t want to ever be on his bad side, especially not now. He made me a promise after he was himself again—that he’d avenge my capture and captivity. But then there’s a lot the creature who controlled him has to answer for, not just what happened to me and my mother.”
“They took you before she could give you your name,” Mona said with a nod. “What a horrible thing for a child to grow up never truly knowing who they are. Nicholas is not who you are, nephew. That name belongs to the boy from the prison cell. The foster child of a mind-controlled puppet.”
She turned back to the chest and opened it. From inside she pulled out a parcel wrapped in soft leather and bound with a ribbon.
Nicholas was about to object to her characterization of his former master. Now that Nikhil was free of said mind control, he was the farthest thing there could be from a puppet. But the words died in his throat when she handed him the parcel.
Power thrummed in the object, a heavy, rectangular thing. He untied the black ribbon that held the leather wrapper.
“Your mother prepared this for you before she died,” Mona said. “She knew she wouldn’t live long enough to see you again. The immortal spirit inside her took its toll—she might have lasted longer, had it not been for all the power she expended reinforcing the barrier to protect the Sanctuary. All four of the clan shamans have paid a heavy price—your mother was not alone in this. She was just the first to go.”
Nicholas peeled the covering away from the object. In his hands he held a thick book in tooled black leather. On the front cover was the unmistakable shape of a huge boulder with a tree sprouting from the top of it. The tree’s roots wrapped around the boulder in an elaborate pattern of knotwork.
“What is this?” he asked, sure the book was important simply by virtue of the constant, buzzing energy coursing through his hands from the cover.
“Ever since she returned to us, she wrote to you all the dreams she had for the life you might lead. While you were a prisoner of our enemy, you were free in your mother’s heart. You were her joy—her firstborn son. This book contains your ursa name, and every tale of your life which she cast into the magic of the Sanctuary’s barrier so that it would know you when you were finally able to come home.”
He gripped more tightly at the book, his teeth gritting almost as hard. “I have no tales besides my captivity. I’ve been nowhere in my life besides the cell I grew up in and the hallways I walked while shackled and guarded.”
Mona smiled at him as she made her way to the door. She patted him on the arm.
“Read it,” she said. “If you want to know your mother, find out who she is through what she wrote about you. Hopefully you will find your own truth by the end. She knew you the way only a mother can know her child.”
She left the room, and Nicholas sank down into a leather chair by the fireplace, staring at the book. He was bone-tired, but couldn’t force himself to put it down to sleep. He’d come so far just to know who he was. The evening spent with his true family was only part of it. Being there alongside Aurum had felt perfect, but it was almost too perfect, because knowing their time together might come to an end in a matter of days, he found it almost impossible to truly enjoy the moments they had left together.
He doubted even the revelations inside this book could console him. What good would a mother’s words be when it was already too late? She was gone.
But he could know who he really was, and that was something. He opened the cover of the book and began to read.
His aunt hadn’t lied … Somehow his mother really did know him. While the stories she wrote of were of a grand life full of adventure and love, every single one somehow read as though it were a parable of the life he’d actually led. His own memories transformed with every new word into moments he could cherish in spite of their limited scope.
His world may have been a prison, but he realized that true prisons are the limitations that exist inside one’s own mind. His mother often liked to compare him to a bird whose wings had been clipped, and was only waiting for his feathers to regrow so he could fly. Her stories even mirrored one of the things Aurum had said to him—about how an ursa could survive on only water and sunlight, and that when one was lost, the only way for them to truly come home was to follow the rivers and the sun and they would be led to their birthplace. That as long as an ursa had these two things within his sight, he would always find his way.
Nicholas wasn’t sure what it all meant, but the power of his mother’s words filled him all the same. The ache of missing her dissipated the more he read, the more he realized how well she understood him. He’d been born more than two centuries earlier, and there seemed to be passages for every single day of his life. Some took up several pages. Others took no more than a few words.
When he reached the date of his rescue a month earlier, all the passage said for that day was, “The sun is my mistress today and evermore. She does not shine for me yet, but someday soon she will.”
The final pages were even more cryptic, every word seeming to have a double meaning that Nicholas felt he should understand, but was unable to decipher. Finally, he came to the last page and a long, black feather floated to the floor. He picked it up and stared at the silken, iridescent object, the color of it seeming to both absorb and reflect the light in equal measure.
Holding the feather in one hand, he read his mother’s final words to him.
“I have little energy left, and it’s the eve of your homecoming. I wish I could be there to meet you—and I will be, in a sense. The immortal spirit embodied in this shell still thrives. I know all my memories and all my power will greet you when you arrive, but it will be in the form of your sister.
“This body is dying, my son. The body that created you—from which you were born and nurtured in your first few moments of being in this world—will be no more by the time you read this. Do not mourn for me, my
child. This is the way of our kind. This is the cycle we follow that makes us who we are. And this is how I know that the trials you have endured have not broken you. You may feel that way now—unable to achieve the thing you feel entitled to the way a bird with broken wings longs to fly.
“When you were a baby, I only had the time to fill your mind with the most basic impressions of our world that would allow you to find your way home. Now that you are here, hopefully all these messages and wisdom I have put on these pages will do the rest. You have only just begun your journey, my little blackbird. You are barely out of your nest, your wings still weak, but they will strengthen soon. When they do, you must learn to fly. It is what I have dreamed for you, so it is what must be.
“Our kind are of the earth, but I always saw a different path for you—one that carried you both deeper beneath the surface of the rivers and higher into the cloudless skies. The wind runs in your veins as strongly as the earth. The enemy altered the blood of your father before we mated, and his Windchaser power took to the turul magic they infused him with. That magic is in your blood now, too. You are meant to be part of the bond between the elements to strengthen the world, my son. The moment you came out of my womb with that thick head of midnight, I knew what you were meant for. This is why I named you what I did that day, though I never had the chance to tell you before they took you away from me.
“You are Raven Stonetree. You are destined to fly.”
Nicholas blinked gritty eyes, his mind muzzy from lack of sleep. The last few words sent a jolt of recognition through him that made him sit bolt upright and stare off into the distance. Was he giving up too easily?
Thrown into motion, he hurriedly rewrapped the book and ran from the room. He’d seen the direction the dragons had been escorted to their quarters in, but when he got there, none of the rooms were occupied.
Confused, he stood in the middle of the corridor until the maid, Metilda, wandered down the hallway, her arms filled with linens.
“Where is everyone?” Nicholas barked at her.
“Why, they’re at breakfast,” she said.
Breakfast? He finally registered the bright, silvery light streaming through all the windows and skylights. Looking out one frost-rimed pane of glass, he realized it was daylight outside and the snow was still steadily falling.
He broke into a run, nearly upending Metilda in his exuberance. He had to find Aurum. His mother’s journal was proof that they belonged together. It said it right there … he was meant to fly with dragons.
* * *
When Nicholas got to the dining hall, only a few unfamiliar faces were still sitting around the long tables, picking at scraps. Another maid pointed him in the direction of the Queen’s study where she took private audiences.
Rounding another corner at a sprint, he saw the door and barreled through it
More than a half dozen faces turned to stare at him when he came to a stop in the doorway, brandishing the book.
“Aurum, don’t go. Please. We belong together. I knew we did. Even my own mother knew we did—she says so here.”
“What?” she asked, her eyes brightening. “Let me see …”
She rose from her seat on a comfortable chair beside Emma’s fireplace. Emma looked on with interest, deftly maneuvering her daughter’s lively shape and moving to lay the child down on a thick rug a safe distance from tramping feet. Once little Mai was situated, she came to stand on Nicholas’s other side.
He opened the book for them both, pointing to the final words on the last page.
“Right here,” he said. “It says right here I’m meant to … to fly with dragons. She told me my name, too.” He turned to look at Aurum, hoping she would see what he saw—what his own mother saw. “My name is Raven Stonetree. This …” He gripped a hunk of his hair in his fingers. “It’s not my true color. Stay here with me, Aurum. Be my mate here in the Sanctuary … become part of my true family.”
Aurum’s brows knit as she looked from his face down to the words on the pages of the book.
“I can’t read this,” she said. “It looks like Old Draconic, but it’s different—the characters are strange.”
“That’s because it’s ancient ursa,” Emma said. “The languages aren’t meant to be read by the other races, and this particular message wasn’t meant to be read by anyone but the individual it was meant for. Not even I can read it, even though I possess my mother’s memory of when she wrote it.” Looking up at Nicholas, she added, “She only meant this for you.”
“You have to believe me,” he growled, frustrated by the skeptical look Aurum gave him now. Fuck, she must think he was desperate, making shit up just to try to keep her. Somehow she still wasn’t seeing it, even though every time he touched her, he knew.
With a pained look, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Nicholas. I already told you I know it isn’t you. It doesn’t matter whether I believe your hair should be black or white. Fate sent me a dream of a man with a very specific aura. I should never have let you become so close to me …” Her words gradually sounded more and more strained, her cheeks flushing with emotion. Just as she turned away from him, he caught a welling of moisture in her eyes.
“I’m sorry. It just isn’t you,” she murmured before racing from the room.
“The fuck it isn’t!” he yelled, but before he could chase her, a pair of huge bodies blocked his path. Both Aodh and Gavra grabbed him and pushed him backward. Emma’s two mates closed ranks with the others until he was caged in by all the males in the room.
Emma moved to stand before him, Numa by her side.
“Brother, I know what you’re going through is difficult, but we have far more pressing concerns right now.”
Nicholas glared around at the others, rage tickling at the base of his skull, making him want to shift. But one thing he’d learned in captivity was that in close quarters, his true form was far too deadly to let have free rein. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, especially not the people in this room.
He tamped down the anger and hurt over Aurum’s departure and focused on his sister.
“What can I do?”
Emma regarded him with caution, then seeming to be satisfied he was under control, she nodded and moved back to her seat.
“As you might already have realized, your arrival here has resulted in an unexpected instability in our barrier. Under other circumstances, I would be placing your friends under arrest for the breach. The ursa laws on this are clear, though we’ve had no need to enforce them for ages.”
Nicholas finally became aware of the tension in the room. “You should have come to get me before this meeting,” he said. “I knew we’d fucked up something. I want to know how to fix it.”
“And we will,” Emma said. “There isn’t anything else you can do, though. Right now, it’s between me and your friends.” She gave him a warm smile. “Besides, I knew you would want time to absorb our mother’s message to you. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“I want to help,” he said. “Please.” He would do anything to fix the breach. Particularly if his mother’s words couldn’t help him convince Aurum to have him as her mate. He needed something to focus on now.
Emma sat in silence, her expression growing thoughtful. Her attention strayed to the gurgling child on the floor, and for that moment, she looked nothing like a regal queen and everything like an attentive, loving mother. The image made Nicholas’s heart ache to please her, as well as the spirit of their mother that still somehow resided in her.
“All right,” Emma said, pressing her lips together and directing her gaze at him again. “You know the Sanctuary already, don’t you? Knowledge of it is passed down at birth to every newborn ursa.”
Nicholas nodded, instinctively aware that he could find anything in the Sanctuary, even though he’d only been here for less than a full day.
“Your frie
nds aren’t so fortunate, but I need them to repair the breach. I’d like you to act as guide to the other clan portals. The breach didn’t drain the energy of the barrier. In fact, it did the opposite. It infused it with a flood of energy at a single portal that created a dangerous imbalance that must be corrected soon. Your friends have agreed to be assigned to each portal, and through their telepathic links to each other, they can help stabilize the power of the barrier.”
“And you’d like me to guide them to the other portals?” Nicholas asked.
“Just one of us,” Numa said. “Gavra will return to the Rainsong portal, which we already know the way to. Aodh will remain here at the Stonetree portal, and I will head to Sundance, accompanied by Emma’s cousins and their families. It seems they are headed that way already.”
That left Aurum, who was conspicuously absent. Only one portal remained.
“You will want to meet your father’s family,” Mona said, seeming to read Nicholas’s mind. “He was a Windchaser. You and Aurum will travel there together.”
A fresh wave of elation buoyed his mood, but there was just one thing wrong with this plan.
Nicholas glanced around at the three dragons. Had they already asked Emma the most important question? If Aurum was being tasked with feeding energy to another portal, did that mean she had abandoned her plan to get to the Source?
“We didn’t just come to bring me home, though,” Nicholas said. His heart felt like a heavy stone in his chest, but he had to make sure Emma knew what they really wanted. He had to make sure Aurum could reach Calder, even if it meant Nicholas was left behind. He refused to stand in her way, but hoped that he would still have time to convince her to stay with him. This assignment might be the key, but he wasn’t about to leave anything up to chance.
“I know,” Emma said. “Aurum has already made the request to be given access to the Source.”
“And?” Nicholas said, filled with equal measures of excitement and dread.