by Dan Allen
“Yes, but—”
“There is war now in the south,” Toran said, his voice growing heavier with each word. “Tira, the witch queen of Hersa, stirs our enemies against us. The Serbani are falling. I go to war again. We can only hope—” His gaze turned to the pale face of the mother, her body still and silent. The king’s composure crumbled as grief stabbed through his steel armor into his unprotected heart.
He gently handed the child back and looked from Tannatha’s mother, to the nurse, and said again with the ferocity of an enraged lion. “On your allegiance!”
His shoulders shook. His eyes closed tight. The pit of his grief suddenly swallowed the strength of the conquering warlord. In two steps, he moved past the silent witnesses and knelt next to the still body. His hand touched hers disbelievingly as he swept her hair from her face.
The infant’s cries grew louder.
“Go find a nursing mother,” the seamstress said, shooing her daughter toward the door. Tannatha didn’t move. She watched as the king scooped the dead maiden into his arms. Her head lolled back as he lifted the body and her arm fell to one side exposing a palm scarred by a clan symbol: a cross and x within a circle—a compass.
Then he was gone.
The nurse knelt where the body had lain and muttered to herself, explaining away the tragedy to an audience of silent Guardians. Her ramblings melted into sobs.
“Mama, if Toran leaves will the Outlanders come again?” Tannatha asked. Her eyes filled with fear and innocent faith as she rocked the wailing infant from side to side.
Tannatha’s mother smiled thinly. “Not for a long time, dear.” She lifted the infant and clutched the babe to her chest. Its cries softened to pitiful whimpers. “The Outlanders won’t invade while we have an alliance with Erdal. Together we are too strong for them.” She looked her daughter in the eyes. “We were lost without Toran’s cavalry. Remember that.”
And she did. She remembered Toran—and his heir.
Chapter 2
26 years later. Serbani Realm. Port of Yerban.
The old courtier lifted the fired-clay mug in an air of lost refinement. His vest bore no buttons and his hat was flat and tattered on the edges, yet he spoke with conviction born of liquor and dotage.
“They say Toran left no heirs.” He wagged his head, miraculously managing to keep his balance. “It’s a lie. I was his cupbearer, keeper of many secrets.”
The other patrons in the Musk Mink, the rankest wallowing place of the Serbani port town of Yerban, made no response, except one old sailor whose face slumped to one side where a missing eye left a gaping hole in his face. “Then where is your mark, Ranville?” he said to the old man.
Ranville snorted. Simply because Toran had not branded him with the mark of the compass did not mean he was no less serviceable or trusted by the great leader.
His social graces dulled by the stiff local grog, Ranville pursued his rant with increasing vigor. “The bringer of the great peace ruled five kingdoms. Five realms!”
Rising to his crooked height, Ranville rapped his cane on the wood floor. “I ask you, how many heirs ought there be?”
“Five,” the bartender droned. “Five heirs born in secret to his mistresses, one on each of his campaigns—we’ve all heard your rant a dozen times, old man. Now what can I get you to drink?” He added under his breath, “With luck, one more pint and you’ll pass out.”
“Five heirs,” Ranville stated with an inland plains accent that hinted at better grooming than his rags implied. “Five heirs to reunite the kingdom—may I live to see the day!”
“You know, I think Ranville’s got a point there,” called out a tavern rat with fewer teeth than fingers. The man’s gap-toothed grin widened. “But Ranville, have you ever thought how you are going to serve five cups to five kings all at once?”
Rude laughter erupted across the room with the clatter of mugs against tables, hands slapping knees, drunkards spraying beer into the air, and old frogs wheezing into coughing fits. A few drinkers fell from their chairs, all making for a scene of comedy so desperate one might have forgotten why they were there in the first place.
Ranville turned with a tight-lipped grimace. He slogged his way through standing mockers and out of the shanty tavern.
“They mock his memory—the king who saved them all. Where was Serban’s strength when the battle masters laid siege to the tower of Essen? When the Hersians ravaged the coast, who turned back the cursed corsairs?” he said to an audience of two bedraggled horses tethered at the hitching post.
Even they ignored him.
He leaned up against one of the village’s few lit oil lampposts. Sighing, the old bureaucrat reached into the inner pocket of his battered waistcoat and withdrew a leather folder. He opened it with trembling, wrinkled fingers to reveal a side-bound collection of aged parchments.
“I’m the only one who can find them.” His voice choked on the words. His drunken face grimaced as grimy tears pushed out of the corners his deep-set eyes. “I must not give up . . . I must not . . .”
The cryptic pages held scattered clues, the fragments of conversations, maps, names, and notes. But his dim eyes could no longer read his own handwriting. The clues he had known and clung to for so long floated just beyond the reach of his fading memory.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
A tall man descended from his horse a few paces away. He was dressed in clean trousers and a tailored black dress coat.
“What did you say, sir?” Ranville asked, gazing at the tall gentleman.
“I know who you are, old man. You served the great king,” he said smoothly, keeping his horse’s reins in his hand rather than looping them over the tavern’s hitching post. He had a southerly accent, and his clothes were altogether too clean.
Not a local, Ranville decided. The only irregular thing about him was a patch of pale skin on the side of his neck. An old burn scar, it appeared to Ranville.
“Such loyalty as you show is a rare thing,” the merchant said, stepping into the yellow light of the lamppost. His face had a sallow but piercing look, born of luxury and mingled with misfortune. He had straight shoulders and straight, black hair topped by a wide-brimmed hat.
“Why do you come to me?” Ranville asked warily. His feet shifted backward until his heel bumped against the rough outer wall of the tavern.
The gentleman tucked one hand into his own coat pocket and looked Ranville in the eye with something of a smile. “It is time the children of the king take their places.”
“But what can you do? How can you find them, when I myself have searched in vain these thirteen years?”
“I have resources.”
“What do you want with me then?” Ranville said. “Speak to the point. If you are out to mock me like those ingrates in the tavern—”
“Time counts your paces, Ranville,” said the well-to-do young man, who looked to be not much older than twenty.
Hearing his name spoken with a nobleman’s elegant diction stirred a vestige of pride in Ranville. He lifted his eyebrows and straightened his posture as much as his age allowed.
“I know what you carry with you: clues to the identities and locations of the heirs,” said the young man smoothly. “It is time to enlist new help, or your commission will die with you.” He let the words steep in Ranville’s fogged mind before continuing.
“You must trust me with your clues. With your knowledge and my resources, we can find the heirs.” He added in a distant voice, “I have longed to see their faces.”
Ranville’s eyes widened with hope, as if he were being pardoned a lifelong sentence. “You will find them?”
“I have sworn to do just that,” said the man, drawing his horse alongside. He quickly tore the folder away from Ranville and vaulted himself into his saddle.
His eyes shone with a look of fiery deter
mination as they narrowed. “I will find them, one by one. And I will kill them all.”
Ranville’s mouth fell agape. He reached for the precious notes, but in vain.
Eyes burning with vengeance, the stranger drew a saber and swung it, striking the unarmed drunk across the head with the steel hilt.
Ranville fell. Blood spilled from the side of his skull as he crumpled to the ground.
The stranger spurred his mount, galloping away with the clues to the heirs.
“Stop!” Shock and guilt closed on Ranville like a trap from which there was no escape. “What have I done?”
Chapter 3
Montazi Realm. Village of Neutat.
The narrow rope and slat bridge bobbed precariously as Terith raced across it. Beneath him, the shifting currents of perennial fog hid the bottom of the steep-walled canyon. In the darkness below lay a seething swamp, roiling with gas vents and hot pots where creatures lay in wait to feed in frenzies on the unlucky victims that slipped on the ivy and fell into the deep. Terith gave no thought to the deep and its terrors as his well-placed steps carried him down the curve of the gently sagging bridge and up the opposite slope.
At the end of the bridge a guard stood, seeming to appear from the mass of giant green ivy leaves that draped over the edge of the cliff. The soldier dropped his half-drawn sword back into his scabbard and gave a salute to the man half his age.
“Ho, Terith!”
“Abervall!” Terith called, recognizing the seasoned foot solder.
“Back from the southern lookout already?” Abervall asked. “That was fast.”
“All clear on the south rim,” Terith said without slowing. “Tell Malian to send the report once the northern watch returns.”
“Because you’ve got better things to do,” the round-bellied Abervall said with a twinkle in his eye.
Terith just smiled and accelerated up a short section of exposed black volcanic stone, shortcutting two switchbacks.
Abervall called after the young champion, “Good luck!”
Terith turned onto the main path as it leveled. He followed it toward the center of the megalith, where the great ivy sent a single taproot into the stone and siphoned water from an aquifer below the megaliths. Even in the dry season, the ivy never faded.
Terith followed the path as it ducked under one of the enormous ivy stems, crawling like a python of gigantic proportions. Tannatha’s workshop was inside the root. Beyond it, overhung by the dense shade of jungle trees and broad ferns, a dozen more stems fanned out over the megalith.
Within the great wooded stems were long comfortable bedchambers, storerooms, visiting spaces, and shadowy places where Terith, as a child, had raced through hidden tunnels and disappeared into the shaded forest at the first word of warning from an elder.
Terith bounded up a boulder and onto the top of the giant stem, before disappearing through a smoke hole into his one-room dugout home. He washed at the stone basin that flowed continuously with water from the taproot spring before shaving with an Outlander’s knife he had caught in mid-throw during a raid. His hair, like that of many of the riders, was cropped short, giving his face a strong, lean appearance.
Terith breathed in the hot, moist air that drifted in through the round windows. He drank in the change of climate with a thrill of expectation.
The rains are coming.
It was time for the challenge.
Terith felt that at last his moment had come. As a foster child of the village, his lonely beginnings had foreshadowed nothing of the miraculous path his life had taken.
If his luck held for one more week, he would be the champion of champions and engaged to be married.
Thinking of Lilleth, the eldest daughter of the Montazi chief, anticipation thrummed through him as he stepped out through the beaded entry curtain onto a cobblestone courtyard.
He jogged away from the small cluster of dugout homes on the edge of the village on a shaded path.
A bloodthirsty screech ripped through the air. Terith instantly rolled to the ground. He landed in a crouch, quickly drawing two long, curved knives from the sheaths on his calves. From a place far away, beyond the horizon, he summoned the light of the Montazi awakening. His body rippled with light at the edges, a haze of pure energy.
Few humans on earth could hope to fight a dragon successfully in combat. Terith risked no chance. He drew every thread of fate tight about him. The power of the awakening coursed through his muscles and mind. The world slowed into an almost-suspended animation where Terith alone moved at the speed of his will.
Terith saw the laughing girl on top of the ivy stem and banished the euphoria of the awakening. Life came back into real motion, along with a massive headache.
“That was a very good imitation,” Terith said to the giggling twelve-year-old. He sheathed his knives and rubbed his temples. “You even got the rising pitch as the dral starts a dive.”
“I know,” the twiggy girl said smugly. She reached down and jumped into Terith’s arms. “My awakening is getting stronger all the time, don’t you think?”
He caught her and then dropped the sound-casting prodigy unceremoniously. “I could have done with some warning, Mya.”
The girl grinned ear-to-ear at her besting of the young champion. “You glowed so bright it looked like you were going to light the forest on fire!”
Terith let a small laugh escape through his attempt at a reprimand. He mussed her hair and started back along the trail.
Mya followed in a lighthearted skip. “Where are you going?”
“The keep.”
“Wanna hear a joke?” she asked.
“Sure,” Terith said. “But if it’s as bad as—”
“Where is the best place to get stung by a buzzing scorpion?”
“Well, it’s not the leg,” Terith said. “You can’t run away once your leg is paralyzed.”
“Give up?” Mya said expectantly. “In the hive. Get it? If you get stung in the scorpions’ hive then you get eaten faster, so it hurts less.”
Terith groaned. “That . . . was the worst joke I have ever heard. Who told you that?”
“Kyet—he probably learned it from Nema. Anyway . . .” she said, drawing the word out expectantly, “just between the two of us—when you win the challenge, will you choose Enala or Lilleth?”
Terith stopped and focused his most imperial stare at the blushing girl. “That’s none of your business.”
Mya stared at his boots and clasped her hands in front of her. “I’ve already placed my bet, so it won’t matter if you tell me.”
Terith ignored her plea as he hurried down the stone stair to the edge of the megalith where a cavern opened toward the deep.
“Can I at least make a guess?” Mya called from a wary distance from the keep’s entrance. Her voice became fainter as she continued to call after him. “Do you think Lilleth would be satisfied with someone as simpleminded as you for a husband? My mother wants to know—and if so, how come you flirt with Enala so much? And . . .”
“She flirts with me.” Terith hollered back. “Farewell, Mya.”
Terith turned into the torch-lit entrance of the natural cavern formed long ago by the swelling pressure of a large ivy root. A trickle of water ran out of the cave, off a cliff, and disappeared into the mist in the canyon depths.
Terith climbed farther up into the cavern to where Redif, the warden of the keep, was busy sharpening a spear on a grindstone. Endle, the apprentice, worked the hand wheel. This spear had a foot-long metal tip at the end of a seven-foot shaft, just long enough to reach through the bars to the center of the yearling dragon cages.
Redif nodded at Terith’s arrival and stopped sharpening. He came alongside the young champion, his dreadlocks of tightly matted black hair bobbing.
“What of the first rides?” Terith asked.
“Two could not yet bear a rider,” Redif reported. “One was imperious and refused.”
“Keep it.”
“And the others, Terith? Shall we dispatch them now?”
Terith looked past Redif farther into the keep and noticed Kyet, the youngest rider in the Montas, struggling with a yearling dragon. Terith nodded to Redif. “I’ll take care of it. Call it a day.”
Redif whistled to Endle, who bolted for the exit with nothing but dinner on his mind. Redif followed, quickly disappearing out the mouth of the cave.
Terith lifted two of the long spears and approached Kyet, considering what he was about to do. Kyet was only fourteen—as young as Terith had been when he became a rider—and unproven. Terith set one spear on the ground and leaned the other against his arm.
Kyet pulled hard on the neck spines of a yearling fruit dragon to get it to bow its head for harnessing, but the dragon merely twisted its neck and screeched at him. The fruit dragon had strong hind legs and short maneuverable forearm wings balanced by a long tail with a flattened tip. The yearling was a dull green color, with hints of a brilliant yellow and gold that would cover a full-grown queen, like Terith’s Akara.
“Yield!” Terith ordered, staring Kyet’s dragon in the eye. The yearling bowed submissively.
“I worry about this one,” Terith said. “It gives up too easily.”
“Too easily?” Kyet scoffed. “Yeah, right.”
“Your will to dominate must be complete from the first moment,” Terith reminded.
“A dragon senses fear,” Kyet rehearsed, as if for the hundredth time.
“And it will kill anyone that fears it,” Terith noted with finality. He took a weighted breath, still eyeing the weak-willed dragon. “We don’t have enough room to keep them all.”
“I wish we had larger varieties,” Kyet said, his voice rising with expectation, “like the strythe.”