by Dan Allen
“Get out, you,” she snapped, stomping her foot angrily.
A brief buzz sounded before it was silenced in a satisfying crunch.
Enala flipped the arachnid carcass off the cliff with her sandaled toe.
Stomping a scorpion half the size of her foot was not the sort of thing most girls did to endear their would-be lover. “Sorry,” she sang to the falling scorpion carcass. “It’s a private party.”
“I could have gotten that for you,” Terith offered, as a falcon snatched the scorpion’s remains from midair.
Enala simply fastened her eyes on him, took both his hands, and led him into the clifftop pagoda outfitted with poufs.
Terith realized the pagoda’s military value immediately—an archer’s station.
Enala likely saw only its romantic isolation from the prying eyes of the feast.
“I’m so glad none of the dragons have tried to make a nest here,” Enala said, “or I might have had to kick them out, too.”
Terith laughed. “Give it a week. The mating pairs are still returning to the sacred plain.”
“What do they do there all winter?” Enala asked as she fluffed a pillow.
“Gather as clans for protection, find their mate, and then just lie around and wait for the return of the rains,” Terith said.
“Let’s be dragons,” Enala said, plopping on a cushion. “Now where is my mate?”
Terith gave a disconcerted cough.
“Only, if you were my mate,” Enala continued, “I wouldn’t let you eat any of that nasty ragoon weed. Dragon breath is unbearable. I don’t see how you can even endure getting near them.”
“They have to eat it,” Terith said with a laugh. “The ragoon weed rots in their extra stomach until the fumes are flammable. That’s how they make fire to heat the solid amber yolk of their egg and free the dragon within.”
“Oh . . . the dragon within,” Enala said playfully. “So, challenger Terith, will you stroke my hair if I sing for you?”
“If . . . if you insist,” Terith said, his voice betraying real interest. He had experienced Enala’s entrancing voice on enough occasions to have a shiver pass over him at the thought of it.
Enala sat in front of Terith with her back to him, while he ran his fingers through her straight blond locks that draped over her narrow shoulders.
As he touched her hair, unsure of quite what to do with it, she began to hum and then sang out a long, beautiful note, as if calling to eternity itself. The air seemed to draw in around them as her voice trilled and lifted it into harmonies with its own echoes. The haunting sound sent chills down Terith’s spine. The melodies stirred the deepest part of his soul, as if he were waking from a kind of living sleep into a state beyond awareness wrapped in blissful oblivion where feelings swirled effortlessly, like colors on a painter’s palate. The Montazi awakening gave her voice strange, entrancing spiritual power.
Terith passed out of time and space. His spirit left every pain and regret behind. All around him, peace and serenity lapped in a rhythmic ebb and flow. His fingers stopped moving through Enala’s blond hair. A glow grew around him, lighting his eyes. His own awakening was hastening. Never had it been so close without his own life in peril. The horizon lightened as strength flowed into his arms, and the speed of his heartbeat and the wind slowed noticeably.
Terith hovered near the edge of a trance, until he felt Enala’s hand slide up his thigh.
He jolted. “Hey! What are you—?”
“I was just about to say,” Enala covered in a soft voice, “that Pert would rather see you fall into the deep than beat him in the race.”
Terith roused his senses. It had been almost six months since he had heard Enala sing. The dry season hadn’t improved his resistance—or Enala had been practicing. But the past few minutes had been as close as he had come to paradise, and as far as he had been from the constant duties of a champion.
Terith rubbed his eyes as the light faded like a closing flower blossom.
“It’s not like Pert hasn’t tried killing me before,” he managed. “Remember when he sawed my saddle strap half through before that Outlander raid, hoping I’d not see it and fall off in the Outland desert somewhere? I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, but this time he has a velra.”
“A fishing dragon?”
Enala nodded.
“You saw it? It’s not a strythe? It wasn’t one of those mountain goat hunters with the big fangs?”
Enala nodded overtly, as if begging for her hair to be stroked once again. “It was a velra. I saw it when it arrived at the keep this afternoon in a big cage. It has those spiny teeth and hook claws. And it has a blue belly. That’s how I knew. I’ve seen them flying around the inner lakes.”
With Pert’s advantage on his mind, Terith could think of nothing else. “I thought all trained velra were already owned by wedded men. Pert must have . . .”
“The air is so cold all of the sudden,” Enala whispered. “Why do you not put your arms around me?”
Terith unclasped his double-folded dragon-wing cloak and set it on her shoulders absently. He stood and paced the small pagoda. “I can still beat him. I can’t keep with him on the ascent, but . . . I am going to have to bend the rules. I have no other choice.”
“It’s not worth it,” Enala pleaded. “You don’t have to win the race. You don’t even have to enter! Pert wants my sister. You know that. He’ll try to kill you if you get ahead.”
“But I must enter.”
Enala stamped her foot. “I won’t have you die! Even if . . . I have to marry someone else. I could just run away after the wedding and come find you.”
“I won’t die, Enala. I promise,” Terith said. “And thanks for the tip about Pert. I can still win. You’ll see.”
Terith turned and ran back over the walkway, leaving the younger daughter of Ferrin to pick her way back along the rope trestles by herself.
He might have run all the way back to Neutat that night, had not a ghostly figure blocked his path on the southeastern bridge.
“Hello, Terith.”
“Who is it?” Terith’s eyes strained out into the darkness, seeing through the misty air only the outline of a form ahead of him on the living ivy rope and slat bridge.
The gentle sway of the figure and the stillness of everything gave the answer.
“It’s quiet here,” she said with a voice that sounded as though she were smiling.
Terith said nothing for a moment, heart racing and adrenaline robbing his wit. “Have you been waiting for me on the bridge this whole time?”
She shrugged.
“You knew I was coming?”
“You always run away when things get political. Did my sister finally scare you off?”
Terith leaned against the ivy rope that ran along his side and relaxed.
Lilleth sauntered into view and leaned against the opposite guide rope stretching her arms outward along its length, gazing down into the haze drifting over the deep.
Terith felt the tension run out of him as her calmness seemed to pass effortlessly through the space between them.
“Apparently her legs are longer than yours. Did you know that?” Terith said. “It must have been a very important piece of news because as soon as she’d had enough liquored yaz, she told me herself.”
Lilleth laughed gently. “I don’t blame her. She’s burning up with spring fever. She’s nearly as bad as the Furendali.”
“Not you?”
Lilleth turned to face him, her long eyelashes and full lips no longer in silhouette. “I’m an autumn girl.”
“Like the dragons.”
She smiled knowingly. “Your sudden midnight excursion . . . it isn’t about some new bit of information regarding the race, is it? The velra?”
Terith huffed a breath of frustrat
ion. “I can beat him. Why don’t either of you trust me?”
Lilleth shook her head. “His mount is far superior. Your problem is the climb. You weigh too much for a fruit dragon, even a large one. A strythe might do if you had one.”
“It’s too late to change dragons now, and besides, even if I could manage to trade for one—and train it—we just haven’t got the resources to support the mountain dragons in Neutat.”
“You could come live with us up here in the clouds,” Lilleth invited. She stepped forward, eyes gleaming, dress alight with cloud-
filtered moonlight. “It would be enough to have you here with us . . . with me.”
“Enough just to be here? And just what is that supposed to mean? I shouldn’t enter the race, just let Pert win—and marry you? Am I not good enough for you or Enala?” Terith burst out defensively.
Lilleth looked for his eyes, but Terith avoided her gaze.
“I—I’m sorry. I know you care about me—want me to be safe, but . . .” Terith sighed anxiously.
Lilleth slid her hand down her thigh, gathered a bit of skirt and moved it gently from side to side. “Are you sure you belong in Neutat?” Lilleth said simply. She always spoke as though she knew better, and she always did. “Does a bird belong in the nest where it was born?”
“Ferrin needs me there,” Terith replied. “The people of Neutat can’t defend themselves against the Outlanders. Every summer the horde comes in greater numbers.”
“They sense our loneliness,” Lilleth whispered. Moonlight glistened off her bottom lip and the pale skin of her neck.
A chill ran down Terith’s spine.
“The alliance crumbles all around us,” Terith said. “None of the other realms send help.”
Terith froze as Lilleth slid her fingers gently around his wrist, in a delicate grip that instantly drew his attention toward her.
“There is always something we can do,” she said, as her eyes searched his face. “Destiny is a song we make, not a book we read.”
“That is why I defend Neutat against the horde,” Terith said. He mustered the resolve that Lilleth had so easily deflected. “And that’s why I’m going to race.”
“Terith.” She hushed his lips with a soft finger. “I want to know something. Would you have me or my sister if you have your choice?”
Terith, unsettled, dodged the question, despite wanting to shout the answer that he wanted her. “I would have peace first, and then let Ferrin decide.”
Lilleth dropped his hand. “That isn’t how it works with the challenge, Terith. You choose.”
The wind stirred the air around them, plucking leaves into small vortices.
“I have my own future to consider,” Lilleth said. “It’s the one future I cannot see. I have to make it myself. We all make it—together. It’s our choices that weave it, not fate.”
Terith winced at the truth of it. “I know. I just . . . feel like a stream headed for a gorge that’s being pulled into two different falls. I can’t tell which way I’m headed or see where it leads.”
“May I?” Her offer was disarming. Her commanding voice pushed all other thoughts out of Terith’s mind.
“What?” Terith said. But he knew exactly what she meant.
“Shall I look into your future?”
Terith’s heart beat twice and stayed out of rhythm as the wind picked up again and began to sway the bridge. Terith tried to speak but stopped abruptly. The sound of his breathing and hers merged into a matching rhythm as if Lilleth were somehow part of him.
She was summoning her awakening. He’d never felt it, but he had seen it, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. It was like a whirlpool that pulled at the veil of eternity until it tore open and spilled its secrets before her. But it took time to summon. Perhaps he could distract her.
“Lilleth, why don’t—”
Lilleth took both of Terith’s wrists in her hands, her touch soft and disarming. He was powerless at the first brush of contact. Her skin, luminous, was full of rapturous, potent vitality. “Terith, you have never let me see your future. Are you afraid?”
A rider had no fear. Past and future were both open to the seer, but this time she would look forward. The wind whipped around them, licking their clothes and slapping hair into their faces.
“Terith, look at me. Let me see.”
Raindrops began to splatter against the large ivy leaves dangling from the bottom of the bridge, driven by the sudden crosswind. Her awakening siphoned nature, like a whirlpool at a sinkhole, drawing in everything in an unstoppable rush.
“But what if I am maimed or I become a villain? I can’t make you carry that burden.”
“I want this, Terith.”
Her face was close, her lips very close. The snapping of branches punctuated each gust of wind.
“How far can you see?”
“Days, weeks—I see only events. I can’t choose what I see, and I only see those things I cannot change.”
“What difference will it make? If I die, I die.”
“Let me see your eyes.” It was a regal command, but soft.
Terith lifted his gaze until he stared straight into the eyes of Lilleth. His world vanished in a moment of rapture.
Electricity sizzled through the air. A bolt of lightning avoided the bridge and slammed into the side of the megalith as a thousand points of light flickered around his body, gathering into streams that poured into Lilleth’s white-rimmed eyes.
Terith felt time and space siphoning past him, as if his fate was unrolling from inside his own body.
Light eclipsed Lilleth. She was silhouetted, angel-like for a moment in time. Her face formed an expression of rapture that turned in an instant to a look of horror. Lilleth screamed and covered her face. She tipped and collapsed onto the slat floor of the bridge.
Terith knelt next to her but couldn’t encourage any speech out of her. She only wept, shivered, and wept again. “The deep . . . not the deep . . .”
Terith shuddered involuntarily, but he reached out, almost automatically, and lifted Lilleth in his arms. Her strength was entirely gone as she hung limply against his body. He stood and carried her back toward the great house where the ivy taproot plunged into the core of the megalith.
Lilleth’s voice rang in his head as he carried her. The blood-chilling scream and those ominous words: The deep . . . not the deep . . .
Terith did not have to wonder what the words meant.
She saw me fall.
Terith seemed unaware of anything as his mind wandered through the mist of his past and future in a daze. He made his way back to Ferrin’s enclave, not feeling the burden in his arms. He let Lilleth down on a pillow under the braided reed canopy of the courtyard of Ferrin’s lair. His heart filled with a sense of immediate anxiousness.
Now was the time for action. Pert had a velra. That was what mattered. Ferrin’s race aimed to fatigue the dragons early with a series of punishing, rapid ascents, to spread out the challengers and reduce clashes later on. It made for a more exciting race since most of the spectators would be watching near the start. A fishing dragon was a born climber, with forearm wings that had bat-like proportions. With its smaller legs and narrow head and nothing to excess, the blue-bodied dragon had a supreme advantage. Pert’s dragon would come out of the climbs with energy to spare.
Terith’s fruit dragon was a grazer, as comfortable on the ground running and leaping as it was in the air. After the exhausting initial climbs, his dragon might never catch up to the larger velra.
Then I find another way.
For that, there were preparations to make. Visions of the future did not matter. Lilleth’s dreams could not determine his destiny.
She whimpered as Terith stood to leave.
Then Enala was there, standing beside a stone pillar like another ghost, still w
rapped in his dragon-wing cloak. Her shocked gaze shifted from her would-be lover to her tormented sister and back. Shock and fear, anger perhaps, showed in those eyes, feelings no one could sing away.
“She looked,” Terith explained lamely. “I—I didn’t want her to see. She’s a bit shaken up. I think she’ll be all right. I’m sorry. I’ll be back in a few days. But I have to go.”
As he left, Lilleth broke into a wail. Her sobs rang in his ears, like an echo that followed his paces.
Chapter 6
Erdali Realm. Citadel of Toran.
Reann’s queries about the visitor turned up little information from the other servants. She had no choice but to take up researching the matter personally—spying, as Ret called it. She ought to have been researching her future employer. The logical side of her brain told her that she had only a few weeks to change her situation as a servant before it became permanent, and the other logical side made the excuse that only a few weeks of research wouldn’t make enough difference. With those sides locked in argument, Reann followed her heart. She had felt something when the visitor arrived. She wanted to know why.
He got up early and did exercises of some sort in his chamber. Reann could tell from all of his heavy breathing and grunting.
The second morning as she listened at the keyhole, she detected the whistle of a sword blade.
He spent a lot of time walking the halls. He cornered folks at random and asked them questions, but only when he thought he was alone. And, of course, he always spent time in the library, usually in the historical section, pulling out books at random and flipping through pages.
Reann decided that whatever his business was, he had no idea what he was doing.
Reann’s interest only grew from her hours of surreptitiously watching him as she mopped the already-gleaming floor and re-sorted stacks of books that she had already put in order.
When she came to the library on the fifth day, leaving the door ajar, the young man stood from his desk, pushed the door closed and walked over to the table Reann was needlessly dusting.