by Bo Savino
Chapter 11: Into the Fire
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“Let’s go, ’mates,” Jet said to Team Phoenix, without taking his eyes from the members of Team Dragon.
“What’s the matter, Phooka?” Blaze Flamebringer sneered.
“Nothing. Just have a schedule to keep. We were already heading out.”
Ryssa eyed Blaze. He was an older boy, maybe sixteen or so. Unlike most of the people of Faery, who wore their hair long as a mark of pride among the Courts, his black hair was cropped short and spiked, the tips dyed in alternating colors of red and orange. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and gleamed with malice as they swept across the members of Team Phoenix. They settled on Pyro, Jr., who had gathered his sweets, ready to leave with the rest of the Team.
“I guess your father was right,” Blaze snorted.
Pyro stiffened. “About what?”
“That you are obviously defective for the Lia Fial to have placed you with this bunch.”
Pyro, Jr. scowled and looked away, but Ryssa caught the flash of hurt in his eyes. It made her angry. Even though Pyro, Jr. had been a complete toad since the moment they first met, Blaze was hitting below the belt as far as she was concerned.
“You lie,” Ryssa said through clenched teeth.
Blaze shot her a superior smile. “You don’t know much about the Codes of Honor among the Courts, do you, Starborn?”
“No member of the Faery will tell an outright lie, Ryssa.” Moira didn’t take her eyes from Blaze. “We can’t. It’s part of our Earth connection—like a promise or vow. A liar is punished almost as severely as an Oathbreaker, because all in all, it’s the same thing. Our word is our bond. It’s too fine of a hair to split.”
“Maybe I don’t know much about Faery Codes of Honor,” Ryssa gritted her teeth, “but I can tell when a person is being honorable, and I’m not seeing it here. No parent would say such a horrible thing about their child.”
“You really don’t know anything, do you?” Blaze sneered, his face darkening. “Junior, here, has been an embarrassment to his family since the day he was born. Seventeen and still only a Fire Initiate? I’m sixteen and already a Fire Practitioner. He’s weak. His blood taints the lines. Pyro tried to make him strong, but now the Lia Fial has shown him the truth. Junior’s nothing, and never will be.”
Pyro, Jr. refused to acknowledge Blaze’s comment, but Ryssa saw the muscles tighten in his jaw.
“He can’t even protect himself,” Blaze smirked. “Ask him. He won’t deny it. He knows it’s true.”
The members of Team Phoenix politely eased their eyes away, trying to save Pyro, Jr. from added embarrassment. Ryssa didn’t. She watched as Blaze’s hand start to glow down at his side, where the others couldn’t see it. Flames leapt across his fingertips, and he raised his hand as if to throw the fire at Pyro. Ryssa did the first thing that came to mind. She balled up her fist and punched Blaze full in the face. Fire raced up her arm. She screamed and yanked it back. The flames extinguished but the pain didn’t, and she burst into sobs.
Blaze screamed too, as flames erupted over his body. His clothing ignited in tiny flashes. If something wasn’t done quickly, he would become a living torch.
Loo stepped forward. “Hold his arms,” he said dreamily. Two members of Team Dragon stepped forward as though to stop Loo. His face and eyes took on a harsh, angry look that was so out of character for him it gave them pause. “Don’t be stupid. I’m trying to help.”
Ash and Baker Flamebringer looked at each other and shrugged. They captured Blaze’s arms to stop him from flailing, all the while attempting to avoid the flames.
Loo brought his hands up and over the head of the burning boy,. Water poured from his palms to run down Blaze’s body. Flames extinguished, Loo removed his hands. Little wisps of smoke curled upward from black charred patches. Blaze’s hair, no longer spiked, hung limp down his face, water running in rivulets through streaks of soot. He looked like a drowned rat.
Blaze’s eyes rolled into his head and he fell forward in a faint. Instead of holding him, Ash and Baker were so surprised that they let go, and Blaze landed with a thump to the floor.
“Neat trick.” Jet stepped up and stared down at the still smoking boy, prodding him with his toe. “At least he’s alive.” He looked up at a dazed and confused Team Dragon. “I’m thinking you might want to get him over to either Luza or Sammiel. They’re the only ones who might be able to heal him before he wakes up and really starts screaming.”
Jet turned to Ryssa, who was slipping into shock with the pain of her own arm. She whimpered beneath the tears streaming down her face.
“Nice piece of work, that,” he admired, trying to keep her calm. He threw a questioning look at Meek. The boy squared his shoulders and stepped toward Ryssa.
Reggie, clearly worried, elbowed his way in closer. Moira held Ryssa’s uninjured arm, but placed her free hand on Reggie’s shoulder to stop him from interfering. “Meek’s going to see if he can help her.”
Meek stood at Ryssa’s side and critically eyed the arm she still held to her chest. Meek made a motion to show he needed her to hold it out a little, away from her body. Ryssa did as he indicated, but slowly. A cry of pain escaped as the shock of what had happened started to wear off.
Somewhere behind him, Reggie heard shuffling as Team Dragon dragged Blaze out of the sweets shop. They were being none too gentle about it. The boy was sure to feel a few more bumps and bruises if he awoke before the healers were through with him. Reggie found the dark thought appealing.
Meek held his hands a short distance from either side of Ryssa’s arm. An orange glow enveloped his hands and expanded until her wrist was encased in a glowing, orange ball of light. Moving his hands slowly up her arm, he took care not to make contact. The ball followed, lingering between his palms.
Ryssa drew a sharp breath as a cooling sensation enveloped her wrist and spread up the rest of her arm. When it reached the last of the burns, Meek stopped and lowered his hands.
Ryssa frowned at her arm. It was charred and crusty, and covered with blisters. “I don’t feel any more pain, but it doesn’t look any different.”
“It’s not,” Moira said. “Meek’s talent is passive healing and it’s a secondary talent at that. He manipulated the nerve endings, or maybe your energy field, so your body doesn’t register the pain anymore. I’m not sure which, ’cuz I don’t know enough about Healing magic. We still need to get you to someone who can heal the actual damage, not just the pain.” She looked to Jet.
“Let Aurelius make the call.” He shrugged.
“Is she in any danger?” Reggie asked.
“No,” Moira shook her head, “just of scars. But she’ll be healed long before that becomes an issue.”
Ryssa studied her arm, testing the movement of her blackened fingers by curling and uncurling them.
“It doesn’t even look like a part of me any more, does it?” She laughed nervously, and waved her hand through the air with a growl. “It looks like something out of an old horror movie.”
“Curse of the Mummy’s Hand?” Jet supplied.
“Should be wrapped in bandages,” Moira laughed. “So that’s kind of appropriate.”
The other team members watched with blank expressions. They had never experienced the mortal world, let alone movies. Hammie was the exception, of course, but he seemed more concerned by the slight disarray in the sweet shop, especially the waterlogged floor.
“Maybe we should help clean up a little before we head out,” he suggested.
“Pay it no mind, child,” Madam Quiggley, the plump shopkeeper, said cheerfully. “I seen what was what. Not so much a mess that I can’t tackle it. You run along and get that girl’s arm taken care of.” She winked at Ryssa. “’Twas the best right cross I’ve seen in some time. I’d hate to have you unable to do it again—not that I’m condoning violence, mind you.”
Ryssa blushed, not knowing how to respond.
“Well, off
with you now.” Madam Quiggley came around the counter and bustled them toward the door. She pressed a small package into Ryssa’s good hand and winked again. Ryssa looked down. The label read Magic Marvels. Moira smiled enthusiastically, so Ryssa assumed they were good. “Them Flamebringers had it coming if you ask me. Always coming in here with uppity little attitudes and—” She broke off, looking at Pyro, Jr. “Sorry, no offense.”
Pyro, Jr. didn’t respond. He walked numbly out the door with the rest of the Team.
“So how did this happen?” Ryssa asked suddenly.
Moira gave her a confused look. “What do you mean?”
“This.” Ryssa held up her arm. “I don’t get it. All I did was punch him.”
“Well—” Moira hedged.
“Why did you punch him?” Jet interrupted. “Not that I don’t think he deserved it.”
“I don’t know.” Ryssa thought about it. “One minute he was standing there, and then his hand started to glow and catch fire. He moved like he was going to throw it at Pyro, and nobody else seemed ready to stop him. So I just swung. It was instinct.”
“Oh,” Jet started in surprise. “I suspected something, but—”
“Nobody else saw him—the glow I mean?”
Moira eyed her curiously. “It’s not common to see magic being called like that. It’s pretty high level stuff.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t get worse, like Blaze,” Jet added.
“Number one rule of magic, Ryssa.” Jade nodded sagely. “Never, ever touch someone once they’ve started calling the magic. It can be bad for one or the other, or both. By rights, you should be the one looking like Blaze does right now.”
“I didn’t know he was casting magic. I mean, I knew, but I just thought—” She shrugged. “I don’t know what I thought.”
“I thought you needed a wand to cast magic,” Reggie was puzzled.
“No.” Glinda shook her head. “Wands are used to amplify magic. But everyone in Faery has a sort of ability to cast magic without a wand—like Meek just did to stop Ryssa’s pain.”
“Oh. So how do you find out what kind of magic you can cast?”
“Magical potentials tests,” Gervais said in his gravelly voice. “Usually happens when you’re as young as two or three years old. You were both taken out of Faery while you were still infants.”
“So don’t you think we should be tested now? It might help with this whole competition thing if we knew what mine and Ryssa’s strong points were so we knew how we meshed as a team.”
“Won’t work now.” Gervais shook his head. “The tests are done when you’re young, because you’re old enough to understand simple instructions, but not old enough to have definite opinions about things. It screws up the tests otherwise.”
“So how do we find out?” Ryssa asked.
“Trial and error, kidlets,” Jet sighed. “A lot more work for all of us, I’m guessing.”
“I’m sorry you got stuck with us.” Ryssa was irritated. “It could ruin your chances to win this competition.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Moira said. “I’m for thinking that the Lia Fial played fair by putting everyone exactly where they needed to be to live to their best potential. We’ll figure it out.”
The group walked the rest of the short trip back to the tree in silence. That silence slowly became punctuated by bird song, heard long before they even reached the Sithin. The closer they got, the louder the ruckus became.
Glinda’s face was scrunched as though trying to focus, but failing in the midst of the racket. When they arrived at the Sithin tree, hundreds of songbirds flitted about the branches, their voices raised to an almost deafening level.
“Sparrows?” Reggie moved closer to Jet.
“Yup.” Jet nodded.
“Is that what they’re called?” Glinda fixed her attention on the birds.
“You’re the bird girl,” Reggie eyed her, “didn’t you know?”
“No. We have more of the exotic birds here from the mortal world, and others that can’t survive out there anymore. But these—sparrows—they’re different. And they’re kind of a nuisance. It drives me crazy that I can’t understand what they’re saying. It’s not just me. A few of the elders feel the same way.”
“You talk to birds?” Ryssa’s amazement showed on her face.
“Of course.” Glinda glanced at her with surprise. “It’s one of the most basic forms of the Animal magics.”
Reggie looked at Gervais.
“Me, too,” Gervais answered the unasked question. “But not with birds—mostly four-legged creatures.”
“But you can’t understand them?” Ryssa pointed to the sparrows.
“No,” Glinda replied. “None of us are able to. The elders think it’s because they are so much a part of the mortal world that it makes it impossible for us to connect with the chatter of their thoughts—like there’s no magic left to them.”
“Then how come they’re here in Faery now?”
“There’s a lot of speculation, but no real answers.” Jet regarded the birds warily.
“They—I mean the elders—think it has something to do with the Wilt,” Moira explained. “Since the Wilt is pockets of dead magic, they think the veil between Faery and the Zombie Zone is starting to thin out in places. If that’s true, sparrows may not be the worst of what could get through to us here.”
“So what happens when the veil is gone completely?” Reggie asked.
“Faery will cease to exist as a separate domain from the rest of the world,” Jade was blunt. “And it could mean the end of magic.”
“But wouldn’t that also mean the end of the world?”
“That’s pretty much the gist of it,” Jet said. “Now you know why the elders are so uptight about losing more potentials—other than their actual loss, I mean. With each death or disappearance goes one more who could possibly save Faery.”
“But who would do such a thing?” Ryssa couldn’t wrap her mind around the thought. “Wouldn’t that mean they would die, too, along with the rest of the world?”
“Obviously, someone who thinks immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Reggie speculated. “Like somebody who’s forbidden to use his or her magic anymore—”
“Like the Nightfall guy?” Ryssa interrupted.
Jet grunted. “Maybe—but the elders have been all over him since the fireball thing thirteen years ago. He was the first suspect.”
“So were any of those with dark magic potential,” Moira added. “There were traces of dark magic found that day.”
Ryssa glanced discreetly at Meek, remembering that he had been there. She also remembered he had been up and awake before anyone else this morning—before Glinda’s brother turned up missing.
“You know,” Reggie gazed at the birds, “maybe there’s something more magical about the sparrows than you think.”
Glinda furrowed her brow. “How so?”
“I mean, in the, er, Zombie Zone, there is some speculation that goes on about them. It seems like every time there’s a major disaster, they appear in flocks around the scene—whether it’s a natural or man made.”
“Sort of like carrion birds?”
“Yeah, but maybe they are drawn to the energy vibration of the violence. Maybe they feed off the dark energy stuff, rather than actual bodies, like the vultures do.”
“So maybe I don’t understand what they’re saying,” Glinda worked through the suggestion, “because I’m trained to tune out the dark magic—because the dark magic is forbidden.”
“Maybe.” Reggie shrugged.
“Hmm. I’ll have to think about it. If you’re right—”
Her thought was cut off when a sparrow broke away from its perch and flew directly at her. Glinda ducked, waving her hand above her head to keep the bird at bay. It flew back to the tree and sat, watching her.
Glinda narrowed suspicious eyes in its direction. “I think it’s laughing at me.”
The rest
of the Team looked up.
“I think you’re right,” Moira frowned. “What a nasty little creature.”
“They’ve never done that before.” Jet mirrored his twin’s expression. “I wonder why now?”
“Maybe we’re getting closer to the truth,” Reggie said. “And they’re trying to distract us from figuring it out.”
“Hmph,” Gervais grunted. “Birds are always harder to deal with than the four-leggeds. They’re so unpredictable. Four-leggeds are much easier to understand—pretty much straight forward, basic survival instinct stuff.”
“Dumb as rocks, you mean,” Glinda sniffed.
“Rocks aren’t dumb,” Jade insisted. “Their thoughts are slow, but they are extremely intelligent.”
“You talk to rocks?” Ryssa held up her good hand. “Never mind—basic Earth magic, right?”
Jade smiled. “Actually, it’s a pretty rare talent. Most Earth magic users can get the earth to work with them, but it’s pretty immediate. Talking to the earth, especially rocks, is definitely an Unseelie trait—and it’s even rare among them. They have the passive, lots-of-patience type attitude more than the Seelie do.”
Ryssa could see it pained her to give the Unseelie Court any kind of compliment, so she let it go.
“Okay, kidlets,” Jet sighed. “Let’s head down and see about our teammate’s arm, shall we?”
The rest followed Jet as he led them to the side entrance that was the same as they had left it. Reggie was secretly relieved, figuring it meant they still had time before facing Aurelius.
He was wrong. When they reached the common area, Aurelius was seated on the couch, speaking in quiet tones to a slender woman who wore white and orange clothing that looked like a cross between Faery-style robes and an evening gown. Her white hair hung almost to her ankles and was woven in a single braid down her back. Her kind blue eyes showed concern when they fell on Ryssa’s arm.
The woman broke off her conversation with Aurelius and hurried over to Ryssa. She examined the charred limb, and raised a questioning brow to Meek. “Your work?”
Meek lowered his eyes to the floor.
“Who’s that?” Reggie whispered to Jet.
“Luza, Matriarch of the Bonemender House,” Jet replied softly.
“Excellent work, child, excellent,” Luza pronounced. “She isn’t feeling any pain, yet she can still feel the arm. You’d have received high marks if you were being tested for level advancement—and without a wand!”
A blush of pleasure flushed Meek’s face, but he continued to stare at the floor.
“Okay, girl,” Luza stepped back, “hold your arm out straight so we can do this, all right?”
Ryssa nodded and did as she was told. The Matriarch passed her arm in a circle, directly under, then over and around Ryssa’s. A trail of orange colored light followed it on the first pass, a trail of white light on the second pass. Each time she completed a loop around the arm, the colors alternated.
She moved faster, building a steady stream of white and orange light that encased Ryssa’s arm. Suddenly she pulled away. The light flickered out. The arm was healed—no scars, no marks, just perfect peachy flesh.
“Oh, thank you!” Ryssa threw her arms around the woman in gratitude. Luza stood there as though she didn’t quite know what to do. Patting the girl’s shoulders, she politely pushed her away. The pressure in the room grew heavy and then lightened again.
“Well, yes.” Luza cleared her throat, evidently unaccustomed to physical displays of affection. She lifted her chin as the last of the heaviness dissipated into the air. “I guess I’ll have to keep that in mind for the future.” She abruptly turned away.
Ryssa was confused. Did I do something wrong?
“Not that it’s any of my affair, Aurelius,” Luza said with a chastising tone, “but you had best see to it that these children get some instruction before they hurt themselves more seriously.”
Aurelius’ face darkened, but he waited until she had left before speaking.
“Very well,” he sighed. “I’d hoped to be able to start you further along, but we must do what we must. Have a seat, children. I’ll have lunch brought in for us. It’s time for your first instructional.”
“Which is—?” Jet looked hopeful.
“Basic theories in magic.”
Half the Team groaned—the other half rolled their eyes. Reggie and Ryssa just stood there, confused.
“Lectures,” Jet explained. “Dry, boring, textbook type lectures without even a slide show to sleep through.”
Ryssa groaned like the others, but Reggie just gave a grunt and shrugged. “We have to start somewhere, don’t we?”
While the team mumbled their complaints, Aurelius stepped across the room to whisper instructions to the Brownie woman Ryssa had seen earlier that morning with Meek.
Her suspicions returned. Why were you up so early, Meek?