by Cindy Dees
“Whey-uhh yel-low dra-gon? We see magic. Know he hee-uhh!” Ki’Raiden roared.
One of the men must have said something to the effect of the orc being mistaken, for Ki’Raiden backhanded the fellow viciously across the face. The villager dropped to the ground like a stone.
Will’s stomach sank just as hard. He whispered to his father, “They saw me. I used magic to defend myself from their scout. They’ll be looking for me.” Oh, stars. Lars is dead because of me. His father stared at him, and something akin to fierce pride flared for just an instant in Ty’s eyes.
The Boki continued his tirade, finally declaring the villagers no better than sheep and deserving of a sheep’s life. Shame burned in Will’s gut. He had to do something. He couldn’t just sit here and watch them die, slaughtered like lowly beasts. His legs uncoiled and he drew breath to shout a challenge.
This was his fault. He had to fix it. As Will began to rise, a heavy hand landed on his shoulder, forcing him back down.
His father whispered sharply, “Do not be a fool. You would die for nothing. And there is more at stake here than you know.”
“But—”
His father threw up an imperious hand, cutting his argument off before it found air. What? Didn’t Ty think Will was good enough to fight for his friends and neighbors? Nothing he ever did was good enough for his father. Will hadn’t even been allowed to join the local militia when other boys had long served in it. Ty had merely drilled Will in how to use a broom and a threshing pole. To paint and shovel and chop wood. He acted as if Will were a stripling lad who couldn’t begin to handle himself in a real fight.
Mayhap Ty was ashamed of his human son. Had he wanted so badly for Will to be an elf like his mother? Of course, Will was disappointed that he hadn’t inherited his mother’s centuries-long life span. But it didn’t mean he was flawed. He was simply human. And after all, Ty was human. Most people on the northern continent were.
Will hissed, “He’s going to slaughter them all. We must do something!”
“No!” Ty hissed back. “We must not.”
“Those are your friends. Neighbors. Have you no heart? How can you watch them be killed like sheep? Or are you truly the coward they whisper you to be, hiding from anyone who might recognize you and name you gutless?”
“Is that what they say of me?” his father muttered.
“Is it true?” Will demanded.
Ty scowled at that.
“Fight, Father. Be a man. Defend your home, curse you!”
“You do not understand what you ask … the time is not yet right … the cost—”
“To whom? You? To the next man that beast guts?” Will battered at his father’s resistance, but words failed him as outrage clogged his throat. “Did you not teach me to do the right thing? To stand up for justice? For the weaker man who cannot defend himself? What do you stand for if you will not stand by your friends?”
To his credit, Ty looked intensely chafed.
Will’s mother spoke up, adding, “If not now, my love, when will we make our stand? For all these years we have bided our time while memory of freedom slips away. The values you would pass on to your son are being forgotten, stripped away one by one by the Kothites. Perhaps this is the portent you have been waiting for.” She glanced back at the village. “You can win this fight. You know you can.”
Ty took a long, assessing look at the carnage behind them as if trying to decide if this was the moment he’d been waiting for. Will held his breath while his father measured the enemy and weighed the options. Finally, unable to hold his silence any longer, Will whispered raggedly, “We have to help them.”
Ty exhaled hard, his face settling into steely determination. “All right. It is time. I will do as you ask.” Will started to pump a fist in triumph until Ty’s voice cut across his celebration low and hard. “But we do this my way.”
Will glanced at his mother for support in resisting his father’s condition. But as always, her solemn, wise eyes pierced his anger, making it seem impetuous and childish. Sobered, Will reluctantly muttered, “Your way.”
Ty nodded briskly. “To the woods, then. And the emergency stash.”
What emergency stash? Will’s mother nodded as if she knew what Ty was talking about. These two had made plans for a Boki invasion?
“And bring along that spear. I’ll see what I can do with it.”
Will blinked as his father took off running low and fast into the woods.
Townspeople screamed and the seething mass of monsters howled behind them as his parents started for the woods. Will glanced back and caught sickening glimpses of the massacre unfolding—the invaders waving bloody axes and pikes in the hellish glow of the fires, orcs hacking through doors, dragging women and children out by the hair. He saw one of the men bearing a pitchfork face off against an orc. He was all but cut in half by the beast’s axe.
Nauseated, Will turned away and crawled as fast as he could for the trees, envisioning the wholesale slaughter that accompanied the screams and groans and howls behind him. He risked another look back and swore he saw an ogre lift a severed arm and take a bite of its bloody meat. Gorge rose in Will’s throat.
And somewhere in the midst of his anguished impatience for Ty to get on with saving the villagers, rage took root within him. The deep, implacable kind that grew and festered over time, that made a man hard and cold, that vowed—and delivered—violent reprisal. An eye for an eye. A limb for a limb. Blood for blood.
His mother reached the end of the stone fence and angled right, following the shadow of an alarmingly sparse line of gorse bushes. Will could barely make her out, so well did she blend in with the shadows and so fluidly did she creep along. He’d had no idea she could move with such stealth!
Will read her lips as much as he heard her whisper over her shoulder to him, “Stay low. We must reach the woods unseen. Whatever you do, do not look back.”
Too late. Images of the nightmare behind him had burned themselves into Will’s memory forever, nesting like serpents in his mind. Creeping on their bellies through the cold, wet weeds, he and his parents made for the shelter of the trees.
A few more screams split the night, but then those, too, faded away, leaving only the wailing and howling of the monsters and their orgy of death. The tangy smell of burning wood and the sharper smell of burning flesh filled Will’s nostrils. His stomach heaved, and he arched his back, catlike, as the contents of his stomach poured out upon the earth.
Just shy of the tree line, Ty’s voice floated out of the trees, surprising Will mightily. Ty ordered, “Stay here, Son. When your mother signals you, gain the attention of one or two orcs, then run for the woods. You know the pine-split boulder atop the first ridge?”
He knew the spot and nodded. It was a broken boulder, its halves pushed apart on either side of a mighty pine as if the towering tree had grown right up through the middle of it.
“Lead the orcs to me there.”
“Then what?” Will whispered back, his heart already pounding at the prospect of being chased by orcs.
“Stay out of the way and do not get hurt. I will do the rest.” Will gaped at his father’s terse response as Ty continued, “We must make haste. The Boki will send out search parties, and we must be in place before then.”
Who or what were the Boki looking for this far south, so far from the Forest of Thorns? What could they possibly care for a place like Hickory Hollow?
Will swiped the back of his hand across his mouth, which now tasted foully of bile, and crouched, readying himself to run. Those beasts had killed his friends. His neighbors. He would avenge their deaths. Every last one of them. He knew not how, but he vowed it would be so.
How long he waited for his mother’s signal Will couldn’t say, but it seemed a dozen eternities. Finally, blessedly, he spotted her just within the first tree line. She waved at him once, twice, three times.
He pushed to his feet and looked back at the village, which was fully ablaze
now. The glare of the fires blinded him to the fate of his neighbors, for which he was grateful. A pair of huge shadows crossed between him and the flaming village. He started to shout, but then thought better of it.
Ty had said to draw out one or two orcs, not the entire war party. Will kicked a stone hard into another one, and as he’d hoped, the resulting clatter made both orcs’ heads jerk up sharply.
He ducked and took off running then, bent low and dodging back and forth in case they thought to send spears or arrows his way. The trick was to be hard enough to spot that the pair of orcs would not be certain of what they’d seen and would not send up a general alarm. The orcs were shockingly fast, though, and gained on him much more rapidly than he had anticipated.
He was not hollow born for nothing, however. He knew these woods as well as he knew his own hand. As he reached the first trees, he dived flat on the cold ground and wiggled through a low gap in a stand of dead blackberry canes left over from last summer. The dried thorns should slow the orcs down enough to give him a greater margin before them.
He headed for the split boulder at a dead run. As he flew through the trees, he imagined an orc behind every one, a goblin lurking in every shadow, and his heart lurched at each and every one. But finally, he made out the silhouette of the mighty pine ahead. He put on a last burst of speed up the hill. Those cursed-fast orcs were closing in on him yet again. He dashed around the boulder and nearly bowled into his father.
“Stay here!” Ty hissed as he stepped out from behind the rock. “Have you still got your bracelet?”
Will frowned, startled. He never took the braided leather band with its greenish stone off. It had been a gift from Adrick. “On my wrist,” he replied.
“Good. Keep it on.”
Adrick had said that the bauble would protect Will from harm, but he’d thought the woodsman was just being superstitious. Was there some truth to the claim, or was his father just as superstitious as his old friend?
Ty thrust a staff into his hands as he moved past. Will examined the weapon quickly. It was his spear. Except the broken end had been cut off, the new end banded by a piece of metal. How had his father accomplished such a repair so quickly? There was no time to ask, though, as his father moved down the hill.
Will stared in disbelief. Where on Urth did his father get that shield? It was not a foot soldier’s round, wooden implement. Rather, strapped to his father’s left arm was a kite-shaped shield made of thin metal painted a rich shade of blue. The ease with which his father carried it announced its extraordinary lightness.
Ty assumed a fighter’s stance, and a chain-mail shirt caught what little starlight filtered through the trees. Not the heavy, clumsy, hand-riveted mail manufactured in the colonies, this mail had impossibly tiny rings so tightly woven it looked almost like cloth. The beautifully crafted gambeson under the mail looked made of thin, supple leather. It was dyed the same blue as the shield and inlaid with gold wire in an intricate design. Will’s father’s leather gauntlets were similarly dyed and decorated. And then there were the rows of blazons on his chest, Mage’s Guild, some sort of family crest, a yellow dragon that matched the one on his gambeson, what looked like combat campaign badges—a lot of them—and many other blazons that looked like favors granted for services rendered.
“Get down!” Ty snapped over his shoulder as he strode down the small slope.
Will rolled his eyes at his father’s back and blatantly disobeyed. No way was he missing seeing Ty fight orcs. He eased around the boulder, keeping to the dark shadows under the heavy pine boughs.
The fight, if one could call it that, was so short and fast Will could hardly believe his eyes. Two bolts of bright golden light shot from Ty’s right hand, one after another, striking each of the orcs squarely in the chest. The pair dropped like rocks. Ty leaped forward and with quick flashes of a dagger slit their throats from ear to ear.
What. Was. That. Light?
Oh, Will knew the answer well enough. He simply couldn’t believe his eyes. His father possessed magic? Was that where he’d inherited his own gift for it? Why, in stars’ name, hadn’t Ty taught him how to use it, then?
And not only did his father have magic; he also could cast spells powerful enough to drop a full-grown orc like a rock! Battle mages were incredibly rare, and what few there were lived lives of luxury in Imperial guild houses in big cities. They were not humble cobblers struggling to scrape out a bare living on the edge of civilization.
His mother jogged up to him, then, and he was stunned to see that she had added a ranger’s leather jerkin to her attire. It was covered with small, sewn-in pouches that looked stuffed with the tools of the trade. An elegant long bow and quiver were slung over her shoulder with the ease of long familiarity. Hanging from her belt was a short sash covered in blazons, none of which he recognized. One had a tree on it, another some sort of house crest. A third blazon appeared to be made of amber.
As shocked as he was by her tracker’s attire, his first words were, “What is all of that?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward his father methodically cleaning his blade on the loincloth of a dead orc.
“That is your legacy, my son.”
He hated it when his mother went all cryptic and elven on him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped.
“You have all the tools to become what your father is.”
“A humble cobbler on the edge of civilization?” he retorted sarcastically. “No, thank you.”
“This is not the time for childish attitudes!” she snapped back. “Listen to me, Will. You can be as great a battle mage as your father if you wish. He has given you all the building blocks you need to develop your abilities.”
Of a sudden all the boring lectures about calming his mind, emptying his thoughts, and disciplining his emotions took on a whole new meaning. He’d always thought Ty merely taught him how to avoid the sorts of thoughts and words that would get him killed by the Empire.
His mother muttered, “It is time for you to become a man and take up the torch your father has passed to you.”
Now she told him to grow up? After all those years of treating him like a helpless child?
“How am I supposed to master magic if he never taught me?” Will demanded.
“Because it is a simple and powerful truth that cannot be taught, cannot be proven, and cannot be measured. The most powerful magic is all around us. It is in the air we breathe, the earth we stand on, the water we drink, and the fire that warms us. It is always and forever, never waning, never fading. It is what you feel in your heart, what you know in the deepest part of our spirit, and what you believe in your wildest dreams. It is simple and pure like the scent of lady’s breath.”
Lady’s breath was a beautiful plant that produced sweet-smelling white flowers. Its leaves were burned as incense and made healing poultices for wounds. It was said the last breath of the Green Lady upon the land had created the plant.
Something rustled in the bushes behind them and Will whirled. Without thinking, he channeled his magic through the broken spear he clutched and blasted the orc scout into an unconscious heap. Will watched in shock as his mother darted forward and efficiently finished off the beast by slitting its throat.
Ty, who’d raced up the hill, no doubt at the sight of Will’s magic blast, reached them, sword drawn and hands glowing dangerously.
“It’s handled,” Will’s mother murmured.
Ty turned an amazed stare on Will, who glared back, furious.
Serica interrupted the burgeoning confrontation sharply. “There is no time for this. Husband, the trail is laid.”
Trail? Was she a trained tracker, too? What other secrets had his parents kept from him all these years? Will shot her a thunderstruck look, brimming with demands for answers. Her exotic uptilted eyes flashed him back one of those severe “not now” looks of hers that quelled all questions.
“Give me that.” His father held out an expectant hand, and Will laid Adrick’s
broken spear in it. “Close your eyes, both of you,” Ty ordered.
Will did as instructed. A bright flash shone beyond his eyelids for an instant but was gone before his eyes could fly open and see the source.
His father held out Adrick’s spear to Will, remade yet again. The entire end of the staff, a forearm’s length of it, was now wrapped neatly in what looked like copper. “How—” Will started.
“An old spell I know,” Ty interrupted impatiently. “Go back to the edge of the forest and draw another patrol to me.”
“Are you mad?” Will demanded.
“You are the one who insisted I save your friends. Bring me another pair of orcs.”
Will ran down the hill without giving voice to the myriad questions dancing upon his tongue and went in search of another Boki patrol. He did not need to leave the forest to find one. He darted across the path ahead of this duo and the chase was on. This time he had no way of slowing the orcs’ pursuit and the creatures had drawn frighteningly close by the time he charged up the hill toward the split boulder.
He caught a flash of reflected light as his father leaped out of the brush on the attack. The weapon in Ty’s hand looked like a long sword, but made of no material Will had ever seen before. It gleamed milky white in the shadowed glen. Will skidded to a halt underneath the pine tree and lurched as his mother materialized beside him.
“What is his sword?” Will whispered.
“Dragon’s Tooth,” his mother replied absently, her concentration entirely on the scene below.
Was that its name, or was she suggesting that was an actual … Dragons didn’t even exist. Right? Right?
Will’s jaw sagged as his father slipped his left arm free of his shield and thumped his chest with his left fist, uttering something in what sounded for all the world like guttural orcish. His foes bared their huge teeth in bloodthirsty grins as Ty donned the shield once more and gestured the orcs forward with the tip of his sword. Both orcs pulled huge battle-axes off their backs and advanced.