Dragoon (War of the Princes Book 2)

by A. R. Ivanovich

  My wet hair was splayed out beside me and I lay in a puddle of the draping white nightgown I'd found in the washroom armoire. My eyes fluttered shut. I was trying without much success to forget about the little blonde girl who’d been dragged from the training room, when a hand closed over my mouth.

  I struggled frantically but stopped when the blade of a knife pressed against my throat. Sucking in air through my nose like a rabbit with a dog on its heels, I grasped the gloved hand holding the weapon and looked up at my assailant.

  It was Commander Kestrel. His imposing figure hunched over me, his eyes shadowed from the moonlight by the round, hollowed sockets of his birdlike helm.

  “Don't scream,” he said, his voice muffled. Any more pressure, and that knife would slice into my skin.

  “I wonf if you wonf,” I said into his hand, and let a rope of electricity snake its way from my core, through my palm, and into Commander Kestrel's arm.

  He grunted as the jolt sent him stumbling backwards into my bed frame. The knife clattered to the floor. I scrambled away, dragging the long crimson curtain with me until my back hit the wall. The curtain, stretched and tangled beneath me, nearly broke from its fixture.

  The Commander groaned, his black and red leather armor dimly illuminated by the moonlight. I used my hands to help me get my footing, bare feet sliding on the curtain, and wrung my right hand until it was bright with slivers of electricity. The tendrils lapped up to my elbow, and I held my hand out defensively.

  “Don't move!” I hissed, pointing my palm at him.

  Commander Kestrel rolled his head to one side and looked up at me from where he was slumped. Rising like a mountain cat, his shoulders taut, he looked down at me from his full height. “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am. Historian Kestrel. I'm from Mount Yumin. There's nothing more to know.” It was a feeble attempt to maintain my cover, now that he knew I had the Spark.

  “Yumin?” he echoed.

  I nodded.

  He made a thick sound. “You really had me fooled. And after thinking...”

  “I thought my family were the only Kestrels too,” I said.

  Commander Kestrel cocked his head to the side. “You thought what?”

  “I had no idea there were others,” I told him, wondering if he had come to talk. Maybe he'd be more civil now that the odds were evened out a bit. Then again, there was the Command.

  If only I could reach my satchel with the flintlock pistol. I could shoot him and not have to worry. It was on the floor at the corner of my bed. I could reach it if he was distracted.

  “I think we're doing this wrong,” I said, hoping I could convince him. “Let's just relax. Can you take your helm off so I don't feel like I'm talking to a statue?”

  I shook my wrist and winked out the electricity as a show of good faith. He considered me for a moment. The instant he tilted his head down and reached to place his hand on the helm, I dove for the bag. My fingers closed around cool rosewood and brass. I ripped the gun from satchel, feeling far too slow. He'd dropped the helm on the floor, snatching up the discarded knife.

  Clutching my weapon with two hands, I leveled it at him. My fingers went suddenly limp. Did the gun always feel so slippery? My pulse hammering in my ears, the world slid on its side the same way it had when I was in Rocktree Camp. The pistol, pulled by gravity, escaped my fingers with ease, and hit the ground with a heavy thump. I stumbled one step to the side, saving myself the indignation of falling flat on my face.

  “Rune.”

  Chapter 26: Night Lights

  His name fell from my lips like a wisp of steam on the wind. Gently, yes, but on the inside, I’d been bludgeoned with disbelief.

  “Don’t use my name so familiarly,” Rune said, holding the knife out at me. He was clean now, like me, scrubbed free of the evidence of the battlefield. His angular eyebrows were pinched and the line of his jaw was set, revealing a dimple at level with his molars. The scar that Commander Stakes had given him was a shiny line that streaked from his temple, over his cheek. It was the souvenir he'd gotten while saving my life.

  Warmth and relief swelled up in me, and a fine mist grew in the corners of my eyes. It was a harsh and wonderful awakening, to find that the person you had thought would kill you was actually the person you loved most in the world. The racing locomotive of thought screeched to a halt, bringing me face to face with how he was looking at me and what he had said.

  “Wh-why?” I asked dumbly. “Oh gravity, I shocked you. I'm so sorry.”

  I moved toward him and he stepped back. What kind of a dance was this?

  “I thought I’d never see you again.” I could feel the smile, lightening my face. He didn’t mirror my relief. It took a moment for reality to sink in. Rune was standing in my room with a deadly blade in his hand.

  My smile vanished along with my trust. Electricity ignited both of my arms. “Why did you attack me?”

  “I came to talk,” he said, blue eyes locked on my every movement. This wasn't the Rune that curled up with me in my dreams; this was a Dragoon, a killer. The thick blade of the dagger burst into blue flame.

  “With a knife up to my neck and a thing over your face?”

  “Helm,” he corrected me.

  “Yeah, I know, whatever. What's wrong with you? How did you think I'd react?” I demanded. “I thought you were Commander Kestrel, coming to kill me or something. You have the same helm.”

  “It’s not the same. Cormorants are issued helms with copper banding. Junior Commanders get a similar design without the banding. It signifies their graduation to draining.”

  “Well it looked the same to me!”

  “I couldn’t risk you waking Axton.”

  “And you couldn’t do that by asking?”

  He ignored me. “So you're a Historian? Did you enjoy playing me for a fool?”

  “What? No, I mean yes, not really,” I fumbled. “Just put the stupid knife down, okay? I can't think straight.”

  “Need to get your lies in order?” he asked me, not lowering the knife.

  “No!” I said, upset. “What the hell is going on? You’re not making any sense.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “Not unless you put that thing away,” I told him. Glancing down, I saw my arms alight with electricity. It was blinding, lighting the room. I exhaled, forcing the element away again.

  “You pulled a pistol on me,” he pointed out. Just hearing his voice and that lilting accent sent a trickle of warmth down my spine. It was very distracting.

  “It wasn't loaded.” As if that'd help. It didn't. “I thought you were Commander Kestrel. Please,” I tried again in the most sincere of all tones.

  I could see the battle in his body language. He shifted from one foot to the other. Finally, he rolled his head to look out the window, exhaling heavily through his nose. The flame disappeared from the dagger. He placed it safely on the bedside table, beside my Historian pin, and stepped away.

  He was angry… really angry. It didn't change my physical response to him. The way he filled my room with his presence, the shape of his body, fitted so perfectly with layers of armor, the scar that told me with more honesty than words how he'd once felt about me. Finally seeing him in front of me after all this time, I just wanted to throw my arms around him.

  Those eyes weren't cold, no, they were hot as blue flame, and they held me fixed where I was. I couldn't go to him like this. Maybe he really did hate me. “Why are you looking at me like that? I thought you'd be happy to see me.”

  “Is this where you start manipulating me again?” he asked sharply.

  “No! Rune, what did they do to you? What happened?” I asked, beginning to feel a new kind of fear. Had he forgotten everything we'd gone through?

  “Nothing. Everything is the same, relatively speaking, except for you.”

  “I came back,” I said. He gave me a flat look.

  “What were you doing with her?” he demanded.

 
; “Who?”

  “Hest.”

  A sickness crept into my stomach. He'd seen me walking around the Installment with the Margrave of the region, known best for her polite demeanor and bone crushing ruthlessness. Pun intended. Of course he'd think something was wrong with me. “Believe me, I'd love it if she'd leave me alone! She thinks I'm writing a book on the Penalty. It's part of my cover story,” I explained quickly, knowing it wasn't enough.

  “Excellent subject matter.” His words were cutting. “And him?” He pointed furiously at the closed door adjoining my room to Dylan's. Crap.

  My bed stripped of sheets, all the covers on the bed of the greatest betrayer of my life. “It's not what you think,” were the first words out of my mouth. “I know everyone says that at the worst times, and usually its not even true, but believe me, there's a lot more than meets the eye.”

  He shook his head almost imperceptibly, and looked at me sidelong, as if he couldn't believe what he was about to say. “I saw you and Hest by the stairs tonight and I thought I'd finally lost my mind. Maybe I was seeing things. Maybe it was only someone who looked like you. I kept a distance and followed you here. I wore a helm so no one could link me to you if anyone was watching. I slipped in the door to find him there. All I needed was one pillow.”

  “Gravity, Rune! Did you kill Dylan?” I asked, panicked.

  “No, but my restraint should be commended.”

  “Oh,” I sighed, grabbing at my heart. “Don't scare me like that.”

  “Tell me about you and Hest.”

  “There isn’t anything to tell.”

  “You work for her. Explain yourself.”

  My jaw dropped open and I sputtered with thin laughter. “Work for Hest? Are you kidding me?”

  He was not amused.

  “Rune, you know me.”

  “I’m not certain that I do, and I won't help you escape from your lies.”

  “I haven’t lied! Why are you acting like this? What really happened to you?”

  “Nothing happened to me,” he snapped, looking away out the window. “Nothing can happen to a sword in the Prince's arsenal. It just is. When it's sharp it's sharp. When it kills, it kills.”

  “And when it breaks, it's broken?” I cut in.

  He looked at me then, his blue eyes filled with a cold calm. “I'm not broken.”

  “But you're a sword, for the Prince. Just an item, to be used and discarded?”

  “It's the way of things.”

  “No, it's not! You're a person!” I said, my frustration finally boiling over. What had I done? By leaving him here, he'd gotten worse. Was it my fault? My responsibility?

  “I'm not here to argue my life purpose with you.”

  I saw the weakness in his statement and descended on it like a hawk to a mouse. “That's a good point. Why are you here, Rune?” Immediately, I regretted pushing him too hard.

  He looked me over. “What are the chances that you really are a fabled person with multiple Abilities from a country that doesn't exist?”

  “Of course it exists.”

  “There is no evidence to support that.”

  “And this is why you're here? To interrogate me?”

  The look he gave me was as severe as it was somber. “I am not interrogating you.” I wondered what his definition of the word meant. He paced away to lean on the frame of the window. The next words came quietly. “I need to know who you really are.”

  Of course he did. I was the one person in the world who had treated him like a real human being, with feelings and self worth beyond his military appraisal. He wasn't supposed to speak to anyone on a personal level, to make friends or to let his guard down. He'd done all three of those things with me. In the time we'd known each other, he'd torn himself away from the cruel laws he lived by, and ignoring penalty of death, he helped me. Was there any chance I didn't make a serious impact on how he saw his world? No, probably not.

  Finding me glued to Margrave Hest's side, traveling with my most bitter betrayer must have been quite a difficult pill to choke down. It would call into question everything he saw in me.

  I needed to be patient. He was clearly distressed and I had no idea the kind of life he’d been forced to endure for the long months we were apart. “I’m the same person you knew last year.”

  “Maybe you’ve worked for Hest all along. She pulled you out of Yumin and gave you a chance at glory. There was already a power-struggle at the Breakwater installment. She sent you in to speed up the division. A mythological Lodestone was controversial and tempting enough to do the trick. You chose to manipulate me because I was sick, weak, dying.”

  My head was spinning. I didn’t even know where to begin to explain how wrong all of it was. “That doesn’t even make sense!”

  “No, Hest training and using pawns to further her military career is more than possible, it’s likely. I may not have all of the details worked out, but the best plots are the most crooked.

  “What doesn’t make sense,” he pressed on, “…is that a girl who barely escaped Breakwater with her life, whose people would be massacred if they were found, has returned. Moreover, she has chosen to keep company with the most ruthless of child-murderers, the Margrave, Hest.”

  “Rune,” I said quietly.

  “If someone had asked me if this could ever happen, I would have told them no,” his eyes glazed over with the threat of tears and his jaw tightened until he spoke through his teeth. “There is no way that the girl who treated me like a human being would ever endanger her people, let alone stand, smiling, beside the murderer who kidnapped my eight-year-old sister. There was a time I would have bet my life that it was impossible.”

  I looked down at my feet, feeling like the wind had been driven from my lungs. “I’m not a spy,” I began to say, until I realized that in essence, I really was one. “I'm not a spy for Hest. I swear, on... on everything!”

  He didn't relax his stance at all or make any casual gesture so as not to frighten me. It hurt, seeing such distrust in his eyes.

  “I can explain everything, from the beginning,” I promised.

  “You'd better start.”

  * * *

  By the time I finished my story, I was sitting on the bed with my legs tucked beneath my nightgown. Rune was leaning against the wall beside the door with his arms crossed. I'd told him all about the officer who contacted me, my missing mother, the weather tower's destruction, and every step of my journey since I set foot in the Outside World again.

  “If you'd said that you came back for me, I’d have no doubt in my mind that you were lying,” he said, his broad shoulders no less tense.

  After so much time spent in anticipation, dreaming to see him again, his words stung me. “I wanted... I would have... But I couldn't be selfish.” I fiddled with my fingers in my lap. How could I express what I felt for him now? He'd think I was trying to manipulate him somehow.

  He was as immovable as the foundations of the palace. “That would be the correct decision, if it were true.”

  “It is. I told you everything, why won’t you believe me?”

  “The truth is too rare a thing to be accepted without question.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  He broke from the wall to stand directly ahead of me. The soft light from the window radiated behind him, turning him dark as a shadow. “Give me some irrefutable evidence that what I know about you isn’t a lie.”

  “Nothing you said even fits with our experiences together last year. Isn’t that worth something?”

  “The details are irrelevant. If you do belong to Hest, I may not be equipped with enough information to guess at your true purpose.”

  I sighed. “Okay then. How about the way I talk?”

  “Few have been to Yumin and they're widely known for a strange accent.”

  “I'm from a town called Rivermarch. There are five watermills there. I used to put soap in them. My dad is a weather man.”

  “Recited, or inv
ented.”

  “You could meet my friends.”

  “Do they have multiple Abilities that they can show me?”

  Only Sterling had an Ability that we knew about, and he only had one. It wouldn't be proof enough. “What about this? Is this enough proof for you?” I demanded, yanking down the neckline of my nightgown. Showing anyone the circle of tooth-like scars in the center of my chest, just beneath my neck, made me feel exposed. Just thinking about them, remembering that they were there, plagued me with echoes of excruciating agony.

  Something flashed into his features. Pain or regret. I saw a break in his armor against me. He wanted to believe what I was telling him. It wasn't much, but it gave me hope. “No,” he said anyway.

  I threw my arms up. “What can I do? Look at it from my perspective, just for a second.”

  There it was again. This time I saw sympathy, just for the briefest of moments. “I’m sorry. I should never have come. We’re done here.”

  “Wait!”

  I groaned, slouching. There had to be a way I could prove it to him. Irrefutable evidence of something he couldn't explain. It'd be just enough. Biting my lip and drumming my hands on my knees I thought about it. The answer blazed before me brighter than letters written in lights.

  “Test me!” I said, putting my feet on the floor and sitting up tall. A smile crept to my face. I had him, I knew it. “Test me.”

  “Test you?” he asked, shifting his weight. “How?”

  “They tested me for the Pull when I was in Breakwater, but if you need to see it with your own eyes, I'll show you,” I said with growing excitement. “Put something in one of your hands. I'll guess which one it's in.”

  “A child's game,” he said, but didn't argue. Walking over to my bedside table, he plucked up the Historian pin beside his knife. Rising to my feet, I met him half way and rocked back on my heels. Had he always been so tall? My attraction to him was persistent and distracting.

  Rune looked down at me, but his concentration was far away. He folded his arms behind his back, and brought them forward, fists closed and palms down.