Fletcher approached Keriya slowly and embraced her. The last time the two of them had parted, they’d fought, and he had assumed they’d never see each other again. Yet this goodbye felt more serious, more heartbreaking. More final.
“Necrovar won’t win,” he whispered. “He can’t. In all your stories about heroes, the heroes always triumph. Right?”
She put her arms around him and squeezed. “Right. The heroes prevail, and they all live happily ever after. So you’d better live through this.”
Fletcher chuckled. “I’ll do my best.”
When they drew apart, Fletcher turned to Thorion. He could hardly believe it was only two months ago they’d wandered the Galantasa together; the dragon had seemed so young and small then.
“Everything will be okay,” Fletcher told him.
“You have a good heart, Fletcher. It will lead you to greatness if you listen to it.” Thorion bowed his head in respect. “May your wanderings be blessed.”
“Until we meet again,” said Fletcher. Without thinking about it, he leaned forward and hugged Thorion goodbye. A soft, warm thrum rumbled in Thorion’s chest, vibrating against Fletcher’s ribs, and the dragon put his wings forward to return the embrace.
“Until we meet again,” Thorion echoed softly.
Fletcher squeezed his eyes against the burn of tears. He broke away and hurried to Roxanne and Effrax. It wasn’t goodbye forever. He had to believe that.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Roxanne muttered when he reached her.
“Yes, I do.” Fletcher turned one last time to look at Keriya. She and Thorion were watching him, their eyes gleaming pinpricks of violet against the bland backdrop. Fletcher raised a solemn hand and, with a heavy heart, started walking east.
He, Roxanne, and Effrax trudged through the morning in silence. Fletcher could tell it was midday when his stomach started growling, but they didn’t stop. When the rainforest grew visible through the white flurries, he suppressed a groan.
Effrax smirked at Fletcher’s reaction. “We’re not going back in there. We’ll skirt the edge of the jungle until we cross the West Outlet, and it’s a straight shot across the fenlands to Noryk.”
“Fantastic,” sighed Fletcher. He resigned himself to the idea of being wet and frozen for the next month. Thorion needed help, and Fletcher refused to be the weak link in the chain of people who were going to save him.
As the afternoon wore on, Effrax tried to break the silence by engaging Roxanne in conversation.
“Why are you talking to me?” she asked, in a tone that Fletcher thought was much ruder than the situation warranted.
“Look Tigress, I think we got off on the wrong foot.”
“Maybe that’s because you never use my real name, or wait—maybe it’s because you tried to blackmail me.”
“To be fair, I was trying to blackmail Keriya, not you,” he said, catching Fletcher’s eye and shooting him a conspiratorial wink. “What do you say we start again?”
“Hmpf,” said Roxanne, and she lengthened her stride to outpace him.
“That’s how girls act when they like you,” Effrax said matter-of-factly to Fletcher, watching as Roxanne kicked her way through a snowdrift. Fletcher wasn’t sure about that; Roxanne had been very upfront about her feelings for Effrax, and none of those feelings were particularly positive.
The sky darkened to a deep slate gray, then to an ominous purple. They retreated into the cover of the trees to make camp.
“If you find me some kindling, I’ll make a fire,” said Effrax, tethering Emyr to a leafy bush the mule could nibble on. Fletcher nodded, and he and Roxanne moved further into the undergrowth.
“You’re being pretty mean to Effrax,” Fletcher observed, snapping branches off a spindly tree.
“So?”
“So we’re going to be stuck with him for a while, and it’ll be better for everyone if we could get along. He’s trying to help Thorion, too.”
“Only for his own benefit.” Roxanne yanked on a branch so forcefully that she uprooted the sapling it was attached to. “He’s wanted to bring Thorion to the Fironem for ages. Wants to take him to the palace to be praised as a hero or something.”
“I think he means well,” said Fletcher.
“That’s your problem. You insist on seeing the best in people, even when they don’t deserve it. Just because you think he’s good-looking doesn’t mean his intentions are good.”
Fletcher paused in his work and cast her a suspicious glare. She was preoccupied with her business of violently snapping twigs and branches, and it seemed she’d voiced her comment without thought. He deliberated for a few long moments before he replied, in a measured voice, “I can think he’s good-looking and still be a good judge of character.”
Roxanne also stopped moving. She turned slowly, her expression hard to read in the dusk. The silence was deafening, and Fletcher wondered if he’d made a serious miscalculation. She opened her mouth and he braced himself.
“Does Keriya know?”
He let out a slow breath. “I’m sure she’s guessed,” he admitted. He grabbed a nearby shrub and pulled off a branch with fingers that were shaking. “She knew people hated me, and she heard the names they sometimes called me, but I haven’t told her. I couldn’t have said anything in Aeria. The Elders would have stoned me to death.”
“Or burned you at the stake,” she said. “They were fond of that one.”
Fletcher managed a humorless snort. Roxanne smiled.
“I’m sorry you think you have to hide who you are,” she told him. “It’s not a good feeling. But we’re not in Aeria anymore. Remember that. You can be whoever you are here.”
A warming sense of relief spread through Fletcher. He nodded and allowed a self-satisfied smile to quirk his own lips.
“What?” she asked.
“You see? I am a good judge of character,” he replied with a touch of smugness. Roxanne rolled her eyes, but some of the tension she’d been holding in her shoulders eased.
“I still say you’re wrong about Effrax,” she said, returning to her work. “The trusting him bit, at least. I will freely admit he’s good-looking.”
Over the next few days, Fletcher saw an improvement in Roxanne’s temper. Something had changed between them since he’d confided in her. It was as if in opening the door to his biggest secret, he had torn down one of her walls.
Roxanne wasn’t what he would call reserved—she was the furthest thing from it, in fact—but she was guarded. She kept many secrets, and she’d been forced to divulge one for the sake of the quest. It had only seemed fair that Fletcher should offer something of himself to her. Now that he had, they were both more comfortable.
From an emotional standpoint, at least. There was hardly any comfort on their tedious cross-country slog. Effrax kept them on strict rations. Malnourishment hindered them. Every day they walked longer hours and covered less ground. Every night sleep came easier to Fletcher as his body slowly shut down, trying to conserve what little strength he had left. At this rate, they would run out of food long before they reached Noryk.
“We haven’t been graced with a magic show in a while, Tigress,” Effrax said one afternoon, limping along beside Emyr. “Why don’t you entertain us menfolk?”
“What did you have in mind?” Roxanne’s tone was pleasant enough, but Fletcher saw her hands curling into fists.
“Something to break up the monotony,” Effrax replied in a long-suffering voice. “Are any of your friends around?”
“A few mice, a snowfox, a hare, an owl.”
“Let’s meet them, then.”
“That might be nice,” said Fletcher. In an undertone, he added, “Might keep our minds off being bored and starving to death.”
Roxanne sighed. A look of concentration clouded her fine features, and moments later Flet
cher heard a whisper of movement. A white rabbit emerged from the rainforest a few heights in front of them, barely visible against the snow.
“This is—” Roxanne’s words were cut short as something whizzed through the air past her face. There was a soft thunk, then everything was still . . . until she let out a bloodcurdling shriek.
Emyr brayed and reared up, startled by her outburst. She rounded on Effrax, who stood calmly with his bow in hand. “You—how dare you!” She was livid, unable to speak. “You betrayed me—you just . . . why?!”
Fletcher squinted through the mist and saw a single arrow sticking out of the snow. The hare was pinned beneath it, unmoving. A blot of red marred the pristine whiteness around its body. His empty stomach churned with shock even as it rumbled with hunger.
“You may not agree with my methods, Tigress, but I’m the leader here and I’ll do what I must to protect you,” said Effrax. “Sometimes that means making the call no one wants to make, doing the things no one wants to—”
Roxanne stepped forward and slapped him. The sound echoed across the empty plain to their right. Effrax reeled away. He worked his jaw a few times and rubbed his cheek, glaring at her.
“You want to help Thorion? You want to reach Noryk? Then you’ll have to make sacrifices. I know you’ve been keeping the animals at bay since before Sairal, but if you want to survive this journey, you can’t do that anymore.”
Fletcher felt he should intervene, but he had no idea what to do. For a moment, he was afraid that Roxanne was going to wield against Effrax. He had never seen her so incensed. She drew five long breaths through her clenched teeth before speaking.
“Fine. But if you ever use me like that again, I will kill you just as happily as you killed that hare, and twice as easily.” With that, she whirled around and stomped into the trees.
They made camp. Effrax conjured a fire and proceeded to skin the rabbit. Under normal circumstances, Fletcher would be horrified by the sound of the hare’s pelt being ripped from its muscles. Now he watched Effrax’s every move like a hawk. He was revolted to find that his mouth was watering.
Effrax built a makeshift spit to cook the animal. The smell of roasting meat was like ambrosia to Fletcher. The problem was, he was sure to upset Roxanne if he accepted any of the food.
Roxanne returned from the wild when it grew dark. She sat at the edge of the firelight and dug a hole in the snow, exposing the frozen earth beneath. Placing her hand over the patch of dirt, she wielded, growing a carrot for herself while glaring daggers at Effrax.
“You’re wasting energy,” Effrax warned her.
“I’ll replenish my energy by eating my cruelty-free dinner.”
Effrax shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Your magicsource isn’t an unlimited well of power.”
“I know. I’m an accomplished earth-wielder who’s saved your two-timing neck on multiple occasions.”
“Then you should know that magic is energy,” he snapped. “And the energy you used to create that carrot is not equal to the amount of energy you’ll gain from eating the carrot. You’ll kill yourself growing food that can’t sustain you in these conditions.”
Fletcher hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself small. He had no interest in getting roped into the middle of this argument.
“What’s done is done, and it wasn’t by your hand, it was by mine,” Effrax continued. “So do me a favor, Roxanne, and have some meat.”
Roxanne yanked the carrot from the ground and crunched on it loudly. In response, Effrax took the rabbit off the flames and tore into it. A pang of hunger made Fletcher double over and he wrapped his arms around his stomach, watching as juice dribbled down the Fironian’s chin.
Roxanne grew two more carrots before she lay down in the snow, still and silent. Fletcher was fuzzy on the mechanics of magical energy conversion—the Aerian schoolelders hadn’t bothered teaching him much because his magic was so weak—but he suspected Effrax had a point. Roxanne couldn’t replenish her strength with carrots alone, especially if she was creating those carrots using energy drawn from her own body and soul.
Thinking of carrots made Fletcher eye the orange roots longingly. How he wished he could grow food. According to the Allentrian Tier System, only Tier Six wielders and higher could perform creation magic; Fletcher suspected he wouldn’t even be classified as a Tier Three wielder.
He glanced at the rabbit and reflected that weaponry skills wouldn’t hurt, either. As it was, he was dependent on others for his survival.
He was ashamed of himself.
Effrax noticed Fletcher’s sorry state. He stood and walked over, offering him the rabbit.
“Here,” he said. “You need this more than I do. Eat the rest.”
“You only had a few bites,” said Fletcher, though he grabbed the proffered meal and gnawed on it. It was burnt and tough, and it tasted glorious.
“You were a walking skeleton before we started this quest,” Effrax told him. “Eat.”
Fletcher ripped into the rabbit without abandon. Effrax went to Emyr and pulled the last of their provisions from the saddlebag. He left a bedroll and the bag of dried fruit and nuts next to Roxanne before retreating to the far side of the fire.
Only when Effrax finally fell asleep did Roxanne pull the bag of food closer to her to eat.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Awareness is a heavy burden to bear.”
~ Delmin Tierlake, Tenth Age
No matter how quickly Thorion had latched onto emotions, they were still new to him. He couldn’t decipher the complex, burning tangle of hurt that had settled in the pit of his stomach.
Why? The question consumed him. Why had this happened? He had been happy; now every step he took was one step closer to his fate.
Unbonded sovereign dragons were blessed with longevity stemming from their timemagic. They could heal most physical wounds and they were immune to the base magics. They weren’t easily killed—and without emotions, they didn’t have the capacity to fret over death the way humans did.
When Thorion had bonded, he had become mortal. With death lurking on the horizon, mortality was now a terrifying concept.
A week had passed since they’d parted from Fletcher and Roxanne. As they continued west, Keriya asked what the unicorn’s advice had meant and what Valerion had done. Thorion refused to tell her, going so far as to cloak his mind to shut her out. This visibly hurt her, and he regretted it at once. But he was too tired to talk. He was too ashamed of the things the darksalm had made him do. He was too broken to hope.
And he couldn’t do what Valerion had done.
Valerion had willingly cut out part of his soul—he was little better than the demon lords who’d served Necrovar in the Great War. Mortals viewed Valerion as the greatest hero who’d ever lived, but the dragons knew a different version of history. If anything in Valerion’s scheme had gone wrong, he would have doomed the world.
“We’re nearing the border,” Max said one evening as they huddled around a pitiful fire. “Once we’re in the Erastate, we can stop in any town and I’ll be able to find help.”
“I don’t think we should go to any towns,” said Thorion. “It’s too dangerous.”
I’m too dangerous. His stomach churned and his throat constricted. It wasn’t fair that emotions could cause such physical agony.
“Maybe we shouldn’t cross the border,” Seba mused. “I think we should head to the Naetren Mountains.”
“Why?” asked Keriya.
“Because all the legends of the werelion-healer say he lives in the Naetren basin.”
“Seba, that healer is a myth,” Max told her flatly.
“Most Allentrians think unicorns are a myth,” she retorted, “yet we found one. Don’t you think it’s worth our time to at least look for the werelion?”
“No, because we don’t have
any time,” said Max. “We have to go to the Fironem.”
“I’d like to hear more about this werelion,” said Thorion. This was the second time Seba had brought it up, so she must know something.
“The legends say he has incredible healing abilities—”
“I’ve heard these stories,” Max interrupted, “and there’s nothing to them. My younger brother was born with an illness and my parents scoured the land for a healer who could save him. All my father’s men couldn’t find this fabled werelion, and my brother died within six months. If the full power of the Erastatian military couldn’t locate him, that means he doesn’t exist.”
Seba’s narrow eyes took on a sudden gleam. She laid a hand on his arm. “I know, Max, and I’m sorry. But that may be because your brother wasn’t the one doing the searching. The werelion only reveals himself to those who are ill.”
Thorion glanced at Keriya. He dropped his mindcloak and asked telepathically,
He sensed Keriya was reluctant to trust Seba, but she was desperate to try anything that had the slimmest chance of working.
Keriya nodded.
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