She took in deep drafts of air through her nose. “I smell the salt of the waves, and taste the sweat and toil around me. I feel… warm. I can feel the albatross on my shoulders and hear her breathing.”
The wind around me shifted slightly, filling the sails to my right.
“I feel the waves lapping at my feet, the sprites playing in my hair.” I frowned at her, her hair transforming as we watched from black to gray and lifted strand by strand into the air around her head.
Panic took hold of my chest, icy fear gripping my ribs as I watched the gray at the top of her head beginning to lighten and turn white.
“Stop!” She didn’t seem to react to the sound of my command, so I reached out, grasped her shoulder, and shook her. Still no response.
“WIND!” I howled into the air, feeling my connection to the element with my mind. I blinked, and I stood in an airy palace of clouds solid enough to move about on.
You have a lot of nerve howling at me, dog. A voice filled to the brim with cold hatred berated my back.
I turned to see the maelstrom given life, a large elemental at least fifteen feet tall towered over me with an opening twice as tall behind him.
“I’m ‘howling’ at you because your champion is connecting to your magic and it is changing her!” I couldn’t lose the fear in my voice, no matter how hard I tried. “For all I know, it could be killing her.”
My magic will not kill her, mortal. The Wind Primordial snickered, the gust buffering my clothes and fur angrily. Come.
The sweeping funnel of an arm motioned me closer, and the buffeting aura died down a little.
I stepped closer and looked out of the large opening into the vast reaches of my host’s domain. Sprites and ariads, wind dryads—strange creatures that looked like clouds given human form—floating and flitting about on the breezes and gusts. There, floating in the center of it all, Odany bobbed up and down with her eyes open.
She smiled and whispered to herself.
Her connection to my realm is uncanny, her ability to adapt to my power is almost worrisome, and the best part is? The creature paused for what seemed like forever, giving me time to truly take in what I was seeing. All of the creatures playing around the little girl and her just taking it all in delightedly.
“Your people love her.”
My people adore her, mortal. He corrected slightly less angrily. If I were not smarter than that, I would swear she was one of us.
“Is it possible?” I raised an eyebrow at him, and he turned to regard me.
It is not possible, the lines to the Eriments dried up long, long ago.
I blinked. “The what?”
The Eriments, a people whose bloodlines mixed with our own. The swirling hand of the prime lifted up to his chest and stayed there. Theirs was an ancient race we loved, and their passing was… difficult.
“What happened?”
Human mages, mortals whose hubris couldn’t be contained, hunted them to extinction to study them. Enslaving our beloved children and grandchildren to have them perform tricks and minor magics so that they could perfect their own. Using their blood to experiment for their own… sick fantasies. His voice took on a howling hiss as he spoke through my mind. The breeze that had wafted around him flickered into a turbulent whirlwind that slashed at my flesh painfully. When the last of them fell, my brothers and sisters wailed for months without end. The pain we felt severed our ties to the prime realm shortly before the high elves struck them down.
“Sounds like you hate mortals still for what those ancient assholes did.” The wind turned and glared down at me with the small holes in his face that had to be the place it saw from. “Hey, there are a lot of people out there with hate in their hearts over things that ancestors did. I can’t say that they’re all wrong. Seems a common thing. Human, elf, Fae, and now elemental? I can’t say that I would put it past anyone.”
Do not compare me to those mortals when my pain is immortal. I will live until the universe fades and know the pain of our loss until my last breath.
“But did you really feel that loss?” I asked quietly.
A painful slap into my chest flung me up against the cloud wall behind me. The raging winds slapped against me, my health beginning to fall slowly, small slices developing all over my body.
I mourn still to this day, druid! His fury beat along my body.
“I’m just saying that maybe all of your children may not have been taken!” I roared over the gusting noise. “What if your lineage was smart enough to hide? What if they left the continent to get away from all of that?”
The wind died down immediately. I floated gently to the ground and watched as the elemental equivalent to a god turned its gaze toward the little girl playing in his domain.
… I do not know, druid. His bluster seemed to leave him. Do I dare hold out hope? Do I want for them to live as I did in the past, knowing that they may be sought out once more for something perverse and terrible?
“I wouldn’t claim to know.” He was a dick. A big one, and helping him wasn’t something I wanted to readily offer—but I did owe his champion my aid. That helped bridge the gap that his dickishness and my anger had created. “But what I do know is that little girl needs my help to harness your power. If she’s one of your people, then I need you to let me know what to expect.”
You can expect that she will continue to progress more swiftly than she has on an instinctive level, he went contemplative for a moment. I will need to think on things, but for now, she will need one of my smarter children to guide her. Unfortunately, Dusty cannot teach her and guide her the same as my eldest child can. She has a name already, and you will help her to summon her. Her name is Sylphy. You may go.”
His dismissal slammed me metaphysically back into my body, and my eyes opened even as I jumped and fell backward. Time slowed immensely, and I forgot everything I knew for a moment and forgot how to shift forms. Luckily, my foot caught in one of the openings in the netting and stopped me, albeit painfully as my hip was displaced violently from the drop.
I shifted into my owl form and fluttered back to the mast and hobbled closer to Odany before shifting back. She was still stuck in his realm, so I smacked her shoulder, and she popped out of it with a look of betrayal.
“Ouch!” She huffed petulantly. “I was doin’ what you asked, mister Zeke.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I growled over my aching limb. “Listen, I need you to dismiss Dusty and call Sylphy to us from the wind realm. Okay?”
“No.” She refused stubbornly, her arms crossing automatically.
“Then, I’m not teaching you any magic.” I began to limp my way down the ropes even though I could have… you know what? Yeah. I’d do it big.
I cast Teleport and landed jarringly on the deck of the ship next to a crew member carrying a length of rope. The man cried out, and dropped the rope onto the deck as I hobbled down the wooden planks of the ship.
A swift wind halted me, and Odany landed in front of me. Fuck, she’s learning faster than I thought she would. This is bad. I growled.
“Why won’t you teach me?” She huffed, her hands out to her side.
“Because you refuse to do as I instruct.” I shrugged and went to walk around her but a wall of wind erupted in front of me. “You better knock off this childish tantrum, kid.”
“I have a name!” She roared, her eyes flashing turquoise just before the wind whipped even more into a frenzy.
“Yeah.” I rolled my eyes, stopping to look at her. “And a temper too. If you can’t rein yourself in, you can’t learn magic.”
“But I’m better at it than you!” She shouted, a look of… was that competitive nature on her face?
I took a calming breath and reached out to the shadows around me, pulling them to me as effortlessly as she had the wind and gathered them in an orb the size of a basketball in my right hand. In my left, a blazing fire roared to life, and I twisted it until it also floated in an orb over my hand.
&n
bsp; I solidified my grasp over it, then lifted them into the air over my head. I pulled the stone from the dirt on the deck, lifting it into an orb the same way I had shadow, and did the same with water. Light filtered into my hands, and then wind came to my will. My mind ached at holding all of them in tight, precise balls over my head, spinning each of the six orbs like I was a planet and them, my moons.
“You got raw power, kid,” I spoke gently to her, almost a whisper over the wind she controlled. “And that can be a heady thing. But I have you beaten in control and experience. My control and expertise can be yours someday if you work really hard. But it can be yours sooner if you listen to me. And you don’t seem to want that.”
I relinquished my control over the elements floating over my head, their return to the various places they belonged as spectacular as one might think, and the sailors around us clapped vigorously at the show. I kept my eyes on the kid, though. Her scowl had only deepened.
Finally, her walls of wind dropped, and she looked up at me. “Dusty, go home. Sylphy, come to me.”
I felt a slight pop as the large elemental dissipated from this realm, and a smaller one formed to Odany’s right side. It was basically a smaller version of the same elemental, but this one had wider eye holes and a mouth.
“Thank you for summoning me.” The smart little voice echoed almost hollowly from the being. “It took some time longer than had been expected.”
It looked at me. “Did you have trouble teaching her my name, idiot druid?”
You have got to be shitting me, I snarled.
Chapter Sixteen
I huffed once as we finished the sails. Weaving my mana through them had been difficult, so we only went one at a time. We strengthened them, and then when we finished that, it was time to teach Odany how to use her magic.
And put her little smart-ass self and her little smart-ass elemental to work.
Look, I’m all for spunk and originality in people. People are as different to me as the voices in my head are—belay that. She’s allowed to be herself, is what I mean to say. But herself has just so much attitude.
And it’s just so unconstrained by manner or fear, that she just has it all over. She’d been such a happy child until she realized she had power. What was that saying? Absolute power corrupts absolutely? Well, there should be one about little girls and being able to try and cut a grown man in half with wind when she doesn’t want to work on her magic.
“Why do I have to make the air go into the sail again?” Odany whined for the tenth time in almost as many minutes.
“I told you six times ago—to learn to control your mana usage.” I rolled my eyes as I was doing the exact same thing as she was.
“But we know I can control it!” She pouted with her lower lip quivering intensely, I snorted and laughed. “What’s so funny?!”
“You, thinking the lip quiver will work.” She growled, and I snapped my fingers loudly to get her attention. “You do well on this for another twenty minutes or so and maybe—maybe—I’ll teach you how to make a spell. But you have to try, and you have to pay attention. Deal?”
She nodded, and I knew that she would try because learning spells was all she wanted to do. Honestly, she could probably make them herself, and she likely would, but it would be a while before she did it well enough to be trusted to do it without guidance either from Sylphy or me.
Who, by the way, was nearly as mutinous and dastardly as her summoner. The little wind elemental chided and rebuked me any chance she got and doubted my training loudly to boot.
“Really?” The echo came, and I shuddered, the near-murderous desire almost winning out, from my left side. “This is purely labor that will make the ship travel faster. How does that help her?”
“By putting her to work on a ship she damned well could have been thrown off of?” I sarcastically shot back. “Not to mention, she’s learning constant control and what it feels like to focus on a task with her magic. Why do I have to defend myself to you?”
“Because, idiot druid, it is my duty to oversee Odany and to see that her strength grows, and not to see it wasted as it is now.” The little wind elemental crossed her arms before her.
“Getting really fucking tired of you dickhead wind elementals,” I muttered to myself and focused as I silently summoned Yve to my side. I’d called her back shortly before enchanting to be sure I didn’t end up killed by the surly little child or her elemental pal.
The large Fae strode forward in her saber tooth form and loomed over the elemental. “I’ve never devoured one of these before, my King. May I?”
“No, but you can bat her around if she keeps trying to distract Odany.” Suddenly, I knew that the Fae had made herself visible to Sylphy thanks to the audible gasp from her. “Yup. You come to Odany, and I got someone who comes to me. You keep talking shit and we play harder than we are now. I don’t care who you belong to, you and the kid are my responsibility now. Hear me?”
The elemental went to move away, and Yve sprang over her head, leaning forward into a low crouch. “My king spoke to you, little wind thing. I would suggest you answer him.”
An echoey reply of “Fine” reached my ears and she went to her master’s side.
Sometimes it’s good to be the king.
True to her word, Odany did put forth an effort to use her magic well and focus it as she was told to. Finding the appropriate carrot for the student, and the right stick for her servant was great. I could work like this. But I’d need more eyes.
“Yve, you sure it’s okay to summon Servant?” I glanced at the Fae, and she nodded visibly as she watched the little elemental hungrily. I covered my head in shadows the same way Maebe had before when I first summoned him and muttered, “Milnolian.”
The shadows at my feet deepened perceptibly, and he stepped from them with hardly any draw on my mana. “My King.”
“Hello.” I found myself almost reaching out to him like he was a dog and stopped myself. “Ah, sorry. How fare things in the Fae realm?”
“Well, my Queen’s interrogation techniques seem to have improved in her time here among the mortals.” He sounded overjoyed at that, and I wondered what kind of interrogation moves she had learned here. That sent a chill up my spine for no good reason.
“Do you think she will join us soon?” I wondered a little more hopefully than I maybe should have.
“As soon as she can, my King,” he answered politely before scenting the air. “Sister.”
“Hello, little brother,” Yve purred from her spot on the deck. “Good to see you again.”
“You tried to eat me the last time I saw you.” Servant eyed her mistrustfully. “Why are you here?”
“I chose to divulge my name to our King,” she answered simply. Her feline smile not threatening in the slightest, the Cheshire like lilt to it making me freeze. “I find him interesting, as I am certain you do.”
“I find him trustworthy,” Servant replied, though he made no move to say anything else.
“You two going to behave yourselves here?” I asked warily, with the two of them staring each other down.
“Yes.” Yve relented after staring at her brother a moment longer.
“I will.” Servant answered, and I knew they would. Their word had given me notifications. Good. “What would you have of me? Queen Maebe told me some of what she suspects, but nothing has changed, has it?”
“The kid is my charge now.” I pointed to Odany as she played with Sylphy while waiting on me. “You’re going to watch my back at all times while Yve watches her.”
“Four thousand years old, and I’m relegated to nursemaid.” Yve flopped onto her side and lifted her legs into the air. “However will I live down this shame?”
A barking laughter came from Servant that made me pause, he gathered himself and coughed once into his paw before looking up at me. “She can be entertaining at times.”
I grinned at him and shook my head. Time to teach the kid.
“I w
ant you to close your eyes and focus on what you were just doing, and I want you to pour your intent into it.” Odany frowned at me when I gave the order. “Yes, I want you to make a utility spell. This is going to help us travel faster. And since we will be traveling a little more quickly, we can make sure we get you home faster.”
“And you’ll still teach me how to defend myself?” She narrowed her eyes at me, distrustfully.
“I will.” She received a notification of my oath and nodded.
“And all I have to do is focus on making the spell?” I nodded at her, and she closed her eyes, her hair lifting from the sides of her face as she concentrated. She opened her eyes, then cast her spell.
“Continuous Gust,” she shouted and made a small symbol with her hand and blew through it softly. The soft hush of air became a mighty gust filling the sails nearly to bursting and pressing the vessel forward hastily.
“Great work!” I hooted and hopped up and down. “Now, we can catch that ship in no time!”
“Why are you after that ship?” The echoed voice of Sylphy whipped up behind us.
“Because we have reason to believe that ship might belong to an enemy of the realm, one who we seek to bring peace to this land.” I glanced down at her pointedly, then back at the ship in the distance. “I’m sure your father told you about my group’s mission here in your world and why it’s important that we destroy these enemies to the realm?”
She was still, silently listening to something but then turned back and stated, “That checks out.”
“Glad to know I have your approval.” I rolled my eyes and faced forward with my shoulders squared. “Part of what is to come will be combat. You seem comfortable making barriers of your own. Let’s see if you can do it with any kind of strength.”
“You said you would teach me how to def… oh.” She seemed to deflate slightly.
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