The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Volume 1)

by G. L. Breedon

  “No. It is not.” Kellatra looked away. Her voice broke with emotion as she spoke. “I killed a man. It was not defense. I killed him for revenge. He took my mother’s life, and I sought the only justice I could find. I violated the central oath of the Academy. I used The Sight to kill him. The punishment for such a violation is death. But the council did not want word of my actions becoming known for fear the people of the city would turn against them. If the public knew the full power those with The Sight wielded, none would feel safe. My father argued for adherence to council law, but Menanthus, the man who left me the codex, he spoke up for me. The other council members agreed to banishment.”

  Kellatra turned back to face Rankarus, clearly seeking out some sign of his reaction. He looked into her eyes, the eyes of the woman he loved, the mother of his children, a seer, a fugitive, a murderer. He could not fully imagine her acting in anger. She rarely so much as raised her voice, even in the heat of an argument. She had never been anything but loving and tender and kind to him and the children and everyone who walked through the door of the inn. How could that woman be the same one who set those councilmembers and her father aflame? How could that woman have killed a man?

  “You broke the neck of that soul catcher.” Rankarus thought back to that night their lives changed so completely. The night that set both their secrets climbing up from the graves of their past where they had been buried. “You set that man on fire.”

  “No.” Kellatra shook her head, looking concerned. “I killed the soul catcher, but I have no idea how the fire started or how the third man came to be aflame.”

  Rankarus frowned in concern as well. If Kellatra had not created the fire at the inn, how had it begun? Had someone else been tracking the book? Could that person be following them in hopes of retrieving it? He shook his head and returned his attention to the questions that gripped his soul rather than those that teased his mind.

  “If you say the man you killed took your mother’s life, and you say he deserved to die, then I trust you.” Rankarus’s heart beat fast in his chest. “If you say this book has something to do with the dreams and we need to follow the pilgrims to figure out what, then I trust you.”

  She said nothing, grabbing his neck and kissing him forcefully and passionately, her fingers clutching at his thick hair. He clasped his free hand around her waist and lost himself in the kiss, forgetting the cares of what his wife might be or not be, what she might have done or not done, what she knew or did not know about his past.

  She smacked his chest as she released him from the kiss, her eyes narrowing.

  “I told you to stay with the children.” Anger and gratitude warred across Kellatra’s face.

  “When do I ever listen to you about the children?” Rankarus smiled that cocky grin that always made her smile in return.

  “When do you ever listen to me?” She kissed him again quickly, then looked at him quizzically. “A baker’s dowel?”

  “I followed you in through the servants’ entrance at the back and grabbed the first thing I saw as I ran through the kitchen.” Rankarus thought back to following Kellatra through the streets and breaking into the estate house, worried something would happen to her before he could find her again. So much had happened in such a short time. “I’d hoped for a cleaver.”

  “And the knives?” Kellatra asked. “Were you lucky?”

  “I’ve always been good with knives. Somehow, I always manage to cut myself with swords.” Rankarus frowned at the memory of retrieving his blades from the necks of the dead councilmen before they fled her father’s house. He hated killing, but when he realized they intended to execute Kellatra, he had not hesitated to throw his daggers. Thoughts of how differently the evening might have transpired drove him to hold her tight and kiss her deeply again. She held tight to him, returning his passion, expressing without words the fear attendant to the recent events.

  “Cosy lovers lost in the night. How sweet is that?”

  “She looks tasty, friend. Is she juicy like a plum?”

  Rankarus turned from Kellatra’s kiss to see three men standing abreast in the lane, blocking their path. He glanced to the opposite side and found two more men impeding any possible escape. He turned back to find Kellatra glaring at the men.

  Rankarus noted the odd sensation associated with understanding he faced no real danger while standing beside his wife. A man ought to be the protector of his wife and family. Knowing his wife posed more threat to any potential attackers than he could ever muster aroused not a sense of inadequacy, but a strange and growing longing. He had always been attracted to Kellatra’s sharp mind and her willful nature, but seeing her stare down violent-looking men without flinching, having recently seen the consequences of her wrath, left him overwhelmed with desire. He found himself wishing he could pull her into the darkness behind the bushes and show her the extent of that yearning. Instead, he let the more practical side of his mind find expression.

  “Fire might bring unwanted attention,” he said.

  “Walk with me.” Kellatra took his hand and pulled him off the path.

  “Ooo the love … What?”

  “Dark gods and spirits!”

  “What have ya done?”

  “Dark Sight!”

  Rankarus walked hand in hand with Kellatra, circling well away from the thugs in the lane, their cries of terror ricocheting off the trees, their feet sunk deep into the stones of the path, held tight as though planted there ages ago.

  “Quiet now,” Kellatra said to the men. “Or I will do more.”

  The men fell silent, watching as Rankarus and Kellatra stepped back onto the lane and continued on their way. Rankarus smiled broadly in the moonlight filtering through the leaves of the branches arcing over the lane.

  “I think I’ll rather enjoy having a seer for a wife.”

  “I think I’ll rather enjoy having a thief for a husband.”

  “I’m not really a thief anymore.” Rankarus wondered at that statement, realizing that he had not thought of himself as a thief in many years.

  “No, you are not.” Kellatra squeezed his hand. “But we may both need to rely upon the skills of our past on the road ahead.”

  “The pilgrim road.” Rankarus worried about Kellatra’s plan, but he did trust her. The book arriving on the night of the new star’s birth might merely be coincidence, but sometimes, coincidence meant more after the fact than at the time. Ripples flowed from events in unpredictable ways, the way stealing from a wealthy merchant girl’s family led to a wife and children and an inn and a journey across the realm.

  “Yes, but we need to take a different road first.” Kellatra quickened her pace. “There is a woman I know who may be able to tell us more about the codex. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to find her.”

  To continue reading the Seer story arena follow this link.

  To continue reading Rankarus’s storyline follow this link.

  THE WITNESS

  ONDROMEAD

  STEAM ROSE through the smoky, dense air, carrying the scent of beef and broth and onion and garlic and potatoes and carrots. Ondromead’s mouth watered as his spoon dipped into the bowl of meaty soup. He and Hashel sat side by side at a table in the far corner of a tavern, lanterns around the room coating the patrons in an oily yellow haze as they talked quietly and ate and nodded their heads to the music of a fiddle player seated by the empty fire hearth. The fiddle player’s arms swayed with the bow, fingers wavering along the strings to the sad tune he played.

  Hashel grinned as he stuffed spoon after spoon of thick, hot soup into his mouth. The boy did not speak, but he could eat a seemingly endless amount of food. Ondromead chewed a stringy piece of meat and stared at the boy. He had tried writing in the book to ask the boy his name, but the child did not read. When he first called him Hashel, the boy looked surprised, but responded. A good enough appellation until the boy spoke to correct him.

  The morning sunlight had found them sleeping on the docks of a f
ishing village along the northern coast of the Iron Realm. The day’s events unfolded as one might expect at first, the Nevaeo villagers setting their boats into the water and heading out to gather the day’s catch. Hashel had watched the fishing boats with great interest. The boy quickly learned over the preceding weeks that their arrival presaged some event of importance, and he keenly observed the faithfulness with which Ondromead recorded the happenings in the black book. He had been even more fascinated with the book’s endless supply of blank pages than the purse at Ondromead’s waist that always held enough coins to pay for their needs.

  After the first week, Ondromead took to opening the book each night in an attempt to teach the boy how to read and write. He wrote the events of the day in the language of the land they occurred in, and there were many languages to choose from. He had no idea how he could speak and write every language of Onaia, nor did he understand why he felt compelled to record each day’s events in the black book. With so many options, Ondromead chose the language he suspected the boy might speak. As they had met in the south of Atheton, he only selected passages in the Easad tongue to read to the boy. Sitting in an inn on the north coast of the Nevaeo Dominion provided a chance to recite the day’s events in the language shared by the two dominions, thus making it easier for the boy to understand them in written form.

  Ondromead pulled the book from the bag sitting beside him on the wooden bench and placed it on the table. Hashel wiped the inner depths of his bowl with a piece of stale bread and stuffed the soggy mess into his mouth, licking his lips as he tried to chew the oversized bite.

  Ondromead opened the book to the page recording the event they had witnessed earlier that day. His finger found the exact spot with ease. He could always open the book to any passage from any date whenever he wished. It did not matter if he opened the book at the front or the back, the words he wished to see would be on the page before him. He turned the open pages so Hashel could follow his finger beneath the hand written text as he read aloud.

  “Year 3512. Month 9. Summer. Kullhah. Nevaeo fishing town. The fishermen pushed their boats out into the water shortly after dawn, rowing far out from shore. The fishermen here work in teams of three or four boats, each with two men aboard. The boats have a single mast and sail with one set of oars. One man minds the tiller and the sail while the other rows. Once in position, the lead boat passed slowly by the other craft in the team, the men pulling at one edge of a large net until it spread out between the vessels. They lowered the net by means of stone weights, waiting nearly half an hour before pulling it to the surface, piles of large fish flopping in panic.

  “The fishermen then hauled the catch into the boats and rowed to shore, piling the fish in rows along the moss-speckled docks before returning to repeat the process several more times. The women took the fish and gutted and smoked them in huts along the beach. In the afternoon, a young man of twenty or so years fell from one of the boats, getting tangled in the net. The other men tried to save him, but his struggles only ensnared him more deeply in the woven strands, trapping him and a school of fish. The fishermen eventually pulled the man into a boat, but he had drowned. His mother wailed for hours at the dockside, clinging to his body, the man’s younger brother standing behind her, weeping.”

  Ondromead looked up from the page to see tears in Hashel’s eyes. The boy reached over and closed the book, looking away from the table to the fiddle player by the fire. Ondromead understood the boy’s pain. While witnessing death and suffering became familiar, it never grew easy. Not all days bore events of that nature, but more than most. Some days entailed births or weddings or merely listening to conversations between lovers. A tragic death could be hard to watch, but he understood from writing in the book that cause created effect, and a drowning could easily lead to important incidents years and decades later, like ripples from a dropped stone striking the far shore of an ocean.

  The fiddle player began another mournful tune, some of the villagers humming along. Everyone knew the drowned young man, and all spoke of him with warmth and affection, trading stories about mischievous and amusing acts from his childhood. Hashel slid off the bench and walked over to the fiddle player, an older man with long, graying locks, and a brown face weathered by too many days fishing in the sun. Ondromead placed his hand beneath his chin. What had drawn the boy from the table? The song? Did it come from his past? As he listened to the tune, wondering how many times he heard it played at inns and taverns and campfires over his many years, Hashel started to sing.

  “Fallow fields and fallow hearts.

  The fire ends and always starts.

  Mountains rise and forests fall.

  The harvest comes for each and all.”

  Hashel’s voice carried high and clear across the room, stilling all speech, turning every ear, capturing every eye with the words of his song. Ondromead listened to the boy sing, unfamiliar with the words of the song, an oddity that gripped his mind. He had heard nearly every song sung in every realm. How did the boy know the words, and he not? Did Hashel create the words as he spoke them? How might a boy so young manage such a thing with apparent ease?

  “He sings beautifully.”

  Ondromead turned from watching Hashel to find a woman sitting across the table. A woman he knew. A woman he had known for as long as he had known anything. A woman he called Meraeu, although he did not know her actual name or how she found him through the centuries or even why. It had been decades since he had seen her last. She placed her elbows on the table, leaning her chin on her folded fingers, her long, gray curls of hair falling around the rich, dark skin of her oval-shaped face. She smiled. He did not smile back. Her presence generally forewarned of ill times to come.

  “Why do you return?” Ondromead rested his hands on the cover of the book.

  “The same reason as always.” Meraeu’s smiled faded. “I am concerned for you.”

  “If you held any real care for me, you would answer my questions.” The ancient annoyance, the central anguish of his existence, arose within Ondromead.

  “Your questions are not for me to answer.” Meraeu shook her head slightly — repeating lessons to a child.

  “Naturally.” Ondromead glanced down at the empty bowl before him. “Tell me then of your concern.”

  “You have never traveled with another.” Meraeu’s words brought his eyes up from the remnants of his meal. “You know what happens to all you witness.”

  “I do not witness the boy.” Ondromead tapped the book. “He does not get written down.”

  “Whether you record him in that book makes no difference to the fact that he will die.” Meraeu dropped her hands to the table.

  “A threat?” Ondromead’s tone deepened.

  “All will die sooner or later.” Meraeu looked to the room of mourners listening to Hashel sing the bewitching song, swaying slightly with the entrancement of his voice.

  “All except me. And you apparently.” Ondromead followed her eyes to watch Hashel. “I know this.”

  “You know it, but you have not felt it in a very, very long time.” Meraeu’s voice sounded sad, almost comforting.

  “I have observed loss and sorrow for thousands of years.” Ondromead saw a tear crawl down Hashel’s face as he sang. Tears fell from the eyes of many of the patrons. He wiped at his own eyes with the back of his hand.

  “True,” Meraeu said. “But can you remember when you beheld the loss of one you loved?”

  Ondromead turned back to answer Meraeu, only to find himself once again alone at the table. He sighed. She always came and went thus. She never stayed to explain herself.

  Hashel’s song ended, and the crowd applauded, begging for more. Ondromead caught the boy’s eye and nodded his approval. Hashel sang another song, and the fiddle player struggled to follow along. Ondromead considered the old woman’s words. Should he leave the child now, before he witnessed the boy’s inevitable demise? Or did he wait, as he always had, for events to unfold as they would, re
cording them in his book, preserving them for reasons he did not understand and would never know.

  Listening to the boy’s pure-toned voice, feeling it enter his chest like air breathed in, its power seeping into his heart, Ondromead decided to do as he had ever done. He would wait and see what came with the sunrise.

  To continue reading the Witness story arena follow this link.

  To continue reading Ondromead’s storyline follow this link.

  THE SEER

  LUNTADUS

  THE WAGON shuddered and swayed beneath the stars and the slivered moons. Luntadus peeked open his eyes, pretending to be asleep, curled up against his sister on a bed of hay, the two of them lying between Uncle Abananthus and Jadaloo on either side. Luntadus frowned at the sound of Uncle Abananthus’s snoring. How could he sleep with all that noise? He wanted to climb up and sit between Mommy and Daddy in the driving seat, but he knew they would only send him back to rest beside his sister.

  He had been pretending to doze ever since they left the inn in the dark of the night, Jadaloo carrying him at her shoulder while Abananthus held Lantili in his arms. They had met Mommy and Daddy not long later, picking them up at a street corner by one of the big gates to the city. Jadaloo worried aloud that the city guards would never open the gate so late at night. Mommy told her not to worry. The gates opened just as Mommy said they would. Jadaloo grew very quiet afterward. Luntadus had peeked through the open back of the wagon to see the guards sleeping on the cobblestone as the giant iron door of the gate slid to the ground. He wondered who opened the gate if not the guards. Lazy guards. Sleeping when they should be watching the gate. He felt surprised Daddy didn’t chide them. Daddy always chided people for not doing what they were supposed to.

  Daddy would chide him for not sleeping when he should have. He often found it hard to sleep, the lights buzzing before his eyes as he tried to slumber. Annoying little dots of light that danced in front of his eyes whether he closed his lids or not. He once told Mommy and Daddy about the lights, but they said to ignore them. If he had been a good boy and ignored the lights, they could all still be at the inn. But he hadn’t been a good boy. He had stayed awake when Jadaloo put him to bed beside Lantili, staring at the ceiling, watching the lights dance above his bed. He should have ignored them. He should have been asleep. If he had been asleep, he would never have seen the man come into the room. If he had been asleep, he never would have gotten frightened. If he hadn’t gotten frightened, he never would have thought to wish the lights to attack the man as his big hand reached toward the bed. If he had been asleep, the man would never have caught on fire.