“How much longer do you intend to have me stay with your people?”
“How much longer do you think you need to?”
I shook my head. “It’s not a matter of me needing to stay.”
“Perhaps not for you.”
“You would say Affellah needs me to stay?”
“Affellah has guided you to us,” he said.
“Then Affellah gets to decide how long I stay,” I said. He watched me, saying nothing. I shook my head. “Eventually, I have to return to my people.”
“Are they your people?”
“Not questions like this again,” I said.
“Are you afraid of them?”
I snorted, leaning back and resting on the ground. “The only thing I’m afraid of is what you might do to me.”
He smiled slightly. “Have I done anything to you?” The words were soft, barely more than a whisper, though they carried to me.
The air seemed to steam and crackle. Distantly, as the thunder continued rolling toward us, I could feel the air changing, the energy shifting again. There was something more he was trying to ask, but I refused to acknowledge it.
“You asked me to come so I could understand your people.”
“Partly,” he said.
“And you asked me here so you could separate me from the dragon.” He watched me, saying nothing. “You wanted to test whether your power could work on the dragons.”
I wasn’t exactly sure if that was true. Still, I had noticed there was an increased separation between me and the green dragon. Had time given the Servants an opportunity to test whether they had the power to cause this separation? I could feel him, and though he had a distinct sense of frustration that he couldn’t reach me, he didn’t suffer.
It was almost as if my time away from the dragon had also granted me the capacity to better understand his emotions, something I had not been able to do before I had left the kingdom.
And then there was the cycle.
It was muted, which I suspected was due to the distance I had traveled from the other dragons. Distance made a difference, though should not impact the power I could call. When I focused on the cycle, I could feel that energy building slightly, a hint of power that began to bubble up within me—just enough to make me aware of its presence. I no longer thought I could take some of that power from the cycle and send it moving through me to the green dragon. At this point, I no longer knew if I could free us from captivity if it came down to it.
He regarded me for a long moment, while I thought about how he might impact the dragon connection.
“Have you seen me harm your dragon?”
I sat up and looked toward Affellah. In the darkness, I could see its faint glowing, like a rim of light that seemed to loom above the ground and shine down upon everything. Times like these made it easy to understand why the Vard believe Affellah is something powerful, some god they should worship.
“I don’t even know,” I said.
“How has your dragon been?”
I shook my head. “Not harmed. Frustrated, but not harmed.”
He started to smile. “Why should your creature be frustrated?”
“Because you’re holding him,” I said.
“Affellah holds him.”
“Much like you’re holding me.”
“Am I holding you?”
“Not physically. But you keep walking me deeper into your lands, which draws me away from my cycle and the connection I have. I don’t know what you intend, but if you truly don’t mean me any harm, then help me understand so I can bring that information back to the kingdom, and I can make sure my people don’t harm yours.” I looked up at him. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted me to see your people, to know they’re not the terrible, vicious beings you assume my people believe them to be.”
“There you go again, calling them your people.” He smiled in a tight line—it was almost grotesque, but it was a smile. “Perhaps I am holding you. Perhaps I am testing you. Perhaps there is something else.”
I didn’t even know how to react, but I knew the dragon’s frustration was flowing into me. And I wasn’t even doing anything all that frustrating. I was following the Servant as we visited villages, heading to the end of the earth, then beyond. Why should that fill me with frustration?
Probably because I felt as if I should be able to help, as if I should be able to use the power from the dragons, defend the kingdom the way I had been taught to, but that wasn’t always what the dragons wanted from me. When I felt the cycle coming through me, I realized that power had a different purpose.
“Why do others want the kingdom to attack the Vard?”
He watched me. “You begin to ask better questions.”
“With your control over Affellah,” I said, deciding to ask the question that had been bothering me, “and with what I saw in the village, the way you create your own cycle with your people, you obviously have considerable power. If you wanted to attack the kingdom, you would have an easier time of it than the king believes.”
The Servant regarded me, but said nothing.
I pushed forward, this thought troubling me.
It was what had brought me here, after all. I had wanted understanding, and there were answers tied to whatever had driven the Servant to permit me to come with him. Perhaps it was just him wanting to prove that his people deserved to be left alone, but I didn’t think that was the case. It might even be that he wanted to show the strength of his people, but there were far better ways he could demonstrate that. He didn’t need to bring one person into the Vard lands to do that.
He had chosen me. He had brought me.
He thought I could understand Affellah.
Maybe that was the key.
His face was unreadable across the fire. The flames crackled and reflected off his face, though his skin tightened as if Affellah were responding to one of his commands.
“There is no reason for us to attack your people,” he said.
“The king believes you do it because you want our resources.”
“Your kingdom could share if it chose to, but Affellah provides.”
I stared at the fire, watching the flames and feeling the heat. There was some power burning within it that was different from that which burned within me.
“You celebrate fire, but you don’t celebrate the dragons,” I said, looking up. “Why is that?”
He said nothing.
“And you don’t have any interest in them, but you have the ability to form a cycle, so it suggests to me that you could connect to them.”
This might not be part of understanding what he wanted from me, but I felt like it was part of what I needed to understand. Something that would help me know what the Vard intended, if anything.
The Servant leaned forward, and looked as if he were placing himself in the fire. There was a time when I would’ve thought such a thing impossible, but I had seen the way the Servant tolerated heat and flames and energy. His connection to fire was different from my connection to the dragons, and probably different from the dragons’ connection to fire too.
“We have tried to reach your people for many years,” the Servant said. “None have been interested. There are those who think to celebrate fire, and they do so for the wrong reason.” I thought of Joran and his family, and wondered if they were like that. “But you are the first who has been willing to come and look for different answers. You are the first who has come with an open mind. If you close it again, you may leave. Until that time, I remain committed to try to help you understand Affellah.”
He leaned back and rested his head on the ground, staying near the fire.
Troubled thoughts raced through my mind for which I had no answer.
I wasn’t concerned about the Vard attacking. I might be the only one in the kingdom who believed they had not—well, other than the Djarn, and they refused to get involved. Somehow, I had to learn something here—something about the power the Serva
nt intended to show me—that would help me keep the kingdom from attacking again.
Those troubled thoughts stayed with me as I rested. The dragon was there in the back of my mind, and I wasn’t sure whether the frustration I felt was mine or his.
I looked over to the Servant.
The Vard, and the Servants, would have been able to easily attack the kingdom.
I didn’t know if they could overwhelm the kingdom, not with the dragons there, but they understood the cycle of fire in a way that most dragon mages did not.
Because of that knowledge, it was entirely possible that they would’ve been able to withstand any dragon attack.
But they hadn’t even tried to connect to the dragons.
As far as I could tell, the Vard didn’t care for the dragons, even though the dragons were part fire—part of the same kind of power the Vard possessed.
I didn’t understand that either.
Maybe I couldn’t leave just yet.
There were still answers I needed.
The cycle remained within me, feeling ever more distant, even with the dragon staying a part of me. How much longer would it be before that faded altogether?
I had started to settle down, thinking about sleeping, when I felt another surge of heat in the distance. It was a familiar sort of heat, the same heat I had felt when the dragons had come and attacked the village.
I got up, and the Servant looked over to me, shaking his head.
“You can do nothing.”
“If they are coming to attack . . .”
“You can’t stop it.”
I had seen the other village. There was no threat there. There was no danger to the kingdom.
Unless the Servant was still keeping something from me. Perhaps the dragon mages had uncovered some different danger. I could imagine Servants nestled into one of the villages. Perhaps some other power.
But I knew better. It was unlikely for that to be the case.
Which meant the king and the dragon mages had attacked helpless villagers.
Was that what I had defended?
Chapter Five
It was early in the morning, and the ground trembled.
I looked over to the Servant and found him standing with his arms crossed, looking out into the distance. Heat radiated from him, pressing down into the ground and away from him. He was using it in some manner I couldn’t quite understand. The sun was up and it was already baking my skin through my clothes. I took a small sip from the waterskin, not daring to drink too much. Not yet.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
He didn’t turn back to me, but I could feel the flow of power coming from him.
“We are running out of time for you to understand,” he said, his voice harsh.
“And then what?”
“Then it will be too late,” he said. When he did turn back to me, he looked irritated. In fact, it was more about the irritation I knew he felt, the energy emanating from him, as there wasn’t much of a difference in how he looked, whether he was irritated or calm.
“Too late for what?” I got to my feet, dusting my hands across my pants. My back ached from lying on the stone, though over the last few days, I had come to feel more accustomed to it. I didn’t like it—I wasn’t sure if anybody could enjoy sleeping on hard stone—but I tolerated it, though I didn’t know if I was sleeping too much or not enough.
He said nothing.
I came to join him along the ridgeline, and he paused long enough for me to reach him before we started down, into what seemed to be the ancient riverbed. The path was smoother here, as if the ancient river had eaten away a roadway, making it easier to navigate, though the Servant never said anything about it.
“Why won’t you tell me what it’s going to be too late for?” I asked.
He looked over to me and frowned briefly. “Because it makes no difference.”
“If I am to find Affellah, then it might make a difference.” I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try to tell him what I thought he wanted to hear. “Though I don’t want to end up like you. No offense.”
“You will not. Over time, the servants can become Servants,” he said.
“I don’t understand the distinction.”
“If you stay long enough, you will.”
We traveled over a series of rocks. There was more debris here than in other places. I paused while the Servant continued making his way forward, clearly familiar with picking his way around the rocks. He had been through here before. He knew the path.
There was something strange about this.
As I followed, I looked down. I remembered what he had said about the stones around the well coming from different places beneath the earth. I couldn’t help but feel as if the stones here came from someplace else too, and were for something else.
“What happened here? This doesn’t feel right.” I turned behind me; everything was a barren wasteland, but in the distance, there was this pile of stones, as if a mountain was formed out of it, then the empty riverbed ran alongside it. “This is different.”
“Many parts of the world are different,” he said softly.
He turned away, but not before I saw a troubled expression burning in his eyes. He continued making his way forward, and I followed his path.
The debris had a certain clustered pattern to it, revealing it had once been organized in some manner.
“This was a village,” I whispered.
“Not a village.”
I frowned, looking around. There were quite a few rocks, boulders that had been piled up, but it extended far beyond where we stood.
Not just a village.
This had been a city.
There had been no signs of cities like this anywhere. The Vard simply didn’t live that way. The only place the Servant had brought me where there were people had been the single village, though he had made a point of motioning to others out across the bleak landscape.
“What happened here?” I whispered.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “This was once a city of the people,” he said.
“And what changed?” He said nothing. “Was it Affellah?” I asked.
“Affellah did not do this,” he whispered.
“If it wasn’t Affellah, then what?”
“Affellah does not destroy like this.”
Affellah was fire, at least as far as I knew, and I had seen what it had done to the Servant, so I had little difficulty believing that Affellah could do something like this.
“But fire can destroy.”
“What do you feel?”
I stood on one of the stones and focused, trying not to teeter one way or another so I didn’t slip and fall, dropping back to the ground. I felt the heat and flame within myself, that which connected me to the dragon, but there was something else here. I didn’t know what it was though, and I said as much to him.
“You must open yourself to Affellah,” he said.
I smiled. “I think you have me mistaken for one of your people. I can’t open myself to Affellah. I’m trying to understand it, but . . .”
He watched me and I ignored it, turning and focusing on the stone in front of me, resting my hand on it, letting power flow from the dragon into me, trying to create a pattern of power between my hands. It was faint, not nearly as potent as what I would have liked it to be, and I could feel the stone resisting me as I pushed outward.
The stone itself was hot, like every stone I had encountered in this part of the world. Whatever else I felt within it might have only been my imagination.
I closed my eyes, feeling for the heat within me. I followed those early lessons, thinking about what I had been taught in the Academy, the way they had instructed me to feel for that power within myself. Maybe using that strategy would help me learn more about what was here.
The dragon burned within me, and I borrowed from the cycle I shared with it. Heat flared between my hands, and I tried to keep calling upon it.
T
hen it faded.
I stood, straightening, and shook my head.
The Servant made his way down, picking his way along the stones.
“How long ago did this fall?” I asked.
He said nothing.
I felt like I was close to an answer here, something he wanted me to see.
“Did your people leave when the river dried?”
He still said nothing.
“Then what is it?”
“Not much farther and you will see it.”
We continued picking our way forward, and it was near dark when we reached another pile of debris. This was just as large as the last one, and I knew immediately that it was the remains of another city. They were within walking distance of each other, and they would’ve been along the same river. The Servant had been quiet as we walked, as if he was giving me some opportunity to try to find answers on my own—though there were no answers.
When he stopped, he turned to me. I could practically see him glowing. He had not used his connection to Affellah quite as potently during our travels as he did now, reminding me of it.
“If you focus, you might be able to find something here. The memory is strong.”
He crouched down, kneeling on the stone, where he rested one hand. Heat began to radiate from his hand, flowing outward and looking like fire, but his hand didn’t change. “What do you feel when you touch the stone?” he asked.
I modeled him, taking a knee and resting my hand against the stone.
“The city must be incredibly old for her to have fallen into decay like this,” I said, looking over to him. “We have buildings in Berestal, where I’m from, that are centuries old. I think even the king has buildings that are incredibly old.” As I looked around, I couldn’t imagine when this might’ve been here and how much time had passed since then, but the Servant seemed to view it as a recent loss.
“Time destroys all things,” he said.
“Yes, but it would take a while for time to destroy this.” I studied the buildings, trying to get some understanding about what was here, when a realization finally came to me.
“You were attacked,” I said.
Could this have been the kingdom?
I would’ve expected the king to have said something if they had been responsible for this, and this seemed too old anyway.
The Summoned Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 4) Page 5