Ash (The Elemental Series, Book 6) (9 page)

The shouting was getting closer, the voices clearer and more defined.

Voices I knew, most of them I’d trained with, if not flat-out trained. These were my friends, the family I clung to when my own was killed . . .

The world swayed and for a moment I was a child again, trapped in the burning house that swallowed my family. I could taste the smoke on my tongue, feel the heat from the flames. No. I was not there.

“Chive, get off me,” I snarled, tasting blood on my lips.

“No, you tried to kill the king, You’re a traitor!” He shifted his weight on me, leaving the dagger in my side—a mistake. “You’re going to be executed. I wish you’d never trained me.” His words were as sharp against me as the well-honed weapon he’d used to cut me open.

Seconds between making a vow and breaking it, that had to be a new record.

“That makes two of us,” I said as I pulled Chive’s dagger out of my side and swept it upward, driving it under his rib cage and into the lower half of his heart. We all made mistakes as Enders, especially young ones, but rarely were they fatal.

That I was the orchestrator of his death sliced through me. But if I didn’t get out of here and find a way to bring Lark home, I feared even more lives would be lost. What was one life to hundreds?

Just because I knew I was right didn’t make it any easier to swallow that I’d taken the life of a young Ender before he truly began to live.

He gasped once, the darkness hiding the sight of his dying face from me. “I’m sorry,” I said as I got to my feet and stumbled in what I thought was the direction of the Traveling room, away from the voices and growing light.

“Hurry, Ash, they’re close.” Peta leapt back to my shoulder. I crashed into the doors and they fell open into the Traveling room. The soft glow of the globe that blinked back at me was a welcome sight. I turned and slammed the doors shut, sliding one of the short swords from my side through the two handles.

A bit of time was all I needed and there would be no following me. I limped to the side wall and grabbed one of the Traveling armbands. Made of cedar wood and polished to a high gleam, it smelled of the Rim.

I slid it up and over my bicep.

The door thundered as something, or someone, slammed against it. I walked to the center of the globe and stared at it. As if I were standing in the heart of the world and looking out, the options were endless as to where I could go. But this would be my one last easy jump anywhere in the world.

Unless I went to one of the other elemental families.

No, that would not work. Cassava was not hiding within any of the other families’ homes. But . . . she’d fallen at the Eyrie, there could be a clue there. Then there was Granite. He’d been my mentor and trainer. And he’d helped Cassava in all her plans.

I cleared my mind and thought of him, but all I could see was the Eyrie.

“Damn you, Granite.”

“Granite?” Peta twisted to look me in the face. I told her of him, and his part in Cassava’s plans, but that had been a long time ago. When we’d first gone after Lark.

I stared at the globe, as sweat ran down my body. Where was he?

Still, the Eyrie persisted in my mind. Could Granite be there?

It was all I had to go on, and there was no more time to think about it as the door rattled and the wood cracked.

The decision made, I reached out and touched the globe, adjusting it until a narrow valley in the Himalayan Mountains drew close to me.

“Peta, hang on.”

She dropped her head and tucked her face under my chin. “Ready.”

I reached up and touched the valley with one finger while with the other hand I twisted the armband. Behind us, the door shattered open, the splinters flying to either side of me as I was sucked through the globe.

There was a moment or two of complete peace, silence like that spot between dreaming and wakefulness where you aren’t sure that you are even real, the place where you wonder if your body is even a tangible thing or if you are completely made of thought, of spirit and intangible matter. There were stories of people being lost to Traveling, of becoming addicted to the feeling, and I could see why.

My ears popped, light bloomed around us, and Peta and I were spit out of the air.

I gasped at the instant cold, and then we were falling. Down the side of a mountain we tumbled, the snow cushioning us. She shifted into her snow leopard form and stopped her slide but I continued to roll.

I headed straight for the edge of a cliff. I scrambled, doing all I could to dig my hands and feet into something that would slow me. I managed to spin around so I was going feet first, and I stared back up at the streak of blood I left in the snow behind me. The snow was too soft to use as a grip.

I called up the earth under the snow, but it was too far down to help me, and I wasn’t strong enough to pull on it. I wasn’t Lark, I couldn’t draw the earth like she could.

“Peta!”

“Hang on, I’m coming!”

She raced down the snow, leaping fifty feet with each stride, but it was going to be close.

I held my hand up as my legs shot out into open air.

With a last jump, she landed and grabbed my hand in her mouth, stopping my flat-out race down the mountain.

“You know, I think you like the drama of the last-second rescue,” I breathed out. I put my free hand into the snow and she helped me away from the open overhang. I turned and took a look back.

My heart pounded as I stared at the abyss below. As far as I could see, there was no bottom. No end to the fall that I had no doubt would have killed me.

“Peta . . .”

She snorted. “Drama of the last second? I’m good, Ash, but even I’m not that good. I almost didn’t . . .” She flexed her shoulders and shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. You’re on this side of the mountain, as am I.”

We made our way up the slope, away from the loose snow. I rubbed a hand over my bare arms and looked around. The snow was cold, but it was summer, so the depth of the chill wouldn’t kill me.

At least I had that going for me.

Peta sat and stared out at the mountains around us. “I suppose you had a reason for bringing us here? You said Granite, but you also said Cassava. Which is it?”

“Both, I think.” I couldn’t shake the sense that Granite was here too. Something I’d never shared with anyone . . . a trait I had that had bubbled up during my training had given me the title of being one of the best.

Latent Tracking abilities had shown up in me. Not to the depth of a true Tracker . . . but I could often get a generalized area for those I knew well. Granite, I knew very well. Cassava . . . I knew her better than I wanted to.

“Cassava was buried here in the rubble of the Eyrie when she faced Lark.” I stared out from our vantage point. The mountains spread in a blanket of white and gray around us, and as I situated myself with the four points of the earth, I twisted so I faced the Eyrie. Or at least where the Eyrie had been before Lark had destroyed it.

“I think they are both here; the pull to the Eyrie was too strong,” I said softly.

“I’m sorry, what?” Peta reached up and put a big paw on my thigh. “What did you say?”

I crouched beside her. “I can . . . sometimes sense where a person is when I look at the globe in the Traveling room. Not quite like a Tracker. I think it’s something else. But . . .”

“It’s why you thought Lark was dead. Because you couldn’t sense her?” Peta blinked several times. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrugged. “You were so certain she was alive, and I know what it is to believe that someone is alive when they are dead. You won’t listen to anyone, you can’t. You have to see the truth for yourself.”

Her ears twitched. “I hear a story from your past there, Ash.”

A story . . . I wished it was only a story. “A long time ago, yes. It is not a tale for right now.”

She bobbed her head and let the topic drop. “What is your plan then? You can’t possibly think to walk into the Eyrie, can you?”

“I wasn’t with Lark when she was here. They won’t see me as a threat even though Samara threatened her life,” I pointed out, standing and making my way toward a chunk of the mountainside that looked like it had some half-decent handholds.

Peta moved through the snow beside me and shook her head. “And what about me? They know I am her familiar.”

“Then you will have to stay back at the edge while I go in and ask some questions.”

I was hoping there would still be enough chaos that I could slip in and out without drawing the attention of the new Eyrie queen. The last thing I needed was to add a few Sylphs to my problems.

“And your reason for coming to the Eyrie? They will want to know.”

I shrugged. “I have no reason to lie. I am searching for the traitors, Cassava and Granite. We believe she didn’t die, and that is all the reason I need to come to the Eyrie. We believe that he is still helping her. Under the laws of the Enders, I have every right to search for a traitor of my own family even within another elemental family. You know that.”

Peta was silent for a few minutes, her whiskers twitching now and again. “Ash, you know Samara may try to kill you just for being from the Rim.”

“She might.” I went to my knees to inspect a section of the mountain I thought would be good to scale down. “But I have dealt with pissy rulers before, Peta. I am not new to this.”

“Could have fooled me. You were in that cell for months and you decided where to go seconds before we had to leave.” She snorted.

I smiled. “I never said I was perfect.”

She snorted again. “Tell that to Lark. She thinks the sun shines out your ass.”

There was no stopping the laughter from escaping me. “Gods, Peta. She’s not that bad.”

She shrugged and peered down at me as I slid over the edge. “She loves you. That’s enough to keep her from seeing your flaws, of which you have more than a few. But I approve of her feelings. You are the one for her, Ash. Don’t doubt it no matter what happens.”

Her words stopped me, and I stared up into her green eyes. “How do you know that?”

“That she loves you, or that you’re the right one for her?”

“The second bit. I know she loves me.”

She smiled, which showed off all her pearly white and wickedly sharp teeth. “I am her familiar. Whether she likes it or not, I can see the people around her and how they affect her. You . . . you support her, help her to be more than she is on her own.”

Her words reflecting what Raven had said to me in the cell made me shiver. I started down the side of the mountain, not sure I wanted to hear more of what she had to say.

“I’m not done, Ash.”

Laughing to myself, I hurried up my climb.

“You can’t get away from me, you should know that by now,” she called down, which only made me go faster. A literal game of cat and mouse proceeded down the slick mountainside and I let the movements and pull of my muscles push all the thoughts out of my head.

The ache in my side from the dagger wound Chive had given me slowly eased as the skin knit together. I touched it once, checking it. Chive . . . another life lost because of Cassava. I didn’t think my hatred for her could grow, but I was wrong. She’d done so much and caused so much pain in this world of ours.

But before I found her, I would have to deal with the Sylphs.

My left foot slipped and I scrambled, hanging from one hand for a heartbeat before I got another point of contact on the mountain.

“Keep your mind on what you’re doing or you’re going to fall,” Peta said from above me. She was almost vertical in her stance, head down and tail up, but she didn’t seem bothered by the positioning.

I grimaced. “Yes, Mother.”

Peta was right. There was no room to worry about what Samara would say, or what Lark was doing, or what trouble the Rim faced. There was only my body, the rock and snow beneath me, the next hand- or foothold. That was all I could feel, all I could do with the moment at hand and the slick rock as it tried to dislodge me with every move. Either I paid attention to what was in front of me, or I was going to pay a very steep price.

Finally, my feet touched ground that was not vertical and I took a breath that turned into a deep sigh. As I turned, I got a look at the direction we were headed. From what I could see, there were three mountains between us and the Eyrie. The missing peak that Lark had so recently destroyed had left a gap between two mountains, like the gap between a child’s front teeth.

My positioning of us from the Traveling room was poor at best. This was what I got for using a Traveling band under pressure. A half
-
assed move.

Hardly something I was going to brag about when I saw Lark . . . I stopped, my line of thoughts skittering off to one side.

“What’s wrong?” Peta butted her head against my thigh. I shook my head.

“Was thinking about telling Lark something, and—”

Her voice cracked. “You remembered that you can’t tell her anything.”

“Yeah.” I breathed the single word out, surprised at how much it hurt.

She pushed her head into my hand. “It’s like when we were looking for her when she was in the oubliette.”

I nodded. That was exactly the problem. “Almost like finding her was a dream, and losing her again, we’ve gone back to the nightmare and had to start all over. Only this time . . . we’re looking for the one who created the nightmare.”

Two years we’d spent looking for Lark, our every waking moment searching out corners of the world that she might have been stuffed into. In the beginning, I’d believed as Peta had that Lark was in an oubliette, and I knew we only had so much time. Weeks at the most, where Lark would survive as she slowly starved to death.

Those first few weeks had passed, and I began to lose hope. Not because I thought we wouldn’t eventually find her, or that I’d give up. No, I never thought that. We’d stopped in at the Rim more than once and I’d tried to find Lark on the globe in the Traveling room, and had picked up nothing. I tried to tell myself it was because she was in an oubliette, and not because she was dead.

I lost hope that we would find her alive. Oubliettes were designed to hold an elemental for a few days as punishment, a week at most if you’d been really naughty. They were the last effort before you were banished.