SummerDanse (2 page)

Water wasn’t far away, no more than a five-minute walk into the wood. I should’ve known Xyla would make sure of that. After taking a very long drink and splashing the cold water on my face, I filled the skin and returned to the fire. As the water heated in the pot, I pulled my herbs and a clean tunic from my pack, then tore the tunic into strips.

When the herbs had steeped in the hot water long enough, I soaked one of the strips and pressed it gently to Breyard’s forehead for a few moments to soften up the dried blood. Then, carefully and slowly, I dabbed at the gash, using a clean bit of cloth to dribble more water onto it. Once the worst of the blood was gone, the wound didn’t look quite as bad as it had, although it didn’t look good, either.

After wrapping the top part of his head in more of the strips, I cleaned up the rest of his face. When that was done, I sat next to the fire with a sigh. I’d managed to kill less than an hour.

My stomach rumbled. Nothing I could do about that. It was too early for even the earliest of Spring’s berries. And I had no hunting gear, by virtue of the fact that I had no hunting skill. I would just have to make the best of it. It wouldn’t be that difficult to make it through a day without food. Besides, there were plenty of herbs for tea.

Partway through the morning, I pulled my meditation kit from my pack. Choosing a pale green candle for health and a dark blue one for resourcefulness, I went through the meditation routine.

Clear my thoughts. In this still, solemn place, that was easy enough. I concentrated on taking slow, steady breaths, letting the tranquillity of the woods still my mind.

Find my calm center. There. I nudged the worry over Breyard and our parents aside, and took another breath.

Open my inner senses. I let the vibrations of life flow through me. Small woodland creatures, blooming shrubs, blossoming life, all but hidden to the eye, surrounded me.

Absorb the power of the earth, the air, the life all around. Let it fill me and strengthen me and replenish my soul.

The day passed at the speed of a snail. If even that. I drank endless cups of tea, checked Breyard over endless times, and paced around the fire endlessly.

In the afternoon, I meditated again. Not very successfully this time, as my empty stomach kept intruding on my thoughts. After awhile, I gave up in annoyance at my inability to ignore something as insignificant as a bit of hunger and blew out the candles.

The day had been reasonably warm for the time of year, but as the sun began to head down in earnest, it grew colder and I had to stay near the fire. At least it would soon be dark enough for Xyla to fly without being seen. Surely I didn’t have too very much longer to wait.

I stared at Breyard’s face, willing him to give me some sign of improvement. Until recently, looking at him had been a bit like looking at my own reflection, except that he had hazel eyes while mine were dark brown. We shared the same thin nose and high cheekbones, and once upon a time had both had long, straight brown hair. Now his hair was almost shoulder-length and mine was bobbed at my jaw.

But the biggest difference was the silver mark on my left cheek. A labyrinthine design called an Etosian knot, it had been carved into my skin by Rennirt, an evil lord who had tried to take my maejic power and make it his.

I shook my head. Brooding on that mark wasn’t going to make it go away; I’d have to try to forget it. Or just learn to accept it. With a deep sigh, I rose to my feet and went to fill my waterskin one last time. It would take Xyla a few hours to get here.

Three cups of tea later, I felt the dragon’s approaching presence. Relief flooded me that soon, proper help for Breyard would be here.

Two huge shapes—not just one—came into view, blocking the stars with their wingspans. Xyla and Edin landed, and soon several human forms approached. Yallick, the mage who’d agreed to apprentice me. Oleeda, a master from the magic academy I’d run away from and who secretly was also a mage. And Traz, my ten-year-old traveling companion. I wondered how he’d convinced the mages to let him come.

“Well, young lady,” Yallick said as he strode into the firelight and cast me the deepest, darkest frown he ever had. “What is this all about?”

Worrying about that girl will be the death of me. If it is not one thing, it is another. Or another. How her parents ever survived her childhood is beyond my power of imagination.

Yet look at what she has done, what she has accomplished at so young an age ... not yet sixteen. I am proud, when I am not tempted to strangle her.

And her parents will be proud, too, when they learn the full tale. The return of the red dragons from their long exile! A thing I never expected to see!

Though go we to rest now,

say not thou “defeat.”

The power of ages

again shall be meet.

Ascent from the ashes,

Descent from the stars,

The power of ages

once more shall be ours.

A strong one will quicken

and harvest alone.

The power of ages

to lead us all home.

They are home now, and they are mighty, but what of their power? We shall see; we shall see, indeed.

I swallowed and didn’t meet Yallick’s gaze. Never had those icy blue-green eyes of his pierced my soul as they did now. But an explanation of why I’d left in the middle of the night without telling him would have to wait. First things first.

“Someone attacked my home. Mama and Papa are gone, and Breyard is hurt.” I gestured toward my brother and found that Oleeda was already tending him.

“Xyla told us these things, of course,” Yallick said, holding my eyes with his. I refused to look away first. After all, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was Yallick’s apprentice, not his slave, and I didn’t need his permission to go home to my parents. Yet he still managed to make me feel guilty.

With a soft
hrumph
, he turned from me and crouched down next to Breyard. I moved closer.

“What’s wrong with him? He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

Oleeda had one hand on Breyard’s chest and the other on the crown of his head. “He has suffered a head injury,” she said, “but not a bad one. With the proper care, he should recover.”

“I did the best I could!” Then I bit my lip. No one had suggested I hadn’t.

Both of the mages looked up at me in surprise. The wrinkles around Oleeda’s eyes deepened as she frowned, and Yallick rose to his feet again. When he spoke, his gravelly voice was soft and kind.

“Come walk with me, child. Traz and Oleeda can look after your brother.”

He held out his arm in an expectant way. Had I felt any sense of compulsion, I wouldn’t have moved, but the vibration I felt from him was one of entreaty. I reached for his elbow, and he tucked my hand into the crook of his arm and led me away.

We walked on for what seemed to be forever, while the pressure built up inside me.

“How are we going to find—” I finally began.

“Hush,” Yallick interrupted, patting my hand.

Hush? How was I supposed to hush with all this anxiety roiling around inside me? Did he have a plan? And if so, why not discuss it in front of the others? I felt as if I were going to explode, but every time I took a breath to speak, the old mage just patted my hand maddeningly again. If he thought that would calm me down, he was greatly mistaken.

Eventually he let out a long sigh. “You have been through much in the past few months, more than it would seem anyone ever should, especially one so young as you.”

His words stung me into defensiveness. “I’ll be sixteen soon.”

Yallick patted my hand. “Indeed. You are a young woman of whom your parents must be very proud. And,” he stressed the word when I opened my mouth to interrupt him, “I am proud of you, too. Perhaps even more than your parents, for they do not yet know the whole story.”

“And what do you think has happened to them?” Why didn’t he seem to think this was a pressing matter? The longer we delayed looking for them, the harder it would be to find them.

“Xyla said the two of you were attacked by dragonmasters.”

“Yes, but what does that—” I stopped speaking as the obvious answer burst into my mind. My next words came out as a whisper. “Are you saying my parents were taken by the dragonmasters?”

“It would seem so.”

“But … but why?”

“That, indeed, is the crucial question, is it not?”

“Well, why do you think they would?”

“I can think of many reasons, but would prefer not to speak of them until I know which is the correct one.”

Typical sort of answer from the mage. I looked over at him as we walked in silence under the stars. His long white-blond hair was tied back as usual. Under the night sky, he looked even younger than Papa, although I knew that he was actually over eighty years old. Positively ancient.

But for the first time, I wondered what it would have been like to know him when he was my age, when he was an apprentice mage learning about his maejic instead of the powerful—if clandestine—leader he was now. Much as I hated to admit it, I decided he’d probably been good-looking, maybe even as handsome as Grey. I steered my heart away from that thought.

Yallick cleared his throat, which never managed to improve the sound of his voice. “We will address the situation of your parents presently. Right now, it is you yourself about whom I am most concerned.”

“Me?” My heart started to beat a little harder.

“You sound surprised. Have you forgotten in the space of a single day that you virtually ran away?”

His voice sounded almost hurt, and my reply that he couldn’t tell me what to do died on my lips before I could speak it. Me, hurt Yallick’s feelings? Now there was an idea I would’ve thought laughable.

“What I want to know,” he continued when I didn’t answer, “is what made you leave so precipitously, without even waking me.”

I bit my bottom lip. When he put it like that, it seemed the obvious thing I should have done. And the truth—“I had a dream”—sounded stupid now. We walked on in silence as I tried to think of a way to answer him that didn’t make me look like a complete idiot.

Yallick sighed. “I think it is time you understood something, Donavah. I am not your father, and though I am your teacher and bear a certain responsibility for you, you remain your own person. There are powers at work here that none of us entirely understand. If we talk about them openly and frankly between ourselves, we are more likely to gain enlightenment. Now. Will you please tell me what happened?”

I tried to compose my thoughts in an ordered fashion. Best, probably, to be succinct about it. “It was a dream,” I said, speaking softly. I paused, waiting for him to snort derisively or otherwise express his annoyance with such a weak explanation.

Instead, he spoke in a musing voice. “A dream?”

Encouraged, I went on. “I’ve been having these dreams for weeks, where someone is playing Talisman and Queen with me. And they keep taunting me, saying over and over that it’s my move. Last night ...” My voice trailed off and I shivered at the memory. “It was Anazian.” Yallick stopped walking and stood frozen in place, looking straight ahead. I swallowed. “Something in his manner, the way he talked about my family—well, when I woke up, I just, well, knew with an absolute certainly that I had to get home. Immediately. Xyla was awake and said she’d take me.” Yallick still hadn’t moved, and I began to feel uncomfortable. “I see now, I should’ve woken you up.”

“It would have been better,” he agreed. “And yet I understand why. Or at least I suspect that it was not entirely your own decision.”

“What do you mean, not my own decision?”

He didn’t answer immediately, and the silence stretched between us. “I think it better to say no more until I am sure.”

I wanted to ask him why he’d brought it up at all if he didn’t intend to explain himself, but I managed to bite back the words. Instead, I asked, “What do we do now? How will we find my parents?”

Yallick stopped walking, turned to face me, and took my chilly hands in his warm ones. “Your parents are currently beyond your reach. It will take a concerted effort to effect their rescue, and we shall do so. But in the meantime, I want you to regain your equilibrium. It is what they would want you to do.”

“But—” I started to argue before his words sank in. “What?”

He gave my hands a little squeeze. “Right now, you are my chief concern. I want you to take some time and focus your considerable energy on yourself, on your own spirit.”

His gentle words brought tears to my eyes. “My parents,” I said yet again.

“Shh. I do not ask you not to worry. I ask only that you trust me. Will you do that?”

Looking down, I nodded. Yallick released one of my hands and tucked the other back into the crook of his arm. We walked without speaking back to the others.

Where I learned exactly why Traz had come with the mages. Breyard was sitting up next to the fire with Oleeda on one side of him and Traz on the other. My brother wore a slightly dazed expression on his face, while Traz looked triumphant and Oleeda amazed. Yallick let out a tiny gasp of surprise, let go of my hand, and practically leapt the last few steps.

Traz grinned up at him. “I told you so,” he said, laughter glinting in his eyes as he held up his staff, which he’d found on our first journey together and later discovered was a powerful artifact from another world.

“All right, young man,” Yallick growled with gruff affection. “You have proven your point and need not gloat.” He crouched down next to Breyard, one hand on his shoulder and the other on Traz’s. “How do you feel, son?”

Breyard lifted a hand to his forehead and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t understand. How did I get here? The last thing I remember—but no.” He shuddered. “It must’ve been a dream. Or a nightmare.” His shoulders slumped.

Yallick and Oleeda exchanged glances. I felt a jolt of tension pass between them. What did they know that they weren’t saying?

“Let us go. The sooner back, the sooner we can all have a hot meal.”

We put out the fire and readied ourselves to go. Oleeda had brought a spare cloak for Breyard. He put it on, then he and Traz mounted Edin while Oleeda, Yallick, and I climbed onto Xyla.

It was a long, cold journey back to the cave in the mountains. Generally, I loved flying dragonback—the wind rushing past my face, the way the ground sped by below, the great sense of power in the animal on which I rode. But now my mind was elsewhere. I wondered that I hadn’t felt the cold last night. Had that been part of Anazian’s enchantment? The thought that I’d been so thoroughly taken in made me feel hot with both anger and embarrassment. Yet something had obviously gone wrong with his plan. I just couldn’t figure out what. None of it made sense, but I had the feeling that the answer was important, if I could only puzzle it out.

My thoughts wound themselves into knots as I tried to make sense of everything, but none of the pieces quite fit together. Why would Anazian go to so much effort to get me to leave the safety of the mages and go home? Why had dragonmasters kidnapped my parents and left my brother for dead? Why did Yallick act as if finding my parents wasn’t important? How did all this fit together?

Finally, Xyla began to descend. Before long we were back on the ground. To my surprise, mages bustled everywhere.

“What’s going on?” I asked Oleeda as she dismounted.

“Why, we are getting ready to leave, dear. Surely you knew, did you not?”

I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. Why?”

Yallick slid down Xyla’s back. “The dragonmasters know where we are. We must go.”

“But where to?”

“The dragons have told us of a lake in the desert. Several of them flew there today and found that it is uninhabited.”

“Of course. Delaron,” I said. That was the sage community on Stychs, a world exactly like our own; at least it was physically the same. The red dragons had somehow magically transported themselves to that world a thousand years ago, and when the dragonmasters attacked the mage encampment in the mountains a few days ago, Xyla had taken Traz, Grey, and me there to escape. We’d found the red dragons in their city of Delaron and convinced them to return with us. We’d stayed there several months, but when we returned to this world, Hedra, it was the same instant in which we’d left.

“Yes,” Oleeda said. “The dragons say this is the name of the place in their world.”

Yallick nodded. “So we will go there while we determine our next move. Let us go inside where it is warm.”

He led the way, and Oleeda and I followed. Breyard and Traz came in a few minutes later. The meal was full of conversation about the move to Delaron, but I didn’t pay any attention. I wondered how we were supposed to find my parents if we went a hundred miles farther away from here—across the mountains, even. I didn’t care that Anazian would be far, far away and wouldn’t be able to torment me anymore. What did that matter if the dragonmasters were tormenting my parents?