The Dark Throne, page 16
Vell smiled faintly. “Sorry about that. Arcana was being especially difficult that day, and I was still getting the hang of…” She waved her hands in the air. “Distributing the power, I guess.”
I laughed. “Fair enough.” Then I sobered. “But nothing’s going to happen to you during the hunt, Vell. We’re going to go kill this dragon, all of us together.”
“It is war, and death does not care if he reaps a queen or a cripple,” Vell replied, serious again.
I couldn’t come up with a light-hearted reply, so I followed Vell as she began striding back toward camp. Finally I managed, “So who designed your breastplates, and where can I get one?”
She glanced at me with one eyebrow raised. “You’re incorrigible, Tess.”
I grinned. “I try. Sometimes I even succeed.”
Vell shook her head and I saw a faint smile on her lips even as her demeanor changed, and she was once again the fierce vyldretning as we threaded through the purposeful chaos of camp. I made my way back to my saddle and packs, and found Nehalim grazing nearby. He raised his magnificent head, a long blade of grass sticking out of his mouth as he gazed at me solemnly. I chuckled. “You are the picture of equine grace,” I told him. He flicked his tail and finished chewing his breakfast.
“That was much more than just a few minutes,” scolded Farin as she swooped down on me, landing on my shoulder without asking for permission.
“I didn’t expect to suddenly have sword practice and then a big announcement this morning,” I said by way of apology.
“I suppose I shall have to forgive you,” Farin said haughtily.
“Oh, you shall?”
“Yes.” She sniffed. “I am a most generous friend.”
“I agree, indeed you are.” I smiled as I gave Nehalim a quick groom before sliding the saddle onto his back. Dust dulled the runes on his gleaming coat, but I decided against taking the time to retouch them. Luca saddled his mount nearby, his twin swords at his hips.
“Tess!”
I straightened from tightening the girth on my saddle as Calliea cantered up to us on her fleet faehal. I blinked. Her face gleamed wetly, and she wore a scarlet scarf wrapped around her neck.
“What’s with the new fashion statement?” I asked. “And what’s on your face?”
“I don’t care what anyone says, your bluntness is part of your charm,” Calliea replied cheekily, sliding down to the ground with boneless grace. “And to answer your question, I suppose you haven’t looked completely through your pack. Remember how you were asking about our defense against the dragon-smoke?”
I quickly dug through my pack until I found a small bundle that wasn’t provisions or a spare set of clothing. My scarf was a brilliant emerald green, the fabric sliding through my fingers like water, and bundled in the scarf was a clay pot, stopped with wax. I pried away the seal. A silvery gelatinous substance filled the pot to the brim; it smelled like the air before a storm, like clouds heavy with water. I dipped a finger into the pot experimentally. The jelly-like concoction felt cool and slippery, echoing the texture of the scarf. Calliea’s face and neck gleamed with the strange mixture; she’d applied it to every visible patch of bare skin.
“All of the clothing we are wearing was treated with this,” said Calliea. “It’s called…well, I can’t pronounce the Northern name.” She made a face. “Suppose I’ll have to work on that. But it translates to something like direflame.”
“Direflame?” I repeated. “If something’s dire…it means it’s bad. Why…?”
“I don’t know.” Calliea shrugged. “I didn’t name the stuff. I’m probably translating wrong anyway. But what I do know is that it’ll protect us against the smoke…and against the dragon-flame. Hopefully,” she added in a low voice.
I rubbed a glob of the stuff between my fingers. “All over my skin, even my hair?”
“Some didn’t do their hair, they’re just going to pull up their scarves, they said. But I would rather have to wash my hair a dozen times to get the direflame out than be burned bald,” replied Calliea. Farin giggled in my ear. I conceded Calliea’s point.
“What’s in it?” I asked, trying to decipher if there was any familiarity at all in the scent of it and the cool slippery texture between my fingers.
Calliea raised her eyebrows. “It’s best not to ask. But I heard something about powdered siren’s scales—them being creatures of water and all. Willow bark taken from the tree during a full moon, and burned to white ash. Moonlight gleaned from ice, and a few other things.”
“That sounds appropriately complex,” I murmured, wondering how exactly one harvested moonlight, but deciding that was a question best asked at a later time. “So…I guess it would be best to have a partner, to get at places I can’t see,” I said begrudgingly.
“Yes,” replied Calliea as she leapt up onto her faehal. “Looks like you already have a very fine candidate just a few paces away.” Her blue eyes sparkled wickedly.
“Wait, what? No—I thought you were—you’re ridiculous!” I called after her as she wheeled her mount and cantered away, her laugh trailing like a ribbon in the air behind her.
“When will everyone start minding their own business,” I grumbled to myself.
“Probably when you stop minding their teasing so much,” Farin replied.
“I wasn’t asking you,” I retorted.
“I know,” she said sweetly.
I sighed and patted Nehalim’s neck as I walked over to Luca. “Did you know about this?” I asked, holding up the clay pot.
My question was already answered, if I’d just taken a moment to observe, because Luca had his own clay pot in one hand, slathering the direflame onto his neck. His painted runes gleamed, entirely intact, beneath the thick yet transparent direflame. Kianryk stood behind him, watching the process with distrust.
“I feel like I’m smearing Vaseline all over my face,” I said to myself as I followed his example. I couldn’t help but wince as I spread the viscous substance over my skin, but overall the feeling wasn’t unpleasant. The direflame was thick and cool, and it was easy to believe that it would protect my skin from the dragon-smoke. My hands itched with the sensory memory of burning flesh even as I pushed the fleeting thought of dragon-flame from my mind.
“It isn’t so bad,” Luca commented, but he sounded as though he was trying to convince himself as well.
“What about the wolves?” I asked. Kianryk looked at me and yawned.
“Their pelts protect them,” replied Luca, “and they will stay well away from the smoke in any case.”
I spread the gel across my face and down my neck. Farin dipped her small hands into the pot and worked on one ear; her fingers tickled my earlobe and I concentrated on suppressing my laugh. “At least I know my ears won’t burn,” I commented to Luca as Farin moved to the other side of my head. He smiled and held out his clay pot. I set my own pot down and took his, feeling the warmth of his hand still on the clay.
“It would probably be best if you sat down,” I said with a grin. “You’re too tall for me to reach the top of your head, and it would be a shame if you were burned bald.”
Luca shook his head. “That wouldn’t do at all.” He sat cross-legged on the grass and I started spreading the direflame onto his head, working the gelatinous substance into his golden braids and making sure I didn’t miss any patches of scalp. Luca sat carefully still. I finished with his hair and crouched behind him, sitting on my haunches as I scooped another dollop out of the pot with two fingers. He shuddered slightly as I touched the back of his neck. I felt my own cheeks heating in response. I slid my fingers beneath the collar of his shirt, making sure there was a good amount of overlap between the cloth and the direflame-protected skin.
“There,” I said. “Do you need me to check the front of your neck?”
“It’s covered,” he said, his voice slightly husky. “I’ll do yours.” He stood and motioned for me to sit. I fumbled with his pot of direflame, almost dropping it.
“Oh, I thought that Farin was going to do that,” I said.
“I am only the ear expert!” chirped Farin with a little giggle.
“Of course you are,” I muttered.
“Farin is right,” Luca said as he took the pot of direflame from me and waited for me to sit. “Your friends only tease you because your embarrassment is quite endearing.”
“Endearing?” I glared at him as I sat down, crossing my legs grumpily. “I’m glad others get enjoyment out of my discomfort.”
Luca chuckled, his large hands steadily working the direflame into my braids and scalp. It felt disarmingly good. For a moment, I resisted, but then I relaxed beneath his hands and let my eyes roll back as they’d been trying to do.“It is endearing because you are so very sensitive about a matter which you really shouldn’t feel any embarrassment,” he said.
“Since when did you become a great scholar on….feelings?” I finished lamely. I sighed. “I know. But how else am I supposed to feel about it?”
“I do not know how it works in your world, Tess,” Luca said, moving from my braids to my neck with warm, adroit fingers, “but in this world, and especially among my people, women choose their mates. Their lovers,” he amended. “And if they wish to have more than one lover, or none at all, well, that is their choice.”
I felt my eyebrows rise almost to my hairline. “You’re suggesting I take more than one lover?” My voice came out as a squeak.
“It is no secret that there is something between you and Finnead,” Luca said, almost gently. “Most, I think, can see that I favor you as well. And I do not begrudge you your choice. I am patient.” His fingers dipped below the collar of my shirt at the nape of my neck, but his touch was brisk, almost business-like. He wasn’t trying to seduce me, that much was certain, and I felt a strange rush of gratitude, because I wasn’t sure if I would have been able to resist, with the high excitement of the dragon hunt running through the air like electricity. And somehow, in a thoroughly strange way, the fact that Luca acknowledged my attraction to Finnead, almost welcomed it, made him all the more appealing. It reminded me again that though I was the Bearer, I hadn’t been born in this world, and some things in it were still foreign to me. I took a shaky breath just as Luca said, “Finished. Let me see your face.”
I obediently turned up my face as he moved to the front of me; for a moment, I was gazing up at him from a very compromising position until he crouched down, inspecting my application of direflame. He dipped his thumb into the pot. “Close your eyes.”
“I forgot my eyelids,” I groaned. “Rookie mistake.”
Luca chuckled as his thumb brushed direflame across each of my eyelids. “There.”
“Thanks,” I said, clearing my throat as I stood. I picked up my emerald scarf, folding the rectangular piece of slick cloth into a long triangle; I laid the flat edge of the fold over my head, then took the bitter ends of the triangle and crossed the two sides over my nose, tying the ends behind my head at the nape of my neck. I noticed Luca watching me curiously, but I ignored him until I pulled back the hood from my head and pushed down the cloth covering my mouth, arranging the scarf around my neck.
“You wear your scarf like your brother,” Luca said suddenly.
I blinked. “I…yeah. He taught me how to tie a shemagh after his first deployment. I must have bugged him about it for a week before he gave me one and showed me how to wear it.” I smiled fondly at the memory. “It looks strange when you’re first putting it on, but this way you can pull the back of the scarf up to protect your head and the back of your neck, and the front can be pulled up over your mouth if you’re in a dust-storm. Or…dragon-smoke,” I added as I demonstrated.
“A shemagh?” Luca repeated, tasting the foreign word on his tongue as he folded his own blue scarf into a triangle.
“Yes. It’s a scarf worn by the native people in a particular part of the mortal world.” I swallowed against the tightness in my throat at the thought of Liam deployed in hostile mountains overseas.
Luca arranged the scarf over his head, commenting as he folded the scarf over his mouth, “I look like an old woman in a headscarf.”
I chuckled. “Only for a moment. And I said the same thing…but it works, so that’s enough for me.”
Luca tied his scarf and pushed the material down around his neck. “If your brother taught you, I am sure it works well.” He nodded. “Your brother is a trustworthy warrior.”
“Glad you think so, because I agree.” I smiled. I shoved the wax seal back into the top of my pot of direflame. Then I paused. “What about the faehal?”
“Already done before we left,” said Luca.
I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t realized the intensity of the preparations for this hunt, and I felt vaguely guilty. I’d probably been asleep for most of the time that the other riders had been preparing the packs and the steeds, not to mention the great weapons, the bespelled wings and the direflame itself. I tucked the clay pot into my pack and picked up my breastplate, leaning the Sword against my leg as Luca wordlessly tightened the straps of my armor. I looped the strap of the Sword’s sheath over my head, settled the blade against my back, and pulled on my gauntlets. Luca offered his hands again, but I shook my head, pulling myself up onto Nehalim’s back. My hands protested with a bright quick starburst of pain, but it soon faded, and I sat with satisfaction in the saddle. I looked over at Luca, astride his faehal. Kianryk bounded away through the grass, his tawny hide gleaming in the golden morning light.
“What do we do now?” I asked, raising one eyebrow.
Luca turned his mount’s head with a twitch of his reins, replying with a grin, “Now we go to hunt a dragon!”
Chapter 12
The choosing of the vyldgard began without ceremony in the dusty light of the early morning, a long train of silent riders following their High Queen into the east, the new-risen sun revealing the desolation of the lands before us. The long verdant grasses disappeared, replaced by bare ground as we rode onward, the hooves of our faehal kicking up a cloud of fine dirt, which hung about us and turned the gleaming wetness of the direflame into a dun speckled mud. I hoped the substance still retained its effectiveness, and the Sword sent me a reassuring hum. It had been mostly silent since we’d left the Hall, but now I felt its power stirring, pacing within the cage of my ribs, bumping against my sternum like a great dog pressing its head into my chest. As I pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth against the cloying dust, I wondered idly if the Sword would jump into the fray against the dragon as its primal wolf-form….or if it could take the form of another dragon, bellowing forge-hot taebramh into the air.
If I were to appear as a dragon, said the Caedbranr in my mind, it would not be as a pale imitation of the Great Ones.
And it sent me an image of a creature even more terrifying than the dragon I’d glimpsed in the great cloud of smoke, a creature whose bulk wrapped around mountains and whose wings blotted out the sun, throwing whole kingdoms into shadow. I shuddered a little and reminded myself that I was essentially bound to an object with the power of a deity. I began to wonder if the Sword was indeed an actual deity—if Arcana was a fragment of the Morrigan, and my power, through the Sword, was equal to hers….then it was within the realm of possibility. But rather than answer my thoughts, the Caedbranr merely chuckled and settled down behind my beating heart, tucking itself into a pulsing cylinder of flame somewhere among my arteries, drowsily surfacing every now and again to glance at the column’s progress.
“You answer only what suits you, don’t you,” I muttered, bringing my full attention back to the desolate landscape about us. Luca still rode beside me, our fleet mount’s strides eating up the bare ground. Now and again a lone tree struggled upward from the soil. A coppery sweet scent hung faintly in the still air; we rode past the hulk of a cadengriff corpse, red bone gleaming through its decaying flesh; and I wondered in horrified fascination if it was the same dead beast that had sheltered Vell, Beryk and me when the dragon had almost ended our journey to Brightvale. The three wolves showed their teeth to the corpse, growling and snapping as they bounded past, their lithe shadows racing along the ground beside them.
We rode deeper and deeper into the dead grasslands, and as dark sweat laced the flanks of the faehal, we began to see more obvious signs of the perils ahead. There were no more rotting corpses; instead we passed the charred skeleton of some huge creature with wicked tusks, and another which was no more than a pile of blackened bones. The few trees that had survived in this wasteland were fire-blackened, their crooked limbs bearing a coat of burned and cracked bark. The coppery sweet scent in the air became layered with the smell of sulfur and smoke. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and I felt the Sword’s power awaken, prowling close to the surface of my skin. The sky pressed down on us, the sun fading behind thick gray clouds.
At some unseen signal, no doubt from Vell, the thundering mass of riders slowed and halted. I decided I’d rather be closer to Vell—she’d charged me with being a healer, but I would protect her as she’d so doggedly protected me during our long journey. And she’d asked me to be Arcana’s second—I was still trying to figure out exactly what that meant, but I tucked away the thought as Nehalim cantered gracefully up the long length of the halted column. He tossed his head as we slowed, as if to show me that he still had plenty of spirit left even after the long gallop over the barren hills. I patted his neck and picked out Vell. The High Queen gave an order to Gray, and the golden-haired knight wheeled her mount and cantered over to two dozen waiting warriors. They all dismounted and carefully untied their wrapped wing-frames from their mounts. As I watched, one of the warriors smoothed out the leather straps of a gleaming harness, fitting it to the muscled chest of his faehal. I turned my attention back to Vell.
I trotted up on Nehalim as Vell finished speaking to Finnead. As I slid down from my white mount’s back, Finnead turned, and his drowning-blue gaze, vibrant from the depths of the dark scarlet band painted across his face, caught my eyes. A thrill leapt through me, a spark swirling through my limbs as Finnead, transformed into some wild creature of the North, held my gaze with his own. He walked toward me, closing the short distance between us with that same lithe cat-like grace. He was entirely different and completely the same, both at once, an electrifying transformation made all the more exciting by its contradiction. Even his raven-wing hair was artfully tousled, an echo of the fierce ridge of braids worn by Vell, yet somehow it didn’t make him seem vain. He wore the Northern war paint and hair like he carried the sigil of the High Queen on his breastplate and on his shield: with a fierce silent pride and a wildness that hadn’t been at the forefront of his demeanor as part of the Unseelie Court. I smiled a little despite myself, and an answering smile quirked one side of his eminently kissable mouth. His high cheekbones shone with the direflame, his pale skin somehow unmuddied by the dust of the barren plains.
