Page 39 of A Rising Hope (The Freckled Fate #3)

39

FINNLEAH

T he wind rushed past my ears as a small group of scattered islands appeared on the horizon illuminated by the bright sun. The long cliffs stood tall, topped with green hills above like little specks of paint on a deep blue canvas below. I steered us down, lowering the dragonfly until its threefold legs hit the ground. Priya swore, already jumping off the creature.

“Never fucking again,” she hissed, her dark skin gave an unhealthy green undertone in the dazzling daylight. But after a few curses, she finally paused, looking around.

“Where are we?”

“A good place for lunch,” I mumbled, unbuckling myself. I hopped off the creature myself, making way down the narrow, pebbled path towards the village. Priya begrudgingly trailed behind me.

By the time we made it to the house with a very odd glass tower, the human village was bustling with activity. Homes were built, lines of laundry hung up, chickens running around.

My hand rose to knock on the door, but before I made a sound, Aurelia opened it.

“You are right on time.” She smirked, and then glanced behind me to where Priya stood, giving her a scrutinizing stare. “She’s pretty, but mean. I don’t like mean people.”

“And I don’t like people that blabber,” Priya snarled behind me, and I turned with a warning look at her.

“Aurelia, this is Priya. Priya, this is Aurelia.” I smiled at them both.

“Stating the facts and blabbering are two separate things. But I’ll make sure to blabber extra around you just in case you can’t tell the difference.” Aurelia took a step away and let us in.

We climbed the wooden stairs to Aurelia’s room. Priya curiously looked around the strange dome, picking up a few scattered papers and random objects.

Aurelia shoved a few stacks of books, maps and papers off her bed, a vial of ink spilling on her sheets, but she ignored it, grabbing the leathery sack in which she kept an ancient book. The one I had stolen from the Pleasure Dome.

“Thank you for keeping it safe.” I couldn’t resist flipping through a few pages. A part of me hoped a sudden revelation would dawn on me. A piece of the puzzle would click into place, and everything would make sense. I turned a few more pages, the unknown symbols glaring back at me. Unhelpful. Useless.

I shoved the disappointment deep inside me.

“You are hoping the book will tell you how to defeat the Queen . . .” Aurelia probed. “In a way that we do not die,” she added, earning a sharp glance her way.

“Aurelia . . . ”

“I overheard my parents talking. I might have not been raised in court, but I can still decipher gossip from the truth. And that was the truth.” Her face was blank, no fear, nor excitement. A statement, nothing else. “I’ve read the book, Finn,” she stated, turning back to her book, searching for a few papers. “Not like read, read it. I mean, I don’t know the symbols. Nobody does. I’ve done my research.” She handed me a few large volumes of dictionaries and books from her father’s library. “Such language is not known; the letters don’t make sense. And I tried to read it backwards and upside down, which was not helpful. I tried sounding the letters out too, but that didn’t help. Well, it kind of did,” she rambled on, and Priya glared at me, but I masterfully ignored her. Aurelia reached for another book. But this time it was a much thinner one. Long pages bound with a thread. “This one.” She tapped with her pointer finger on top of it. “Look at the pattern.” Her silver eyes widened, implying something grand.

“I’ll need more explanation,” I finally told her, my jumbled thoughts became unreadable even to me.

“The notes. The lines, the rhythm,” she proclaimed with a certain excitement in her voice. I looked down at the book. She tapped again. Her mother’s book of songs and ballads. She yanked it back, opening to a random page inside. “See, here. One-two-three, one-two-three.” She sounded the notes and then sang a sentence. “Now look here.” This time, much more gently, she reached for the ancient book, pointing to a page. “One, two, three . . . One-two-three.” She used her pointer finger to trace the scribbled lines. I saw it then. “It’s a rhythm, like notes.” Aurelia twisted around, grabbing another paper off her floor. Drawn lines and dots for rhythm dabbled in ink, just as unreadable as the ancient book. Except for Aurelia, it was a melody she sounded in her mind.

“So, this is just a book of songs?” I tried to hide the disappointment in my tone. Tried and failed. Aurelia looked at me, this time a bit more defeated. That look felt like a lashing against my heart. “Aurelia, these are great findings,” I corrected myself. “Songs mean rhymes, and rhymes are connected to Seers and Seers can see the past and the future. We can do something with this.” This time it was me who was fumbling, flailing for words. So much for useless fucking visions . . . This book turned out to be quite unusable. I choked the frustration in me, as I stared at the unknown characters on the ancient paper. “Do we have any clue what the song is about?” I asked hopeful, but not surprised, when Aurelia shook her head.

“The song is somewhat a slower one if I had to guess. It matches some of the tempo from the slow dances that I do, but that’s as much as I could decipher.”

“Thank you, Aurelia.” I gave the girl a kind smile before placing the ancient book back into its leathery sack.

“I hope when I die, I’ll turn into a beautiful phoenix,” she stated, leaning back on her cluttered nightstand. “It’s a bird that rises from ashes.” She shot Priya a snide look.

“I know what a phoenix is, odd girl,” Priya huffed.

“Nobody is going to die, Aurelia. Remember that bird that we saved on the beach a few months back? We thought it was going to die.”

“Of course, he had a broken beak and a curled claw. Whitewings can’t hunt and feed with broken claws and beaks.”

“And what did he do instead of dying slowly?”

“He found our farms and stole food.”

“Exactly. He fought the odds and found a solution and so, we will too. If a little bird could do it, so will we. Besides, I remember you were the one making a trail of scraps for him leading to the farms for days. Sometimes help comes in the most unexpected ways, Aurelia.”

“And what if it doesn’t?” she asked.

“Oh, but what if it does?” I chuckled, fighting the tight clump in my throat. I had no guarantees, and I had no answers. All I could do was hope. Hope that it’d work out. Hope that we’d live to see another day. “I’ll see you around.” I winked at her, heading for the door.

The steps creaked under my boots as I descended the steep stairs and stepped outside.

“You look like you just got gutted,” Priya grumped behind me.

I did feel gutted. Completely gutted.

“I don’t actually know how to kill the Queen,” I said to her, quietly enough for only her to hear as we strolled through the village.

“Well, I’d say a dagger to the heart will do the job. Boring, yes, but I’m past the age of lavish killings . . . actually, who am I kidding? Wyg root but just a drop; while she is hallucinating, we will chop off her fingers one by one, then cut off her eyelids so she can’t blink but she’ll still be alive so she’ll see it all. Then we’ll flay her skin or pull a major artery from her body inch by inch without severing it. Perhaps we’ll scalp her and wear her hair as a wig, so as she hallucinates, she’ll think she is the one killing herself. I don’t know honestly, but that’s a start . . . ” Priya stated it louder than I wished as a few villagers turned their heads, scattering from her vicious glare. I had forgotten just how much excitement it was for Priya. Her tone was upbeat and thrilled.

“Did you miss the part where I said the whole of humanity would die?” I whispered, faking a smile to a few of the villagers that greeted me along the way.

“Hell, always so dramatic. So what? A minor setback. I don’t plan on dying. Do you?”

“It’s not that simple, Priya. Her magic is unruly, mixed. It will wipe out the world.”

“Says who?”

“What?”

“Who says everyone is going to die?”

I paused, unsure how to reply. We had always taken that as a fact, the cause of the wild magic. But I wasn’t sure who discovered that as a possibility to begin with.

“Exactly,” Priya answered. “She is probably the one who started the rumors. She probably got so mad that people called her the Mad Queen that she decided to come up with some threatening backstory.” She tapped the hilt of her dagger. “I’d like to see her tell that to my friend number one.” She clicked another dagger at her hip. “And my friend number two.”

“And if we all die because of your brutish methods?” I countered, giving her a skeptical look over my shoulder. But Priya’s words breathed a flicker of hope back into my heart.

“First of all, Freckles, my methods are not brutish, they are art. So watch your little tongue. And second, if we all die, so what? At least then I won’t have to deal with your depressed skinny ass.” Priya pushed past me. “People die, get over it.” She glowered at the waving person before adding to me, “Though personally, I plan on staying alive.” Determined, as always. “Or are you no longer interested in getting your loser boyfriend out?” she mocked me.

“Not boyfriend. Husband,” I corrected her, taking a deep breath.

“Yeah, not if I’ll have anything to do about that . . . ” Priya murmured, earning a scowl from me. But she was right. Getting Gideon out was my number one priority. I just hoped I’d figure out the rest too.

I stopped in my tracks, my sight drifting a few houses down, recognizing the familiar faces. Something inside of me warmed at the sight. There was Viyak, dressed in clothes a bit too big even for him. His sleeves rolled, the same for his pants. His hair had grown out since the last time I had seen him. His infectious laugh echoed through the garden where he chased Nizana—a woman from the Desolate Desert—in between the large buckets filled to the brim with water and laundry. Nizana squealed, laughing as she splashed water at him, awkwardly tumbling between other refugees that scrubbed their clothes free of dirt.

I smiled.

He was happy.

“So that’s the slave,” Priya said with dismay near me, swiping a few rolls from the lunch table near us.

“He is not a slave, not anymore,” I stated. She passed me a roll, but I wasn’t hungry. The constant ache in my stomach wouldn’t allow it.

“Florian will be devastated when he finds out you traded his looks for that scrawny looking man.” Priya sneered between chewing on the fresh bread, clearly already in a better mood than a few seconds before.

“I didn’t trade anyone. Besides, I am married.” I finally looked away from Viyak, hoping my mind would remember the happy look on his face, his joyful laugh. I took a sharp turn down another path, returning to our dragonfly.

“Ah yes, I keep forgetting. Considering your boyfriend is nowhere to be seen.” She casually strolled next to me. I just shook my head, passing a meadow filled with wildflowers.

“You two are going to get along so well.” I scoffed, thinking that perhaps the end of the world would be Gideon and Priya meeting and not me killing the Queen.

The blazing heat from the summer sun tickled my skin. I wiped away a small drip of sweat off my brow.

“You still don’t want to get a cozy boat? I could compel a few of your ‘no-longer-slaves’ to row for us. I bet they are good at that,” Priya taunted me, pointing with her chin towards the horizon where the sky crackled. And dark clouds gathered.

“Your slave jokes are getting old, Priya. Come up with something more clever,” I snapped back. I shielded my eyes with my hand, looking at the darkened horizon where the ocean met the sky. “It wasn’t supposed to rain today.”

“Well, it sure looks like a storm to me.” She rose her brow. “And I am not flying in a storm. These fucking leathers aren’t getting ruined. Do you know how hard it was to find Laviticus and now with him being dead, there is not a single competent craftsman in the whole of Svitar. Besides, I think?—”

“Shhh . . . ”

“Did you just fucking shush me?”

“Listen,” I warned. Priya stopped.

“What? Did you get upgraded fucking hearing too? It’s just the wind, Freckles.”

“Gods, Priya, shut up,” I scowled, brows furrowed. Priya opened her mouth to say something vile and bitter, but then she heard it, too.

It wasn’t just the howling of the wind or the roar of the ocean. My powers surged, and I felt the pull then.

A second later, horns went blazing from the surrounding islands.

What previously looked like rapidly approaching dark clouds, now shaped into winged, leathery creatures. Their loud war cry shook the seas like thunder.

“What the actual fuck is that?” Priya hissed as she took a step closer to me. Blades already out.

I dared only a single glance behind me, to the village where screams erupted and people scattered for shelters in a panic. But it was that second loud sound of the horn that reached my bones.

We had minutes before the creatures would devour us. And Dragon’s Island, full of mages. Full of children was the only thing standing in between them and us.

A split-second decision, and I was sprinting at full speed towards the saddled dragonfly drumming its wings, pulling on the rope it was tied with, eager to fly away.

Priya raced right next to me.

“What the actual fuck?” she shouted against the erupting animal-like cry rapidly approaching us. “Don’t tell me you are going to fly this into that ?!”

“I am going to try to draw them away from the islands.” I jumped into the saddle, not bothering with the helmet, as I snapped in the few buckles tying me to the seat. “It’s an island fucking full of children, Priya.” A silent ask.

“Oh my fucking hell,” she seethed, but with a swift jump she landed in the saddle. Before she could finish buckling the last strap, my clammy hands jerked the reins up and the dragonfly dove into the darkened skies.