Page 30 of Magick and Lead (Dragons and Aces #2)

ROHREE

I t had been like waking from a nightmare—being broken out of the box, taking Clua’s hand, and running free—but now, it had shifted into a stranger sort of dream.

The sort where you’re running endlessly, but never fast enough.

The sort where you’re surrounded by a never-ending wood full of grasping branches.

The sort where something evil is chasing you.

You can’t see it, but you can feel it, and you know it’s there.

You rush ahead in a mind-weary haze on legs so dull and tired they’re barely capable of hurting anymore.

And you don’t know whether you want to scream or cry or just fall down on your face and sleep for a hundred years.

But you do know if you stop running, you’re dead.

Rohree was just grateful she wasn’t running alone.

She wasn’t sure how long they fled like that, plunging through woods, across fields, over roads, and through streams. But after a while, the sense of impending dread that told her the witch was near began to fade.

It was hard to talk and run at once. But with what little breath she could spare, Clua had caught Rohree up on all that had happened while she’d been locked away.

The release of the golenae. The fall of Issastar and Charcain.

The defeat of the Skrathan at the Hatchery.

And of course, the death of the queen at the hands of the man they’d all become fond of, Kit, who, it turned out, was really the famous Admite ace, the Silver Wraith.

She’d already pieced together some of the events through conversations between her captors she’d overheard while locked in the box.

But hearing the tale now, in its entirety, it was almost too much for Rohree to take in.

Several times she found her eyes stinging with tears, or her teeth clenched with rage.

“It’s all my fault,” she said when the tale had been told. The dwarf stopped running, grabbed her arm, and turned her so they were facing each other.

“What?” she demanded.

“If I hadn’t gotten caught… if I’d just made it back, I could have warned everyone about the golenae in the crates. Perhaps the queen could have done something. None of this would have happened.”

Clua reached for her with such a fierce expression on her face, Rohree thought she was going to throw her to the ground. Instead, she pulled the sprite into an embrace.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.

Those words washed over Rohree like warm sunlight. She felt her body relax, her throat unclench. She surrendered the embrace, letting herself be hugged like a child.

“If it hadn’t been for damned Ollie…” she muttered.

Clua pulled back, looking at her. “What?”

“Ollie,” Rohree said. “It was he who caught me and turned me over to the prelate and his goons.”

Clua’s eyes went wide. “Ollie was… working with them?”

Rohree nodded gravely. Then, a realization struck her. “Is he with Essa now? She may be in danger.”

Clua shook her head. “No. When I left to search for you, he hadn’t been seen since the fall of Charcain. Still… we’d better get back and warn Essa.”

And they hurried on with renewed determination.

Had they followed the roads, the going would have been much easier.

But, as Clua told it, since the fall of Issastar, the noble knights and the Gray Brothers’ minions had set up checkpoints along most of the roads, and it was quite possible the witch could have gotten word to them to be on the lookout for a pair of half-sized outlaws.

So, they stuck to the woods. Occasionally, a meadow would open up before them, or an animal path or an ancient Elven road would align with their trajectory, and the going would be easier for a while.

But sooner or later, the trail would always devolve back into scrub once again, and the two would find themselves picking their way through the underbrush like a pair of wild animals.

But it was far better to struggle through the shadows than to run in the open and risk being seen.

Hours ground past like flour between a pair of millstones, and the day began to take on the purple hues of dusk.

They’d eaten only a few mouthfuls of the bread Clua had brought with her, and Rohree’s stomach had begun to ache almost as much as her legs.

But just when they were about to drop from exhaustion and hunger, they burst out of the woods and found themselves at the edge of a small village.

“Oh Gods,” Rohree panted, falling to her knees with relief. “Look, Clua!”

The dwarf was so exhausted, she could only nod.

The idea of a warm meal and a bed filled Rohree with such joy that tears nearly rose to her eyes. “They might have food. They might have an inn. Do you have money?” she asked.

“Yes,” Clua said. “But let’s be careful. There may be Gray Brothers about.”

And yet, as they skirted a pasture and found the main dirt road that led through the village, Rohree’s relief only grew.

The place looked as ordinary as a village could be.

The stone cottages were tidy, with well-thatched roofs.

The fields were tended. Goats and sheep bleated greetings from their pens.

She saw no people—not yet—but firelight flickered ahead, bright and welcoming.

“Surely they must have—” she started to say food , but the smell hit her before the sentence was finished, the scent of roasting meat, crackling fat, dripping grease.

Her mouth began to water, and she walked faster, stumbling ahead as if pulled by an invisible thread, heedless of Clua’s whispered warnings to be cautious.

Ahead, the dirt track opened up into a modest town square.

At its center, a bonfire burned, flames twisting and twining up toward the nascent stars.

This was where the scent seemed to be coming from, and Rohree hurried toward it even faster—moving with such abandon that she nearly tripped over the first body.

She stopped, staring down. A man lay across her path. And another. And another. And a woman beside them. And another woman beyond her. The whole square was filled with prostrate bodies, dozens upon dozens of them.

“Slaughtered,” Rohree whispered, her breath catching in her throat.

But Clua shook her head, pointing. “No. Look. They’re breathing.”

Sure enough, upon closer inspection, Rohree saw chests rising and falling. “What in the name of the Mother…?” she muttered.

Clua shook her head, slipping her mace free of its sling. “Stay close to me,” she said.

Together, they picked their way through the sleeping bodies, toward the bonfire. Here and there, they caught whiffs of vomit on the air, and twice Rohree had to step over multicolor splatters, redolent with wine.

“Did they all drink themselves stupid?” she wondered aloud, glancing around once more.

Clua had made it to the edge of the fire.

Now that they were close to it, Rohree could see that the fuel for the flames wasn’t just ordinary wood.

It was… something else. Clue reached out and lifted a half-burned slab of something.

It was large and smooth and slightly curved, and had veins of silver-painted wood, like a painter’s canvas made of leather. Or like a…

“Dragon wing,” Clue muttered. Then she stooped, poked her mace-head into the ashes, and brought it up again. Caught on one of the spikes was a tangle of honey-blonde hair.

“I saw you coming,” the voice made Rohree and Clua both start, and they turned to find a man kneeling some twenty feet away.

He was naked except for a sort of loincloth, and he seemed to be smeared in dark mud—which, Rohree supposed, was why they hadn’t seen him sooner.

He knelt at the edge of a large, round trough.

“I scried you,” he said, pointing at the dark, still water.

“Good evening, Grandfather,” Clua said, using the most polite greeting she could for an older man. “What’s happened here?”

The man’s gaze swept the expanse of bodies.

“Ah. Traveling into the void, they are. I would be too, but someone must scry-watch and man the fire, or so we’ve been taught.

But you are strangers and you come into my town asking me questions when by rights I should be asking questions of you . Tell me, who are ye?”

“We are the queen’s—” Rohree started to answer, but Clua stepped in front of her.

“We are but travelers, sir. And weary ones. Do you have a bit of food to spare? We have coin.”

The man’s eyes lingered on Rohree’s antlers, then on Clua’s fine coat of chain mail.

He pursed his lips and pointed to a building behind them.

“They’re cooking over there, at the boarding house.

Food for our brothers and sisters, once they awaken.

But come. A half-woman and a sprite hiking together through the woods.

That’s a fancy sight. There must be more to your story.

And tell me your names. And who you serve. ” He arched an eyebrow, inquisitive.

“We—” Rohree started to say, but Clua cut her off again.

“We are refugees, grandfather. I am a blacksmith’s apprentice, and my friend here served a noble family. We left Issastar after the city was destroyed. We are traveling to stay with some cousins of mine in Iyafelt,” Clua said.

“Hmm,” the man rubbed the scraggly beard on his chin. “You came from the wrong direction, then.”

Clua swallowed, adjusting her grip on her mace. “I guess we got turned around in the woods. We’ll just buy some food and be on our way.”

The man’s expression became stern.

“No. You will leave. And you will leave hungry, for the food being prepared is for the voyagers into the void,” the man declared, then his eyes drifted down again to gaze into the water.

Clua was tugging on Rohree’s arm, but the hunger burning in the sprite’s belly shifted to become anger. She tore away from Clua’s grasp, stormed forward, and splashed the dark water into the man’s face.

“Many things have changed in Maethalia these past months,” she said. “Have the laws of hospitality disappeared, too? Even a child knows the Mother’s teachings. Welcome the wanderer. Feed the stranger.”

“Rohree,” Clua warned through gritted teeth.

“Now give us at least a chunk of bread! In the name of the queen.”

At this, the man looked up again from the water.

“In the name of the queen?” he repeated flatly, then he pointed to the fire. “We burned her.”

Rohree followed the man’s gesture. Suddenly, the burned dragon wing and the shock of half-burned hair made sense. They’d burned someone in effigy. They’d burned the queen. And not Synaeda, either. Essa.

“But… why?” she asked, bewildered.

“The queen cares nothing for the likes of us,” a voice said, and she turned to find one of the sleeping women had woken and sat up. Others were stirring, too.

“The queen is the whore of the nobility, nothing more.” The mud-covered man said. “She and her Skrathan care more for dragons than for her own people.”

“They take our boys off to fight in their war and die on Dorhane,” one of the awakening villagers said.

“They tax our crops to feed their lavish court,” someone else put in.

“No, we serve no queen. We are peasants. We are nothing. We are of the void, and we serve the void,” the scrying old man said.

“We serve the void,” several voices echoed in unison. More villagers were waking and getting to their feet, one by one.

“Our mistake,” Clua said, tugging on Rohree’s arm. “We’ll be leaving.”

But Rohree simply couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Nor would she stand there and listen to her beloved Essaphine be slandered without coming to her defense.

“Princess—I mean Queen Essaphine—cares more for you than that selfish, black-hearted Prelate Kortoi or the bloated, gold-hungry nobility ever will! She’s risked her life on dragon-back to keep you safe from the enemies across the sea.

When the nobility pushed for higher taxes, it was her mother—may her soul fly—who kept them at bay.

Her family took my parents in when they were nothing but poor refugees from Koratain with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

The Skrathan may be hard people. They’ve had to be.

But they’re kind. And good. You all have been deceived, that’s what’s happened.

The void has corrupted your minds. Essaphine is the strongest, bravest, most wonderful person I know! ”

The mud man’s eyebrows went up.

“You… know the queen?” he said, slowly rising to his feet.

Rohree glanced over to find Clua with a hand slapped over her face.

Because one-by-one, the villagers were rising from their slumber and moving toward them like a pack of drifting phantoms. And they didn’t look pleased.

Clua brought up her mace. “Rohree,” she said through bared teeth. “We’re leaving now.”

Just at that moment, the nearest villager lurched forward to grab them. Clua’s mace whisked through the air and hit the side of his head with a sickening crack. He dropped, and Clua and Rohree were running again.