The Arrows of the Heart Page 5

  I shook my head, a bit bemused by the vehemence of his outburst. A good listener listens, which means getting the other person to talk. “So Final Form is a myth?”

  “It comes back to n’Andana. The short version is that the Tala come from the n’Andanans, who were shapeshifters, but also practiced far more powerful magics than we—their pitifully attenuated and inbred descendants—are capable of. The goal of the most proficient and talented shapeshifters was, so some Tala believe, to take Final Form. Which is a dragon. Immortal, impervious to damage or disease, still able to retain human intelligence and the ability to wield magic. But final is final, right? You can’t come back from it. And dragons basically are magic, so when magic disappeared from the world, pffftttt.”

  The sound he made became nearly rude in his scorn and disgust, all but spitting it out. He had gotten that wild look in his eye and I half expected him to shift into some restless creature as he paced, waving his hands.

  “So,” I said carefully, testing the waters, though he seemed to have wound down, “when Zynda returns, it will be as a dragon, and she’ll never be human again?”

  “If she comes back,” he bit out. “She has to ask that cursed dragon Kiraka on Nahanau to teach her. The first time Zynda asked her, Kiraka burned her to death! How can she survive that a second time?” he demanded, stopping in front of me, as if I’d know the answer.

  Maybe it was my misapprehension of the language, but… “How did she survive the first time?” I asked tentatively.

  Zyr rolled his eyes in elaborate disgust, though not for my ignorance, I thought. “Because she’s so super talented she managed to shapeshift into her First Form—a hummingbird—and that mossback Marskal nursed her back to life. And then he capitalized on her gratitude, persuading her to be his lover.”

  That explained so many of the various dropped comments I’d overheard. I wanted to ask what he meant by First Form, but didn’t want to divert him from the story. “So, she didn’t die after all,” I clarified.

  “Oh no, Karyn. You don’t know my sister. She says she absolutely died, went to the afterworld, had a cozy chat with Moranu, and the goddess Herself sent her back. My sister Zynda, the reincarnated saint, now running off to do it all over again.”

  He was fuming. Furious, but also already grieving her loss. It hurts my heart. Such a simple thing to say, and yet so potent. “Why is this so important to her?” I asked, for surely Zynda had good reasons. She had never struck me as foolish. Or as a martyr.

  “Eh,” Zyr snorted. “Babies. All you women ever think about is babies.”

  “I wouldn’t say all,” I retorted dryly, a bit stung because of how many of my own choices had been driven by the desire to have children of my own. “But you have to admit our bodies are geared to want to conceive—just as men’s bodies are driven to scatter their seed widely.”

  He stopped, hands on hips, staring at me in mock astonishment. “An insult. Really? And one not appropriate for mixed company.”

  “I apologize,” I replied instantly, “I don’t know what—oh.” He’d broken into a wide grin. “Ha ha. Very funny.”

  “I thought so.”

  “What do dragons have to do with babies?” I asked, with considerable patience, I thought, resisting the urge to glance at the beach.

  “It’s a long tale, and one we don’t have time for if you’re to go meet with your dear hawkish mossbacks. I’ll tell you over dinner.”

  “Zyr,” I started, as repressively as I could, but he held up his hands in sunny innocence.

  “As friends! Friends have dinner.” He leaned in. “But be careful of using that stern tone with me—it makes me want to do irreverent things to you.”

  Flustered, I stepped back, not at all sure how to chastise him without sounding stern. He watched me flounder with wicked glee, then glanced significantly at the beach. “Ready to go?”

  “I should maybe just walk.” Being late would be better than plummeting to my death.

  His face fell in what looked to be genuine disappointment. “But you promised.”

  Had I? I hadn’t sworn, but… “Why does it matter so much to you?”

  He considered me, choosing his words, I thought. “You’re the first mossback I’ve shown that form to, did you know that?”

  “No,” I answered, somewhat taken aback. How would I have known that?

  He shrugged a little, a small one that didn’t bump his hands off his hips. “It’s special. My best, most powerful form. I wanted to share it with you. I want to show you what it’s like to fly.” Despite his insouciant pose, he watched me closely, something hopeful and vulnerable in his spectacular eyes.

  My mouth had gone dry. Not from fear of flying, but from some acute emotion I couldn’t identify. “Why, Zyr?” I asked, before I realized I was only repeating myself.

  “I don’t know.” He broke into a cheerful grin. “One of those things I’m accepting that I don’t know and thus need to learn. How about you?”

  The challenge in his taunt couldn’t have been clearer. All right, fine. I could do this. I nodded, and his grin widened. “But if you let me fall and don’t catch me, I’ll get your Moranu to send me back from the dead, too, so I can haunt you the rest of your life.”

  “Fair enough,” he agreed. “Though Moranu is yours, too.”

  I shook my head. “She is only a minor deity in the Dasnarian Empire.”

  “I’d say She’d be disappointed that you think so, but Moranu is happy to keep to the shadows and dark of night.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. What good was a goddess who kept to the shadows?

  “Ready?” Zyr repeated, arching his brows, eyes bright with excitement. He seemed to have entirely forgotten his distress over Zynda’s fate. Or…did he just want to appear that way? In the past couple of hours I’d glimpsed far more of a serious aspect to his nature than I had in all of our previous encounters.

  “Ready,” I replied, fervently hoping it was the truth.

  At least I’d braced for it, so the manifestation of the creature several times Zyr’s size didn’t startle me quite so much. I had no idea how he could make something so much bigger out of his slim body. But then he’d said Zynda’s First Form was a hummingbird—and Sey had become a crow much smaller than her human form. What happened to their actual bodies? Magic made no sense at all.

  Zyr ruffled his feathers, spreading his wings as if displaying them for me, turning to preen one with that lethally edged hooked beak, and I did have to admire his spectacular, otherworldly beauty. He’d made a couple of references to what his mind was—and wasn’t—like in animal form. So in some ways, despite his argument that it was still him, the gríobhth must embody a slightly different nature. Like a person who behaved one way in public and another way in the privacy of home.

  He lifted his head, cocking it at me, and in those large raptor’s eyes I caught a hint of Zyr’s impudent challenge. Angling a wing and crouching, he turned pointedly, inviting—or commanding—me to mount.

  Taking my heart in hand and closing it tight away, I bellied onto his back, taking a moment to get a feel for the balance, then swung a leg over and sat up. Much like mounting a horse bareback—which I’d thankfully done enough times to be practiced at it. Plus, the layered petticoats and skirts of my simple gown had enough give to allow me to sit astride easily, without fuss and adjustment as I would’ve had to do with the klúts I’d always worn back home. I missed my klúts, but I’d escaped with only the one on my back—and that one a formal, embroidered court garment I’d folded away. A memento of my visit to the Imperial Palace, and of who I’d been then. And would never be again.

  Jepp had loaned me fighting leathers on the Hákyrling, but I could never become accustomed to dressing like a man. It always felt obscene to me. And the barely there clothing the Tala liked were far too immodest. So I’d adopted some of the simpler gowns the women of the other twelve kingdoms wore, with a few more layers beneath until I felt sufficiently co
vered. I sometimes got overwarm in the tropical humidity of Annfwn, but mostly it worked.

  Especially for activities like riding, though this was like no riding I’d ever done before. Zyr’s feline body had an entirely different feel. His shoulders sat more square and less bony than a horse’s, and the massive musculature that supported the vast wings made his front body large, the attachment points flexing under my knees. Tentatively, I sank my hands into the rippling blue-black mane, a curious mix of silky fur, soft down, and the stiff vanes of the sleek feathers.

  He adjusted his feet, furling and unfurling his wings, as if getting a feel for me, too. And it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked if he’d carried anyone this way before. But before I could, he sprang, leaping over the low wall, and plummeting to the drop below.

  ~ 5 ~

  My scream fell out of me, as if left behind on the ledge above. Along with my heart and stomach. We were falling, falling, falling. My eyes squinched closed, my hands fisted the mane, I screamed in a long, unstoppable wail of sheer terror, expecting the imminent thud of death.

  The great wings pumped. Muscles flexed under my squeezing thighs. Then again, almost lazily.

  I cracked one eye open and saw ocean spread below us, so clear that I could look through it and see the white sand beneath, then the reefs of coral and the darker abysses between. Beautiful—so different than how it looked from a boat—and so far below. Dizzy, I swayed, and Zyr compensated, tilting one way, then another.

  Then he zoomed straight for the beach, dropping in a diagonal. My breakfast rose from a gut roiling with terror, and I swallowed it back, though saliva filled my mouth in dire warning. Zyr landed in a plume of sand and I flung myself off his back, on my hands and knees, puking, no longer caring that I humiliated myself.

  Human hands held my shoulders, drawing my braid back, and I became aware that Zyr crooned some sort of song. Soft and liquid, the words made no sense, but they spoke to something deep in me, the childish part that woke in the night, afraid and full of dread.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand—not easy because I was shaking so hard. I sat back on my heels and drew a deep breath.

  “Karyn, I’m so sorry!” Zyr sounded genuinely stricken.

  “No, it’s fine.” I couldn’t look at him. I shoved sand over my sick and pushed to my feet, both embarrassed and grateful that Zyr steadied me when I staggered. Escaping his entangling hands, I scuffed through the thick sand to the water, bent to cup some of the salty sweet stuff into my mouth, so I could rinse and spit. The gentle surf lapped around my bare feet, wetting my hem, but I’d grown accustomed to that. The Tala seemed to spend as much time in the water as out of it, and no one looked sideways at anyone for being disheveled.

  When I turned to find Zyr watching me, worry on his face, I noted that he’d gone back to his cleaned-up look: hair sleek and neatly tied back, clothes pristine. It irritated me, foolishly perhaps, to be so utterly discomposed compared to him.

  “Why do you always look exactly like that when you shapeshift back to human form?” I demanded, sounding angrier than I thought I’d felt.

  He blinked, reconsidering what he’d been about to say, surprised by my question. “Habit,” he replied. “We drill in it, so we have a form and appearance—clothed, just in case—that we can return to without thought.”

  That made sense, I supposed, but it also made me uncomfortable. Shapeshifting. Flying. All of that was just unnatural. Certainly for me. Imagining otherwise had been a grave mistake. Friends. Zyr and I had nothing in common.

  I looked up the beach to where the Hawks had assembled, then to the cliff where my rooms sat halfway up. I still didn’t have my bow, or even my daggers. If only I’d stuck to my resolve and not let Zyr distract me. That would be the challenge for me. Bereft of the clear laws of behavior I’d grown up with, I’d behaved like an undisciplined child. Better to recognize the error of my ways and correct them. Starting now.

  “I really thought you’d like flying,” Zyr said, sounding contrite and humble. “Maybe if you…”

  He trailed off as I started walking. The morning’s drills would have to be without my weapons. Perhaps I could borrow some.

  “When I teach the kids shapeshifting, and they mess up a form, I encourage them to try again,” Zyr said hopefully, catching up. “That way fear doesn’t set in. I can still take you up—”

  “No.” I said it with all the certainty Zynda could have wished for.

  “I think if you—”

  “Zyr, please.” The shaking had stopped and my stomach had settled, but my heart still pounded and the whole incident had left me inexpressibly weary. I turned to face him, and his expression went from boyishly hopeful to wary at whatever he saw in mine. “Leave me alone. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  He didn’t say anything. Did I imagine hurt in his eyes? I turned my back on it, on him. Resumed walking.

  Then a bird shot past me into the sky, and Zyr was gone.

  Good. Maybe now I could think straight.

  As I headed up the beach, I passed some of the other Tala shapeshifters I’d worked with the day before, exchanging polite greetings with them—and wondering why they weren’t with the Hawks.

  Indeed, the group was all Hawks, with no shapeshifters present. One of the older male Hawks, a man named Tays, with a silver beard and a hard face, was addressing the others as I walked up. He frowned at me as I joined the group, and I cringed a little at the implicit censure. The walk hadn’t taken long, but the combination of shuddering weakness and my water-weighted skirts had made me work up a sweat. I was no doubt red-faced and shiny on top of my general dishevelment. How easy to simply pop into animal form and come back all clean and fancy.

  “You’re late, Karyn,” Tays informed me. “You’ve missed half the briefing.”

  “I apologize, sir,” I told him, feeling my face grow even hotter, ducking it in submission, but locking my knees so as not to shame myself by falling to them again. Curse Zyr for all his bad influence.

  “Address me as Lieutenant Tays, now,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant Tays.” The other Hawks shifted around me. The worn boots of one of the female Hawks—Wren, I thought—edged into my field of vision.

  “As I was saying,” Tays drawled, “before Lady Hardie decided to grace us with her assistance in the urgent business of creating a defense of the Thirteen Kingdoms, Lieutenant Marskal departed this morning and left me in command.”

  “Glorianna preserve us,” Wren muttered beside me.

  “You have something to say, Karyn?” Tays demanded.

  “No, sir, Lieutenant Tays,” I hastily assured him, having no intention of correcting him on his error.

  “Eyes up on me.” He waited until I complied, and I found his expression stern, even mean. “You all know we face a dire threat. Deyrr and their creatures could launch an attack on Annfwn without warning.” He paused significantly, and I kept my face composed, though his mispronunciation of the Dasnarian word put my teeth on edge. “Lieutenant Marskal authorized me to share some details that have been only rumor for most of you thus far.”

  “Five gets you ten that he didn’t know until Marskal told him either,” Wren said from the side of her mouth. Fortunately Tays was still talking and didn’t hear this time.

  “There have been incidents of animal attacks that seem to be reanimated by Deyrr magic much as happened to many of our unfortunate comrades at Ordnung, wrought by the evil Dasnarian sorceress.” Tays frowned at me, as if I’d been personally responsible, even though I hadn’t even been there. The Hawks cursed or made signs to their goddesses, murmuring to each other. They sometimes told tales of those dark days, and it seemed all had lost at least one friend or relative. It surprised me that I’d known this much, from Thalia, but also from being on the Hákyrling with Jepp and Kral.

  Tays scanned the group, nodding. “The current theory is that these creatures are a sort of sleeper spy planted by the practitioner
s of Deyrr to undermine our defenses.”

  “Why isn’t the magic barrier keeping them out?” one of the Hawks asked.

  “Apparently it’s not all that the Tala made it out to be,” Tays bit out, sounding personally aggrieved. “Regardless, we can’t trust in that. We have to be braced for attack, which it’s believed will most likely come from the sea. Right here.” He swept a hand at the peaceful and pristine beach. “Her Majesty High Queen Ursula will be sending reinforcements, but until then, it’s up to the Hawks to stop any attack.”

  “And the Tala,” one of the Hawks pointed out.

  “And the Vervaldr,” another chimed in. “Harlan left a crew of his mercenaries behind.”

  “They are not us,” Tays emphasized. “They are not Hawks! They don’t have our discipline and training.”

  “I thought Lieutenant Marskal wanted us to continue drilling with the shapeshifters like we did yesterday.” Wren nudged me with an elbow. “Right? You came up with that fun game of tagging the shapeshifters with dye from your arrows and—”

  “We are not here to have fun,” Tays cut Wren off. “The Hawks operate best as an independent group. We know each other and those skills pay off in the crisis of combat. On my watch, we drill alone.”

  “Lieutenant Marskal said we have to change our old ways, that—”

  “This is not a democracy. I know you’ve become accustomed to Lieutenant Marskal’s lax mode of leadership, but I’m the one he promoted, knowing full well what I’d bring to the table. We are at war, soldiers.” Tays glared at Wren. And me, though I’d said nothing. “Time to start behaving like it. Are we Hawks?”

  The warriors all snapped to attention at that, clapping their fists over their hearts in their Hawks salute. Imitating them, I did the same, only to find Tays’ outraged scrutiny on me.