The Forests of Dru Read online

  “Then we’ll have to be sure to do nothing to apologize for tomorrow.”

  “That would be good,” she said softly.

  “I thought everything would be okay,” he said, rubbing his cheek against the fur, “if we could just get to Dru. Back in the desert, even the oasis, I just felt so certain that, once here, we’d be all right, that everything would fall into place.”

  “There’s your rosy optimism coming into play,” she replied, though she didn’t sound scornful with it. “I love that about you, Lonen, I really do. But things don’t end as in the tales. There’s no happy ever after in real life. There’s just the ending of that time of trial, and then the people go on to face new trials. We maybe don’t usually hear that part of the story, so we forget it.”

  He lifted his head, resting his chin on her knees, looking up at her. “We can go back to the oasis. You at least weren’t starving for magic there.”

  “You said it wasn’t sustainable—no game coming in, no fruits on the trees, or other food to gather.”

  “We’ll take food with us. Chuffta and I can go hunt in the desert.”

  “And we’ll do what? Just hang out and do nothing all day?”

  “And have sex. Lots and lots of sex,” he reminded her, massaging her back through the robes. “We can touch there.”

  A light, pretty flush graced her cheekbones. “Besides that. We married for duty, to serve our peoples, not to run off and indulge ourselves in sex.”

  “The latter is sounding better to me all the time.”

  “Be serious, Lonen—we have responsibilities. You said it yourself.”

  He regretted that, too. It had seemed so urgent to get them back to Dru, to save the Destrye. “That was before I knew Nolan had survived. He can be king instead. I never wanted it. He does.”

  “Nolan can’t fight Yar or the Trom,” Oria said gently, her expression oddly compassionate as she brushed a curl back from his forehead. His hair tie was around there somewhere. “You know that as well as I do. No matter what your brothers think, we both know this war isn’t over.”

  “I can’t fight them without you.” The ache grabbed his throat. “Without you I won’t even want to.”

  “Don’t say that,” she whispered. “You’re not a man who stops fighting, not for any reason. Look how far we’ve made it. That’s all because of you and your determination to get us here to Dru.”

  True. And part of that had determination had also been to save Oria. Maybe that had been rosy optimism, but he’d believed Arill’s healers could help her, that she could find magic here. That they’d triumph. Somewhere, deep in his heart, he still believed that.

  “You’re going to get better,” he told her.

  She looked amused. “Is that an order, Your Highness?”

  “It is, Your Highness.”

  “I take it you two have made up?” Baeltya said from the doorway. She had the grace to look slightly abashed at Lonen’s glare. Healers claimed a certain autonomy that let them skirt even the more relaxed protocols of the Destrye nobility, but cheekiness went a bit far. “That is, the food is on its way, Your Highness, Oria.”

  “Your Highnesses,” Lonen corrected.

  Baeltya edged into the room. “Not under Destrye law, King Lonen.”

  “A formality only.”

  “A critical one,” Baeltya pointed out. “And not my purview. Oria’s health is, so let’s discuss the energetic aspect of her condition.”

  He deferred to Oria on that one, who was naturally discussing it with her Familiar. She got a certain look in her eye when she did, an unfocused distraction that gave her away. Not that he’d reveal how he could tell, as it gave him a rare window into the thoughts of his sorceress wife.

  Her focus returned to him. “Baeltya says I can trust her with my secrets.”

  It was a question for him. He stood, pulling on his shirt while he thought. Arill’s healers did take a vow of confidentiality, but there were also plenty of stories throughout history of healers helping various political factions with the potent information they extracted. Without studying Baeltya outright, he considered her and checked his gut feeling about the junior healer. He’d picked her to attend him because she wasn’t Talya—not necessarily a strong recommendation—and because her calm and steady reserve reminded him of Juli, who’d been good for Oria—which might be as good a recommendation as any.

  “Oria has explained her skin sensitivity to me, and that it’s part of her absorbing magic from the world,” Baeltya said evenly, catching his eye. “I can guess that if she is starving energetically, that’s because she’s not able to absorb what she needs here in Dru, because we have no magic here.”

  “That’s true,” Oria said, not flinching when he narrowed his eyes at her in warning. “If it’s a choice between trusting her and maybe living or not trusting anyone and dying, I’m going to take the risk.” Her eyes held the knowledge of the same feelings he’d confessed to her. She wouldn’t necessarily act to save herself, but she’d gallop headlong into every battle in order to save him.

  He folded his arms and leaned against the mantel. “Go on, then. It’s up to you to decide what to tell.”

  She nodded at him, her expression soft as a kiss, then spoke to Baeltya. “You do have magic here. It’s everywhere, arising from all living things, pushed and pulled by the moons as they wax and wane. But here it’s what we call wild magic. It’s… chaotic. Very strong but also in a form I can’t digest, to compare it to food.”

  “Like deer can eat bark but we can’t, because our guts aren’t set up for it,” Baeltya supplied, thoroughly intrigued, judging by the light in her dark eyes.

  “That makes sense. Only imagine the tree falling on you because you can’t eat it. In Bára, we had a source of purified magic, called sgath, that we could all draw on.”

  “How did it get purified?”

  Oria glanced at Chuffta, silent a moment. Then shook her head slightly “We don’t know.”

  “We?” Baeltya pounced on that. “You can communicate with it.”

  “You Destrye and your ‘its,’” Oria laughed, holding out an arm to her Familiar. He hopped up, craning his neck with interest at the healer. “His name is Chuffta. He’s a derkesthai and, yes, I can talk to him mind-to-mind. He’s slightly smarter than your hunting hounds. Ow!” She pulled her hair from Chuffta’s mouth where he yanked on it. “Okay, much smarter. You can touch him, if you like.”

  Baeltya’s face went reverent as she ran a finger down Chuffa’s arched neck, and Lonen remembered that feeling well. He’d expected the scales to be hard and slick, not soft as talc. “As smart as we are?” she asked.

  “Different,” Oria hedged. “Don’t you bite me. You know it’s true. He is similarly intelligent, though he sees the world differently. His kind tell stories to transmit history, rather than recording them in books.”

  “Oral histories.” Baeltya’s shrewd gaze flicked to Lonen. “Once the Destrye were the same. Barbarians telling tales around the campfires.”

  “We’ve progressed in any number of ways since then,” Lonen pointed out.

  “And not in others,” Baeltya retorted.

  “A work in progress,” he agreed without rancor. Oria looked back and forth between them, filing the information away in her own keen memory.

  “So,” Baeltya returned to business, still stroking Chuffta, who tipped back his chin for a scratching there from the healer’s adept fingers. “You said, ‘we don’t know,’ meaning you and Chuffta. He advises you?”

  “Yes, he’s my Familiar. He helps me manage chaotic magical input, gives me advice, and is my oldest friend. Neither of us knows how the sgath came to be below Bára, except that the part of the duties of any priestess is to take sgath she absorbs and feed it into the common pool.”

  Baeltya frowned. “That’s circular. You pull it from this source and also put it back?”

  Oria looked thoughtful. “I never thought of it in those terms. Some things you just
grow up thinking you know, and then when you step back and evaluate them through other eyes, they don’t make sense.”

  “I think that’s part of becoming an adult,” Baeltya replied, glancing at Lonen again with wry amusement, then away, as if remembering herself.

  “Maybe one day I’ll find out,” he commented and Oria rolled her eyes.

  “So, maybe you can purify the wild magic, create your own reservoir here,” Baeltya prompted. “If you knew how to input to the one in Bára, you should have the instinct and ability.”

  Oria blanched at the mention of accessing the wild magic, a glimmer of fear she so rarely evinced. “I think… that is not an option,” she said softly.

  “Maybe you can find a way to both cushion the effect on yourself and then purify and store it. It seems someone in your ancestry must have done that in the first place.”

  “Oh yes? You sound very confident of that. Is that how your Arill-delivered healing happened? A priestess woke up one day and said, ‘hey, I think I’ll meditate a whole bunch and see if Arill will give me some of her divine power!’” Oria’s eyes flashed with emotion as she said it, so Lonen didn’t laugh, knowing that her fear spoke.

  Baeltya regarded her steadily. “Actually the legend is pretty close to that. I’ll tell it to you some day.”

  If he’d expected her to apologize to the healer again, she didn’t. Instead she firmed her chin. “I’d be interested to hear that. It would be helpful if I had a similar legend to work off of. Everything I’ve been told is that wild magic means death—fast or slow—but death.”

  “Overload on one hand, or starvation because you shut it out?”

  Oria inclined her head in acknowledgment, a rueful twist to her mouth—that became a smile for her Familiar. “Chuffta says the problem with humans is that we’re too black and white, that it’s not always one thing or another.”

  “So, is there another option?”

  “There’s one.” Oria’s coppery eyes, dark now with consideration, looked to his. “Though that solution has a number of moving parts also.”

  “We’ll discuss that,” he told her, certain she contemplated some plan of enticing golems through the recently discovered tunnels so she could steal the packets of sgath they carried. Perhaps the danger of that truly would be less than her wrestling the wild magic, but he knew fighting golems from personal experience. His side throbbed with the memory and the scar over his eye twitched. He wanted Oria far from the lethal creatures. “A possible back up plan, but even you have to admit it’s far from a long-term solution.”

  “Then it’s back to you purifying wild magic into a sgath source like you had in Bára,” Baeltya pointed out in all practicality.

  “It is some sort of cycle,” Oria mused. “We’ve been wondering if the source in Bára has something to do with that underground lake.”

  “That Prince Nolan nearly drowned in?” Baeltya raised her brows. “That would be interesting. Though we have no underground lake here that I know of.”

  “We have other lakes.” And he would take Oria to one. He should have thought of it sooner.

  “Lake Scandamalion is a day’s journey from here,” Baeltya pointed out. “It’s the closest with any water left in it.”

  “And that’s not the one I have in mind.” No, he’d take her to Lake Chenault, his favorite. If they only had a little time left—don’t think of it—well, he wanted her to at least see it.

  “Surely you’re not thinking of going to—”

  “Where I go is my business, healer. I’ll remind you of your vows.”

  “Your Highness,” Baeltya gave Chuffta one last caress and held up her palms in surrender. “Is that wise?” Her question held a volume of unspoken information.

  “It’s not,” Oria put in crisply. “You cannot leave the palace now. Not with all that’s going on.”

  “I am king,” he told his wife, ignoring the healer. “I decide what I can and cannot do.”

  “Don’t pull out your ‘hear my manly roar’ bluster with me.” Oria glared at him. “You might be a barbarian, but you don’t frighten me.”

  “Maybe I haven’t tried hard enough,” he replied in a tone as silken as the robes she once wore.

  Baeltya looked between them and, apparently deciding they were done, scrubbed her palms together. “I’m going to check on that meal. I think I heard the servants.”

  “Besides,” Oria continued, “you have no idea if your plan would work either. Neither you nor I know where to begin.”

  “I actually do have an idea on that.” One he’d been nursing for some time. If his memory served him correctly, he might have something of a place to start. “For tonight, though, you eat the food Baeltya has arranged. We’ll sleep. Tomorrow, after another round of treatments, I will introduce you to my brothers, show you to the people, and settle matters there. The day after, if the healer approves, and if we’ve thought of nothing else, we’ll set out on our journey.”

  “I agree that we’ll talk about possibilities more then.”

  “There’s but one viable possibility, if you’re not too stubborn to see it.”

  “I don’t know about this, Lonen.”

  “Trust me.” He’d meant it to be firm, but an edge of a plea filtered in.

  “I do.” She trailed long fingers down Chuffta’s back. “I promise that I do.”

  As much as she trusted in anything anymore.

  ~ 5 ~

  The food did help. The fruit juice, in particular, sank like a balm to some dried-out core of her, saturating her desiccated soul. Though the root vegetables were somewhat wizened, they still tasted nourishing, particularly with the salted cream that Lonen dolloped on the starchier ones for her. She hesitated to eat too much, thinking of how lean the Destrye stores must be, but Lonen gave her such a threatening scowl that she didn’t voice it. With her belly finally full in a satisfying way instead of a gut-cramping one, she grew sleepy.

  Lonen was groggy, too, from the healing nap, so they crawled under the furs together, the room lit only by the fire, and fell asleep. With Lonen’s arm draped over her hips over the thick, quilted nightgown she wore, she slept deeply.

  For a while.

  Until the wild magic invaded her dreams, that was.

  At first she thought she lived her life as she always had—which should have clued her in, because her life had become anything but normal. All of that was shattered and gone.

  But the dream worked on her so she forgot all that, walking among the flowers and hanging vines of her rooftop terrace, atop her tower in Bára. The blue desert sky arced above, cloudless and hot. All around, the towers of Bára rose in fanciful spires, capped and scrolled in the colors of the sun.

  Chuffta preened on the carved balustrade, a shimmering white so bright she squinted against his brilliance. He looked at her, the green of his eyes almost painful.

  “Don’t forget what I am, Oria. Or what you are.”

  She paused, trying to remember how to reply mentally, but her brain felt mute, stuffed with silk.

  As she struggled to move, to think, trapped and mesmerized, the reptilian black slits of the small dragon’s pupils widened, expanding so his eyes became matte pits that consumed his narrow head. His skull and body swiftly caught up. Then his eyes grew. Then the body and wings again, leapfrogging each other. He swelled until he filled the terrace, and beyond, overlapping the balustrade, squeezing her out, until she hung perilously over the precipice, pinned between the abyss of the city and his black eyes, now larger than herself.

  “Don’t forget,” his mind-voice grated over her brain, burning into it, setting her on fire with its leaf-dry, knife-edged hiss. “You’ve taken not one, but several steps farther down your path.”

  “No.” Her mouth muffled it, refusing to work, just like her mind. “No!” she tried again, pushing out the shout that was only a mutter.

  “We come when summoned. Don’t forget.”

  “Never!” She arched away, the dizzying dro
p threatening to devour her. “I won’t.”

  “You will. Queen Ponen. Don’t forget.”

  “Let me go!” She screamed it, wrenching away, and fell. She plummeted from the tower, stretching her arms to become wings, wild magic swirling in, exploding her body, transforming her into a dragon so black she became a hole in the sky.

  She burned with the power. Arching her neck, she trumpeted it to the sky. Fire, thick and turbulent, welled up like vomit, billowing from her lips. She screamed her triumph after it, the coal of terror sending agony through her heart.

  Burn!

  “Oria!” A stinging slap to her cheek brought with it a searing impression of Lonen—and a font of his emotions slamming through her. Anger. Despair. Terror. Love. Desperation. The tumult shook her, but also made sense, human sense, in a way the wild magic didn’t. “Arill, take you, Oria, wake up!”

  “I’m awake!” she gasped. Then gasped again, dragging at the air. She couldn’t breathe.

  “Lonen is sitting on you.” Chuffta’s mind-voice—his real mind-voice—fluted through her head, real and reassuring, too.

  Lonen leaned close to her face, looming over her, a shaggy, wild silhouette against the dimming fire. He had her pinned by the wrists, thighs clamped on either side of her hips, his weight crushing. “Breathe!” he demanded.

  “Get. Off. Me.” She managed while struggling to draw breath.

  In a flash, he was off her. Off the bed. Now a standing, naked silhouette between her and the blazing torches of the Destrye guards who’d pounded down the door and poured into the bedchamber, Alby in the lead.

  “Your Highness!” Alby skidded to a halt. “What—”

  “Stand down,” Lonen said, voice gravelly, but firm. “There is no danger. Go.”

  “But Your Highness—”

  “Go!” he thundered. The boom of his rage echoed through his voice, making her flinch. She sat up and Alby’s eyes fell on her, wide and startled. Then he and the men saluted and fled, Lonen following after, practically chasing them out.