Young Writers Society

The weather in Larisen was cold and rainy, as Fyn discovered when he lurched back into existence and was immediately soaked. He spluttered, covering his head with his arms and trying to blink the water from his eyes. All he could see was thick sheets of gray, and the indistinct shape of Cassia beside him.

“Get under me!” Cassia shouted, spreading her wings so they overshadowed Fyn on one side and Sasha on the other. Her wings were nearly ten feet long and five feet high at their widest, and they should have been excellent shelter, but then the torrential gusts of wind nearly knocked Cassia off her feet and blew rain right underneath her wings, leaving Fyn nearly as wet as he would have been otherwise.

“This way!” Sasha’s voice only just pierced the gale. She led them staggering to a nearby building, which rose out of the rain like a wraith.

As they got closer, Fyn only saw the outside of the building in glimpses. It was large and wooden, with a tall roofed porch. Once they had climbed onto the porch and Cassia had quickly layered her human illusion over herself and Fyn, Sasha ushered them both into the building.

Once inside, Fyn recognized it immediately as an inn, but a stranger inn than any he had ever seen. The only light was a pale glow that seemed to come from a sort of luminescent moss that covered the walls, the ceiling, and much of the floor, leaving the room lit in all directions with a half-light. The bar and the tables weren’t covered in moss, but they were made of some deep, rich wood and intricately carved. A fiddler and a flautist were crooning a wistful song in the corner.

To Fyn’s surprise, the main room was full of people, mostly hamadryads. They were all wearing soft cotton robes with simple dyes, and their skin was a mottled mixture of browns and greens so that they blended oddly with the walls and floor. Most of them had long green hairstrands, but others had branching, deer-like antlers instead. They were all talking in a way that would have seemed normal, were it not for their rather quiet voices and the strange rustling sounds they made that dotted their speech.

There were several humans as well, sitting apart but talking as easily as the godformed. They were speaking in a different language than the hamadryads, but they too inserted rustling sounds fluidly into their speech.

Weird, Fyn thought fervently. At least no one seemed to be paying much attention to their group, even though he looked completely ridiculous. Cassia had disguised him as a heavyset human man with such thick straw-colored hair that didn’t have to look in a mirror to know he looked like his head had been thatched.

“Sasha, why are we here?” Cassia whispered to the Courier.

“Because I had a focus to get us here,” Sasha reminded them, opening her palm and showing a finely carved figurine made of a wood similar to the tables and chairs. “I don’t have one to get to Aisen, but I know people here. We just have to wait out this freak storm. Oh, and that reminds me.”

She held out her hand. “Half the deal, half the payment.”

While Cassia was getting out the money, Fyn noticed the hamadryad behind the bar watching him. She wasn’t even being subtle about it. Was she expecting Fyn to talk to her?

Fyn walked up to the counter and leaned against it. “Crazy weather, isn’t it?”

The hamadryad was wearing long robes of blue silk with many wooden bangles on her arms. She smiled unsettlingly. “Larisa giveth. At times more emphatically than others. Can I offer you something, stranger?”

Fyn decided to be direct, since being roundabout had worked so terribly in Timberglut. “Information,” Fyn said. “We’re new here, but just passing through. How long will the storm last? Surely your Archpriest has been tracking a storm this large.”

He knew hamadryads had some ability to predict the weather, and that power would be strongest in their Archpriest, who would have directed them to prepare for the storm.

To his surprise, the hamadryad’s eyes flickered away for a moment before returning to meet Fyn’s gaze. “That knowledge has not reached us here.”

“Oh.” He guessed that was possible. He wasn’t sure how close to the Larisen capital they were. He wasn’t even sure if Larisen had a capital. But something still seemed strange about her demeanor.

“Well, it can’t rain forever,” he said. “Can we stay here until the weather clears?”

“But of course,” the hamadryad said, her eerie smile firmly back in place. “This is an inn. We have space.”

Cassia and Sasha joined him to make arrangements for a room. Then they climbed the handholds built into the wall and found themselves on the second floor, which was still coated in moss, but not the luminescent kind. Their rooms had hammocks hanging from the ceiling and a wooden ‘lamp’ of the glowing moss that could be covered with a cloth. There was a shuttered window, but it was rattling in the wind and Fyn had no intention of opening it to the thundering storm outside.

He half-expected the hammock to break under his weight and was pleasantly surprised when it didn’t. Still, he wasn’t eager to stay in this bizarre place for long.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Cassia said, falling back into her hammock and letting it swing. She ran her hand through the moss on the wall. “Did the lady say how long the storm will last?”

“She didn’t know,” Fyn said absently, wishing for some good solid stone over his head and under his feet. He felt like the whole inn would blow over if this wind kept up.

“Well, I’m going to go talk to people and get some food,” Cassia declared. “People seem friendlier here than in Selachen, that’s for sure.”

And she swung off her hammock and disappeared into the hallway, leaving Sasha and Fyn alone in the room. Fyn didn’t take his eyes off the door for several long seconds after Cassia’s last golden lock bounced out of sight. Her empty hammock swayed in the corner.

Fyn tore his gaze away. Being silly.

He laid back in his hammock and watched Sasha from under half-closed eyes. There was still something about her that was nagging at the back of his brain, like he’d forgotten something about her, but he couldn’t imagine what. She was a human — Fyn had hardly ever spoken to a human other than to give one orders, ever since he was very small. She was transporting them, Fyn and Cassia were paying her, and that was all there was to it.

Sasha seemed to realize he was watching her, because after throwing a dark glance in his direction, she picked up her pack and left the room too.

Fyn lay there, wrestling with himself. Then he got up and followed Sasha as quietly as he could.

At first he thought she had gone downstairs to join Cassia, but then he heard footsteps ascending the ladder to the third floor, then walking down the hallway above. He hurried to the ladder and climbed partway up, just high enough to peek above the floor.

At the opposite end of the hallway, there was a window seat with one of the few glass windows in the place. It was rattling in its frame, the wind and rain beating against it. Sasha perched on the window seat, her legs drawn up under her. She put her hand against the glass, muttered a few words under her breath, and the glass stilled, as if bracing itself better against the wind.

Fyn frowned. Most mages were only really good at producing one or two types of magical effects. Fyn didn’t know much about how magic was grouped, but stilling a window seemed pretty different from teleportation, which meant she was powerful, and therefore dangerous.

At the same time, something about how she was crouching, how she had put her palm against the glass…

The glass stilled, Sasha leaned back against it, still crouching rather than sitting. She took a plain, ordinary river stone out of her pack and turned it over in her hand, smiling down at it in a way that made her whole face look softer.

She closed her eyes and gripped it tightly. The stone flashed with red light and when it faded, the rock was lined with colored stripes, as if the minerals had been sorted into layers.

And Fyn knew who Sasha was.

A strange joy leapt in the pit of his stomach, and he thrust himself up the ladder, scrambling onto the upper floor. “Sariah!” he called to Sasha. “Sariah, it’s me, Fyn. I remember you!”

Sasha – Sariah – went very still, not looking at Fyn. Fyn stopped in his tracks, confused, memories of furtive nights laughing and playing together spilling out before his eyes.

Sasha turned, and her eyes were dark and cold. She moved too fast for Fyn to follow, hand outstretched, and in a split second she had pinned Fyn against the wall by the throat with a strength that belied her slender hands. Fyn spluttered, trying to swipe at her with his unclawed hands, but she pinned one arm against the wall with her free hand and the other with her elbow.

She leaned in so close that Fyn could smell the mint bark on her breath.

“That girl is dead,” she spat. “And if you don’t want to go her way, you’ve never seen me before in your life. You’re my client, this is business. Do I need to repeat myself?”

“Sariah — Sasha —, I don’t understand,” Fyn said. “We got caught, but you were fine, and then you were gone —”

He cut off there as Sasha slammed an elbow into his windpipe, choking away his words. She let out a sharp bark of a laugh. “Well doesn’t that just show exactly how little you know, drake. That girl is dead. Don’t make me repeat myself again.”

She didn’t let up on his throat, and Fyn saw stars. He nodded, choking out an incoherent plea.

That apparently was good enough for Sasha. She jerked back, lifting her arm, and with a final dark glance at Fyn, disappeared down the ladder at the end of the hall.

Fyn staggered forward, massaging his windpipe, and stared after this older, harder version of the only being, drake or otherwise, he had ever once called friend.

------

The rain did not stop for six long days, and by the end even the hamadryads muttered and called the storm a bold sign of Larisa’s wrath. Tempers shortened and the innkeeper confined everyone to their rooms except for meals. The few times anyone dared open the door or crack open a shuttered window, they reported the water level risen another inch or more. For a day, the whole inn was certain the ground floor would flood, but then on the sixth day, the clouds broke and the rain eased to a drizzle.

That afternoon, Cassia sat in a corner table on the ground floor, enjoying the ray of sunlight beaming in through the newly open window and the fresh, clean-scented air filtering into the musty, stale air everyone had breathed for the last several days. She had out one of her last few pieces of parchment and a nonmagical quill.

She was planning. Or trying to plan. Or planning what to plan, more accurately. The only notes written on her page were vague piecings together of what she’d seen each time she scried on the Treatise since getting stuck here. From there, they needed to pin down an exact location, get to Aisen, get to wherever it was she was seeing, figure out how Iona was hiding the Treatise, and spirit it away without getting into a fight they were destined to lose.

It was a thirty-foot wingspan order, that much was certain.

Fyn’s appearance leaning over her table distracted Cassia from her grim calculations.

“Where’s Sasha?” he asked. Demanded, really. He hadn’t quite broken that habit.

“Out looking for the teleportation talisman. The water’s low enough now that if she can find the right person, we can go today. So you’d better help me plan.”

Fyn grunted, but he slid into a chair at the table, so Cassia took that as assent.

“Here,” Cassia said, pushing a rough sketch toward Fyn. “This is what I saw while scrying the first day we were here. Tall mound in the desert riddled with holes. And then after that, it’s all been tunnels. Sometimes Iona’s carrying it. I think she’s still doing experiments, but it doesn’t seem like they’re traveling like they were before. So I think they’re in the mound. We just have to find it.”

Fyn grunted again and glanced at the inn door, but he did glance at the paper and start reading some of her notes.

“I meant to ask,” Cassia said, following his gaze. “Did you and Sasha argue about something?”

“Huh? No,” Fyn said, crossing his arms.

“You’ve been avoiding her all week,” Cassia pointed out. “What did you say? I can’t get a word out of her if I try. I don’t know how you made her angry.”

“Nothing,” Fyn insisted. “She’s probably just afraid of me. She’s obviously a runaway. I should bring her in at the end of all this.”

Cassia found the reverse more likely, but decided not to press the issue. Fyn hadn’t taken their confinement well. He’d spent half his time pacing up and down the hall and the other half ignoring Cassia’s attempts to plan in their spare moments without Sasha.

Come to think of it, Cassia hadn’t dealt well with the delay either. Every day that passed was like another gong ringing in her head, chiming out the death knell of the Treatise and her father. Eleven days, ten days, nine days… and now if her self-kept calendar was right, only four days before the appointed time of the Renewal.

Likely the Treatise would last several days past the Renewal. But no one knew. So they had to assume it wouldn’t.

Fyn pushed her notes back across the table. “Look, I’m sure you’ll be able to find it. But we need to decide what happens when we get there.”

“I know,” Cassia agreed. We can’t fight them.”

Fyn flung himself forward across the table, twin licks of fire running down his arms and burning a mark into the wood. “Of course I can fight them!”

The shout turned several heads. Although Fyn looked like a human, he was now vaguely smoking.

“Keep it down,” Cassia hissed at him. “And what do you mean, you can fight them? You saw how well that went last time! You’ve said yourself you can’t fight mages.”

Fyn sat back heavily in his chair. “I have a plan.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” He hid his still-smoking forearms under the table and leaned in, his eager brown eyes meeting hers. “I just need your wings again.”

Cassia blinked at him. Out of all the plans she had considered, that had not been among them. It played out clearly in her mind’s eye: Fyn wearing her wings, swooping high above the desert and raining fire down on tiny human figures spilling out from the tunnels she had seen in her scrying. Like scrubbing away ants from a kitchen floor. All the violence of a drake spilled from the free sky.

She was silent too long.

“You think it’s stupid,” Fyn said. “You think I can’t do it.”

“No. The opposite, actually. I don’t want to kill anyone. Not if we don’t have to.”

Especially when from Iona’s perspective, the woman was just trying to destroy a system she probably had every reason to be furious with. Stationed as a mage at Mt. Onyx, transferred with her young family to the harsh conditions of Ashbourne, then sent to Promise nearly ten years later, this time forced to leave her family behind. It was inhumane.

Fyn shook his head. “You really don’t know how this works. She knocked me off a cliff. She’ll kill us if she gets the chance. Plus I can’t just let an enemy of Selach live. How am I supposed to explain she’s still loose when we get back?”

Cassia put her head in her hands. Couldn’t Fyn just forget Selach and all his Order’s stupid ideas about loyalty for one second? Couldn’t Cassia get through this without condoning violence, Mithrinde’s antithesis? She had already defied her Archpriest, stolen money from the treasury to fund the mission, and stood by while Fyn had hurt a child for information. Gods, she didn’t have the right to decide whether Iona lived or died.

She felt Fyn’s brown eyes boring into her.

“What if I still have your wings, but I’m a distraction? I draw her out and stay out of reach, and you sneak in and find the Treatise? After that… we’ll figure something out.”

Cassia looked up at Fyn. His hands rested palm-up on the table. On the surface, the dark brown skin of his illusion lightening to a pale cream creased with wrinkles, meeting in the center of his palm and running up to his fingertips. Underneath the illusion, Cassia saw the same pattern: red scales fading into tough, pinkish brown skin, lightest at the fingertips, the only difference the color and the curling talons. His eyes were soft and eager instead of stubborn.

She took the olive branch. “That’s… actually a great idea. No one’s ever seen a drake with wings before. You’ll be a huge distraction, and you’re safe in the sky as long as you stay high enough. And I won’t need my wings while I’m underground in the tunnels.”

She wouldn’t have Mithrinde’s magic, either, but she’d have her human magic. It would have to be enough.

Fyn beamed and ran a hand along his ruffle. He pushed back from the table so he was leaning on two legs of his chair. His illusion didn’t hide his crinkled nose or his grin of mismatched teeth. “It’s a plan.”

The latch on the inn banged into place. Wet from the waist down, Sasha held aloft an odd-looking, thorny dried plant. Ignoring the others in the inn watching her, Sasha strode right up to Fyn and Cassia’s table.

“I heard an Aisen tour is leaving in ten minutes,” she smirked.