On Wings of Fire: Chapter 12

The silence of teleportation exploded into light and noise. Fyn stumbled, knocked off-balance by the uneven ground and the wave of chatter that assaulted his ears. Savory and spicy scents mingled with the dusty scent of dry earth and made him splutter.

“Get out of the way!”

Fyn staggered as someone large and heavy shouldered into him, knocking him sideways onto the street. He snarled and turned back, but whoever it was was already lost in the crowd.

For whatever reason, the teleportation had dumped them into the middle of a bustling open-air market underneath a scorching sun. Fyn squinted against the garish, brightly-colored cloth stallspresenting a plethora of ridiculous-looking foods and resisted the urge to cover his ears..

“Who pushed me?” he demanded.

“Maybe get out of the way faster next time,” Sasha’s voice came. Fyn spun around and saw her leaning against one of the pillars of the wooden awning that stretched over fading marks of the teleportation circle. Cassia was standing next to her, shading her eyes with her hand and staring.

“Where are we?” Fyn folded his arms. They were supposed to be in the center of Aisen, but this didn’t look like any kind of city. It was just a bunch of tents and a couple of shacks, no buildings that he could see.

Sasha rolled her eyes. “Lhening. Like I told you. Capital of Aisen.”

Fyn blinked, his watering eyes adjusting to the bright light. He didn’t know where to look first. Maybe one in five people of the crowd were sylphs, waif-like godformed of Ais, with long, oddly-jointed limbs and strange folds of sandy skin that stretched between them like a banner. Their ears were large and pointed like a fox’s. Another one in five were other godformed, hamadryads and thunderbeasts, even some merpeople in human form and sweating profusely. It was a mix like Fyn had never seen outside of Promise, and even there godformed moved within their own groups. And everywhere, humans pushed past them or brushed against them without regard for form.

Five paces away at a stall selling several kinds of pastries, one drake in human form with shiny red scales like Fyn’s paid for a scone and took a bite. A small human hand appeared and broke off a piece from behind. The little human girl swallowed the bite whole and grinned up at the drake.

The drake laughed. He bent down and gave the girl another piece, then swung her up onto his shoulders and paid for another pastry for her.

Cassia shoved a piece of paper at Fyn. “Take this.”

“What?” Fyn shook the drake from his mind and looked down at the paper. It was a copy of the drawing she had shown him in Larisen — the spire she had seen while scrying.

“We should split up and ask around,” Cassia explained. “See if anyone knows what this is and how to get there.”

“Let me see that,” Sasha interrupted, taking the paper from Fyn. She studied the drawing and read Cassia’s notes with a half-cocked smile twitching on her face. “You could have mentioned you were looking for the Hive.”

“You can get us there?” Fyn demanded.

“Well, no. Not much growing out there. Hard to find anything with a strong connection, and gods, who’d want to go there anyway? It’s the literal middle of nowhere, and locals say it’s cursed. But here, I’ll go ask around and find out how to get there. Gods know it’ll go faster than having you two do it.”

Her sharp grin pricked where her words had stung, but Fyn didn’t bother arguing. “Fine. Just hurry.”

“Sure, if you stay out of trouble,” Sasha shot back, already turning and melding into the crowd.

“Also,” she called over her shoulder, “lose the disguises. No one will care about seeing a drake or angel, but you two don’t act enough like humans. They’ll know the second you open your mouth.”

Fyn stared after her, gritting his teeth, until Cassia tugged at his arm and pulled him behind the tent. In that dusty space between stalls, she waved a hand and their illusions faded. Her skin bled silver and her wings bloomed. She spread and stretched them, closing her eyes, pure delight on her face.

Fyn looked down at his own scaled hands. It had been nearly a week since he’d been in his true drake form. Once this skin had felt oppressive, demeaning. Small. Now he walked and slept in it without a second thought. It was smaller, less powerful, but more nimble. He put a hand to his chest, where his mote of Selach was nestled inside him like a tiny flame. That was the biggest difference: Selach did not call so loudly in this form. Fyn should have hated the separation.

He should not like how Cassia smiled at him more easily in this form. Or how strangers had looked at him underneath her human illusion — without fear.

Maybe he didn’t need an illusion to have that here.

Cassia rolled her shoulders and grinned, clasping her hands together and glancing from stall to stall. “I’ve never even seen half these foods before.”

Her enthusiasm infected Fyn. He took a deep breath and the whole market unfolded before him, hundreds of scents mingling together to form… mostly a mess. But a particular savory scent caught his mind. Roasting meat, spiced with something he had never smelled before. His stomach growled.

“We shouldn’t go far,” Cassia said.

“We won’t be long,” Fyn agreed.

Cassia held out a hand to Fyn. Her moonsilver palm seemed to gleam even under bright sunlight, like a pure, perfect pool.

Fyn hesitated. His red-scaled palm and taloned fingers didn't belong in that hand.

But they fit perfectly.

------

This was what Cassia had always envisioned when it came to traveling the world. Not sleeping under a thin blanket on stony ground that left her back aching. Not sneaking through towns beneath a human-skin illusion.

First they looked and looked, until Cassia’s head spun with a hundred kinds of cloth and dozens of foods she’d never seen before. Then they listened, and though Cassia’s tutelage had included introductions to every godformed language and the common human language, half the languages shouted after her were completely foreign. And then Cassia counted out the dwindling sum of money in her pouch, grabbed a handful of coins, split them with Fyn, and told him to buy something. This so dumbfounded him she had to pick the item out herself, choosing a necklace with a wooden pendant shaped like a phoenix. She hung it around his neck and insisted it looked elegant on him, which it did.

It was all rather like something out of a dream, or a storybook— something delightful around every corner. And someone to share it with.

Some unknown time later, Cassia and Fyn arrived back at the teleportation point. They sank gratefully onto mats underneath a shaded awning. Cassia was holding a wrapped sort of foldover fruit tart, while Fyn had a meat skewer in each hand.

Sasha was nowhere in sight.

“She’s taking a long time,” observed Cassia. A prickle of worry ran down her spine, puncturing the vibrant day.

“Mm.” Fyn gnawed another piece of meat off his skewer and chewed it with his eyes closed, the juices running down his chin.

Cassia took another bite of her tart. “Do you trust her?”

It was a question she’d asked herself several times during their interminable stay in Larisen. There was no way to deny it, Sasha had inserted herself into their lives at the perfectly convenient moment, and despite her hard exterior and general snappishness, had only continued being helpful since then. A month ago, Cassia wouldn’t have thought anything of it. They were paying her, after all.

But, well, Sasha was human. And if Cassia had learned anything out here on her own, it was that humans, at least in heart of the Basin, hated godformed.

Sasha didn’t seem like the type to break the mould.

Fyn swallowed his piece of meat. “Of c—”

He flinched like he had just been struck in the face. His eyes widened and he ducked his head. “Of course not,” he repeated, licking a speck of meat off one of his talons. “She’s human.”

Cassia leaned forward, bending down to look up at Fyn face on. “That’s not what you were going to say.”

Fyn set the meat skewers across his lap and picked at them. “Maybe not.”

Cassia waited for an explanation. Since when was Fyn, prince of suspicion, capable of trusting anyone, let alone a human?

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Fyn admitted. “Maybe you can tell me how to fix it.”

Cassia put her chin in her hands, tart forgotten. “Tell me what?”

“That when I was a hatchling, Sasha was called Sariah. And she was my best friend.”

------

Fyn told Cassia everything, though he stared at a pebble in front of his knee rather than look at her. In his mind’s eye, he was reliving the story as he told it, seeing memories he’d thought long since buried.

“She was the daughter of one of the servant mages working in the depths of Mt. Onyx. I don’t know what they did. Important magical stuff, I guess. But she was just a kid, so she cleaned and ran errands, but sometimes no one was there to watch her.

“I found her.” The memory was just a flash, a grubby face looking up at him and clambering onto his back. “She’d been sent into one of the dark tunnels, and she got scared. I was playing with Kez and Vak and I heard her crying. They didn’t notice. I didn’t tell them, I just went looking. They would have only made fun of her. Hurt her, if they felt like it.

“I didn’t really understand that she was scared, I just realized she couldn’t see in the dark. So I carried her to where there was light, and after that… she kept coming back, or I went to find her. All Kez and Vak ever wanted to do was fight, but Sariah and I, we’d go exploring together, and I’d practice my fire breathing and she’d practice her magic. That’s how I knew it was her; she loved doing this trick where she’d make a rock separate into different layers…”

He wasn’t explaining this well at all. The more he talked, the more the memories expanded, filling him up and pressing against his mote like a sharp pebble. For so long he had not dared say these words, admit to his blasphemy against Selach. He’d burned with shame and bent his head and worked twice as hard and still not a week had gone by where Broodfather Jarken hadn’t alluded to it with sly glances and veiled threats.

But this afternoon with Cassia… it had been like those playful moments in disused tunnels all over again.

He bit his lip in an effort to stop fire from creeping down his hand. He’d sworn he’d never blaspheme against Selach again. He’d sworn.

“How did it end?” Cassia said. She reached out and touched his knee.

It was the touch that did it. The flame licked down Fyn’s leg and scorched Cassia’s hand. Fyn flinched back from Cassia at the same instant she jerked her hand to her chest and gave a little gasp of pain.

Fyn’s mote was raging inside him. He shot to his feet and backed away from the angel in front of him, chest heaving. Never again.

“They found out. They punished me. And I never saw her again.”

He wasn’t talking to Cassia anymore. He turned away so he didn’t have to look at her wings. Or her face.

“I thought she was dead,” he said quietly. “They’ve killed for less. And I knew it was my fault. I should have known better. I should have left her there in the dark.”

She was still there. Her presence was like the heat of lava bearing down upon him. He didn’t need to look at her to see her face.

“Fyn,” she said. “I’m so, so—”

“Shut up!” Fyn shouted. “Don’t you see? I rescued her. I let her come play with me, because I didn’t care. Because I thought the rules were stupid. But they were right and I was wrong. Selach demands loyalty. And read my lips—”

He turned back around, seizing the pendant Cassia had so recently picked out for him. The angel was shaking silently, every feather of her wings standing on end.

Fyn set his jaw. “I will not be disloyal again.”

He yanked the pendant from around his neck. The cord broke in two. He held the remains out to Cassia. “Take it back. I don’t need it.”

Still shaking, not taking her eyes from his, Cassia approached him inch by inch. She held out her hand, and he dropped the pendant into it.

She clenched her fist around it. It was only then that Fyn realized she was not shaking in fear, but in rage. But her eyes held only sorrow.

“What you did for Sariah was brave, and kind,” Cassia said. She spoke through clenched teeth, her knuckles white on the pendant. “And if Selach really does demand such hatred from you, then he shouldn’t be any god of yours.”

The mote inside Fyn roared in the space between his heartbeats. Flames licked down his arms and would have burned his sleeves had his clothing been real and not only a manifestation of control over his human form. He had no conscious thought of what to do or say. He felt only a fury that was not his own yet swallowed up his core.

“Hello? If you two aren’t here, I’m heading back to Promise without—”

Sasha appeared around the corner of the teleportation tent and stopped dead. She’d changed clothing, trading the leathers and furs she’d been wearing for a colorful wrap that left her stomach bare. She’d acquired a long scarf somewhere and had wrapped it around her head to keep off the sun. She held a folded piece of paper in her left hand.

Sasha looked from Fyn to Cassia and raised an eyebrow. “Having a spat?”

Fyn ignored her question. “Well?” he demanded.

“I know how to get there. I got someone to draw me a map.”

Fyn stepped away from Cassia and with a huge effort of will quenched the flames still playing along his fingers. “And how did you do that?”

“I asked nicely.”

Fyn huffed. Sure she had. “Give it here.”

She did, still looking back and forth between Fyn and Cassia with a carefully guarded expression.

Fyn unfolded the map. It was crude, but easy enough to follow. Head southeast out of the city along what was labeled the Seasons’ Path. Upon reaching a ‘stone of many lions,’ strike out directly south until reaching what looked like a winding gorge, then follow it west. The Hive was marked directly on top of one of the bends in the gorge.

“They said it was nearly a five-day’s journey,” Sasha said.

“Then we’ll have to make it three,” Fyn said. He stashed the map in his bag and swelled into his drake form. This space between tents was only just large enough to fit his drake form, and both Cassia and Sasha took several steps back.

“Give me your wings,” he ordered, closing his mind against the fear that flashed across Cassia’s face. “We have to fly if we want to stand a chance of getting there in time.”

Cassia’s mouth opened as if to protest, then closed. Slowly, she reached back, took off her wings, and pressed them against his side. She stared at him with a thin mouth, like she was daring him to back down, or to admit something.

Fyn did neither, nor did he flinch away as her mote sank into his skin. He gasped as Mithrinde’s light flooded into his system and swept Selach’s rage away, leaving him momentarily adrift and numb. Then he found his mote again and gripped it tightly, ignoring the cool wash of power through his veins. This was nothing more than a use of resources, like how they had used Sasha’s teleportation to get them here. Selach rewarded drakes who took advantage of power. Whatever its source.

Wordlessly, Cassia snatched up their things and scrambled onto Fyn’s back. She left the meat skewers behind.

Fyn spread Cassia’s wings, nearly knocking over the tents on either side, and looked up at the hot, still sky with no idea of whether he would be able to jump straight up high enough to carry them off the ground.

Who cared if he knocked a few pies over? He crouched to spring.

“Wait,” Sasha said. “I’ll come with you. For another twenty. You’re in a hurry, aren’t you? Well, if I come with you, you won’t have to fly back here to teleport back to Promise. It’ll save you days.”

It was nearly double what they had paid for the last two teleportations, but Fyn didn’t care.

“Whatever,” he growled. He gave her thirty seconds to clamber onto his back and tie herself on. Then he leapt into the hot, arid sky.