Young Writers Society

Cassia plowed through the trees, pushing through bushes and crushing leaves underfoot. The noise she made distracted her from the heat creeping up her cheeks. The nerve of him! Asking her if she wanted some meat right after she nearly threw up from seeing those bloody entrails thrown everywhere. And this was after he had argued with her all day about everything from their campsite to how far away she was walking from him on the trail.

The weirdest thing was, when he had offered her the meat, he had almost seemed sincere.

“He’s arrogant, insensitive, and utterly, utterly clueless,” she spat, addressing a nearby tree as if it had challenged her. “Honestly, it’s a miracle I haven’t flown off to find the Treatise by myself yet. You try listening to his high-and-mighty attitude all day.”

But he didn’t seem deliberately cruel. And truthfully, that was more than she’d expected from a drake.

She released her breath and shifted her watertight cooking pot – more of a bag really – from one hand to the next. They had chosen a spot near a stream, and Cassia could hear it spilling down a stony bed. She pushed through the last of the bushes and squinted up at the sky. The sun had barely set, so the moon should be up for a few more hours…

There it was. The waxing half-moon hanging halfway in the heavens. Relief washed through Cassia. Dropping her cooking bag, she knelt on a boulder that jutted out into the stream, took out her small scrying bowl, and carefully poured every drop of luminescent water from the vial that guard had handed her the day before. She hadn’t had the chance to slip away the night before, so she hadn’t spoken to Tilana since she had left Mithrinden.

She angled the water to catch the reflection of the moon. Immediately, it blazed blindingly white. Cassia touched the water with her fingertip, channeling magic from her mote of Mithrinde to complete the spell and allow the water to connect with its other half in Mithrinden. It was the first time she’d ever tried to cast the spell, a mixture of human and angel magic, and she wasn’t sure it would work.

“Please be free, Ty,” she whispered. “Please.”

She waited anxiously, shifting to a crosslegged position since her knees were already growing numb, careful not to spill a drop of the water. The water pulsed – and then it cleared, revealing a familiar pale face framed by two long, dark braids. She was already wearing her dressing gown. Seeing her wingless was strange, and Cassia touched Tilana’s wings on her back unconsciously. Wearing wings all the time still caught her off-balance, but having Mithrinde’s power all the time — even if it didn’t quite belong to her — still thrilled her to her core.

“Ty!” Cassia exclaimed. “I was worried you would be busy.”

Tilana smiled in an expression Cassia recognized as pure relief. “Of course not. I’ve been worried sick for two days. You’re supposed to send me messages! That’s why you have all those quills.”

“Right.” In truth, Cassia had completely forgotten about the extra bundle of quills she had tucked among her spell components. Sending messages by quill was a human spell and not one she used often. “Sorry about that. I should probably save them, though. It looks like we’ll be spending a lot of time in the middle of nowhere.”

Tilana frowned. “Are you in a forest? I hear water. Are you on the Treatise’s trail? How is it with the drake?”

“It’s fine. I’m telling you. It’s not like they eat babies or anything,” Cassia said, casting a glance over her shoulder at their fire. “Just deer. Raw.”

Tilana read the implication in her words. “Ew.”

“Oh, that’s not the half of it,” Cassia said.

Tilana leaned forward slightly and raised an eyebrow.

For some, that gesture might not have meant much, but it was all Cassia needed to know Tilana was eager for her spill the beans.

She let out a deep breath, and with it went a dam she didn’t know she had built. After a long, agonizing day of near-silence, it was so good to hear words. They spilled out of her the way the brook spilled over the rocks. She told Tilana everything, from Fyn’s attitude to her scrying on the Treatise to his plan to find it and their infuriating supply excursions in Promise. She talked for nearly a quarter of an hour, with Tilana hardly saying a word but only listening in the way she had always been best at.

“–and so it’s a lot,” Cassia finally finished. “But I think I’m doing okay. He’s too big for me to strangle, and so far he doesn’t seem interested in strangling me, so that’s something. As for when we’ll get the Treatise, I guess it all depends on if Fyn’s theory is right.”

“Hm.” Tilana was looking down now, scribbling notes on a piece of parchment Cassia couldn’t see. Cassia knew her sister was taking in everything Cassia had told her, sorting and sifting it for any insight into what the drakes were after and what they expected of this unlikely alliance.

“I know the drake seems like a buffoon,” Tilana said, “but you still need to be careful. He might have orders to kill you after all this is over. Barring that, I’m certain now that they’ll be sending other drakes in secret to find the Treatise first. You could come into conflict with them, and they probably wouldn’t hesitate to kill you to keep the secret. So–”

“I know, be careful,” Cassia said, her momentarily happy mood punctured with fear again. “Thanks for the pleasant thoughts.”

“I didn’t mean that. I don’t think you’re in immediate danger now,” Tilana begun, but Cassia cut her off.

“Ty, what’s – what’s happening at home? With Dad and everything?”

The fear had been gnawing away at her for the past two days. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t picture her father’s inevitable wrath when he learned she had taken his place. She had never done anything to make Micah really angry before.

Tilana cast a nervous glance over her shoulder. From the bits of the wall and ceiling she could see, Cassia recognized that Tilana was in her room, the left bedroom of their double suite. A surge of longing for her own bed on the other side of one of the doors she couldn’t see welled up in Cassia.

“It’s not good,” Tilana said quietly. She reached over to a bedside table and Cassia heard her ruffling through pages. “He found out… two hours and 34 minutes after you teleported from Mithrinden. His face went white and cold. It was… frightening.”

She swallowed. “He’s sending search parties after you, at least for now. He doesn’t know we’re in contact. I don’t know how long he’ll be looking. He didn’t think it was a good idea to admit to the drakes that we had sent the wrong person, but if someone finds you, he’s going to come out there and replace you himself, and have them drag you back here.”

“So he’s still insisting on going himself?” Cassia said, incredulous.

Tilana nodded. “We tried explaining to him that the entire point of sending you was to keep him resting. He didn’t listen.”

Cassia let out a huff of air, reflecting angrily that she had never known her father to be this stubborn. “Did you ask him why he wants to go?”

“I tried, but he didn’t answer.”

They fell silent, and the chirping cicadas roared loud in Cassia’s ears again.

“There’s one more thing,” Tilana said, so quietly that Cassia almost didn’t hear her over the sounds of the nightlife. “Haliel took all the blame. She insisted she talked us into it. So she’s being held right now for treason.”

“What? But he could execute her for that!” Cassia’s hands shook and she had to let go of the bowl so she didn’t spill the water and disturb the image. “You have to stop him!”

“I don’t know if I can, Cass,” Tilana said, shaking her head, her eyes wide and anxious. “He’s imprisoned her legitimately. What she did — what we did — is easily construed as treason. We took direct action against him.”

“Only to keep him alive!” Cassia said. She felt rattled, like her intestines were twisting up in knots inside her. She couldn’t imagine Haliel as she must be now, locked in one of the damp cells deep below the Lunasium, below even the enormous caverns lit by luminescent moss, where farmers cultivated fungi and lichen to supplement Mithrinden’s limited mountainside crops. She had always been like a kind, if a little bit strange, aunt, and a good friend of Cassia’s parents. Losing her would be like losing another piece of Mother.

“I know, but keep your voice down,” Tilana said, glancing over her shoulder to a door Cassia could not see. “It could go either way. I’m trying to talk him down, but I just don’t understand it. I’ve never seen him this unreasonable.About his own health, about acknowledging what Haliel was trying to do. He never leans on his authority like this. It goes against everything he’s been teaching me about being an Archpriestess.”

When Cassia had begun the spell she was using to talk to Tilana now, she had half-wondered, half-hoped that Tilana had been able to convince their father that they had done the right thing. That the water would clear and she would see his smiling face, wrinkles and all, and he would listen to her tell him all about Fyn, and he would tell her she was doing so well, and then tell her exactly what to do next. Now, she felt she would die of shame if she so much as looked at her father. Of course he was angry. She could see his face in her mind, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed in his customary look of disappointment, and it made her want to run and hide in the Lunasium’s gardens. What had she been thinking? What had any of them been thinking?

“Maybe I should just come home. Say sorry.”

Tilana shook her head immediately. “No. We did the right thing. Dad still shouldn’t be out there. And getting the Treatise back is too important for you to return now.”

That’s easy for you to say, Cassia thought. You’re not the one out here all on your own with a drake.

As usual, Tilana could tell what she was thinking. “You’ll be fine. He sounds like a buffoon, and I have complete and utter confidence that you can handle one of those, given our long experience.”

Cassia chuckled. Several of the petitioners she and Tilana had handled in their duties of overseeing certain supplies and city regulations could charitably be called buffoons.

“Anyway. About the search parties Dad’s sending, I have a few ideas —”

But what those ideas were, Cassia never found out. The bushes behind her erupted, shaking wildly and sending leaves flying everywhere. A dull thud, then another, echoed through the forest.

Cassia’s stomach turned over. It seemed there were animals in this woods — big ones — and one of them was coming right at her. “I’ve gotta go!” she whispered to Tilana, and she stuck her finger into the water, breaking the spell. She went to pour the enchanted water back into its vial, but froze as the shaking bushes burst open.

It was Fyn, looking disheveled, his scales showered in leaves and twigs. He seemed only half-awake, his eyes barely open and his gait shambling. He slouched down to the bank of the stream — Cassia didn’t even think he’d noticed her — and drank, then lifted a leg and sent a stream of pee onto an overhanging root. He slouched back up the hill just as slowly, Cassia waiting until he was out of sight.

Cursing Fyn’s bad timing under her breath, Cassia poured her enchanted water — whose magic was now depleted for at least a day — back into its vial and made her way back to camp.