Young Writers Society

“Let me guess — Ashbourne is an underground city.”

Fyn sighed. After their second day of traveling, they had arrived at the base of the mountain range, winding through canyons until they had reached the dark opening with a crude wooden sign labeled “Ashbourne, South Entrance” hanging above it. “Yes, it’s underground.”

Cassia eyed the tunnel with her hands on her hips. “You could have told me.”

“I forgot,” Fyn said. “Go on, you’re going in front. And try to actually act like a human for once.” As an angel, Cassia was definitely not supposed to be in Selachen, but as long as she wore her cloak to hide her wings, she could pass as human. The problem was, her demeanor was decidedly not human — she needed to keep her shoulders stooped, her eyes down, and most of all her mouth shut. They weren’t the only ones on the road — a trade caravan was just a few minutes behind them, and a coal shipment had just emerged from the exit tunnel a hundred feet to the right.

To his surprise, Cassia didn’t argue. He followed her into the yawning gap, sighing contentedly as darkness swallowed him.

Like most of the tunnels drakes burrowed, it was nearly circular, with a low roof and rough stone walls. It was only meant to be traveled along in one direction — two drakes couldn’t have possibly squeezed past each other. Fyn stretched himself out, crouching low and slithering forward almost on his belly, moving at a comfortable pace. It felt good to be underground again, to be able to see in the soft grays of his dark sight rather than squinting in the harsh light of the sun. The walls pressing in around him were soothing and protective, and with Cassia right in front of him, he could at least keep on eye on —

A bright light flared in front of Fyn. He cried out, shutting his eyes as a lance of pain shot through his skull.

“Oh, did I blind you?” Cassia’s voice said. “Sorry, I guess I should have warned you.”

Fyn couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or not. “Put it out,” he hissed, his eyes still screwed shut. Through his lids, he could see her hand glowing like the moon.

“What? No, I need it to see.”

“I don’t,” Fyn said angrily. “I wanted the dark. Put it out!” He chanced opening his eyes and found that he had adjusted back to his daylight vision now. Cassia was pointing her glowing palm at the ceiling, her stubborn face flushed. Beyond the light it gave off, he could see almost nothing of the tunnel.

“I’m not going down there without a light,” she said. “Not when I can’t see.”

“Scared?” Fyn taunted without thinking. The light still hurt — he could feel a headache coming on.

She reeled back, just a little bit, her fists clenched. “No. Just smart. I’ll twist my ankle or walk into something if I can’t see.”

She is scared, Fyn thought, seeing her chest heave. Suddenly, his anger drained away. What was the point in making her walk miles in pitch darkness? She probably would stumble over every bit of loose scrag, and that would just slow them down. He was pretty sure that human workers used light when they came down here.

He pretended to consider what she’d said. “Then dim it,” he told her. “I’m not staring at that the whole way down. I’ll go blind.”

“That’s fair,” Cassia said, sounding relieved, and with a touch, she dimmed the light to a soft glow.

They didn’t speak again until they had climbed down deep into the earth and rock that was Selach’s domain and emerged into the vast underground cavern that housed the town and mines of Ashbourne.

Even with his darkvision, Fyn could only see about halfway across the cavern. The town itself was small, only a few thousand workers, but the mines stretched for miles. Past the first few fused stalagmites and stalactites that supported the cavern’s great roof, he could only tell anything was there by the sparse glow of lanterns hung for the human workers’ sakes. It wasn’t the largest cavern in Selachen, not by a long shot, and they were still too close to the surface — there wasn’t a river of magma in sight — but it was beautiful.

As they followed the pathway down into town, shadows rose up and become buildings around them. They were rickety structures, wooden mostly, and Fyn had to watch where he was putting his tail for fear of knocking them down. It didn’t help that the streets were even narrower than the alleyways back in Promise. At least here, they were nearly empty, with usually just the shadow of a human disappearing around the corner, or an enforcement drake coming down the street with whip coiled in hand.

He frowned when he realized that every drake they passed was in human form. After a moment’s consideration — if everyone here was doing it, then it had to be okay — he changed too, his snout shrinking into a scaled nose, his paws splitting into delicate-fingered hands. He flexed his fingers and adjusted the pouch in which he had been carrying Iona’s file.

Belatedly, he registered an alarmed squeak from behind him. He turned and saw Cassia with her back to him, hands over her eyes. “What under the earth are you doing?” he demanded.

Cassia peeked at him through her hands, then straightened up, looking embarrassed. “I knew drakes had a human form, but I didn’t know the transformation came with clothes.”

“You learn how,” Fyn said flatly. “Or get nipped until you do.”

As they’d entered the town, Cassia had spent several minutes craning her neck in every direction, and now she had drawn uncomfortably close to Fyn, walking right alongside him with her hand on that pouch she always carried at her waist. He was irritated to see that she was only an inch shorter than him.

“Where are we going?” she finally asked him.

“To her family’s house,” Fyn said. “They’ll be gone already, but we need to pick up their trail. Iona will be at the end of it.”

They turned down one street, then another. Fyn checked the paper again. This was it. He quickened his pace, straining his eyes to see in the dim light, his darkvision gone in this form. It was getting late in the day, though you couldn’t tell down here except by the clocks on the street corners, and most of the windows in both the stone bunkers and the wooden homes on the other side of the street were lit.

Except for one. Fyn stopped in his tracks, looking up at a three-story housing tenement that should have housed Iona’s family along with several others. Instead, it stood dark and silent. Not a single room was lit.

Fyn stomped up the steps and kicked the door open. The bang echoed eerily across the deserted, half-lit street.

“Help me search the house,” he said to Cassia. “We’re looking for any clues about where they went. We’ll scare the neighbors into talking if we have to.”

The rooms were nearly bare of personal belongings, but what was there lay scattered about haphazardly, mostly books and scraps of paper, a child’s doll, a wooden sword. Fyn checked in the basement, searching for loose floorboards and other hiding places, but found nothing.

Then he heard a tiny sneeze. He spun and saw the wooden barrel in the corner rocking gently.

“Show yourself,” he said loudly. “By order of Selach!"

The barrel stopped rocking. Other than that, nothing happened.

Fyn approached the barrel and looked inside, but it looked empty. Had he been seeing things? He turned to leave — and heard another sneeze. This time he stared at the barrel for a full two seconds before he remembered.

“Magic,” he snarled, and plunged his hand into the barrel. It passed right through the illusion of an empty interior, and his fist closed on a squirming bundle of cloth. He lifted it out of the barrel and saw that he was holding a human child, stick-thin with grimy blond hair.

“Get off me, I’m not one of them, I don’t got anything you want —” the child was saying. He wasn’t much more than a bundle of rags and pale skin.

“Oh, but I think you do,” Fyn said. The kid was pathetic — getting information out of him should be easy. So why was his heart pounding so fast?

He pressed the kid up against the wall above the barrel, pinning his skinny frame easily. “Tell me where they went.”

“Where who went?” the kid said blandly.

“I’m warning you, don’t be difficult. The family that lived here before.”

“How woulds I know? I’m just squatting here now it’s empty.”

Fyn just waited, tightening the grip on the boy’s chest. A whine of worry rose in the back of his mind — what if this kid really didn’t know anything, and he was threatening him for nothing?

Fyn pushed forward anyway. The kid had to know something. Humans were always in cahoots with each other. “You’re not just a squatter. They left what, two days ago? And the whole building is empty, too, not just their rooms. I think this whole block knows where they went, and you’re going to tell me.”

The boy shook his head, suddenly defiant. “I’m not telling you nothing. They was nice to me sometimes, I ain’t getting them killed.”

Without conscious thought, Fyn’s hand shot up and pinned the boy’s throat. A powerful sort of rage unlike any he had ever felt before was coursing through him. How dare this boy delay his mission? His mote of Selach pulsed in time with the pounding of his blood.

“You’re a magic-user,” Fyn growled. “I’m guessing the other drakes here haven’t picked up on that little fact yet, or you’d be in one of their training schools instead of here. Well —” he gave the boy a little shake to underline his point — “it’d be very, very easy to take you upstairs and show you to that Watcher on the corner. He’d know what to do with you.”

The boy’s face drained of color, and not just because Fyn was holding him by the throat Fyn had noticed the whip marks around the boy’s legs. He was likely already a runaway.

Fyn waited, lowering his grip so the boy’s feet found the floor again and he could breathe. The child was shaking, and when he spoke, his voice was barely more than a whisper.

“They didn’t tell anyone they were leaving. Went so fast, you see. But as they was leaving, I — I heard them say —”

He broke off. Coldly, Fyn kneed him in the stomach. He doubled over, retching. “They went to Haven! That’s where everyone goes, to Haven!”

Fyn had never heard of the place before. “Are you lying to me?”

“No, I swear it! It’s somewhere in the Haverin Forest. I don’t know where. It’s half legend.”

“Legend doesn’t help,” Fyn said in his ear. “I need a starting point to track them.”

“Blackspin road. They started on Blackspin road. That’s all I know, I swear.”

It was enough. Fyn knew that road; it was uncommonly used, and with any luck, they would be able to pick up the trail of Iona’s family and follow it straight to this Haven… and to her.

His blood still pounded in his head, rage still burning in his veins. But it felt strange and foreign now — Fyn had gotten what he needed, hadn’t he?

Abruptly, Fyn released the boy. “You’re free to go,” he said gruffly. “Get out before I change my mind.”

Still wheezing and clutching at his throat, the human boy scrambled to his feet and scurried past Fyn, dashing up the stairs of the basement without even a glance back.

Fyn looked at his clenched fist and flexed his fingers a few times. Then he left the dilapidated basement and went looking for Cassia.

***

Back on the road heading out of Selachen, Cassia studied Fyn from behind. He was back in his drake form, his tail sweeping the dirt as he stalked down the road. Cassia couldn’t bring herself to walk closer than three paces behind him; she felt more uneasy than ever around Fyn after Ashbourne.

She had been poking around upstairs when Fyn had come to find her. That in and of itself had been a grim enough task. She kept finding scraps of the lives of what must have been Iona’s family. A lovely oak chest, empty but too big to carry with them when they fled. A bandanna stained with coal dust. A doll that wasn’t much more than a rag tied with twine.

Cassia had lingered over that last one, found in the corner of the tiniest room. After a moment’s hesitance, she pocketed it. If they really did have to find Iona’s family, she could use it to scry on the young owner.

Then Fyn had appeared with a fixed sort of expression on his face. He’d said he had the information they needed, so they could leave, but he wouldn’t tell her how he’d done it.

“I think you’d be happier not knowing,” he’d said, with a sort of smug air, almost as if he knew that whatever he had done, what Cassia would imagine as she followed him the narrow, winding road through the mountains would be worse.

All told, Cassia was quite happy not mentioning that she could scry directly on Iona’s family until she absolutely had to. The night before, she had scried on the Treatise again, using the cushion she had taken from the Temple, and this time had seen it wrapped in a burlap sack, hidden underneath a bed in a tiny wooden hut. She had no way of knowing where the hut was, but Fyn had told her Iona’s family was heading to some sort of secret human encampment called Haven, and Cassia supposed that might be what she was seeing.

She was trying not to think about what would happen when they arrived. What if Fyn decided to attack? Would he kill Iona’s children, or just Iona?

But lurking behind that fear was another, deeper disquiet. Cassia couldn’t get the images of Ashbourne out of her head. The dilapidated, darkened buildings, with lanterns hung few and far between. The way she’d scarcely seen any human workers, though hundreds must have lived there, like they all kept to the shadows and out of sight. The few she had seen had averted their eyes and vanished in seconds.

Was that… normal for humans? It couldn’t be. She hadn’t seen very many humans in Promise, but the ones she had seen had all looked fine. Not hopeless and afraid like the ones in Ashbourne.

Was that why Iona had stolen the Treatise? Cassia hadn’t paused to think much about the face described in the file she had read back in Promise, but if her family lived in Ashbourne, she had to know what it was like there…

“What if she’s just angry?” Cassia said softly.

“What’s that?” Fyn swung his neck back to look at her.

“Just talking to myself.”

“Well, don’t.”

His curt response snapped Cassia’s thoughts back into place. Of course the drakes were practically keeping people in slavery. Why should she be surprised? It fit with everything she had ever heard of them. It probably was their fault the Treatise had been stolen in the first place.

Unfortunately, however valid Iona’s reasons for stealing the Treatise might be, Cassia couldn’t let it change her plans. They had to get the Treatise back for the Renewal. Everyone knew that losing the Treatise meant war between the gods, with the godformed as pawns. More urgently, who knew what missing the Renewal would do to her father’s health?

Still, as Cassia followed in Fyn’s wake, she made a whispered promise to herself. “We will do this without bloodshed. If at all possible.”