Antebellum Awakening (12 page)

A light dusting of stubble touched his cheeks with a golden shimmer, highlighting his bloodshot eyes. He rubbed a hand over his face to push aside his hair. He wore it down today, and it hovered above his shoulders like strands of sand.

“You’re brave to taunt the witch who controls how hard you have to run,” he said, mimicking my dry tone. I snorted with false bravado.

“I’m not afraid of you.”

But a little flicker in Merrick’s eyes told me that perhaps I should be.

“Let’s go," he said, nodding toward the creeping fog of Letum Wood. “We’ve got a jaunt to get there.”

“Do we have to run?”

“What else do you recommend?”

I hesitated. “Not going?”

His tolerance for my attitude took a considerable dive.

“We’re going.”

I grabbed his arm when he turned to leave.

“But I can’t run!”

“Why?” he demanded, staring at me.

I hadn’t expected such a vehement response. I could sense something behind his question.

“Because.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Because what?”

Because it hurts too much.

“Are we really having this conversation again? I just can’t."

“Yes, we are having this conversation again because I want you to tell me why you refuse to run.”

My heart hammered in my chest. For a second, the words hovered on the top of my tongue, but I dismissed them.

“There’s no reason. I just can’t."

The muscles in his face relaxed into a disappointed frown. “Well, you’re going to have to figure it out on your own then, since you won’t let anyone else help you.”

He pulled away and continued on to Letum Wood. I scrambled after him, feeling a little like a failure. “What are we going to do?”

“Test a few things,” he said, starting to run.

The early morning mist had just started to rise from the gardens, leaving a coating of dew on the hedge and grass. At first Merrick kept us at an easy lope, skirting along the edges of Letum Wood, for which I was grateful. Once we turned and plunged into the forest, Letum Wood’s trees loomed high and shady. I watched for a pair of bright yellow eyes in the murky trees and thought I heard a snort in the distance. Trying to find the dragon gave me something to think about besides the memories lurking in the back of my mind.

By the time we wound through several back trails, crossed forgotten roads, and waded a low creek, we were in a different part of Letum Wood, one that didn’t incite such strong emotions in me. The trees were spread out here less densely, making it feel open compared to the confinement of the forest near Chatham. It felt like a vise releasing from my chest, allowing me to breathe freely.

“This is where Sanna lives,” he said, motioning with his head to a small cottage. A chimney on the south end piped out a lazy stream of gray smoke, and two open windows faced us, their white drapes fluttering out into the fresh spring air. “Sanna is a friend of mine that lives out here all by herself.”

“You have friends?” I asked, feigning surprise.

“Only a few,” he said with a very brief grin. “Come on. You’ll like Sanna. She’s special.”

I wasn’t sure what surprised me more: the thought of Merrick having something to do outside the Protectors or seeing the old woman hobble onto the porch with a cane as knobby as Grandmother’s hands used to be. She wore a simple brown dress with a necklace that glittered ebony and orange. It only took me a few seconds to realize that she wore a string of dragon scales.

“Special, you say?” I eyed her necklace again. Either it was an old family heirloom, passed through many generations, or Sanna was the only living Dragonmaster in Antebellum. I dismissed the idea. Dragons hadn’t really been around in centuries: the Dragonmasters were long gone.

Then again,
I reasoned with myself,
I didn’t exactly imagine that forest dragon.
A shudder climbed my spine. What was happening? Almorran magic, dragons in Letum Wood, West Guards in the Borderlands. What more?

Merrick smiled. “She’s special for her own reasons. Anyway, we’re going to help her split wood.”

“Wood?”

“Yes. It burns better than stones.”

I followed behind him with a growl, annoyed that he’d bested me in the silent game of wits. If Leda found out how quickly Merrick could silence my own personal brand of sarcasm, I’d never live it down.

“Merry meet, Sanna!” he called with a blithe smile. “Staying out of trouble?”

“Merry meet yourself. I’m probably having more fun than you!” Sanna bellowed back. I’d expected her speech to betray her age like Isadora’s did, but she sounded young and spry. Merrick laughed and turned off to the back of her cabin. I ignored him and followed the footpath leading to her front porch, crossing over a small wooden bridge above a tinkling brook. I was curious about this woman in the woods.

“You must be Bianca,” Sanna said as I approached. “Merrick told me that he’s your teacher now.”

Unlike most female witches, she didn’t curtsy. Instead she held out her steady arm and waited for me to grip her forearm in my hand, like a Council Member might do. Her eyes, cloudy and dim, gazed past my shoulder without seeing. I realized with surprise that Sanna was blind. How could she live alone? Especially here?

“Merry meet, Sanna,” I said, taking the offered arm. Her soft skin and braided white hair reminded me of my grandmother. She wore an old shawl across her thin arms. A peek over her shoulder and into the open door of her house revealed an old wooden table, a braided rug on the wooden floor, and a large claw on the wall that looked like an ivory scythe. My throat went dry.

This little old lady in the woods owned a dragon talon.
Special indeed,
I thought, grateful she couldn’t see my shocked expression.

“What’d you come here for?” Sanna asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” I said, distracted by her necklace now that I stood close to it. Small beads of bright orange gleamed from the black scales. I wondered how long it had been in her possession. “Merrick said something about chopping wood?”

“They’re heart scales,” Sanna said, and I glimpsed a knowing grin on her face. For a woman who had no sight, she certainly knew what was going on. “I got them from a very special dragon when I was a little girl. They shed these scales from near their heart when they are young, you know. For the rest of its life, a dragon will loyally serve whoever gets its heart scales.”

“Oh,” I whispered, glancing from her necklace and back to her eyes. “It’s beautiful. You are a Dragonmaster then?”

“No, I’m a fairy,” she snapped, and I stared at her in open-mouthed surprise. Then she burst out laughing, a belly-deep cackle that made me smile, albeit hesitantly. “Of course I’m a Dragonmaster! You’re not very sharp, are you?”

“But you live out here alone,” I said, running my eyes over the forest. I’d grown up in a safer part of Letum Wood, but even there the dangers had been very real. “How are you a Dragonmaster by yourself?”

She snorted.

“What you’re really asking is how am I the Dragonmaster when I’m so old and blind?”

“Yes,” I admitted, feeling sheepish. “I guess that’s what I’m asking.”

She tapped the side of her head.

“It’s all in their heads.”

“Whose heads?”

A heavy line furrowed her forehead. “The dragons, stupid girl. The dragons! You don’t get out much, do you? Didn’t you just graduate from Miss Mabel’s School for Girls? I’m surprised my sister let you in.”

“Isadora?” I asked, my mouth dropping. “You know her?”

Sanna rolled her eyes. “Know her? The woman is my twin. She’s the hardest sister to grow up with you’d ever meet. She anticipates the punch line of every joke.”

“I didn’t know she had a twin.”

Sanna snorted. “Figures. She never talks about personal things. She’s much too high and mighty that way. I broke a china teacup once and she took years to get over it.”

“We’ll be done in no time, Sanna,” Merrick interrupted, striding around the corner with two axes resting on his shoulders. “I’m glad we came today. You’re almost out of wood.”

I was grateful he showed up at that moment. I needed a chance to recover. Sanna and Isadora were twins? Two more different witches never existed. Isadora, who was always proper and calm, the sister of this loud, obnoxious witch before me? Impossible. I shook my head to clear the collecting thoughts. An aged, blind Dragonmaster? None of this made sense.

Merrick shoved an axe into my arms as he walked past.

“Let’s go,” he said briskly, swinging the other ax off his shoulder with smooth, practiced grace. “You’ll want to get started soon. A girl like you will need as much of an advantage as you can get."

“A girl like me?”

Sanna gave a low whistle. “Sounds like a challenge!” she called out with another bawdy laugh.

“We are each going to make a pile of wood and see who wins,” Merrick said when I stepped off the porch and joined him. He’d already grabbed a rotten log from nearby and pulled it near a stump. I tested the weight of the ax in my hand. It didn’t feel too heavy.

“What’s the prize?” I asked.

“If you win, I’ll let you transport back. If I win, we run without complaint.”

One less chance to run into Mama’s memory and flounder in a magic I couldn’t control?

“Deal,” I said.

“I’ll show you how to do it,” he said. “Watch.”

He grabbed a log, lifted the ax above his head, and brought it down with a mighty swing of his arm. The wood broke into equal parts and fell to different sides of the stump. I laughed under my breath.

“Easy,” I said. Merrick’s eyebrows lifted innocently as he bent over to gather the pieces. He took a few skinny shards that had split off to keep for kindling.

“You think so?” he asked.

“Indeed. You better get to work,” I said, spinning on my heel toward another splitting stump. “You wouldn’t want a girl to beat you.”

Sanna chuckled and moved into her house with all the confidence of someone with perfect sight. Papa used to split firewood for us all the time. When he wasn’t around Mama used an incantation her father had found in a family grimoire, and the logs simply fell apart into perfect pieces. How difficult could it be?

Extremely, it turned out.

Aiming the ax correctly was the first hurdle. Most of the time I missed the wood completely and shaved the side or hit the stump, or even the dirt. One poor attempt embedded the first inch of my axe into the wood. No matter how many times I pounded the log onto the stump, it wouldn’t budge.

“Jikes,” I muttered, wiping a bead of sweat from my forehead. I had nothing to show for my sweat. Merrick had stopped chopping to watch my struggle, his modest, neat pile mocking me.

“Need help?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure if it was the magic that felt hot inside or the sting of my pride. The heat crept into my cheeks.

“No! Well . . . not help, exactly,” I corrected. “I can do it! The ax just won’t work right.”

“So you can’t do it?”

The heat from my chest turned into an ugly glare his direction. He abandoned his ax with an effortless grin and grabbed mine. “You want to use momentum to break the log,” he said. “Not just your arms.”

He adjusted my grip on the ax handle, taught me how to keep my dominant hand fluid, and walked me through my first attempts at swinging it above my head and down.

“Use your back,” he said, observing my first pathetic attempts. “Good.”

The first three strokes missed the wood. I reset my grip, and the fourth hit true.

“Ha!” I cried, abandoning the ax and stacking the three pieces into a little pile with no small amount of pride. “Take that.”

My victory, however strong, was short lived.

Within twenty minutes my arms trembled violently. I could lift the ax, but each swing grew weaker. Merrick’s rapidly-growing pile dwarfed mine. I envied his fluid, synchronized movements. Set the log, step back, swing the ax, pick up the wood.

“I’m losing my grip on the ax,” I said, looking over my shoulder at him. “My hands aren’t strong enough to hold it.”

“You can quit if you want,” he said unsympathetically.

I eyed the depressing difference between our piles. Running home had already been decided. I’d never win. Why waste the energy chopping wood if I’d just have to run anyway? Merrick wiped the sweat from his eyes and looked right at me.

“Since you’re too weak to keep going, of course. In that case, you should probably take a break. Maybe go check on Sanna. Drink some tea. Or you can just do it with magic since you’re not strong enough physically.”

He was baiting me; I knew it. I recognized the sarcasm in his voice, and I couldn’t help but feel rankled. The idea of not following through on the task made the magic come alive inside me with a little jolt of anger. I wasn’t so weak that I had to use magic. I straightened so tall I thought my spine would snap. I didn’t want to face ghosts while I ran, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t capable.