Dragonoak (31 page)

Just a little dizzy
, I'd meant to
say, but the tree was the only part of the world that hadn't
stopped spinning. Shoulders hunched, I heaved, offering what little
I had, what little there was, to the twisted roots beneath me. Bile
followed when there was nothing else left inside of me, and I
gulped down a whimper, forming ruts in the bark. Soft wood caught
beneath my nails and I screwed my eyes shut, breathing
deeply.

“Yrval...?”

“I'm
okay,” I murmured, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. My
stomach felt as though it was cutting into me, but the world had
stopped spinning. “I'm okay now.”

“We'd
best be getting you home and cleaned up,” Kouris said, rubbing my
back. “I'll boil you up a hot bath. How's that sound?”

I looked
down into the valley, but the farmhouse didn't catch my attention.
One of the buildings beyond did, though I couldn't say which one,
and all at once, a darkness the night couldn't account for swarmed
my vision. I blinked and I saw chains, heard them rattling from
behind me, above me, all around me, and though I was staring at my
village, all of the wrong things were filling my head.

I knelt
down, convinced I had to knock my temple with the heel of my palm
until the right images flooded back in.

“I don't
want to go down there.”

“Why
not?” Kouris asked gently.

“Because
Katja's down there, and I don't want her near me,” I
mumbled.

Pathetic, pathetic.

Crouching down beside me, Kouris said, “Alright. We can stay
here for as long as you're needing to. I don't mind camping out.
It's a good night for it. But you need to understand that none of
us are going to let her near you, not ever again. You're safe with
us, yrval. Safe with me.”

Why did
it matter that Katja wouldn't be allowed near me now, or in the
future? She'd been near me, near enough to slip her blades in, and
that's all that mattered. It wasn't the future I had to fear; it
was the past she kept dragging me into.

“You'll
feel better once you've taken a bath,” Kouris went on to say, “Then
you can lock yourself in your room and look through those
bags.”

The
bags. I'd forgotten all about them when I hadn't seen
Claire.

“It'll
just be... books, armour,” I protested.

“It's
just a key and a coin,” Kouris pointed out.

Kouris
was good for being patient with me, I thought. She could've
snapped, could've been angry at me for yelling at her, but she
wasn't. She could've grown tired of all the things that consumed
me, but she hadn't yet; but it wouldn't be like that forever. In
hours or days she'd give up on me, and I'd feel keenly how childish
I'd been.

I stared
at the farmhouse, at the ground beneath my feet. What difference
would it make if I closed the distance between me and Katja as
little as I would by locking myself away in my own home?

I tried
my legs, wincing when they worked. Without a word, Kouris followed
me down the dirt path, bags slung over her shoulder.

Inside,
the air was stained by the smell of tea. I'd expected the others to
be sleeping, but my father and Atthis were sat up in the kitchen,
talking over steaming mugs, surrounded by dim candle
light.

“How was
Praxis?” Atthis asked cheerfully, and my father didn't show a jot
of the relief he was feeling.

“Never
mind all that,” Kouris said, “Tell 'em what we saw. I'm gonna go
draw this one a bath, if that's alright with you, Dad.”

My
father nodded, content to let her find what she needed herself, and
I sat down at the table between them. Atthis poured me a drink and
I held it between my hands, considered taking a sip, but realised
that they were both looking at me, expectant.

“There's a hole in the wall,” I said carefully, as though
it'd been weeks since I'd seen it. “A dragon must've knocked it
through, which means they're still using them,
and
they're losing control of them.
But it's not all bad. We saw the resistance. They came charging
through the gap in the wall, and...

“Orinhal. One of the soldiers – Felheimish soldiers, I mean –
said something about Orinhal. I think that's where the resistance
is.”

What I'd
said felt like it amounted to nothing, but Atthis could barely hold
back a smile.

“Rowan!”
he exclaimed. “That's incredible. I didn't expect you to find out
anything on this scale. Gods, we're getting closer and closer to
being where we need to be. How did you find this all out? I hope
you didn't have a run-in with the Felheimish soldiers.”

I told
them what had happened without mentioning the woman in dragon-bone
armour, tea cooling between my hands. Atthis and my father hung
onto my every word, and it was a far cry from the mornings spent
sat around that table, where Michael's tales would accompany every
breakfast.

Kouris
clattered around in the living room as I spoke. She'd found our
metal tub and was working on filling it, fire no doubt stoked,
heading back and forth in the dark to collect water from the well.
Once I'd told Atthis all I possibly could and confirmed every
question he had to ask, I sat and listened to him and my father
slip back into their old conversation about something that didn't
interest me at all, but made for soothing background
noise.

“It's
all yours,” Kouris said half a mug of tea later, sweeping an arm
towards the living room.

I
thanked her as best I could and dragged my feet in there, keeping
the door shut by pulling one of the armchairs across it. There was
just enough space for the bath tub in front of the fire, and a
great pan of water was being heated over it. I peeled off my
clothes, wishing I could've pulled more away, and sunk into the hot
water, shivering from the shoulders up.

Kouris
was right. I scrubbed at my skin and I did feel better. My body
relaxed with the heat, and as the water lapped against me, I felt
who I truly was seeping back into me. That hadn't been me, shouting
at Kouris; I hadn't thrown up into the dirt, hadn't had things
force themselves behind my eyelids; I'd slipped away for a moment
and it had all unravelled.

I stayed
in the bath until the water was cold and found that Kouris had left
towels and clothes for me on the arm of the sofa. I dried in front
of the fire, half-heartedly rubbing my hair, and changed into clean
clothes. I could hear the others in the kitchen, talking about
something broken up by bouts of laughter, and I slipped out of the
living room, as light on my feet as I knew how to be as I darted up
the stairs.

A tray
of food had been left by my door, as well as Claire's bags. I took
the tray in first, placed it in the middle of my room, and dragged
the bags in after me.

I stared
at them, pulling off chunks of bread and chewing slowly to appease
my stomach, knowing that I wasn't ready to open the
bags.

Knowing,
more than that, that I never would be.

I pulled
the larger one towards me. If I didn't look inside now, there
wouldn't be a waking moment when my mind wasn't fixated on their
imagined contents.

Carefully unhooking the straps, I pulled the flap back and
opened the bag, peering inside. I'd been right: there was armour in
there, and not the usual sort. Dragon-bone gauntlets were wrapped
in a thick, rich blue length of cloth, far more intricately
decorated than the ones Claire had worn. There were no sharp angles
to them, nothing I could cut myself on. Patterns were scored into
them like the scales of a dragon, no two the same, all of them
fitting together.

I placed
them next to my bowl of soup, and pulled out the next
thing.

It was a dress, light-blue and flowing, and I hurried to fold
it back up and slide it under the gloves. There was a book in the
bag as well, and I immediately knew what it was;
The Sky Beneath The Sun
,
in far better condition than the one I'd brought with
me.

I folded
it open in my lap, expecting to find it different, in some way, but
if there were any discrepancies, they resided within the text. All
of the pictures were the same, all of the diagrams of phoenixes,
the detailed drawings of their feathers and bones.

I paused
to dip bread into the soup, tearing a chunk off between my teeth
before moving onto the next bag.

The
first thing I pulled out was a decorative knife, blade and handle
alike carved from dragon-bone. I turned it in my hands, thumb
brushing across the phoenix carved into her hilt, and the next few
things I pulled out were far less remarkable: there was another
dress, dark blue, this time, as well as a handful of white-gold
chains that were undoubtedly valuable enough to ensure that none of
us ever went hungry again.

The last
item was wrapped in cloth, held in place by thick leather straps.
Using the knife I'd recently liberated, I cut through the
restraints as though slicing the air itself, and carefully sheathed
the blade, terrified it'd become unwieldy.

I peeled
the cloth back layer by layer, and what started as something big
enough to conceal a chest piece melted away until there was nothing
in my lap but a small wooden box, no doubt filled with more
trinkets. It was unremarkable; nothing was carved into its surface,
and while there was a latch, there was no lock. I tilted the box to
the side and something rattled within. Another chain or a
ring.

Licking
a stray drop of soup from my thumb, I opened the box, and found
neither silver nor gold.

White
met my eyes. Not the pure white of dragon-bone, but white
nonetheless.

And more importantly, it
was
bone.

The sort
of bone I'd spent hours staring at while at sea, lost in the pages
of a tome dedicated to the phoenixes.

CHAPTER XII

My
father had grown and raised much of his own food, bought anything
he needed from Birchbridge, and though there was a small stockpile
in the cellar, he hadn't been expecting company of any sort. The
supplies he had didn't stand a chance against a pane's stomach – or
indeed against Akela's – and began to dwindle noticeably within a
fortnight.

Not
wanting to get this far only to starve, Akela and I headed to
Eaglestone. Our plan was to walk there, buy all we could with a
portion of the gold Atthis was holding onto, and pay someone to
take us back by cart as close to the village as we could get
without drawing suspicion. We could walk the rest of the way, and
no one would know where we were going.

Half a
day into our journey, a woman taking cages of chickens to a farm
beyond Eaglestone rolled past us, glanced back, and said if we
didn't want to walk, we'd better hurry up. Beaming, Akela jogged
after the cart, hopped into the back, and held out a hand to help
me up.

It was a
far cry from the carriage I'd taken to Chandaran, as worn as it'd
been. Akela and I sat on the same level as the chickens and the
sides of the cart groaned as we leant against them.

“Ah,
yes. Much better. I am thinking we are getting to Eaglestone a lot
faster now!” Akela declared, pushing a finger through the bars of a
cage to scratching a chicken atop the head. “Once again, I am
directing all my thanks your way, kindest of strangers.”

The
coins chimed together in my pocket with every bump in the road, and
I kept my mind busy by going over all the things we needed. More
flour, for a start; Akela and my father's joint efforts hadn't yet
been enough to teach Atthis to bake what they considered to be a
worthy cake. Kouris was happy to hunt within the forest, so we
didn't have to worry about transporting livestock home. It was a
shame she couldn't have come with us, but we were rightly cautious
after what had happened on the way back from Praxis.

Eaglestone was a shadow of the town it'd once been, but none
within remarked on any changes.

I
squinted at the wall around the town, worried I'd come to the wrong
place, and Akela waved the woman and her chickens off. She'd
insisted on giving her a few coins for her troubles, but we still
had more money than I rightly knew what to do with.

“You
know, Northwood, I am thinking to myself, I am thinking that once
we are being done with all this nonsense, once it is being
finished, I am buying a nice house, and I am raising chickens,”
Akela told me as we strolled into Eaglestone. “What are you
thinking? I am making quite the farmer, yes?”

“I'm not
sure having chickens and nothing else makes you a farmer,” I said,
stepping onto the busiest street around, heading for the
market.

“Then I
am also growing apple trees, yes. They are not taking much care,
no?”

“Less
than chickens,” I said, and she nudged me in the side, almost
knocking me into someone.

Two
years ago, I'd thought all the world had come to gather in
Eaglestone. Now, I was disappointed by what little the market had
to offer. There were dozens of stalls, merchants struggling to
raise their voices over one another, but it was nothing compared to
Mahon in the early evening, goods brought from distant lands in
ships that didn't quite remember where they'd been. Everything in
Eaglestone repeated itself: the clothes were all the same, only
dyed in different shades, and the only variation within the food
came in the form of a few coppers.