Empires of Moth (The Moth Saga, Book 2) (32 page)

Jin looked at his
dragon, then back at Bailey, and she realized: Shenlai was true
master of the empire, sage and councilor and friend to the child upon
the throne.

"Shenlai is
not the only dragon in Eloria," said Jin. "Two more live,
coiling around the thrones of Ilar and Leen. Shenlai has flown to
meet them, yet they will not send aid. We are alone, Bailey of
Sunlight. We must be strong."

She
lowered her head and bit her lip.
As
there are two more dragons, I have two friends in distant lands.
Come
back soon, Torin and Cam. Come back even if no aid is to be found.
Stand with me here.

The next hourglass
turn was a blur of lights, scents, and dreams to Bailey. Servants
took her to chambers where she bathed, ate and drank, and donned
robes of silk. Young women tried to unbraid and brush her hair, and
she sent them fleeing with a glower and curse.

Finally they let
her be, and she rejoined the pack, which camped outside upon the
square, tents raised and nightwolves sleeping curled up into balls.
Soldiers of Yintao patrolled outside the palace, and warriors of
Chanku stood guard among their tents. Bailey found her own tent and
wolf, but she couldn't sleep, even when she pretended to lie in her
old bed at home.

Finally she rose
from her fur blankets, her tent walls dark around her, and drew her
sword. She tightened her lips until they shook. She swung her blade,
up and down, again and again, and with every stroke she imagined
cutting into her enemy's flesh, saving all those who had died around
her.

 
 
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
THE CLOCKWORK KING

Cam was losing yet
another meal over the ship's railing—the latest in a sad string of
them—when he saw the distant glow.

"Camlin,
Camlin!" Linee said, tugging his sleeve. "Land!"

Cam moaned and
staggered back, wiping his mouth.

"Land!"
Linee cried and danced a jig. "Leen. My kind of country."

Queasy and feeling
weaker than a newborn lamb, Cam reached for his skin of spirits,
sloshed the rye in his mouth, and spat. Sailing downriver into Pahmey
last year had been bad enough, but this was worse. For long turns
they had been sailing north through roiling, wavy, bouncy, swaying,
and lurching ocean.

"My country,"
Linee said, hands pressed together against her cheek.

"Hope for the
night," said Suntai, coming to stand beside them.

When Cam looked
ahead, he thought of no hope for Eloria, no armies, no aid. He cared
about only one thing.

"Solid ground
at last."

The captain and his
daughters cried out and pointed. One of the daughters, a stocky woman
who normally laughed and sang, scowled and muttered curses. Her
sisters worked in silence, staring at the lights and whispering.

"This place is
cursed," said the eldest daughter, a doughy sailor with red
cheeks. "That glow is unnatural. That is the glow of ghosts."

Cam felt more of
his latest meal rising and swallowed it down. "I'll take ghosts
over this ship. Keep sailing."

The
Bear
Maiden
's
sails billowed. The ship made way toward the lights, bouncing atop
every wave and making Cam cover his mouth and struggle not to gag. He
tried to focus on the land ahead, watching the lights grow nearer.
The entire horizon glowed. Was this a single city, miles and miles
wide, straddling the whole southern coast of Leen?

"What do you
know of this island, Suntai?" he asked the tall, pale woman.

Suntai narrowed her
eyes. "I told you. I know nothing of this land." She stared
ahead toward the lights and loosened her katana in its scabbard. "Few
in Qaelin do. The people of Leen appear in our old legends. They are
philosophers and stargazers, wise men with flowing robes and flowing
beards. Some say that Xen Qae, founder of Qaelin, was born in
Leen—that all Eloria began on this island." She spat overboard.
"Old stories. Soon you will know. But be careful . . . and stay
near me."

Ignoring the dire
warning, Linee twirled around on the deck. "Oh, it'll be a
beautiful country. I'm sure of it. There will be glowing butterflies,
forests of purple mushrooms, fluffy unicorns, and castles." She
grinned and ran her fingers through her hair. "And they'll
appreciate somebody as beautiful as me, a real queen. Camlin, do you
think they'll have cakes there?"

"I think you
have cake between your ears." He held his belly. "I'm going
to be sick again. Please don't talk about food, and please stop
dancing around."

She stuck her
tongue out, grabbed his arm, and made a point of dancing while
tugging his arm and singing about plum pies. He groaned.

The coast of Leen
grew closer, and Cam squinted and leaned forward. What he had
mistaken for a sprawling coastline city was . . . He rubbed his eyes,
refusing to believe, but his eyes insisted it was true.

"Crystals,"
he said. "A whole damn forest of glowing crystals."

Linee
nodded. "I
told
you. I told you they'd have magical forests."

Cam wasn't so sure
the place was magical. To him the glow seemed ghostly, an eerie
light. At first he thought the crystals silvery like a moon behind
thin clouds, but as they sailed closer, he discerned tints of green
and blue. Wisps floated above the land like haunting spirits. Cam
reached down his collar and fished out his half-sun amulet, symbol of
Idar; he clutched it so tightly it stung his fingers.

"Inagon,"
whispered the sailor's oldest daughter. She had no amulet of her own,
but she made the sign of Idar, a half circle across her chest. "The
land of the dead."

Her sisters cursed
and grumbled. The youngest, a demure girl with a cleft lip, began to
insist they turned back now. The captain emerged upon the deck,
stared at the pale lights, and grew just as pale. He cursed and
prayed and grabbed salt from his pockets to toss into the water.

"There is no
such place as Inagon," Cam said, turning from one sailor to
another. "A cursed land that punishes sinners after death?
That's just a story they tell children to scare them into obedience.
We have the same story in Arden. We're in Eloria, the land of night.
They don't even know Idarism here." He turned back toward the
coast. "It's not haunted. It's . . . pretty."

He heard the lie in
his own voice. The closer they sailed, the odder this place seemed.
The crystals jutted along the coast, reminding him of tombstones. Cam
loosened his collar.

He turned toward
Suntai and whispered to her, "The sailors call this the land of
the dead. What do you think, Suntai? What do your people say of the
afterworld? Does it . . . look like this?"

"In some
stories it is so." Suntai stared ahead grimly, then turned to
him and gave a rare grin, revealing her canines. "If this is the
land of the dead, we will raise them to fight our war. We sail on."

They anchored
offshore and the companions climbed into a rowboat. The captain
grabbed the oars, but his daughters refused to board, speaking of
curses and ghosts.

"We will stay
until the moon is full," Cam said to the captain as they rowed
toward the ghostly shore. He hoped that would give him time to find
someone—anyone—who could help. "Wait for us, and you'll have
more jewels as payment for the journey back south."

The captain patted
his pocket where his latest payment chinked. "Sometimes I think
my daughters run this ship, and they're a foolish lot. Scared of
ghosts and old stories, they are." He hawked and spat into the
sea. "But they'll wait. They like jewels as much as the next
woman, despite their sordid appearance and abundance of body hair."
He barked a laugh—a jarring sound like a rusty nail against a board.

They oared on—a
rowboat with a grizzled captain, an Ardish soldier and his dethroned
queen, and an Elorian warrior. Their two nightwolves swam alongside
the vessel, eyes reflecting the crystals ahead. Cold wind shrieked as
they reached the shores of Leen.

Cam stepped onto a
beach of coarse black sand. The crystals rose before him, taller than
they'd seemed from afar; they stood as large as pines, silver and
blue and cruel as blades. It was very cold. He shivered and wrapped
his cloak tightly around him, and when the nightwolves emerged from
the water and shook, ice clung to their fur. Linee's teeth chattered
and even Suntai, used to the cold night, grunted as her breath
frosted.

As fast as he'd
dropped them off, the captain began to row back to his caravel, not
bothering to set a single foot ashore.

"Do you think
he'll wait for us?" Suntai asked, smiling grimly.

Cam sighed. "Not
for an instant." He looked around him at the crystal forest. "We
sail back with aid or we're stuck here. So I suppose there's only one
thing to do now." He grinned, teeth chattering. "Roam
around aimlessly and hope we stumble across an army."

"If we don't
freeze to death first," Suntai said, mounting her nightwolf.

The companions left
the shore, heading into the crystal forest.

Cam walked in
silence, letting Linee ride the second nightwolf alone. After so long
at sea, he needed to keep his feet on the ground. As they walked, he
kept craning his neck back, gazing up at the crystals. Their surfaces
were smooth and cold, and when Cam leaned close to a few, he could
see the source of their glow. Tiny creatures floated within them, no
larger than specks of dust. When he squinted, he saw that they were
all different—some creatures had wings, and some were wreathed with
spinning rings, while others simply looked like snakes with glowing
eyes. Each shone a light like the lanternfish in the Inaro River.
Thousands filled each crystal, maybe millions, trapped inside and
spending their lives floating up and down and casting their glow.

"Camlin,"
Linee whispered from her wolf, "where are all the palaces?"
She kicked the air with both feet. "I want to find a palace
already."

"We've only
been walking for moments. Be patient. And stop kicking. You know the
wolves hate that. And for the millionth time, stop calling me Camlin
like you're my mother."

They kept walking.
Moments turned into hours. Hours turned into an hourglass turn, and
soon Cam and Linee were both yawning. As much as weariness, hunger
gnawed on Cam; he had eaten little on the journey at sea, and with
his belly settling, he ached for a meal and a good sleep.

"I want to
make camp!" Linee said, arms crossed. "Tell Suntai I want
to stop."

Suntai growled over
her shoulder. "Be silent! This place is . . ." She looked
around her, contemplating. "Holy."

"It's a holy
bunch of boring." Linee tugged the reins, climbed off her wolf,
and stood among the soaring crystals. "I'm not going another
step until I rest."

Suntai shrugged and
kept riding onward. Linee squealed and climbed back into the saddle.

Yet after another
couple hours, even Suntai slowed down and finally stopped. They spent
a cold, miserable few moments huddled between the wolves, eating what
supplies they had: dry crackers, sausages, and mushrooms. After their
meal, they lay down upon a fur blanket, pulled a second pelt over
them, and nestled together. Cam lay in the middle, his companions
clung to his sides, and the nightwolves curled up around them,
providing some protection from the wind. Even with the fur blankets,
both women holding him, and the shaggy nightwolves, Cam shivered and
could barely sleep for the cold.

I
miss home,
he thought. He tried to imagine that he lay in his bed back in
Fairwool-by-Night, a simple wooden thing his father had built, the
mattress stuffed with straw, the woolen blankets soft and warm. He
even missed staying in the Night Castle in Pahmey, his friends at his
side: silly Hem who wheezed as he slept, Torin who always read some
book before bed, and even Bailey . . . crazy, angry Bailey who always
knew what to do, who always reminded him of home.

Does
that home even still exist?
Cam wondered. Ferius ruled Arden now; with the Sailith Order
spreading, perhaps the monk would rule all of Mythimna, this world
they called Moth. Would the monk burn Fairwool-by-Night to the ground
as revenge against his enemies?

Linee mumbled in
her sleep and nestled closer to him. Again her hair filled his mouth,
but this time Cam didn't mind as much. Suntai shifted at his other
side, pressing against him, breathing deeply in her sleep. Slowly
their warmth drove the chill from Cam, and he slept.

They sat around
their campfire, burning the last of their tallow and eating the last
of their mushrooms.

Have
I led them to death in the cold?
Suntai
thought, staring into the flames, her swords in her hands.
Have
I abandoned my mate, his sister, and all our people to ruin?

This had been a
fool's quest. She had failed. She had arrived in this land with no
map, no plan, nothing but . . . but what? Her courage? Her strength?
The pride of an alpha female?

Suntai snorted,
eyes stinging. What were those worth in a northern hinterland of ice
and stone and no life?

"How long has
it been?" the girl Linee whispered, shivering. A fur cloak
wrapped around her shoulders, and she sipped from her bowl—the last
bowl of food she would eat.

Wrapped in his own
pelt, Cam looked at the hourglass that stood by the fire, its sand
trickling away like their life, like their hope. "Seven
hourglass turns."

By
the eighth we will die,
Suntai thought.

She rose to her
feet. "We move on."

Cam and Linee
looked up at her, eyes weary and sunken, two lost pups. She had
brought them here as proof of Timandra, living demons of sunlight,
but now Suntai saw them as her children, as innocents to protect.
Suntai—taller, older, stronger, wiser—had thought that she could
save them, guide them to hope. She had thought she could lead a pack
of wolves. The pack was gone; her children were freezing and
starving.