Shapeshifters (56 page)

A flurry of wings woke me early on my third morning with the wolves. I opened my eyes to see the descent of ten avians, including a peregrine falcon and a golden hawk. I was desperate to see my own people again, and I hurried to meet them.

With a falcon's ability to dive swiftly and gracefully, Nicias landed and returned to human form first. He practically lifted me off the ground as he hugged me with truly serpiente abandon. I noticed a couple of avians averting their gazes as they landed around us, but I tried to ignore them. Birds would forever look away at displays of affection, just as serpents would forever indulge in them. Some things would never change.

Someone behind Nicias cleared her throat, and he sprang away from me to give her room. The other avians—a half dozen from my mother's Royal Flight, and the rest from among my Wyverns—also stepped back, fanning out protectively around us but giving us space.

My mother hugged me so tightly, I feared for my ribs; I hugged her back just as tightly. “We feared the worst,” she
whispered, refusing to let me go. “Are you all right? Can you fly yet?”

“Yes and no,” I answered, trying to keep up with her quick, anxious questions. Though she had been raised avian and was perfectly capable of assuming their poise, my mother was making no attempt to be calm just then. “I'm fine, mostly, but I can't fly. Did any of you see a wolf on your way here?”

“We saw a lot of wolves,” my mother answered, stepping back with a puzzled expression. “Kalisa's people?”

“No, a …” I sighed. She wouldn't have known Betia from anyone else. “We'll look for her later. What's going on back home?”

“You
are
coming home, right?” my mother asked suddenly.

“Of course. How could you think otherwise?”

She relaxed. “Someone went to great lengths to convince us you left willingly. I can't stay long; there are too many destructive rumors going around in Wyvern's Court. Not to mention your father wanted to go tearing off after you. Nicias can explain everything you need to know. I just had to see you alive and well, and hear from you that you are coming home.”

She glanced back at her guards, who were standing at attention. Kel, the sparrow who led the Royal Flight, was quietly conferring with Nicias; he was nodding, listening to her without ever taking all his attention from me. I wondered where Gretchen was.

Nicias excused himself from Kel and crossed toward us. “I apologize for hurrying you two, but Kalisa's runner said that it was lions who kidnapped you.” He looked at me for confirmation.

“Yes, the mercenaries who came to Wyvern's Court.”

“That being so, I would like to send a few people to track
them as soon as possible.” He did not add aloud that he could not do that when all the avian Wyverns were needed to guard me, and the Royal Flight was needed to guard my mother.

My mother nodded, grasping the problem quickly. “Of course. Oliza, we can speak further when you get home; I need to let your father know that you are okay before he goes and does something foolish.
For the gods' sake be careful,
” she said imploringly before hugging me again.

“I will be.”

“Fly with grace,” she bid me before nodding to Kel and shifting back into her hawk form. About half of the remaining guards from the Royal Flight followed her, and the rest stayed with the small number of my Wyverns who were left.

I turned to Nicias then. “Now, tell me what is going on.”

“People are frantic,” Nicias said, as soon as we had some privacy. “When we found the note—”

“A
note
?”

“In your handwriting,” he continued, “explaining that you had left of your own free will. People saw it before the guard did, and half the court was sure—You
didn't
run, right?”

I shook my head, a little dazed. It was the perfect scheme, convincing people that I had left willingly, so that there would be no conflict when Salem and Sive took their respective thrones. But who?

“Who?” I asked aloud.

Nicias shook his head. “We don't know yet. The runner Kalisa sent told me only what they knew—that you had been taken by mercenaries, and that you had been drugged and couldn't fly. Now that we have found you, we
will
find them. Their leader will know who hired them.”

“And if Tavisan won't tell you?”

Nicias hesitated, reminding me that some falcons were more than capable of finding the information they desired in someone else's mind.

“I'll bring him back to you,” Nicias answered finally. “It will be up to you to decide how we deal with him.”

“What else am I going to find when I get home? What happened with Urban?”

“There haven't been any serious injuries since the attack on Urban,” Nicias said, “but the marketplace has been volatile enough that I've had to assign a couple of my Wyverns to monitor it during the day.” I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. I was a child of peacetime; imagining soldiers policing my home made me sweat. “The three avians who attacked Urban came forward and were arrested. They were all from the Hawk's Keep and had come to Wyvern's Court to visit family during Festival.”

“They just confessed?”

“I understand that Prentice put some pressure on the avian community. Your mother dealt with them.”

“Severely, I hope.”

“Serpiente law would have indentured the three of them to Urban for twice the time that he was unable to work—in this case, until he could dance again—but Urban wanted nothing to do with them. Your mother claimed the time instead and has required them to spend two hours each morning in Wyvern's Court with the scholar Valene, learning about serpiente culture, history, myth and language.”

“A fine and cultural tutoring?” I said, incredulous. What could my mother have been thinking? “If they had assaulted an avian, they would have been exiled from the court, possibly grounded. But they can beat a dancer and get away with it?”

“If they had assaulted an avian,” Nicias said, “other avians
would have been calling for their blood. As it is, your mother feared that exiling them would turn them into martyrs.”

Martyrs. What kind of world did I live in, where there were people who would defend three men viciously beating someone? “I want to speak to them when I get back to Wyvern's Court.”

“You will have a lot to handle once you are home. Your mother—”

“I
need
to speak to them,” I said. “I am sure my mother has addressed the issue to her satisfaction, but I need to look into the eyes of the monsters who would attack a young man just for walking on the ‘wrong' side of the court.”

Nicias nodded slowly. “Of course.” After that, he changed the subject to one that obviously had been gnawing at him the way the attack on Urban had been at me. “Oliza, when you were taken … all your guards thought you were sleeping in the nest, and everyone from the nest thought you had gone back to the Rookery. You were abducted from the middle of Wyvern's Court.” His voice was raw with guilt. “There were signs of a struggle by the statue in the market, but there were dozens of scuffles that morning and the rest of the day, once word got out about what had happened to Urban. We were so focused on minimizing those fights that it wasn't until midday that anyone even noticed you were missing. And once we found the note, half of your guard—including Gretchen—refused to search for you, saying that if you had left willingly, it wasn't their place to drag you back like a disobedient child. Others hesitated because they wanted to obey our captain.

“Actually, I have charges of mutiny and treason hanging over my head right now for blatantly ignoring Gretchen's orders and convincing others to follow me,” he said, “though your parents won't support a trial for either. Unfortunately,
by the time I convinced people to look for you, the rain had washed most of the lions' tracks away. We sent out search parties by air and land and found almost nothing. We failed you.”

“It sounds,” I answered, “more like you were one of the ones who didn't.”

Nicias shook his head. “I swore to protect you, Oliza—not the Arami, nor the heir to the Tuuli Thea, but
you.
Even if you
had
left Wyvern's Court willingly, I would still have been bound to protect you. And not to judge you.” Reluctantly, he added, “I didn't know whether you had wanted to leave, but I didn't want to lose you either way.”

 

The trip home was long and dismal. Within a couple of days some of the serpents from my guard met up with us, but even then we were short several Wyverns.

These were the only ones who had looked for me, I knew, the ones who would not let me disappear into the night. None hesitated to consider Nicias their leader; apparently he had earned the position. They watched me vigilantly, never leaving me by myself for a moment. I appreciated the security, even though I desperately wanted to walk away from the group a little and call for Betia.

None of the serpents had seen a girl by her description on their way here, and while they had seen wolves, they admitted that they couldn't have recognized Kalisa from Velyo in wolf form.

A few of the serpiente glanced quizzically at the
melos
I wore, but they never asked their questions aloud, so I never had to answer them.

Being surrounded by armed guards made me uneasy. In Wyvern's Court, I had rarely been guarded unless I was
somewhere secluded. Never had this many been around me at one time, and never had they been so heavily armed. There had never even been an incident in Wyvern's Court in which my guard had needed to draw a weapon. Ours was not a warriors' society.

Right now, we looked like one. Any stranger who approached us would be seen as a threat, not as a visitor.

Sitting by our campfire and thinking my dark thoughts, I shuddered and felt Nicias put a hand on my shoulder. He sat beside me and stirred the fire in silence.

I needed to tell him the one thing I hated to admit even to myself. He was the only person I knew who might have the power to do something about it. Softly enough, I hoped, that my other guards would not hear, I said, “Nicias, when the lions took me, they …” It hurt to face this, as if saying it would make it real. “It wasn't just the drugs that stopped me from coming home sooner. Those wore off days ago. They clipped my wings.”

He tried to hide it, but there was a moment when I could see his horror, the very response I was afraid I would get from all my people.

“Is there anything you can do?” I asked. “I don't know much about falcon magic, except for how powerful it can be. There
has
to be a way—”

“I wouldn't even know how to begin,” he admitted.

“I know you've been studying further since you came home. I know you have some kind of a teacher. Isn't there someone you can ask?”

“I have been studying,” Nicias answered carefully, “but along very different lines. And as much as I hate to admit it, no one on Ahnmik would help me with this.”

“Why not?” I demanded.

Nicias averted his gaze, the way an avian guard would when he suspected that his monarch was near to hysterics and he wanted to allow her some dignity. The instinctive, infuriating gesture made something inside me snap.

“Nicias, you are one of my oldest friends, and one of my personal guards. You told me that you preferred not to discuss your time on Ahnmik, and I accepted that, because I trusted that you would tell me anything I needed to know. You brought home Hai, a half-falcon heir to the throne, and I accepted that because I knew that your vows left you no choice but to help a cobra in need. You continue to study falcon magic and continue to tell me little about it or about your falcon tutor, and I have accepted
that
because I trust your loyalty. But now, I ask you a direct question about a relevant, necessary topic, and again you refuse me?”

“Oliza, maybe this isn't the best time for—”

“Nicias Silvermead, I am not asking you as your friend. I am giving you an order, as your princess. What is it that you learned on Ahnmik that pertains to me, that makes you step away from me, that makes you study so hard—and makes you so certain that the falcons who seem perfectly willing to teach you whatever it is you are learning will deny you this?”

“They fear you,” he finally answered, looking at me defiantly. He drew a deep breath, trying to get control of himself before he continued, in a softer tone. “You're right. You need to know. Oliza—” He bit his lip, hesitating. “According to the falcon Empress,” he told me finally, his gaze distant, as if he hated to say it, “the Cobriana still possess some of the magic of their ancestors—a dormant power that they can no longer use. The Shardae line also carries latent magic, though again, they cannot use it. The falcons believe that, should those avian and serpiente powers combine, they would become active.”

He looked at me as I struggled to unwind his nervous words.

“
You
carry that magic, Oliza, but thousands of years have passed since anyone has wielded it, and so it is still sluggish in you. The experience you had with Hai after Urban was hurt—the disorientation and lost time—resembles the episodes many falcons have when their magic first wakes. Often they perform incredible, or devastating, feats of magic they would never be able to replicate. Fortunately, yours was fairly mild, which supports the falcon Empress's belief that even if your magic wakes, it will never be strong or reliable. Probably nothing would have happened at all without Hai's magic acting as a catalyst. But when you have a child, he or she will also be born with avian and serpiente power, and the falcons believe that that child
will
be able to wield it.”

I stood and stepped away from him, trying to clear my head. What had happened with Hai and the Obsidian guild had seemed like a fluke, perhaps with a simple and reasonable explanation. I had been raised in Wyvern's Court, not in a falcon's land of magic.