White Hall (The High King: A Tale of Alus Book 10) (17 page)

“You can see through its eyes and direct it. Can you hear too? I can imagine a rabbit’s ears are way more sensitive than ours,” she said looking as if she were lost in thought.

Nodding, he replied, “Yeah, wind hitting the grass or even the rabbit’s footfalls sound much louder than we would hear.”

“So when you’re traveling with the animal with your mind, you can make it go where you want so you could use it like a spy? I bet that kind of magic would be useful for the wizards. I know air wizards use their minds separated on the winds to search.

“My brother took me on the winds once. I loved it. Do you fly with the birds then?”

“Occasionally,” he admitted freely and wondered what the girl could be thinking by asking such questions.

Thinking hard about the time Cheleya told her about being a dragoness, Katya’s memory told her several things and the girl began to piece something together.

“Can you use something as small as a sparfinch or would it have to be larger like a sparon or owl?”

Sweat began to bead on his forehead again. This line of questioning was getting remarkably close to the truth all of a sudden, the boy worried. “I suppose either could be used.”

“Have you ever tried to use a sparfinch? I would think that they would have remarkably small brains, though I guess a wizard’s brain isn’t literally inside of its head.”

“Once,” Piotr stated, but refused to say when.

Moving to pull Cheleya away enough to whisper in her ear, Cheleya whispered back in confusion shaking her head. Katya nodded as she said something again and the boy quickly wished that the noise from downstairs didn’t make it so hard to hear what the girls were saying.

Cheleya kicked off a pair of slipper like shoes. She had been talked into them by the younger girl. She always seemed to wear short leather boots, but Katya had thought she might enjoy trying the lighter foot wear while dancing.

“Did you notice the sparfinches resting above the porch at the Calamira Inn?” the girl asked as Cheleya slid her skirt off onto the ground. Her top was short enough that her silk bottoms were revealed while her blouse remained, but her arms crossed beneath her small breasts as if waiting to see what he would say.

“Um,” he tried to stall as the first drops of sweat began to get into his eyes. It would be hard to pretend that the little amount of dancing they had done could produce the moisture, though as he tried to force the shirt to move from time to time, maybe that would be just as likely an excuse. “Can you just remove the spell from my shirt, please? I am feeling really uncomfortable now.”

Katya moved to his side forcing his body to face the dragoness and nodded, “Did you know that Cheleya isn’t uncomfortable in her skin and do you know why?”

At the cue, Cheleya took off the blouse tossing it on the bed.

“Why are you blushing? I think that you have seen them, haven’t you?” Katya demanded angrily inferring the other girl’s petite breasts.

“Ok, Niklaus convinced me to use a sparfinch to fly up by the window. You weren’t supposed to be undressing when I did it, but they wanted to see if I could link them into a vision from a bird,” he confessed realizing that the younger girl had figured out at least part of what happened in Calamira.

Gasping in anger, Katya gave the boy a push and scolded him, “You took those boys in your vision too? Did they see everything and hear everything as well?”

“They couldn’t hear anything, but they saw,” the boy said with a wince. He had banged into the wall, but being forced to admit his little sin was probably worse than the pain, he thought.

Katya started to cover her chest as she thought back to that afternoon and sighed in relief saying, “Well, at least I kept my bra on, so you didn’t see everything!”

He nodded, but couldn’t help blushing even so.

Katya covered herself again and asked, “Did you do it again? Have you been looking at us in our room every day?”

He shook his head and said, “Only that first day, I’ve been telling the guys that I can’t find a bird to do it since then.”

Before they could establish anything else, the door opened. So caught in their interrogation were they that none of the three had heard the sound of a key turning in the lock or the jostling of the handle.

A startled gasp as Iris stood in the doorway in shock surprised them all. 

Chapter 9- Under the Red Moon

Iris stood in shock looking at Cheleya naked save for her silk panties, while Piotr stood beyond the girl, but standing beside Katya luckily still fully dressed.

“What do you think you three are doing!?” the apprentice exclaimed unable to process what she was seeing.

Katya ordered quickly, “Close the door and get in here already!”

Responding immediately to the command without even thinking it through in her astonishment, the apprentice did as she was told. She couldn’t even recover as Katya asked Cheleya, “Do you think we should trust her?”

“Trust me with what?” Iris remained stunned and was just trying to catch up to the scene she had stepped into. She was having trouble seeing, as well as she blinked away tears from her eyes, feeling the wet drops streaking her cheeks.

Cheleya looked unsure of herself and Katya clarified for the dragoness saying, “Well, the peeping Tom must already know, so as long as he can keep his secret better than he did with me interrogating him, you should be all right. It’s up to you if you want to tell her the whole truth though.”

Iris looked at Katya and realized this untrained girl was ordering her around. An unofficial novice shouldn’t be able to tell her what to do and she was older than her by four years as well. Anger started making the apprentice want to snap at the girls. Stripping in front of the boy, what were they trying to do?

“You had better tell me the truth or... or... I don’t know exactly, but you will wish that you had!”

Moving to take Iris’s hands, Cheleya breathed out a sigh and said, “Katya was keeping my secret, but apparently Piotr discovered it when he sent a bird to snoop through our window.” Glancing to the boy, the little blonde seemed to need to clarify and added, “Twice.”

Mortified, Iris looked at the boy aghast. What had he seen?

Groaning at Cheleya’s sloppy divulging of the truth, Katya stepped in and said, “When we were in Calamira, apparently the boys convinced Piotr to use his magic to let them see through a bird’s eyes. And what do young, stupid boys want to see most?”

“Girls?” Iris said going white as a sheet.

Katya nodded and continued. “Aside from that, young Piotr,” she began to gesture as if she were telling some bedtime story to the room as the younger girl called the older boy young, “also listened in to an important conversation between Cheleya and myself. Do you wish to tell it or shall I?”

Cheleya grinned at the younger girl’s strange sense of drama playing out, even as Piotr seemed to want to cringe further into the corner, though escape would have been preferential.

Katya continued her dialogue. “Cheleya is from Mar’kal and was apparently learning to become a dragon mage, whatever that is, when her human teacher tried to steal from the Academy. She walked in on him by mistake and he broke her amulet which lets her change into a che’ther.”

“It turned me human,” Cheleya clarified quickly making Iris frown in further confusion.

Clearing her throat, as Katya was using a deeper voice than normal to sound like a narrator speaking, she continued, “To turn her human,... why exactly?” she asked coming out of character a moment.

“To use dragon mage magic, it is easier to be human size so that I can fly,” Cheleya stated freely now that her secrets were pretty much on the table with the three young people around her. A weight seemed to have lifted as she found more confidantes to confide in as well.

“Ooh kay,” Katya replied confused, but filed that away for later. “The mean ol’ teacher broke her amulet trapping her as a human before throwing her from a tall tower to her certain death. Only a last remaining drop of her magic remained to save our sweet Cheleya from death, but the wizard wasn’t through and chased her all the way to Hala trying to kill her several times, until he was defeated.

“Unfortunately for our heroine, she remains trapped hoping to find a wizard that might one day save her!”

Finishing with a little bow, the younger asked the girl of the story, “Does that about cover it?”

“Close enough,” Cheleya nodded and asked Iris, “Have you ever smelled something sweet in the air around me?”

The apprentice nodded still too much in shock to say anything.

Lifting her blonde hair near the girl’s face to breathe it in, the dragoness said, “It is part of the magic of the charm. Kel’lor is a warrior type and gives off a warning scent that makes him scarier than he really is, while I like people and apparently make them want to protect me from my scent.”

“And why are you naked?”

Katya laughed and shook her head saying, “Sorry, I was trying to interrogate him and it worked. I forced the confession out of him and without even having magic to do it. Since I remembered seeing a finch on the window sill when we were talking that day, and had seen them on the porch of the Calamira Inn; I deduced that Piotr had used the bird to spy on us.

“He could hear us too and discovered Cheleya’s secret when she told me in our room.”

Turning on him, she continued, “But what I don’t know is what he saw the second time.”

“Second time?” Iris asked with a frown glaring at the boy.

“You were asking why she’s naked,” Piotr said trying to get her off of that question back to Cheleya.

“Well, Cheleya showed me that she has no hair to try and convince me that she is actually a dragon, and we recreated that act to force you to confess once. Now you, mister, are trying to dodge the question,” Katya countered slapping his cheek lightly as if to punish him.

“I found an owl before bed that night hoping to hear whether Cheleya would tell Iris and Briahnna her secret in case I accidentally said something then it wouldn’t be as bad, if other people knew it. Cheleya wouldn’t blame Katya, since she would have been the only one to know otherwise.”

“Aw,” Katya said putting her fingers on his chin moving his head back and forth lightly as if he were something cute like a baby. Then her fingers squeezed very hard and he could feel her nails digging in as she demanded, “And then what did you perverts see, because I can tell all three of you did it together again.”

Closing his eyes against the pain and expecting worse, he confessed, “Everything when you got ready for bed.”

“Aw, dang it!” The little blonde cursed as she let him go to add, “You saw me without my bra then. No fair!”

Iris turned white and asked, “All of us?”

He kept his eyes closed and nodded feeling very ashamed because he really liked Iris too.

“Would you put your clothes on, Cheleya?” the apprentice asked wanting to sit down on the bed without having to look at the beautiful girl any closer.

“Some people don’t believe that I am a che’ther until they see that I didn’t know to put hair... elsewhere,” the dragoness finished tentatively knowing from her friends from Staron that she wasn’t supposed to mention such things, especially in front of a boy.

“I believe you. Just get dressed so I can try to think,” Iris sighed closing her eyes so she could sit.

Katya seemed almost completely at ease with all of it and said, “I’m almost thinking that we need to get revenge like forcing him to streak through the town without his clothes or something.”

“Please, don’t,” the boy said worriedly.

Cheleya moved to release her spell on his clothes and Piotr found that his arms had gone to sleep as he tried to shake out the pins and needles as his blood flowed properly again. The pretty blonde pulled on her blouse and skirt quickly before waiting to put on the slippers since they would take only a second.

Iris stood up and looked at the other three looking very serious. “Fine, Piotr, Katya, we must all swear not to tell Cheleya’s secret unless she decides to stop keeping it.”

The apprentice looked at the pretty, little blonde and asked, “So why are you going to White Hall then?”

Katya looked interested having never truly thought to ask her friend fully. She figured if it was truly important, Cheleya would tell her.

“Since my mother hates magic and seeing me in this body always made her angry, I asked Ambassador Theress if he thought that I could go where the great battle mage Sebastian Trillon had gone to school. Perhaps I could learn how to be a battle mage, though it seems a lot like being a dragon mage in some ways. I also started to be able to heal, because it is so similar to alteration magic.”

Iris was forced to ask, though Piotr did not know of that magic either, “Alteration magic, like what you did with the blouse?”

Pointing at Piotr, Cheleya said, “Like when I turned his shirt to stone or changed the color of your blouse and made it the right size for you.

“When I started making my clothes from a dead wizard’s clothing, I had to learn how to make my magic stitch it together and change the color and texture. Those things are part of alteration magic, but no one ever uses it in Mar’kal. They think that it is frivolous magic, so it isn’t taught.