Bone, Fog, Ash & Star (2 page)

“Maybe,” Eliza said lazily.

“Why don’t we begin the party without them?” he suggested.

“No,” said Eliza. There was a flutter of dark wings somewhere within her and she sat up, breaking into a grin. “They’re coming,” she said.

A moment later they all saw the bright speck of gold on the horizon. As it drew nearer, it became recognizably one of the Mancer dragons.

The camels edged away, uneasy, as the huge, shimmering dragon landed close to the camp. Foss came towards Eliza with open arms, his fair hair and white robe billowing in the afternoon breeze, his eyes as dazzling as the sun itself. Before he reached Eliza, Nell had raced past him and hurled herself onto her best friend.

“Happy birthday!” she cried.

Eliza laughed and hugged her, then pulled herself out of the embrace to greet Foss. Now all was well. Everybody was here. It didn’t matter that they were in the middle of the desert instead of on Holburg. This was as much as she could hope for.

~~~

They ate figs and olives as the sun went down and the moon rose. The surrounding dunes went from deep gold to fiery red to ghostly white. The Sorma played music and they all danced around a fire on the cooling sand. Eliza’s mother Rea sat on a blanket and clapped her hands while the others danced, her red hair bright by the firelight. Rom danced circles around her and she laughed up at him.

When they were tired of dancing they set off fire-flares into the desert sky.

Nell and Eliza lay side by side on the sand and watched the fire-flares explode into dazzling showers of colour.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said Eliza. “I know it’s nay easy for you to take time off right now.”

“Lah, I couldnay miss your birthday!” said Nell. “Anyway, I brought my notes with me.” She pulled a cream folder, thick as a book, out of a stylish satchel to show Eliza. “This is it. Everything I’ll need for the Austermon Entrance Exam.”

Austermon was the top university in the Republic. Nell had her sights set on studying cetology there with the renowned marine biologist Graeme Biggs. With top grades and countless academic awards from prestigious Ariston Hebe Secondary School, Nell was certain to be accepted, but she needed to a win a full scholarship if she was going to afford it. That meant acing the notoriously difficult entrance exam, as well as the interview.

“I’ve got my own shorthand, aye, and I’ve been reviewing nonstop,” said Nell. “I dinnay recommend trying to study on the back of a dragon, though. I lost a few pages, and I had to get Foss to make the dragon land so we could look for them. They’d fallen in the top of a tree and it was very awkward getting them all. He got a bit annoyed with me, I think. It’s hard to tell when he’s annoyed, though, dinnay you find?”

Eliza laughed, and then said carefully, “Charlie was disappointed that you didnay ask him to come get you.”

“It just seemed easier this way,” said Nell. “Besides, I like dragons. Much smoother ride, aye.”

Eliza rolled over on her side to look at her friend. Nell’s face was lit up by the fire-flare exploding overhead, her violet eyes reflecting the shower of brilliant sparks. Her light brown hair formed a pool of silken waves around her head. She was a beautiful girl and perhaps too much aware of it.

“Is everything all right between you and Charlie?” Eliza asked. “He thinks you’ve been avoiding him. And it’s true we’ve hardly spent any time together this past year. The
three
of us, I mean.”

“Everything’s fine,” said Nell airily. “I’ve just been busy. And lah, you’re the one who’s really my friend. Charlie’s your friend and of course I’m fond of him too, but I cannay make time to see him when I’ve got so much studying to do.”

“All right,” said Eliza. “But I think his feelings are a little hurt.”

Nell rolled her eyes. “He’s a mite oversensitive. He hardly showed his face in Kalla for months after we got back from Tian Xia. And now he thinks
I’m
avoiding
him?”

Eliza sighed and dropped it. She didn’t want to argue tonight and it would inevitably be sticky getting in the middle of whatever had come between her friends. It was true that Nell was under a lot of pressure lately. She decided to wait until after the Austermon exam to broach the subject again.

“I think that’s it for the fire-flares!” shouted Rom.

Nell bounced upright. “Let’s give Eliza her presents!”

The others laughed.

“Now is as good a time as any,” Rom conceded.

“I agree!” said Eliza.

“Mine first!”

The sat around the dying fire. Foss looked like a golden giant, beaming and luminous among the dark-skinned Sorma – Eliza’s grandmother Lai and her toothless grandfather Kon, her many aunts and uncles and cousins. Rom sat with his arm wrapped around Rea and she rested her head on his shoulder peacefully. From her satchel Nell pulled out a perfectly wrapped box with a purple ribbon around it and handed it to Eliza. Inside was a leather shoulder strap with a long beaded scabbard attached.

“I made it!” said Nell proudly. “It’s for your dagger, aye. So you can look a little more stylish while you tote that thing around! Look, you wear the strap across your chest like this. You can move the scabbard so the blade is against your back or at your hip. See?”

Eliza hugged her friend, touched that even while she was cramming for exams Nell had found the time to make her something special.

Most of her presents were handmade. Her grandmother had woven her a sturdy backpack of camel hair and her aunt Ry had made her a jaunty little cap. Her father had carved her a chess set with hinges at its center, so it could fold up into a little box. Foss, predictably, had brought her a book:
Legends of the Ancients
. It was an unexpected gift, since Foss had originally objected to her wanting to read it at all, insisting it was mostly rubbish. Written centuries ago by an eccentric Mancer and now mostly discredited, it contained some of the more far-fetched theories regarding the Ancients, which Eliza had begun to take an interest in.

“So you’ve changed your mind?” Eliza asked him laughingly. “You think this book might have something useful in it after all?”

“Not a bit,” replied Foss. “No, I think it is arrant nonsense, but it is your birthday and you may read it for pleasure, remembering always that there is no evidence at all to support these wild speculations!”

“I’ve brought some presents back from your friends in Tian Xia,” said Charlie, handing her two small parcels.

The first was from Swarn, the Warrior Witch, who trained Eliza in potions and weaponry. It was a slender white cylinder with the centre bored out and a mouthpiece at one end. Eliza examined it, puzzled. It looked almost like a flute, but a bundle of black darts was attached to the side of it by a tight loop of wire.

“That must be dragon bone, aye,” said Nell, leaning forward eagerly to get a better look at it.

“But what
is
it?” wondered Eliza.

She handed it to Foss and he turned it over in his big gold hands. He took one of the darts and sniffed it, then placed it in the hole at the end.

“Try blowing in the mouthpiece,” he suggested. “Point it away from us, please.”

“And away from the s!” piped up her grandfather, Kon, in the Sorma dialect.

Eliza put the cylinder to her lips and blew. The dart hissed away into the night.

“You will have to ask Swarn,” said Foss, “but I think the darts contain
verlami
, a substance that paralyzes.”

Eliza laughed dryly. “Swarn has a funny idea of what a sixteen-year-old needs,” she commented.

“Let’s see what Uri Mon Lil has got you,” said Charlie.

The wizard’s parcel was wrapped in a delightfully soft, silvery substance that fell away under her touch. At the centre of it lay a little amber dropper with what looked like smoke inside. Attached was a card written in the wizard’s spidery hand:
My dear Eliza, here is a pleasant dream to celebrate your first sleep as a young woman of sixteen! Do come and visit us in Lil soon. Your affectionate friend, Uri Mon Lil.

Eliza smiled. “How just like Uri!” she said.

“When the Sorma turn sixteen, we send them out into the desert for twenty days and they have to find their way back to us,” said Lai, speaking rough Kallanese out of politeness towards the visitors. “But in your case…you have already proved such a test unnecessary.”

“That sounds like a rotten birthday,” said Nell. She had slipped a couple of pages out of her folder and was scanning them by the fading firelight.

“I’ve got something for you too,” said Charlie softly in Eliza’s ear. “But I’ll give it to you later, aye.”

And her heart began to race like when she’d been falling through the sky, braced for impact.

~~~

The Sorma were raking sand over the glowing embers and tents had been set up for Foss and for Nell. It was close to midnight, the moon a bright sliver in the sky. Charlie drew Eliza aside and they walked a little way from the camp.

“Lah, this is your present,” he said, handing her a piece of paper. “Or, this is nay it
exactly
but it tells you what it is.”

Willing her hands to stop trembling, Eliza unfolded it. It was a map of the Western Ocean. Marked out in the centre was a little dot, which Charlie had labelled,
Eliza
.

“I’m almost sure it’s nary been discovered,” he said in a rush. “It’s an island just about ten miles around. You cannay find it on any other map. White beaches and a jungle full of birds and lizards and snakes. There’s a lake on the island too, a small one, and
seventeen waterfalls
. A tiny island but seventeen waterfalls, aye. I’ve named it after you. Whenever you have time, I’ll take you there.”

“Charlie,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse and strange. She cleared her throat and looked up at him. He was watching her nervously. “That’s a wonderful present, aye,” she said. He broke into a smile.

“I thought you’d like it,” he said, relieved.

“I do. Thank you.”

She folded it up again and pressed it between her fingers. Besides Nell, Charlie had been her closest friend for nearly four years now. Whatever it was she felt for him she thought she had always felt, but as she got older it became more urgent somehow. Lately she found it hard to look at him without her heart quickening, and when flying with him the joy was less in the flight than in the excuse to put her arms around him. His uncomplicated friendship was not enough for her anymore. She had said nothing to him of this, at first because she wasn’t sure what she wanted, and then because she was afraid of what he would say if she told him. After all, he had never given her reason to believe that he felt anything but friendship for her.

Alone under the desert sky, she knew she had to tell him, here, now; that there would be no better time for it. But fear froze her tongue.

Have courage, she told herself sternly. You are a Sorceress, and you have done far more difficult and dangerous things than confess your feelings to a boy.

But he wasn’t just a boy, of course. Not literally, for he was a Shade, a shapeshifter, but also because he was
Charlie
, her beautiful Charlie. What could she say to him that would not sound ridiculous? She took a deep breath. It was her birthday. They were apart from the others, hidden by the dark. Suppose she said nothing. Suppose she just took his hands, stepped a little closer, and kissed him.

“Are you sure you like it?” Charlie asked, becoming uncertain. “You look a bit funny, aye.”

“No, I’m…it’s something else. Charlie…”

His expression changed and he took her hands in his. “Eliza! You’ve got me worried now. What’s going on?”

There. He was holding her hands. All she had to do was step closer. Why couldn’t she? Well, she couldn’t. So she would have to speak.

“I’m sorry,” she said feebly. “This is strangely difficult.”

She was cut off by the jolt of her heart and the screaming of ravens, wings beating all around them. The ravens were her Guide and they were telling her something but in her shock and confusion she couldn’t make it out. A sudden fog slithered around their ankles and up, engulfing them. She let go of his hands, reaching for her dagger.

“Stay still,” she said.

A faint whistle and something skimmed her ear. Out of the mist, leaping, somersaulting, flying, came a horde of beings as graceful as acrobats, their clothes and skin and flying hair ash-white. They had no eyes or mouths, just strange blank faces ringed with streaming hair like white flame. Some held curved, glinting swords, others large powerful bows from which arrows rained. Eliza raised a barrier around herself.

“Foss!” she shouted. She had lost Charlie in the fog, didn’t know where to put her barrier around him. “Foss!” she cried again. Then she saw Charlie face down in the sand.

As quickly as it had fallen, the fog lifted. The beings were gone, leaping and spinning over the edge of the dune. She ran to Charlie’s side and turned him over.