Dragonoak: The Complete History of Kastelir (15 page)

“Very well,” Sir Ightham said, and any reluctance in her voice was feigned, to stop Sir Luxon from thinking he'd got what he wanted too easily. “What will you do now?”

Sir Ightham didn't offer her hand, but Sir Luxon reached out for it, shaking it heartily. Still not wanting to react, Sir Ightham stared at him until he was quite done, and he returned her hand with a deep chuckle.

“It's back to Thule for me. It's simply a matter of waiting for His Highness to realise that you've truly—retired,” Luxon said, and looked at me, speaking to Sir Ightham all the while. “You're all set. See yourself out of Felheim, and do it
quickly
, Ightham. Otherwise you really will have the Kingdom's finest after you.”

Sir Luxon bowed to both of us before leaving, not sparing a glance back as he lost himself in the crowd. My eyes were fixed on a brick in the bakery's wall. I didn't dare to face Sir Ightham, after all I'd heard; it didn't matter that most of it only created more questions for me, because I could
feel
the mood of the whole situation and knew that Sir Ightham was in more trouble than I'd thought her to be. She didn't strike me as a coward, as a deserter, and I knew well enough the sort of things that a person could be made to run from.

“Rowan,” she said slowly, and the bricks slipped from my vision. Her fingers curled into fists at her side, as tight as her voice. “What you just witnessed: know that Luxon is not a man to be trusted, or to be taken lightly.”

“I'm not going to—”
say anything
, but Sir Ightham didn't care to hear it. She waved a hand in the direction of the inn.

“Go to Rán – her room's directly left of yours – and ensure that she's awake. Tell her to meet me at midday,” she said, eyes burning a hole in the crowd. “She knows where.”

Sir Ightham was gone before I could part my lips to speak, swallowed whole by the crowd. I told myself that she'd be fine; Sir Luxon had left with what he wanted. With no chance of finding Sir Ightham alone, I doubled-back towards the inn.

Rán's door was unlocked. There was little need for a pane to bother with a key; any intruding human would've tripped over themselves in an effort to get away. I almost did the same thing when I peered in after knocking and not getting an answer. She was curled on her side, chest rising and falling, and I smothered the urge to back away from the slumbering mountain.

I tiptoed across the room, nudging her shoulder to wake her up. It worked all too well. She snapped awake, sat bolt upright on the floor, and pulled me towards her. I tried to squirm out of her grasp until I realised that she wasn't tightening her hold on me. With my hands on her shoulders for balance and her hands covering most of my back, I watched as she tilted her head back and yawned, giving me a glimpse of more fangs than I thought possible to count.

“Always doing the dragon-slayer's dirty work, aren't you,” she said, screwing her gold eyes shut and blinking to adjust to the onslaught of daylight. “What's the emergency now? Someone question her honour?”

“Actually...”

I couldn't help but notice how close we were. I could see thin white scars marring her dark skin, could see myself reflected in the black of her eyes. I was close enough to see the grain of her horns and hesitated not out of fear, but to appreciate the fact that I was put at ease mere inches from her tusks.

Rán scratched behind a twitching ear, then placed her hand between my shoulder blades, waiting for me to continue. I glanced away, but only for half a second. Sir Ightham hadn't told me to hold my tongue, but if she wanted Rán to know what had happened, then she could tell her herself.

“Something like that,” I said, letting one corner of my mouth tug into a frown. “Listen—I know you can't tell me what's happening, and I know that's supposed to be for my own good, but do you think I should be here?”

“That's a funny question, yrval,” Rán said, “You're worried about what's going on, about any danger, when usually, any person on this backwards continent would be running from what you are. Makes me think you don't know the half of what your sort get up to.”

“What—” I started, but Rán tapped a claw against my nose as she rose to her feet. She promptly bowed, curved horns grazing the ceiling even with her back arched.

“The dragon-slayer told me a little about you. Nothing too personal, mind,” Rán went on to say as she reached for the orange sash bundled on the bed. “Just about you being cooped up in that village, pretending to be a healer. Reckon you're gonna figure out a few things along the way.”

I folded my arms across my chest, not caring that Rán was avoiding giving me a real answer. My initial reaction was to say
Sir Ightham speaks about me—?
but I stood my ground and said, “What do you know about people like me?”

“Not much,” Rán admitted with a shrug. She held her sash out in her arms, shaking it flat. “Not met many. Well—not met many and been aware of it. But down in Canth, people aren't so pointlessly aggressive.”

Rán paused, furrowing her brow as she wrapped the sash around the leathers she'd slept in.

“Scrap that. They're pointlessly aggressive alright – you ever tried living in a pirate town? – but not about these things. If anything, necromancers are revered down there.”

I couldn't swallow the idea that not everyone hated and feared necromancers. Canth was still a myth to me, something from my brother's stories; it had no bearing on my life, and Rán was only trying to cheer me up. I said nothing in reply, despite the questions that were clawing at me, and tugged on Rán's arm, leading her out of the room.

We took our bags with us. A guest paused in the lobby, confused when the staircase groaned in protest of Rán's feet, and made himself scarce when he spotted a pane. The woman working behind the counter kept her eyes on us, ensuring that Rán didn't reshape the doorway on the way out, and didn't say that she hoped we'd stay again.

“Everything okay down there?” Rán asked, dropping a hand atop my head.

I'd fallen into a well of thoughts and was having troubling clawing my way out, but Rán's hand did something to help. I looked up at her, nodding, deciding there'd be plenty of time for plenty of questions later. What had transpired between Sirs Ightham and Luxon seemed to be far more pressing than necromancy.

“Sir Ightham said to meet her at noon,” I told her as we set off through the parting crowd. “She said you know where to go.”

“That I do,” Rán agreed, fingers lingering on my shoulder as she pushed herself up to her full height, humming thoughtfully when she spotted a clock on the side of a tower. “Gives us a little time. Treated yourself to breakfast yet, yrval?”

“Something came up,” I said with a wince of a smile, and Rán declared that she knew the best place to go. Not that she'd been to Benkor in a number of years, mind, but she was sure it must still be in business.

I was certain the place we eventually found ourselves at wasn't the establishment Rán had spoken of, if it existed at all, but the food there smelled better than any imaginary café could hope to. The owners were a cheerful pair of twins, selling fresh bread and roasted meat, and when they spotted Rán, one of them said, “Good timing—just pulled this out.”

They held out a raw leg of meat as they spoke, and I began to see that Rán was constantly stepping between two worlds. The one where she was a monster, carving her way through crowds and being turned away from shops and inns and taverns, and another where people greeted her warmly and she responded in kind.

If it was like that for the pane, perhaps there really was a similar duality for necromancers, even if it was across the Uncharted Sea and buried beneath a story.

We wandered through the city with our breakfast in hand. I kept an eye out, hoping to see Sir Ightham, but quickly concluded that Rán wasn't heading anywhere in particular. I stuck close to her side, walking along the sunny side of the street that she favoured, and through the crowd, spotted a second pair of horns drifting towards us.

“Oh!” I grabbed Rán's arm. Her pace slowed for all of a step, and she returned to wrapping her tongue around the near-clean bone as though I'd pointed out nothing more than another human.

The second pane moved through the shadows, leaving as much of the street between himself and Rán as he could.

He was taller than she was, something I hadn't believed to be possible, but his horns weren't as long. They'd yet to start curving back, and his skin was black, making the two pane look as different as Sir Ightham and I did.

I craned my neck trying to fix my eyes on him as Rán hurried me along. Neither of them looked at each other, despite the way the street buzzed with talk of two pane, and once he was out of sight, I said, “Why didn't you say hello?”

“Are you always saying hello to every human you pass?” Rán asked, not annoyed, but not looking down at me, either.

“No, but—it's not as if I'm in a world of pane, and I've only run into one human in days!”

Rán shrugged.

“Those are the laws,” she said, but she said it in a way that made me think twice about asking any more questions.

I stood straight, wrapped an arm around Rán's, and leant against it as we carried on through the city.

They were making preparations for the Phoenix Festival in a square we came across. There weren't any decorations out, nor was there any of the entertainment I was used to on display, but people sat behind tables covered in scrolls. Queues formed in front of them as people scribbled something down and then left. I only realised it was for the Phoenix Festival because of the golden bird embroidered onto one of the cloths draped across a table.

If my village needed months to prepare for the fifteen hundredth celebration, then Benkor had likely been making arrangements for twice as long. I thought back to the festival, to how cheerful everyone was to recall that the Necromancy War was over. Our ancestors had fled the Bloodless Lands and we'd shaken off the shackles of our old gods. The necromancers were dead and gone, and Kondo-Kana had met her end at the bottom of the ocean.

I'd always smiled and laughed and sung along, because I was a healer and nobody ever questioned that.

“Do the pane celebrate this too?” I asked as we drifted close enough to one of the tables to learn that they were taking on volunteers to hang the lights around the city.

“It's a ridiculous human tradition,” Rán huffed, rolling her shoulders back, “The same as most things: remember what you want, omit what you'd rather forget, change whatever makes you look bad. The pane aren't about to be wasting their time on something of the sort.”

“Right,” I agreed with an unsteady laugh. It hadn't seemed ridiculous to me at the time. Michael had never questioned the truth of it, and so I hadn't, either.

“Come on,” Rán said, nudging me away from the festival preparations. “Let's go track down that dragon-slayer before she gets herself into any more trouble.”

It wasn't quite noon, and we took the long way around to wherever we were going. Rán talked all the while, telling me that Benkor was the same as ever, once you looked past all that had changed, and pointed to this store and that, reading all the signs and plaques aloud to me.

I didn't forget anything she'd said about Canth or necromancers, nor did I managed to put thoughts of Sir Luxon or the Phoenix Festival out of mind, but it was easy to focus on other things in Rán's company.

We looped around to the entrance of Benkor, and I was in the middle of telling Rán a story she was enjoying far too much, considering that it was about little more than wandering sheep, when she nudged my shoulder and nodded towards Sir Ightham, over by the stables.

I broke away from Rán, relieved that nothing had happened in my absence – as though my presence would've stopped it in the first place – hurrying to rejoin her, when I saw who she was with.

There, in the shade of the stable, stood my brother.

My first thought was betrayal. Sir Ightham had only let me tag along because waiting for my brother to collect me was easier than prying me off herself. I marched over, meaning to declare that I wasn't going back with Michael, but faltered when he caught sight of me.

He started so much he almost tripped over backwards. If nothing else, he hadn't expected to run into me. Hurrying over, he hit me around the side of the head with an open hand. There was nearly enough force behind it to make me blink.

“Rowan!” he exclaimed. “What the hell do you think you're doing out here? Do you have any idea how worried we've been? What are you playing at?”

Michael gripped my shoulders and shook me in the middle of the street. I decided it was a good idea to kick him in the shin, and he hopped back, hissing.

“What am
I
doing here? What are
you
doing here?” I asked, throwing my hands out to the side as he made a fuss of his leg.

“I have a
reason
to be here, unlike some people,” he said proudly, forgetting his pain and straightening. “I wanted to send Sir Ightham's things by raven, you know, but it seems that I was right in not trusting the mail. And a good thing, too! If I hadn't come here directly, who's to say what would've happened! Beyond me and dad assuming you met your end at the bottom of a ditch, a-any...”

Michael trailing off in the middle of a lecture was an event in and of itself. I followed his gaze to find Rán wandering up to us. Michael stepped back, and so did I; only I backed into Rán, who put a hand on my shoulder and bowed down.

“Collected another one, have we?” she asked, nodding towards Michael. From the way his hands were shaking, I didn't think he was capable of absorbing anything we were saying. “Now, if you don't mind me saying, this one looks an awful lot like you, yrval.”

“My brother,” I explained, grounding myself with a sigh. I didn't understand what Michael was doing there, but I could relish in the fact that he was scared and I wasn't; that I knew something and he didn't. “Although what he's doing here, I can't say. When Sir Ightham said we were meeting a contact, I thought it'd be someone... important.”

His face remained pale, but Michael came back to enough of his senses to snap out, “
Hey—
!” before boldly stepping closer and tugging me towards him. “That's a
pane,
” he hissed in my ear.