Dragonoak: The Complete History of Kastelir (16 page)

“Her name is Rán,” I said clearly, and saw Sir Ightham bring a hand to her forehead.

“Alright,” she said firmly, tempering the situation. “Let us keep this brief: I asked Michael to come here as a necessity. I did not inform him of your presence, for it is none of my business, and he is merely here to deliver me the documents necessary to cross into Kastelir.”

“—we're going to
Kastelir
?”

Michael's sudden appearance was no longer worth worrying over.

“You didn't know?” Michael asked cheerfully.

Sir Ightham remained stony-faced and Rán shrugged.

“Wait. We're going to Kastelir,” I repeated, desperate to make sense of it. I'd known Michael to be a skilled forger, that much was clear, but the fact that Kastelir was looming beyond the walls of Benkor became startlingly obvious. “We're going to Kastelir and you didn't tell me.”

“It didn't seem pertinent,” Sir Ightham explained. “You hadn't left your village, so I doubt you'll measure much of a difference between Eaglestone and any city Kastelir has to offer.”

“It didn't seem... you didn't think it was important? We're going to
Kastelir
and, and...”

I was battling against panic and outrage while the others watched on, perfectly calm. Rán knew the plan and Michael had been aware that Sir Ightham was crossing into Kastelir for longer than I'd known her, by all accounts. The tips of my ears burnt red.

Sir Ightham hadn't told me that we were heading into a country in a perpetual state of discord, even throughout peacetime, hadn't told me that she was in contact with my brother; it hadn't occurred to her that it might matter.

“Calm down,” Michael said, throwing an arm around my shoulder and dragging me further and further from Rán, where Sir Ightham was close enough for him to pretend to be brave. “You're getting yourself worked up over nothing. Sir Ightham didn't mention Kastelir because it's of no concern to you! We'll head back home before there's too much of a fuss about your absence and let Sir Ightham return to her work without distraction.”

I threw Michael's arm off, certain the buildings of Benkor must be drawing closer for the way my vision dimmed.

“What? I'm not going back. Do you have any idea what will happen if I do? Do you have any idea of how they'll—”

“Yes, yes,” Michael interjected, waving a hand. He frowned at the thought of me continuing, not the reality of what awaited me in the village. “It's terribly hard to be a necromancer, I've heard it a thousand times, but there's work to be done and if only you'd make an effort to get on with things, you'd see that—”

I didn't have the chance to protest. Sir Ightham cut Michael off.

“Rowan is coming with me,” she said firmly, garnering our attention. “If she still wishes to. It would seem that I was mistaken in not divulging our destination sooner.”

I didn't know what to say. Happily, neither did Michael.

There was no arguing to be done with Sir Ightham, and we stood there awkwardly, not looking at one another. We'd acted like children in front of her. Michael presumed to tell me what to do, to act as though dragging me back to the village was an inevitability, and I let myself get flustered and frustrated in the middle of the street.

“... I want to come with you,” I mumbled, still staring at the floor.

Sir Ightham placed a hand on the back of my shoulder, and I thought that if I'd been wrong about the pane, perhaps I was wrong about Kastelir, too.

“Clearly, there's a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding going on here,” Rán said, stepping closer and making Michael flinch. “Let's be taking a moment to sit down and explain as best we can.”

We didn't sit down. Sir Ightham claimed there was no time for that, but we spoke as we collected our horses and headed for the other side of Benkor.

“Sir Ightham is
obviously
doing important work, so I've done what I could to help,” Michael told me, but it was a blind sort of faith that made his words light. He had no idea what she was really doing, either. “Let the surrounding villages and towns believe that she was on her way to Canth and rushed to the elders to let them know that I'd seen her off when she disappeared. That sort of thing. Kastelir was her real destination, of course, which is where I come in—again. While Sir Ightham is no doubt skilled in a great number of things beyond dragon-slaying, I must admit that I have far more practice when it comes to forging certain documents.”

He turned to her, smiling and bowing his head as he spoke. Sir Ightham didn't take her eyes off the road ahead.

“But sensitive documents are rarely safe with ravens. Inn owners probably make half their yearly income on blackmail alone; I thought it better to deliver the items in question, and it would've taken too long to reach Praxis. Thus, here we are, meeting halfway.”

Michael was positively beaming, which only made me more frustrated with him. He reached out, feeling the fabric of my clothes between a thumb and two fingers and took the time to frown.

“What about you, though,” he said, tutting. “Running away in the night. I actually hiked up to the fields, thinking you'd fallen asleep with the sheep again—and all for nothing! Never thought you'd get up the nerve to actually do it.”

He was irritated that I'd done something he hadn't, devoid of a reason as he was.

“We ran into bandits,” I told him, elbowing him in the ribs. “Five of them against Sir Ightham. Oh, and I have my own sword now. And what about Rán? You've been ignoring her all this time. Don't be rude, Michael.”

Michael opened his mouth, not sure where to start – bandits or blades – eyes betraying him and fixing on Rán.

“Good day,” he managed to squeak, and she grinned, letting him see all of her fangs.

“You have my thanks,” Sir Ightham said as we neared the gate to Kastelir. Her fingers hovered over her pouch as Michael, who'd grinned ear to ear at a hint of gratitude, waved a hand in front of him.

“Wait! You can't expect me to leave my little sister behind!” Michael said, clinging to me like an anchor. “It'd be a tad suspicious, don't you think, for a woman of your supposed standing to only take one servant on such a trip. Even if a pane
could
bow to a human, they would never serve one, which takes this, ah... which takes
Rán
out of the equation.”

I was fuming, but did all I could to keep my calm. The guards at the gate were idly watching us from a distance and I didn't want to jeopardise Sir Ightham's plans. I breathed deeply, thought of a way to phrase myself, to explain that I didn't think it was the best idea, because... because what?

Because Michael had more experience out in the world than I did and had proven himself useful already?

Sir Ightham turned to Rán and shared a few words with her in a language I didn't understand, and they both came to the mutual agreement of a shrug.

“Hurry up,” Sir Ightham said.

“Excellent!”

Michael clapped his hands together. With the way he was grinning, anyone would've been forgiven for thinking that Sir Ightham had begged him to come along.

The documents he'd brought were proof of identity. I only had a vague notion of such a thing existing in the first place, but as I learnt at the gate, my Kingdom was eager to keep the Kastelirians out and curious when it came to those who willingly chose to leave. The documents Sir Ightham presented at the gate were squinted over, while Rán's horns negated any need to fuss with paper.

I didn't need to be told to keep quiet. I made myself as inconspicuous as I could, piecing together Sir Ightham's story as the guards questioned her: she was a wealthy trader from Thule – the papers were stamped to say as much – by the name of Eden Westerdale, headed towards Riverhurst and the cities along the border to help redirect some of the trade from Praxis, through Benkor.

Michael and I were her servants. Michael chimed in to say he was the cook, though he'd never made the effort to prepare his own meals at home.

We were let through without too much hassle. The guards were far more concerned with keeping people out than keeping them in – if we wanted to venture into Kastelir, it was on our heads – and Michael and I dragged Sir Ightham and Rán's things through to look the part.

I tried to catch a glimpse of Kastelir, pushing myself up onto tiptoes for a better view, but the gate was a corridor of a building, and we were at the far end of it. Sir Ightham stopped on the way out, leaving Rán to look over our three horses – Michael had come to Benkor with his own horse, Patrick – as she went to speak with a man sat behind the iron bars of a small window looking into a small room.

He grunted in greeting. Sir Ightham emptied her pouch onto the counter, gold ringing against stone, and said, “We need to exchange our money to the Kastelirian currency,” for my benefit.

“Is it much different?” I asked, pushed up on tiptoes, watching the man reach through to gather and count the coins. It'd never occurred to me that Kastelir would use different coins; money was money, to my understanding.

“It's mostly aesthetic. See here—” She took one of the coins the man was counting out. It looked like a mark, was just about the right size and colour, but she turned it on her palm, revealing a bear's head worked into the metal in place of the royal family's sigil. Sir Ightham pulled aside more coins, showing me the backs: there was a stag with flowing antlers, a tiger's head, and that of a dragon.

I studied the coins, taking in the way that something so slight made so much of a difference, and knew I wasn't ready for Kastelir. Not that I had a choice: Sir Ightham collected her money, making ready to leave, and Rán led our horses away from Felheim. My feet followed, in spite of my reservations, and I saw Kastelir for the first time.

It was unremarkable.

There were gentle hills ahead of us, clusters of trees speckled across the landscape, along with the shapes of a few towns in the distance. I wasn't sure what I'd been expecting. The wall between Felheim and Kastelir was only a matter of meters thick; it certainly wasn't enough to turn the land to mulch, to make a swamp of the hills and sear the sky red.

Still, I wasn't expecting the transition to be so underwhelming.

I stepped away from the gate and managed to trip on a loose stone. Michael chuckled, patted me on the back, and climbed atop Patrick, deigning to take the lead.

Sir Ightham fell back, talking with Rán as we took the worn path towards a town in the distance. They made no effort to whisper; they were talking in what had to be the pane tongue, and I only understood the words
Luxon
and
Thule
.

My gaze darted this way and that, but I wasn't looking for bandits or pane. I didn't know what I was looking for, beyond something that would instantly make Kastelir
feel
distinct. It wasn't that it wasn't different; but Eaglestone had been different to my village, along with Praxis and Benkor, and there was nothing unique about those dissimilarities.

I'd let myself believe that Kastelir was in a constant state of turmoil, had imagined siblings fighting one another out in the fields, each commanded by a different territory, but Kastelir was whole, open and wide and quiet, beautiful in comparison to the wasteland I'd expected.

The town we headed for – Riverhurst, as Sir Ightham had told the guards – was only half a mile away, with no walls built around it. Its perimeter was made of buildings pressed close together with plenty of gaps to squeeze or stroll through, but the road led to the real entrance.

It was marked with a statue unlike the one of our King and Queen I'd seen in Praxis. It wasn't built upon a pedestal, and there was little skill to speak of in its execution. It was made from weathered stone and depicted three people. Kastelir's rulers, I assumed. The remnants of a fourth figure seemed to confirm this; a pair of pane feet remained though the rest of the statue had been destroyed.

Michael climbed off Patrick's back and scrutinised the statue.

“Queen Kidira, I'd wager. Although the height...” Two of the figures towered over Sir Ightham, while Queen Kidira's likeness was shorter than I was. “Probably emphasised here, as though the statue is some manner of joke. And as for the others, King Jonas and King Atthis—or the other way around. Neither of them are particularly distinct from the other, though I've read they have widely differing heritages.”

“He's a smart one,” Rán said dryly, and Michael would've looked pleased with himself if someone other than a pane had spoken.

“He just reads a lot,” I said, hopping off Charley.

“Yes, well...” came Michael's reply. He cleared his throat, and I decided I'd tell him that Rán was of no threat to anyone once it stopped being funny. “That, of course, leaves only Queen Kouris unaccounted for. Unaccounted for beyond the feet, that is. If the mob who did this had any sense or wit, they would've ceased their vandalism once they reached the shoulders.”

Michael was alone in laughing at his joke, but it was enough to bring him back to himself. He cleared his throat for a second time. Not out of a sense of discomfort, but because he was preparing another of his tales.

“What a farce of a Kingdom! Their Queen married a pane and everyone acted as though nothing untoward had unfolded,” he said, by way of starting things.

“Michael, I don't think—” I tried, but he hushed me with a wave of his hand and set about straightening his collar.

“Towns such as this one are more than used to all manner of performers,” he explained, though it was the thought of him telling a story about Kastelir
in
Kastelir that troubled me, not the fact that he might have difficulty drawing a crowd. “And since Sir Ightham has been infinitely kind and allowed me to accompany her on her journey, I ought to repay her in whatever way I can.”

Michael's stories were always more of a gift to himself than anyone else, but I couldn't deny that he
was
good at it. Michael was tall and lean – taller than I was by a head and a half – but when he tangled himself up in one of his tales, his presence was immense. People took notice, and he spoke as though he'd keep on speaking whether he had an audience of one or one hundred.