The Hearts of Dragons (16 page)

At sunset four weeks
after escaping the Tengu, Rondel and Minawë at last reached the end of the
Eregos Mountains. Below them, the ground sloped down, and a mile away, fog
shrouded the landscape.

Rondel’s left shoulder
twinged. Her wound was bothering it again. She’d removed the Tengu’s arrow and
applied a rudimentary bandage made from a piece of her cloak, but it was no
substitute for what a real healer could do.

She was lucky to have
survived at all. That lightning bolt had almost knocked her out, and retrieving
the Liryometa had resulted in burns on much of her body. Most had scabbed over
by now, but a few of the heavier ones remained.

A shriek overhead
interrupted her thoughts. A moment later a hawk smashed to the ground in front
of her. Rondel rolled her eyes. “I thought Kodamas were supposed to be
graceful.”

The hawk stood and shook
its head in a most un-birdlike fashion. Then it grew. Its feathers shrank into
its skin, and its beak changed into a nose. Last of all, its wings changed into
arms, and Minawë stood before Rondel, looking indignant.

“Flying is easy,” the
Kodama said. “Turns out landing is trickier.”

Rondel smirked.
“Naturally.”

Minawë folded her arms.
“Doubtless you didn’t get Lightning Sight correct your first time around?”

“It took me thirty years
to perfect,” Rondel admitted, but then she added, “let’s hope it doesn’t take
you that long.”

Rondel didn’t want to
tell Minawë, but the Kodama’s pace amazed her. Even Otunë had never used
Dendryl’s magic to change his shape.

“Are you daydreaming again?”
Minawë asked. “Let’s get going.”

“Not tonight,” Rondel
said. “We’ll camp here and head down in the morning.”

“Down?”

“See where that mist
starts? The Eregos Mountains don’t end in foothills on their southern border
like they do in Lodia. Instead, they come to an escarpment that plunges more
than a thousand feet. We’ll have to climb down it to proceed.”

“You climb. I’ll fly.”

Rondel laughed. “You
think you can? You have no idea what’s in that fog. It’s a vast jungle, more
expansive than Eregos: Aokigahara. Maantecs have another name for it, though.”
Her tone darkened. “They call it Suicide Forest.”

“You can drop the melodrama,”
Minawë said. “I grew up in a forest, remember? I’m not scared of them.”

“Aokigahara is nothing
like Ziorsecth,” Rondel warned. “In Ziorsecth, the tree trunks are so wide and
the canopy so dense that most places have little underbrush. Aokigahara is a
green wall. It has plants at every layer from ground to canopy. If you flew
down that cliff, you’d become tangled in the forest’s branches and break a
wing. You might even die.”

“So how do we get down?
We don’t have any rope, and even if we did, it wouldn’t reach a thousand feet.”

“There are spots along
the wall where a person can climb,” Rondel said. “It won’t be pleasant, but
it’s doable.”

Rondel activated
Lightning Sight and examined the cliff edge for any irregularities that might
indicate a way down. Her shoulders slumped. “As best I can tell, there aren’t
any such paths near us. We’ll sleep here tonight. Tomorrow, we can walk along
the wall and search for a place to descend.”

With that Rondel sat
against a pine tree and settled in for an uncomfortable night. She wished they
still had their supplies, but they’d lost everything with the horses in their
flight from the Tengu. The food and camping gear would have eased the pain of
Aokigahara a lot. They’d survived Eregos by having Minawë transform and hunt,
but that might not work in the tangled rainforest.

While Rondel rested,
Minawë stared at the cliff before them. “I have an idea,” she said.

The Kodama shrunk and
changed into a white owl. Rondel smiled despite herself. “So that’s your plan.”

Minawë cocked her head
sideways, then went even further so that she was looking at Rondel upside down.
Rondel laughed. “Would you get going? You’re creeping me out.”

Ignoring the comment,
Minawë took flight. Rondel used Lightning Sight to track her at first, but then
Minawë entered the mist and was lost even to the enhanced vision. Rondel closed
her eyes to wait for Minawë’s return.

A hoot jolted her awake.
Rondel looked up in time to see an owl flop down hard and roll twice on the
ground before settling to a stop.

Minawë changed back to
her Kodaman form and rubbed her arms. “There’s a way down not far west of
here,” she said. “If we hurry, I think there’s enough light for us to scale the
cliff this evening.”

Rondel frowned. She had
no desire to enter Aokigahara at all, let alone at night. Minawë looked so
excited, though, that it was hard to refuse her.

Besides, every minute
they delayed was another Hana and Melwar could spend with Iren. “Show me what
you found,” Rondel said.

Minawë led her to the
cliff and turned right. The pair walked along the edge about fifteen minutes
before Minawë stopped and indicated that they had arrived.

Rondel looked over the
cliff with Lightning Sight. Sure enough, a steep natural stair led down the
escarpment, though there was no way to tell if it went to the bottom.

“It’s more like a ladder
than a staircase,” Rondel said. “You’re sure you want to do this tonight?”

It had been easy for Minawë
to be brave at the campsite, but faced with the actual descent, Rondel could
tell the Kodama was nervous. The route was absurd, even in daylight.

Rondel expected Minawë
to give in and allow for another night in Eregos, but instead the Kodama’s face
steeled. “Well,” she said, “let’s stop wasting time.”

The old Maantec grated
her teeth. It wasn’t hard to see which parent Minawë took after.

Minawë slid a leg over
the edge, but Rondel stopped her. “Let me go first,” the old Maantec said.
“Lightning Sight will let me see the handholds better. Follow my lead.”

Rondel started down the
cliff. Using Lightning Sight, she found the peculiarities in the rock face and
then relayed the information to Minawë. It was rough going, but before long
they’d covered a considerable distance. When Rondel looked past Minawë, she
could no longer see the cliff’s top.

The farther they
descended, the more treacherous the wall became. The fog hindered Lightning
Sight and made the rocks slippery.

The climb shouldn’t have
been a challenge for Rondel, but thanks to her wounded left arm, she had to
make the descent one-handed. With lightning magic enhancing her strength,
though, she was managing.

A scrabbling of rock was
Rondel’s only warning. Minawë screamed and fell. Rondel instinctively reached
out with her broken left hand. It snapped its splint and shot toward Minawë.
For a moment they touched, but Rondel couldn’t get a grip.

“Minawë!” Rondel cried.
She scanned below her with Lightning Sight, but it couldn’t penetrate the mist.
Cursing repeatedly, she scrabbled down the rock face as quickly as she dared.

“Minawë!” she called
again, though she knew it was hopeless. No one could survive a fall like that.

After what felt like an
eternity in her panicked state, Rondel felt solid ground beneath her. Her eyes
swept the dark jungle, but she caught no sign of Minawë.

Her chest tightened.
Minawë must have transformed and become hung up in the forest canopy. Rondel
forced away the mental image of a broken bird corpse lying in those upper
branches.

Rondel dropped to her
knees. Suicide Forest had claimed yet another life, and it was her fault. She
had gone along with Minawë’s suggestion to descend tonight even though she had
known they should have waited until morning.

There was a motion
beside her. She drew her broken rondel. “Who’s there?” she asked, doing her
best to sound fierce despite her grief.

“Rondel?”

“Minawë!”

The Kodama forced her
way through a tangle of shrubs. “I’m all right,” she said. “I transformed as I
fell. I wasn’t thinking about it. I just knew I had to change if I wanted to
survive.”

“But what did you change
into?” Rondel asked. “If you became a bird, there’s no way you could have
broken your fall in time, let alone stopped before slamming into the canopy.”

Minawë blushed. “Well,
it will sound weird, but I didn’t know what else to do. I just knew I needed to
fly, so that’s what I became.”

“A fly?”

She nodded. “Once I
changed into something that small, it was easy to get down safely. Although
since I was so tiny, you beat me here. It also didn’t help that the fly’s eyes
are hard to use. I could see in every direction at once!”

Rondel fell back on her
rump and whistled. Then, without intending to, she burst out laughing. Minawë
looked at her oddly for a few seconds, and then she joined in. The pair cackled
loud and long, and soon Rondel was crying and laughing at the same time.

“Please don’t ever,”
Rondel gasped between sobs, “ever do that to me again. You’re going to give
this old woman a heart attack!”

“I’ll do my best not to
fall off any more cliffs,” Minawë replied.

Rondel slowly regained
control of herself. “All right, I’ve had more than enough excitement for today.
Let’s camp here. Aokigahara is no place to stumble around in the dark.”

“No arguments this
time,” Minawë said. She leaned against a nearby tree and sat down. Rondel stood
to join her, but then she stopped short.

Minawë’s brow furrowed.
“What’s the matter?”

“Quiet,” Rondel hissed
as Lightning Sight flashed. She searched the jungle. One . . . two . . .
three . . . damn.

Rondel raised her
Liryometa, but then an arrow shot past her. It pinged off the escarpment and
left a scratch on her right ear.

Minawë reached for the
Chloryoblaka, but another arrow landed inches in front of her. “Don’t move!” a
voice called, and Rondel’s mouth dropped open as she realized the language
wasn’t that of Lodia.

“Hands up!” another
voice shouted in the same language. Rondel snarled, but she obeyed. Lightning
Sight had already picked up a dozen of them, and there might be more hiding in
the trees where it couldn’t spot them.

Minawë looked around.
“What’s going on? Who’s there?”

They came out of the
trees like ghosts. Dressed in brown leather, they appeared—first ten, then
twenty. Paint and tattoos covered their bodies. They all had drawn bows, and
most of them carried long, broad knives as well.

But none of those
features caused Rondel’s surprise. Her shock came from the detail she noted as
the new arrivals bound their prisoners’ hands and took away their weapons.

They all had green hair.

The past month had been
without question the most brutal of Iren’s life. Melwar’s rigid schedule made
last year’s training under Rondel seem like a morning stroll. Each dawn, Iren
ate a hasty breakfast in his room, then headed to the castle’s central garden
to battle Hana. He lasted longer with each match, but he never won. Hana was
always a move ahead, countering the instant Iren committed to an attack.

His failures were all
the more frustrating because he knew Hana was only the first step. As
impressive as her abilities were, Melwar’s would be far superior.

After each sparring
match, Iren next had to contend with Melwar’s pain test, which was even worse
than the fights with Hana. Melwar had explained that the spell he was using
didn’t wound Iren. Instead, it activated all his nerves at the same time.
Confronting such stress, the body’s natural inclination was to pass out.

“The pain of breaking
your magical barrier will surpass what I can inflict with this spell,” Melwar
had warned him. “If you want to survive, this technique must become nothing to
you. When you can endure my spell for an hour and remain conscious, then we
will be ready to attempt to remove your barrier. That assumes, of course, that
you can land a blow on both Hana and me by then. Otherwise, we will keep up the
pain training for as long as it takes.”

After that explanation,
Iren had understood the reasoning behind Melwar’s dual training methods. Both
motivated Iren to do better at the other. The sooner he defeated Hana and
Melwar, the sooner the pain test would end, and the sooner he mastered his
pain, the less drained he would feel when he fought them.

Both those outcomes
seemed far off. He still lost consciousness for hours after Melwar’s spell, and
he lived in a constant haze of exhaustion and sore muscles.

Though the physical
strain pushed Iren harder than he had ever worked before, the mental effort of
learning the Maantecs’ language and customs was tougher yet. During the trip to
Veliaf, Hana had only taught him a handful of vocabulary. Now that she had him
trapped in his room every day while he recovered from Melwar’s spell, she
became a diligent taskmaster. She drilled Iren in everything from etiquette to
fashion to the use of chopsticks. She taught him more Maantec words, but she
expanded beyond verbal pronunciations to the written kanji that represented
them.

To speed his learning,
Hana said everything to Iren twice, once in Maantec and again in Lodian. She
then commanded him to respond in kind as much as possible.

Iren thought his
language training had escaped Melwar’s notice, but one day the lord addressed
him in Maantec. Without thinking, Iren answered the same way. Melwar smiled
slyly at him. From that moment on, Melwar only spoke to Iren in Maantec.

Of all Iren’s tasks,
writing in Maantec came easiest of all. That surprised him given how much he
hated writing in Lodian. But as Hana showed him, his frustration with Lodian
stemmed from that language’s writing style. It assumed a right-handed author,
so it went from left to right and top to bottom. As a result, a left-handed
person rubbed what he had just written with the side of his hand and smudged
the ink.

Maantec writing, by
contrast, started on the top-right of the page and went down first, then moved
from right to left in columns. Once Iren adjusted to the new format, his
handwriting improved in both speed and legibility.

Unfortunately, all his
progress did nothing for deciphering his father’s diary. Unlike the simple
constructs Iren wrote for lessons, his father used long, flowing sentences and
kanji that gave even Hana trouble. She guessed that Iren’s father had been old
enough to have lived through the Kodama-Maantec War, because many of his kanji
had gone out of use since then.

Though Iren couldn’t
translate the diary, he had at least figured out that all this time he’d been
trying to read it backwards. Maantec books had their spines on the right, not
the left, and they read in the opposite direction from Lodian books.

His first real break
with the diary came when Hana taught him how to write his name in Maantec. For
inspiration, he kept the scroll with the words “My name is Iren Saitosan” open
at all times in his room.

Two nights later, he was
leafing through his father’s writing by candlelight. He was about to shut it
when a column of kanji caught his attention.

Thinking he’d made a
mistake, Iren stared at them closer. He tried to convince himself they weren’t
there, but no, they were the first words on the first page. The kanji matched.
Iren was so astounded he read them aloud, though he could manage no more than a
whisper.

“My name is Iren Saito.”