Caged Warrior

FIVE

The letter is the most important development we’ve had about the cartels in a decade,” said Malnefoley, the Honorable Giva. “You refuse to acknowledge it.”

Sath Wisdom sat forward in her chair. “Watch your tone.”

He whirled his gaze toward the seemingly ageless woman. “What did you say?”

She pressed her hands flat against the meeting table hewn of wood older than memory. It, like everything else in the Fortress of the Chasm, was storied and inviolate—a functional memorial to the creature that had given life to them all. Even their robes were hundreds of years old, sewn from heavy black cloth and accented with each clan’s color. Copies of copies of copies of those worn by the first Council of the Five Clans, when Sath, Tigony, Pendray, Garnis, and Indranan bridged their divisions to secure an armistice that had kept the Dragon Kings strong for millennia.

Only the Sath knew their people’s entire history. They kept secrets they weren’t meant to hide, just as they took powers that weren’t their own.

“You heard me, Malnefoley,” Sath Wisdom said with narrowed eyes. “You won’t get anywhere by bullying us into submission.”

For the sake of harmony and, more important, as a means of keeping his temper, Mal didn’t call her on the obvious slight. His family still called him by his given name. To everyone else, he was the Honorable Giva—the only one of the Council to wear robes of endless black. No clan color. Senators relinquished their identities when they assumed their positions, the better to secure nonpartisan consensus. Two came from each clan. The old women were referred to as Wisdom for their sagacity and maternal patience, while the impetuous men were dubbed Youth for their spirit and eagerness to go to war.

Checks and balances, with the Giva as their fulcrum.

Of all the senators, Sath Wisdom was his most formidable opponent. She was a Thief.

No.

She was Sath. That she challenged him at the start of their twice-annual assembly was not a good sign. It was not a Giva’s place to resort to name-calling, and with what he had planned, the meeting was only going to become more contentious.

Outside their mountaintop Tibetan shelter, a snowstorm raged as if it would wake the Dragon from its forever sleep. Snow swirled against the wall of glass tempered in the deep fires of the Chasm. Unbreakable. Shimmering and golden. Only its unknowable properties kept them safe from the force of a Himalayan blizzard.

He hated the cold and couldn’t wait to return to Greece. Yet he couldn’t govern at a distance. Nynn’s letter changed everything.

With his fists clenched beneath the table, he breathed calmly, using time-honored techniques. The other clans thought the Tigony preferred politics to violence. Far from true. They possessed gifts so overwhelming that control was essential. Mal fought the electrical current gathering in every cell. To outsiders, particularly the Council, his control could appear as weakness. He didn’t feel weak; he was a man whose honor and will held a thunderstorm at bay.

“We are here to disagree,” he said, his voice practiced and even. “That much is necessary before we can agree to take action. We are not here to hurl insults.”

“What if ‘usurper’ is not an insult, but fact?” This from Pendray Youth, whose expression always revealed his powers. He forever stood on the precipice of untold frenzied violence.

Usurper. That word had followed Mal for twenty years.

The Council reminded him whenever they convened—not always with outright snipes, but with their refusal to cooperate. The previous Giva had guided the Five Clans for just over eighty years. He had been an authentic choice. Two children from each clan had looked into the churning, fiery maw of the Chasm where the Dragon had been birthed and where the Dragon had died. There, ten mouths had simultaneously screamed the name of the chosen Giva.

But Mal . . .

He’d been chosen by six whispers. Clans Pendray and Garnis were so few in number that they’d refused to condemn even two children to a mountaintop life of semimadness. For millennia, it had been considered an honor to choose the Giva. Never again wholly sane, the children grew into fierce warriors whose only duty was to protect the Fortress of the Chasm. Now it was regarded as a waste of what few children remained. Those who’d chosen the previous Giva were growing old, leaving the fortress vulnerable. Their skills were dwindling, as was the population of Dragon Kings.

Mal was an obvious symbol.

Only six whispers, when tradition required ten screams.

Four crucial votes had been missing since his first day as Giva, always raising suspicion about his authority. Giva meant fulcrum. Plain and simple. Mal fought to tip the scales in an attempt to save their race, but he did so without unanimous authority.

That didn’t mean he was without power. Or the element of surprise.

“Pendray Youth, if you have a better solution to my standing as the head of this Council, I’d like to hear it. Are you ready to assume my position? You as much as any senator know what we face, as clans and collectively. You have the privilege of speaking, arguing, making trouble, being useful—but ultimately, you’ll remain one of ten. Any consensus will be my responsibility to defend, for good or for ill. Are you ready to bear that scrutiny?”

“Fine.” Pendray Youth was the most contentious. Even Sath Wisdom knew when to back down. “Just know that ‘woe is me’ sounds pretty pathetic, Giva.”

“There is nothing woeful about stating a matter in plain speaking. Petulance, however—”

The young man banged his fist on the table.

“Enough,” said Sath Wisdom, her white brows narrowed. “We speak out of turn and with a lack of respect.”

From long experience, Mal knew she was quietly mocking his leadership. At the moment, he didn’t care. Her intervention gave him a moment to cool his temper as Pendray Youth’s posture lost its aggression.

“Now,” Mal continued, as if the outburst hadn’t occurred. As long as he kept calm, he could play any political game. Twenty years of contentious rule—and before that, years as the head of his clan—had made him a master. “The letter from my cousin is our most decisive proof that the human cartels have overstepped. We’re no longer talking about volunteers, desperate to pay off debts or to gamble on the possibility of a child. Human criminals are taking Dragon Kings from their homes! I’m struck dumb by how easily you’re letting this happen.”

“Because even if it can be proven, the information is from your cousin.” Sath Youth lifted his chin in an obvious sign of disdain. “She was banished for good reason.”

“She was banished because she married a human, and if we’re all honest, as retribution for circumstances surrounding her mother. But not because she was someone to spin tales. That Nynn bore a natural son is something we should be praising. Something to be thankful for. You’d rather dredge up what happened years ago.”

“Her son is only six,” said Indranan Youth, with his dark, steady eyes. He always spoke for himself and Indranan Wisdom, who sat stooped and shrouded to his left. Their telepathy made whispered discussion unnecessary. “No one yet knows whether he possesses a gift from the Dragon.”

How the Indranan chose their representatives was a mystery to the other clans. Northern and Southern factions had been engaged in a bloody civil war for three thousand years. Mal would never know if these two hailed from the Indian subcontinent or from the wilds of the Australian outback. But he resented them because they represented all that stood in the way of the Dragon Kings’ survival. Ridiculous rivalries. Long-held grudges. Jealousy and hatred and all the emotions they’d long disdained of human beings.

The humans thrived. The Dragon Kings held off extinction as if by chance.

The Indranan senators never failed to disagree with Malnefoley. He didn’t attribute it to their unnerving telepathy. They simply didn’t want to acknowledge what he had to say, for reasons he could never comprehend. Personal? Political? A means of manipulating the emotions he kept in check?

Then there were the senators from Clan Garnis. Useless. They were almost always quiet—even their Youth.