sheathing Ironspike, and securing it to his saddle. This came as a comfort, all be it a slight one. If Mikahl lived, Hyden wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to tell him that they had lost the sword.
Hyden wished he wasn’t so slow and dazed at the moment. He felt as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, and his head felt as if it were full of mud. He had done something out of sheer desperation, and had repeated the word he had heard the lady say as she released one of her lighting blasts. The explosion of power that had resulted from the word he used had been the concussion that had sent the Choska twisting up, and away from them. He had used magic, and now he was paying the price for it. His mind was a jumble of sorrow and confusion, and he couldn’t hold a thought. He was sure that a moment ago, he had been alarmed, or excited by something, but now he had no idea of what it might have been.
Drick urged them to get onto the horses. After riding on a wolf’s back for days and days, the saddles looked relatively comfortable.
As he swung a leg over the horse’s rump and settled into his seat, Vaegon asked the ranger a question, reminding Hyden of what it was that had alarmed him.
“Who is that woman?”
The ranger looked at the elf, and unease spread across his face as he took in Vaegon’s wildness.
“I’m not sure you really want to know,” said the man.
There was no hint of jest in his voice, and the look Hyden shot Vaegon, sent chills of alarm up his weary spine.
Chapter 47
With the invasion of Westland complete, and the border now secure, Shaella found that she didn’t have much use for Claret. Through spells she found in her father’s library, she had learned to transport herself directly from her royal bedchamber to the tower library, so the dragon was no longer needed to fly her up to the gaping hole in the wall.
The Breed giants that had sacked Portsmouth and Castleview had been rounded up and herded back northward, away from the Zard and human population centers. A big show was made about getting this done. Shaella came out looking like a savior, and her dragon, a fully trained pet.
If the city folk had ever questioned her power, her ability to keep the massive red dragon restrained, then the ease with which she used it to get the marauding Breed out of the cities and towns, removed all of their doubt. Though she had no immediate purpose for the dragon to serve, she kept the collars in place. She wanted to be able to call Claret to her at a moment’s notice, but she released the dragon from duty until that time arrived. She also returned Claret’s remaining egg. The dragon had taken it, and flown back to her nest in the fang spire.
Claret lay on the smooth surface of the Seal. She was curled protectively around the last of her eggs, deeply brooding. She could incubate the egg by bathing it in her fiery breath at any given time. She had refrained from doing so for centuries, because she didn’t want to have hatchlings to worry about while she was bound to guard the Seal.
Now she felt guilty. Had she incubated the eggs sooner, they might have had a chance to survive. Now, she was bound to the collar. She couldn’t hatch this one, because Shaella could call her away at any time. She was used to these helpless and trapped feelings. She had been bound by the Pact for as long as she could remember. If it hadn’t been for that, she would have left this land full of pesky humans behind long ago.
It took her a few days to make her lair feel homey again. She flew down, and picked choice bones from her feeding grounds. She put her remaining egg on a pile of Zard skulls. Then, she scattered geka bones, and freshly killed snapper carcasses around the smooth floor, until it once again began to look, and smell like what it was.
At idle times, she tried to stretch, and rip the collar from her neck, but it wasn’t to be removed. Its ancient and powerful magical properties dictated that it could only be removed by the person wearing the collar’s mate. Claret knew that long ago. On another land mass, a place far away from this one, the collars were regularly used. When possible, dragons were taken when they were young and raised with the collars on. Those dragons grew up used to the idea of being servants. They never got the chance to know what it meant to be the highest predator alive, to be the ruler of the roost, to be the true master of all that inhabited its territory.
Claret had known those things, once. Long before she had been bound by that tricky human wizard to guard this place. She was once the Queen of a land not so much different to this one. She had watched those silly humans fight over this and that, each faction trying to prove dominance over the other. Every so often, she would swoop down among them, remind them of their folly, and give them a common enemy. She would burn down a few buildings, ravage a few herds, and maybe even snatch up a stray human or two. Then, she would sit back and watch, as they forgot their personal quests for dominance, and banded together to rebuild. A few years later, they would forget, and the whole process would start anew.
She didn’t long for that sort of freedom anymore, at least not for herself. She would die content, and destroy half the world before she went, if she could guarantee that her last un-hatched egg would hatch, and live its full life free and unbound.
She pondered these things while munching the meat from a snapper she had just roasted. For now, pondering was all she could do, but she knew that sooner or later the situation would change. With humans, it always did.
Shaella tried for the hundredth time to ignite the power of her father’s Spectral Orb. Claret had told her that she had seen Gerard crawl down into the Seal while her father had had it open. Shaella had no choice but to believe the dragon. With the collars on, there was no way that Claret could lie to her.
Dead or alive, Gerard’s soul was beyond the Seal now, and according to her father’s books, the orb would allow her to communicate with him. First, she had to figure out the minute inflections of the chant that was supposed to activate the orb’s power. She wasn’t sure if it was her rhythm, or the pronunciation of the words that she was getting wrong. The only thing she was sure of was that she was getting it wrong.
She glanced out of the crumbling hole in the tower wall at the darkness. It was late. The moon was already sinking down into the black expanse of the Western Sea. With a heavy sigh of frustration, she went back down the trapdoor ladder, through the nest, and down into the library. With a flick of her wrists, she set flame to the dozen candles that she had spread around the room. She went to a book that lay open among many on the desk. She read, and then reread, the passages about calling out the orb’s power. Another passage, pertaining to the orb, followed the inadequate instructions that were trying her patience. The crystal sphere didn’t have to remain so large and bulky, it stated. She could shrink it so that it might be moved.
She had hoped to get it to work, at least once, before she attempted to move it, but she hadn’t been able to as of yet.
The gaping hole in the side of the upper chamber was letting the weather in. Several times, it had rained hard enough for water to pool on the upper floor. The floorboards were going to rot, and already water had seeped through, and dripped into the nest, and the library below it. If she knew the commands to use Pael’s lift, she could bring up some masons, and have the damage repaired, but she didn’t.
She had had to rearrange some of the ancient volumes, so that the weather wouldn’t damage them. She had a mind to move the orb, and the contents of the library out of Pael’s tower to somewhere more convenient. If Pael had anything to say about it, she would tell the truth, at least about the books. She was fairly certain that a little rain, or even a long fall through the rotted floor, would do little, to no damage to the powerful Spectral Orb.
She sighed again. Moving the texts and the crystal could wait till morning. She transported herself back to her bedchamber, wondering if the staff she had commissioned to be made was finished yet. If it was, she would shrink the orb, and place it as the staff’s headpiece so she would be able to carry it around with her.
Cole was overseeing the staff’s creation. He was laying spells of protection and binding into the materials as well. She was confident that he wouldn’t fail her. He never had before. He had known Gerard, and how she felt about him. He knew how important trying to contact him was to her.
As she strolled through the castle, in her blood red silken robes, she wondered at how smoothly things were going. The people of Westland seemed to be carrying on as if nothing had changed. Sure they mourned their
