Chapter Two Adela #2
I pull my hands away. She has stopped thrashing. Or breathing. Her wounds were too deep.
He places his forehead against Duschwa’s, holding tight to her seaweed-strand mane. His voice is thick with pain when he says, “I suppose we’ll have another skull for the holies to choose from at the matching.”
It’s a bleak bright side.
I step out to give him some semblance of privacy to grieve another lost charge. Two in one day. My poor father.
Silently, I say a prayer of thanks to the Spinner for protecting my Etana for now, and hope Duschwa will sate the Huntress’s endless hunger for death. So she will not come for yet another creature.
I am at the sink, scrubbing Duschwa’s blood from under my nails, when a high, piercing bell interrupts the quiet night. Dad’s out of the bathroom and putting his cloak on before I can rinse the suds off my hands.
“What is it?” I ask, not recognizing the alarm’s meaning.
“The fire bell.”
I follow him out, pulling my hood up against the cold.
It doesn’t help. It’s still soaked. On the heels of the cold seeping through, I think of the jackalopes and whatever roaring creature followed me silently through the night, the cacophonous skulls, Duschwa’s strange wounds.
It all began with the pulse of energy when I touched my cheek to the phoenix skull.
But surely that is coincidence. I am not responsible.
Right?
We hurry down the gravel path toward the center of the village.
Across the square, the skeletal remains of a house are smoldering, but it’s impossible to tell which one in the smoky darkness.
All the houses look alike until you can see the plants in the front window boxes or the color of the painted front door.
This house has none of that. It doesn’t even have most of its roof. Or walls.
A figure runs toward us, silver hair gleaming in the starlight.
When she gets closer, I recognize Petra, one of the elders who serves on the council with Dad.
She meets us and doubles over, her hands on her knees as she gulps big breaths of air.
It’s so cold and dry, it must hurt her lungs, and she is not a young woman to be running through a late-February night.
“Where is the fire? How can we help?” Dad asks. Identify the problem; discover potential solutions; work toward them. The same as always, despite the heaviness of his own losses today.
“The fire. Is. Out,” she manages to say, which is both obvious and impossible. The bell just rang. Surely no one missed it for so long that it would be able to destroy an entire house in the time we crossed a small village?
I think of the roar I heard.
Unless the fire was not a natural sort but created instead by a creature whose fiery blasts burn so hot that they instantly annihilate whatever they touch, leaving behind nothing but smoldering ash.
When she catches her breath, Petra blurts, “Bartholomew is dead! The dragons attacked him and then fought each other. Only one dragon survived. Come quickly, Oscar. We’re meeting.”
“What? No. What?” I cannot wrap my head around her words. My mentor cannot be dead. I just saw him. I have his robe and his mask to clean at my house. I was going to return them after the week’s ceremonies.
And a dragon gone as well? Gilcriss and Enkidus are only fifty or sixty years old. Basically young adults amongst dragons, which live for centuries.
Neither Dad nor Petra replies as we hurry, half walking, half running toward Bartholomew’s house. Or what’s left of it. Half the structure is gone, wood and glass and plaster scattered across the grass nearby as if it all exploded outward, another quarter charred and still smoking. A ruin.
But that is all nothing compared with the blackened remains of Bartholomew himself or those of his beloved pet Gilcriss.
The dragon lies beside him, red-black blood continuing to leak from a gaping wound at her neck.
Bartholomew’s body lies in what used to be his kitchen, now nothing but splintered wooden floor. Or what’s left of it.
I gag.
I have seen violence; you can’t live amongst the creatures and not.
Kelpies who’ve drowned unsuspecting cows and eaten their bloated faces, gryphon talons rending flesh to the bone, fat and muscle visible beneath the gushing blood of keepers’ forearms or shoulders, and of course the traumas of everyday life in the valley for creatures, animals, and keepers—birth, disease, the abundant indignities of old age.
Hell, moments ago I was holding together Duschwa’s sides as she bled out beneath my hands.
But Bartholomew is worse than all the others combined and magnified by ten.
Somewhere to my right, someone is retching. I hear curses and prayers flying to the heavens. But the Huntress has already been here, and there’s nothing the other goddesses can do even if they deigned to hear us.
One leg is gone, his body no longer holding snug most of his organs, some of which seem missing as well. The other leg is bent unnaturally beneath him, his whole body crumpled as if he had been dropped from a great height, landing in a heap.
A great height.
A fire.
A kelpie with deep gashes, far away from the river where she lived.
The roar I heard in the matching hut.
With soul-crushing certainty, I know then that the pulse of magic I felt when I awoke the phoenix went through the entire valley. It affected Bartholomew’s dragons to the point that one killed its nest mate, a kelpie, and ate half of Bartholomew.
And it’s all my fault.
I walk into the great hall in a haze, following along behind Dad and Petra like a duckling.
The moment we’re inside, there’s a blur, and someone practically tackles me, covering my face in kisses and squeezing.
I inhale the familiar scents of vanilla and almond in my best friend’s silky hair. “I’m glad you’re okay, too.”
“I was so scared when they said it was Bartholo—” Cecelia sobs through the end of his name. “I thought maybe they attacked the matching hut while you were preparing.”
“I’m okay.” I hug her again. “I’m okay.”
“Thank the Spinner.”
“Why are you here?” I ask. While she’s cleverer and wiser than the vast majority of keepers, elders included, at merely thirty-three years old, Cecelia’s far too young to serve on the council.
She holds up some paper and a thin sliver of charcoal. “Honorary scribe for the night. Petra wanted all the elders to focus on the conversation instead of worrying about recording everything.”
We turn to the group of elders, standing in the empty great hall, Petra at the center.
Even in her nightshirt, stained with ash, her white hair hanging down one shoulder in a messy braid, she somehow looks regal.
Her back straight, her shoulders squared, ready to tackle the heartbreaking burden of leading through disaster.
She is the kind of woman I’d love to grow into; the kind of keeper I could never hope to be.
Around the perimeter of the room, there are tables and chairs, stacked up and ready to be laid for the impending feast, but no one moves to grab them, to sit.
They’re already talking. Half are still in their nightclothes, like Petra, with robes or coats held tight against the cold and horror of the night.
Niclas, the oldest member of the council by a dozen years or more, wears a blanket wrapped around his frail, curved shoulders like a shawl. He keeps shivering, his sparse white beard quivering.
Cecelia hurries closer to the group and plops down, folding herself forward to use the floor as her table for note-taking.
“I just don’t understand what happened. They were always so docile,” Ziba says, staring hauntedly into the dark recessed corners of the large gathering space. They are dressed, at least, but their large jowls and puffy undereye bags seem to hang more than ever. “Poor Bartholomew.”
“May the Huntress guide his soul to the after,” Niclas adds in a shaking voice, and the rest of us make the sign of the three at the blessing.
John, a slight, balding man with a quick temper and a tendency toward drama, says, “If you ask me, I think we should go out and hunt that dragon for what it did. Time for them both to do what they were made for. Become skulls.”
The other elders gasp. Redonna might actually faint, her wrinkled, dark-brown cheeks go so suddenly ashen. Ziba finds a chair and has her sit before mumbling something about tea and heading off toward the kitchens.
I realize once they’ve left that I should’ve been the one to go. Like Cecelia, I’m too young to serve the elders, but unlike Cecelia, I have no real purpose here. I just followed Dad and no one had the heart to kick me out.
And then I realize. Bartholomew, our matcher, is dead. I am his apprentice.
Of course they need me here.
Petra stomps her foot, the hard heel of her boot echoes on the marble floor and throughout the large, empty room.
The others quiet. Softly, but with steel in her voice, she admonishes John.
“You forget your place. We are in this valley for the care and keeping of our charges, not to hasten their demise. If I ever, ever hear you mention intentionally harming another creature, you will be expelled from the valley immediately, I don’t care how long your keeper lineage stretches back. We do not hunt.”
Niclas wipes away a tear from his cheek before it soaks into his beard. “I just don’t understand why Gilcriss and Enkidus would do this to Barty.”
A low murmur of voices breaks out as the elders talk amongst themselves, giving potential suggestions for the why of it all.
Ziba returns with the tea, but no one moves to take any.
They all just talk around and around in circles about how and why the dragons snapped, unable to settle on anything reasonable.