CHAPTER 34 #3
“Promise me you will be careful,” he said. “Twenty days. Stay in the house, make soap, don’t do anything reckless.”
“I promise,” I lied.
The boat slipped along the dark sea, fast and nimble. I sat at the bow and watched the sky spreading above us, the stars glittering so bright, Prata waning, Drao in first quarter, and Broe a sliver of a crescent, almost an afterthought.
Solentine’s people came to get us, as promised.
Everard and I boarded the small vessel, the sails went up, and a few minutes later we slipped out of the city and headed into the open sea.
That was always the trouble with Kair Toren.
You could lock the city gates, but blockading the harbor was a lot harder.
We reached a couple of islands, dark jagged tops of submerged hills thrusting through the water. At first, I thought we’d stop at one of them, but instead we passed them on our right and kept going.
Half an hour later, the boat made a turn toward the shore.
The hills rose high here, a dark wall sloping sharply to the water.
Dense vegetation covered the nearly vertical surface, shrubs, strange-looking grasses, and dense, thorny thickets of rudberry.
The boat slid to a small dock, and we disembarked.
A soft high-pitched whir came from the cliff above us. If humpback whales could purr, they would have sounded just like this, haunting, beautiful, and uncanny.
Everard steered me to a path clinging to the side of the hill, leading up toward the apex. We began to climb. Halfway up I began puffing and huffing, while Everard didn’t even break a sweat. He must’ve been part mountain goat.
Finally, we reached the top. I followed him through the narrow gap between two bushes and walked into a clearing facing the ocean.
A huge white beast stood by the cliff, fully eighteen feet tall at the shoulder.
It had a body like a greyhound, with a long ermine-like tail and four long legs, powerful but slender, with paws armed with crescent talons.
Its deep chest narrowed to a ridiculously small waist. Its neck was long and flexible, almost swan-like, except much thicker, topped with a sleek head that ended in an eagle’s beak.
The feathers on its body were so fine, they looked almost like fur, but on the back of its head, they grew into a long secretary bird crest, darkening toward the ends to a shimmering golden brown.
The creature saw us. Its turquoise eyes shone. It spread its enormous wings, blocking the sky. They were golden near the leading edge and white at the contour feathers. Two giant curved claws tipped the wing bends.
Nothing in my life had prepared me for this. There was no equivalent in our world. This was magical. This creature shouldn’t have existed but here it was, in front of me, and it took my breath away.
The beast leaned forward, stretching its neck. Its head lowered and came toward me, lower and closer, and closer . . .
“Easy.” Everard stepped forward.
The beast nudged him out of the way with its head, its eyes fixed on me. It bumped me with its beak and blew air out with a soft huff.
“Oh, she likes you.” Solentine walked out of the shadows.
I reached out. Some part of me realized that the drezmur could cut me in half with one crunch of that beak, but I couldn’t help myself. My fingers slipped through the pale feathers on the bridge of her nose. Oh wow. Soft and silky, like a kitten.
“The drezmurs live in the northern mountains.” Everard stroked the feathers next to my hand.
“They require both flesh and magic to survive, so they hunt creatures rich in magic, like peibasas, kugats, or dorseem. They are always hungry. And they will allow you to ride and steer them, as long as you feed your magic to them.”
Ride them?
He laughed softly. “You should see your eyes, Maggie. They are so big.”
Who was the first person to even think of riding one of these? How?
“It takes a great deal of magic to make them carry you,” Solentine said. “Very few people can do it. Especially outside of the Selvan Mountains. You must be brimming with it because she is dying for a taste.”
“What happens if you run out of magic before you get where you’re going?” I asked.
“If you lose consciousness before you land, the drezmur will fling you off their back and devour you,” Solentine said.
I turned to Everard.
He nodded. “Luckily for us, I have a lot of magic.”
Now the exhausted Solentine from a few days ago made sense. He’d said he had to go around a thunderstorm, which added three hours to the flight. It must’ve drained his magic reserves to nothing.
Everard’s face had a speculative look, as if he had just thought of something. “Would you like to ride her?”
Oh wow.
“We can go for a short test flight above the sea.”
Under no circumstances must you allow him to get you onto a drezmur.
Saying yes was out of the question, and if I took a step back, he would grab me and pull me onto this creature. I had no idea how I knew it; I just sensed it. I held perfectly still.
“You’re not taking my cousin onto a drezmur,” Solentine said. “It’s one thing for you and me to risk our lives, but there is no need for her to flirt with death. Come on. You’re wasting the moonlight.”
Everard’s eyes said Come with me.
I opened my mouth. “Safe journey, Your Grace.”
He sighed and raised his hand. A barely perceptible curl of dark smoke shimmering with green slipped from his fingers and sank into the pale feathers.
The drezmur raised her head and crouched.
The sound of hoofbeats came from the shadows. A man walked out of them, leading a big stallion. The horse was the color of smoke, and its face was pure white.
Hello, Villain. We meet again.
The drezmur let out that high-pitched purr again.
Villain stopped and blew air out of his nose. The man pulled on the lead. The stallion snapped at him.
“Foul temper,” Solentine told me. “Like his master.”
Everard walked over to his horse, took the reins from the man, petted the stallion’s face, and walked him to the side, where a narrow wooden crate waited. I hadn’t even noticed it until now.
Everard pulled the blinders over Villain’s eyes. The stallion stopped again.
“Come on. We’ve done this before,” Everard told him.
Villain huffed, stepped from foot to foot, and then walked into the crate. Everard secured the ropes leading from the harness, tying them down inside the crate, and shut the door, locking the big horse inside. There was a chain attached to the crate, looping under it, and another on top . . .
“Are you going to fly him to Selva?”
Everard looked at me and grinned. “How else would he get there in time?”
“But he’s so heavy, and the crate and the chain must weigh so much . . .”
“I once saw a drezmur pick up a trader boat fully loaded with cargo,” Everard said. “Trust me, this is nothing.”
He strode to the drezmur, then turned.
“Will you give me a kiss for luck, my lady?”
“Absolutely not,” Solentine said.
“I didn’t ask you,” Everard told him.
He was pulling out all the stops, huh.
“Come back safe, without getting poisoned, and you will get one.”
Ramond turned and stepped on the drezmur’s forepaw. The beast raised it, and he climbed onto her back.
“Wait for me,” he called out.
“Maybe,” I told him.
The drezmur reared. Her wings snapped open, blocking half of the sky.
She thrust her beak into the loop of the chain on top of Villain’s crate.
It slid over her head onto her neck, the crate dangling from it like a locket.
The giant beast spun toward the cliff, sprinted, leaped, and soared into the night.
“Thank you, Divine.” Solentine exhaled. “Finally.”