Chapter 34 Find The Mark
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
FIND THE MARK
ADELINE
Getting up, I follow her through the ruined house, stepping over the corpses of the birds. Where did Roane find the venom? Did he retrieve the hydra’s corpse? How would he know to coat this knives in the liquid if he isn’t familiar with tales?
Am I mixing up stories? Or misunderstanding how stories work in this world?
“Let’s hope we don’t get attacked again.” Ardruna picks her way through the overgrown garden where more birds lie dead. “Do you still want to see where I first met Roane?”
“Yes. If you hadn’t guessed it yet, curiosity is one of my defining features.”
“That’s not necessarily a virtue,” Ardruna says.
“Neither is ignorance, and curiosity helps ask the questions.”
“It also killed the cat,” she grunts.
“Unless it’s a wildcat, that line doesn’t work here, so we should be safe.”
Her tail swishes back and forth. “Safe like we were inside that house?”
I wince. “You wanted to accompany me.”
“Yeah, blame this on me.” She’s quiet as we walk through the streets leading out of the city. “Great job I did, protecting you. Sometimes I wonder why Roane keeps me close.”
“You helped him fight the goblins.”
Her ears twitch. “He had it handled. Sometimes I think… he only wants company.”
“Is this where you tell me again that I am what he’s missing?”
She sighs. “We can keep arguing. I can tell you tales of his patience and kindness and you can tell me that it doesn’t erase his more recent behavior, and we’d both be right. So how about we stop talking and save ourselves the headache?”
“If it works for you,” I mutter, though she’s probably right. It’s not her fault I tend to overanalyze everything, seeing patterns and obsessing over them.
But after a while, as we walk past the last houses, I start to hate the heavy silence between us.
“This world has a lot of flying terrors,” I say, “I can’t help noticing.”
“And your point is?”
“It feels tied to its history.”
“You have your own flying terrors. You have dragons. You said so.”
“We do. Dragons and birds. You have griffins, phoenixes, stymphalians, and the Gods know what else.”
“Birds, of course.”
I laugh. “I’ve definitely met the birds. Not very friendly.”
“And then there is Talton.”
“Right. Then there is Talton…” I smirk and her deep growl sounds like laughter.
“It’s this way,” she says. “To the spot I first met Roane. It’s a cemetery.”
My interest is instantly rekindled. “Is it? Of all places to meet…”
“It’s old. Who knows which book it came from?”
“Unless it belongs to this world. Aren’t there loci?”
She lets out a low roar. “Are there what now?”
“Spots that belong only to this world, grounding it, like crossroads, or… hinges around which the other stories revolve?”
“I wouldn’t know such things, you’d have to speak to—”
“Roane,” I say under my breath. “Right.”
No matter. I’m excited either way. Cemeteries are places of concentrated history, of names and dates and family trees. Clues. And I’m looking for clues about her, Talton, Roane, Olm… everything. I mean, you never know, right? I might get lucky this time.
If you have a lot of bad luck, then you’re due an amazing stroke of luck. That’s my theory. I can’t wait to reap my rewards because the past few days have stunk to the high heavens.
We trudge down the road leading through the meadows, among white and red flowers and clouds of buzzing insects. They look a lot like bees but they flash like real gold as they fly from blossom to blossom.
Then something else glints in the distance: a herd, every shift and movement sending flashes across my vision.
“Silver horses,” Ardruna says.
“Not very edible, I suppose.”
“Haven’t tried them, to be honest.”
As we approach, I can see why the name. Their pale manes and coats are so long they drag in the tall grass and they have an opalescence to them, like mother-of-pearl. More shell and marble than metal, if you ask me.
“Are they flesh-eaters, too?” I ask.
“I don’t know. They rarely appear.”
“Let me guess: Roane doesn’t know what story they escaped from. What good is a librarian who doesn’t know his books?”
“Do you expect a blacksmith to know how to wield a sword? Do you expect a seamstress to dance at the king’s ball? Why would he know the books?”
True, but… “Because he shouldn’t only be here to fight monsters. He should be able to push them back into the right books. Isn’t that why he’s losing control of this world?”
“You’re determined to dislike him, aren’t you?”
I bite my lip not to reply. We’ve been over that. She’s unhappy with me because I complained about her idol. And I don’t hate Roane. How could I? He’s a solid presence, always rushing to the rescue, making sure I remain alive. There is nobleness to him, for sure.
If I want more, that’s surely not his fault. And if he is a grumpy, apathetic loner most of the time, it’s nothing to do with me.
Even if Ardruna says he’s normally kind, nice, and funny?
Great. Now we’re back to it being my fault.
The silver horses keep grazing as we pass them by. Their manes and long coats look like folded wings. Winged is a theme in this world, as if the air-magic wielders of the fae race decided to focus on flight when they built it.
But that’s a flight of fancy on my part. Nobody built this world. It’s an amalgam of stories and ideas, spilling from the pages of chained books.
It bothers me that I don’t know the horses’ origin. I remembered the river’s name. Identified the story it originated in. Which horses could these be?
Sifting through the stories I know, a few come to mind.
The tale of the waterhorse prince, Nualeg, with his long white hair, beguiling maidens and drowning them until he met his match with the sorceress Elenya.
Amre, the steed of the tragic King Arctus, Arhondiel, who carried the fairy queen Ilsa, Malaen the evil one…
but these are specific horses, not a herd.
What if they reproduced, though? What if they respond to me?
So I softly call out all the names I can remember as we cross the meadows, from all the stories that come to my mind, and there are many.
One of the horses wanders by, a mare, but she’s probably only curious.
A symbol glints on her side, somehow visible through the long hide, and it looks like a shield and a spear.
“What is that symbol about?” I ask Ardruna. “What are these symbols every creature seems to have stamped in their flesh?”
“It’s a symbol of the book they escaped from. It’s a way to identify the books to which they need to return.”
“And what happens to the story in the book while these creatures are out of it?”
“I haven’t thought much about that,” Ardruna admits. “I suppose the story… stops?”
“Or falls apart,” I mutter. “It’s an impossibility. A paradox. Unless they are returned to the pages. And these horses definitely escaped from a book. So…”
Names. Think of more names and stories. I recall Diomedes’ mares who ate human flesh and were so beautiful that everyone felt drawn to ride them. And what about the horses of Hades, pulling his chariot through mist and darkness?
Oh, and also Ares’ mares, led by the stallion Arion, the star-fire horse, winged and eager to do battle…
“Hippi Arei,” I say.
At the sound of that name, the horses lift their heads and scream, rearing up, stomping their hooves.
“May the Gods help us,” Ardruna breathes. “What’s happening to them?”
“They are changing.” A sharp breath escapes me as they shake their long manes and coats, as they shift, subtly at first, then violently—huge wings springing from their backs, their coats shrinking even as their manes and tails become pure light.
“How did you do that?” Ardruna growls. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t… know.” And yet I do.
In truth, deep inside, I’ve been trying to convince myself that changing the river was nothing, a trick of the mind, an illusion. But these horses are proof it’s real. I pinpointed their story, found their names and brought them back to their original form.
“The longer you live in this in-between world,” I say, working this out step by step, “the more you change. The way others perceive you influences the way you look, even your very nature. Your role is lost. Your place in the story is gone. You can be anyone.”
“You can lose yourself,” Ardruna says, horror in her voice. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Or you can become someone new. It doesn’t have to be all bad.”
“It’s bad. I wouldn’t want to be anyone but myself.”
She’s right. Again, I wonder where she came from. “Do other animals slip through the cracks and enter this world? After all, I managed to enter.”
“You opened the door,” Olm says. “Animals generally can’t. They can’t speak or reason.”
“In theory, dragons could,” I counter. “If they had any interest in entering.”
“I’m sure other animals have entered,” Ardruna says. “Talton did, for instance.”
“True. Do you know how?”
“No,” she huffs. “I never asked him. Why didn’t I ever ask him? Why didn’t I wonder where he and I came from?”
But there’s no more time to ponder that as the now winged horses take to the sky. We watch them fly higher and higher, over the trees and hills, until they vanish in the distance.
“Well, that was a sight to behold,” Ardruna says. “Not something you see every day.”
“No,” I agree. “Not every day.”
Glancing one last time in the direction the winged horses have taken, I follow her through the plain.