Chapter 19 The Heading
Marton cannot stop laughing. I think he's slightly hysterical from the shock of what has transpired.
But from the moment we set down on a high hill in the north of Philostia—with me still in my dragon form, since I have no clothes and we have no money or supplies of any kind—Marton begins laughing, and is unable to stop for several minutes.
He's gasping for breath, tears streaming down his face by the end, but he finally sobers enough to look around, to speak.
His warm brown eyes find me. "That," he pronounces clearly, "was an unmitigated disaster.
" He hiccups almost drunkenly, or perhaps he's choking on another chuckle.
"You just—tore through the Academy—in dragon form.
You fought the Headmaster. You—you—" He begins laughing again, gasping between words, so I have to strain to understand him.
"You should have—seen—the looks—on their faces.
When they were trampling each other to get down the stairs.
" He collapses in a heap upon the grass, gasping.
"They'll never doubt again."
This last comes out as a hoarse whisper.
I nudge him with my nose, rumbling in my chest. A bit worried about him, a bit amused.
He raises a hand to stroke my snout absently.
I feel like I should apologize to him, but I'm not sure what for.
He doesn't seem angry and me.
Maybe I just feel the need to apologize for being such an out of control monster?
I shouldn't have lost my temper, shouldn't have shifted.
But I am strung tight from days of stress, and something snapped in me at the realization of all the lies I had been fed.
Raised as a human, I was kept in the dark about the kin as surely as any human was.
And everything that has happened, to me and to Cherry and to Vakhrin and Marton, has been because of those lies.
The necessity of keeping secrets, which drove so many of the kin to act more monstrously than they ever would have otherwise.
The more I think about it, actually, the more I'm really not sorry at all for what I did.
Those men let Marton go out into the world, blindly endangering himself, searching for a truth they could have easily told him.
They let him hurt for years before that, alone in his beliefs and mocked for them, and they never spoke a word.
And Vakh's parents. They all but abandoned their son because it was so important to avoid discovery.
Then there's Cherry's father, the king, who locked her in a tower for years in a plot to secretly find her a dragon husband.
If that, indeed, was his plan. Knowing how many kin are out there in the world, as I do now, I find it odd that he could not have located her a husband in a better way.
Have we been wrong in our assumptions of his motives all this time?
Has our quest been a waste from the start?
I don't know because everyone keeps lying and concealing things.
Angry again, I pull away from Marton, eyeing the landscape around us.
We're on a barren hill sloping down to miles of farmland and woods on either side.
At our backs are the rolling foothills that lead north into the mountains.
There's no place that looks habited by humans nearby, which for once, is disappointing.
. My cover is blown already, so what I really want now is a place to find clothes.
I need to shift back into my human form, to speak to Marton.
Marton rises to his feet before me, babbling something in his off pitch human speech.
I huff through my nose, turning my attention to him.
"You need to shift?" he repeats, plucking at the front of his tunic.
An offer. He means to give it to me. But.
..then he will not have a shirt.
As I watch, Marton pulls his—slightly less pristine than it was—white pundit tunic over his head.
I see that he has a thin undershirt on beneath it.
He offers me the thick tunic, but I ignore it.
I can't quite feel the temperature of the air around me, but I know it has been getting colder lately, as autumn approaches.
And there is a heavy wind on this hill, tossing Marton's hair to one side and rippling over my scales.
I extend my head, snuffling meaningfully at Marton's undershirt.
Give me that, I mean to say. You need protection from the elements.
I do not.
Marton stumbles a step away from me in surprise, his cheeks flushing at my invasion of his space.
He looks embarrassed. "I—Oh. Oh." After a moment, he rids himself of the undershirt, and I pointedly direct my eyes elsewhere as he dons the thick tunic once more.
He picks up the undershirt, extending it to me, his eyes on the sky.
I shift to my human form, becoming small and unobtrusive once more. I kind of hate it.
With delicate precision, a side effect of recently having had flesh-shredding claws, I accept the undershirt from Marton's grip.
As I put it on, the hem falls down to my knees, the sleeves overlong, the neck gaping just as his tunic did on me before.
A glance down at myself reveals that for all this excess of fabric, the effect is not exactly modest, as the shirt is thin enough to be all but see-through.
Marton clears his throat, and then coughs, and then erms a few times.
I wait for him to finish blushing, and then he finally says, "Well.
We should probably—talk—about that—what happened—before.
"
"I am...sorry that I overreacted. "
Marton pulls his gaze up from somewhere around my chest area.
Flushes crimson. "Oh. Yeah. Fine. Good. But I meant—map—"
"Map?
"
"The—the lines on the—map.
" Marton expression is strained as if he's doing advanced mathematical calculations in his head as he struggles to keep his eyes fixed on my face.
"Ah," I realize what he means, his nonsense words tickling at my memory.
"The—how did Womack put it? The Trove is located somewhere.
..'between the lines of the map'?"
"That's right," Marton agrees.
His eyes regain some measure of clarity as he glances away, out over the landscape sprawled around us.
"Which could mean..."
"Absolutely anything?
" I offer.
Marton shakes his head, deep in thought.
"The wyverns flew north. You said you thought they'd be going somewhere close by, because Vakhrin might wake up soon.
.."
"I don't know that for certain.
There—there are lots of other things that could have happened.
They could have..." Killed him. Overpowered him again.
Chained him up and drug him. He may never have woken up at all.
The onslaught of images to accompany these thoughts makes me nauseous, and prevents me from doing any great thinking or plotting in the meantime.
But Marton carries on, single-minded.
"There's one place I can think of. But it seems almost too.
..obvious." I make no response, waiting for him to think it out.
"North of the Werewood, which already lies practically on top of the border between Philostia and Ithyma.
..are the mountains. Which contain, somewhere in their midst, the border with Olio for both Ithyma and Philostia.
Just like the Werewood, though, the mountains form an inexact boundary for our separate nations.
There's no specific line marked out.
It's just...mountains, and if you cross far enough in, the towns and villages become Olion instead of Philostian or Ithymian.
"
"You think the Trove is there?
" I ask. "In that...space between the lines?
" It does seem almost too obvious. A place we have been skirting around for the last several weeks of travel.
Can it really be so simple? So close?
"Some of the mountain terrain is completely impassible," says Marton, eyes bright as he warms up to the idea.
"Places humans never go, because they cannot reach them.
Places only a creature with wings could reach.
"
It does sound credible.
Suddenly, it seems entirely likely.
"Then we have a heading," I whisper.
"Maybe." Marton does not looks so satisfied.
"That's still a lot of possible ground to cover.
A lot of mountain range to search. And..
.I wonder if it might not help, if we actually had a map?
Perhaps looking at it would help us gain our bearings?
"
"Like the...topographical map we had before?
"
"Yes." But then Marton frowns.
Rubs his chin. "No. The mountain ranges we'd be looking for wouldn't be exactly charted, would they?
If they are places humans can't reach. But I suppose it would help, perhaps, just seeing a representation of where exactly the three borders are supposed to intersect.
Though there's no exact science to it." Marton is muttering to himself at this point, deep in concentration.
"All the maps show it a little differently.
Sometimes the border is here, sometimes there.
.."
I ahem to get his attention, and his gaze comes to me unfocusedly.
He blinks a few times.
"I hate to interrupt, but—" I spread my arms, indicating my state of (un)dress.
"I can't very well go into a town like this, and I don't see one around here anyway. And we don't have any money."