Chapter 32 The Lake
With no better leads to follow, we head southeast towards the distant childhood holiday home that Cherry remembers.
It's far, but it's also in the general direction of the palace, the place we were headed already.
The summer house is closed up in the autumn, with no servants or staff on the grounds.
The ponies, apparently, have other lodgings when the king is not in residence, and the staff only return in early spring to ready the house for its master.
It's our best bet at finding anything of the king's personal library or possessions.
Something that may give us a clue as to what he is.
How to fight him, if a fight is needed.
Our days become endless flying.
One stretch of land blurs into the next, the air growing warmer by increments with every league we journey south.
We fly high over towns and low over forests and dales.
Valleys and hills. Rivers and roads. The entire land of Ithyma passes below us, every settlement and holdfast, every city and village.
The lords in their halls are no more aware of our presence than the farmers on their homesteads.
We don't stop in towns, not even for supplies.
With our new fears about the king, any place where he has reach feels unsafe.
We drink from streams and, when the supplies from the Trove run out, we eat only what we can forage or hunt.
It is not a new way of living for me, but it is different now, too.
Now I hunt more than I must. More than I need in order to feed a human appetite.
Now I hunt like a dragon.
The more we eat, the more our protector forms grow.
The next time we face danger, I am determined that I will not be the smallest beast in the fight.
I will not be outmatched, not overpowered.
This is not about pretending to be human anymore, not about hiding any monstrous part of myself.
This is about my friends and their survival.
I don't know if there's any way for us to be beat a basilisk, but I'll take any advantage I can get.
Vakhrin feels the same, and although by his reckoning he has already reached the size of maturity for a manticore, he is determined to gain any possible edge of his own.
"We need to train," Vakh says one day as we break for the humans to eat and stretch their legs.
We are on a grassy outcropping overlooking a wooded gulley where we recently hunted three wild boar and discovered a berry thicket that delighted Marton and Cherry.
Humans, I know, are averse to an all-meat diet.
"Train?" I repeat. My eyes are fixed on the thicket below, where Marton is meticulously harvesting berries and bundling them in spare cloth from his pack.
These days, the humans have more energy than we do.
It has been more intense and ceaseless flying in this neck of our journey than in any that has come before.
Even when Marton and I flew so fast and hard to reach the Trove from the Academy, it was not this many days in a row of unending travel.
Just sitting here, it is hard to keep my eyes open.
"We need to practice fighting," says Vakhrin.
He waves his hand in front of my face to capture my attention.
I blink at him.
"What?
"
Vakhrin rolls his eyes.
Jerking his chin in Marton's direction, he asks, "Have you talked to him?
"
"We talk all the time.
"
"About flying trajectory and which roots are safe to eat.
About research and books. Have you talked to him?
"
"When did you become so interested in my love life? "
Immediately after the retort comes out, I snap my mouth shut.
Too late.
Vakhrin's eyebrows climb to the sky.
"Your love life?" He starts to smile.
"Shut up," I hiss, flinging a handful of weeds at him.
"I didn't say that. I didn't mean it, and if you know what's good for you—"
He skips backwards, away from my flailing, looking superior.
"You said your lo—"
"And you said let's fight.
Let's fight, manticore." I jump to my feet, undressing and shifting in a whirl.
And we fight.
Over the next few days this becomes part of our routine.
We break for lunch, and Cherry and Marton forage and stretch while Vakh and I try to tear chunks out of each other.
For all that he should be easy to beat after I've mastered the art of avoiding his tail, Vakh clearly picked up a few things during his arena bouts at the Trove.
The manticore just seems to become faster and more impossible to pin down with every sparring session.
We learn each other's moves, and we learn new moves to catch each other off guard. Again and again and again, until our steps are so well choreographed they're almost a dance. Until we're both falling asleep sitting up around the fire at night, and I dream about fighting manticores in my sleep.
It is on the fourth evening of this new routine that Cherry turns to Marton. "Would you teach me to use a sword?" she says.
I goggle, Marton blinks. Vakh nods, speaking around a mouthful of boiled carrot, "I think that's a great idea."
I open my mouth. Shut it. Cherry glances at me warily. I clench my jaw tight to keep my instinctive response contained. I want to say no. No knives and no blades and no danger for my princess.
"I'm not exactly a master swordsman," says Marton, touching the sheathed blade lying next to his bedroll.
Another gift from the dragons of the trove.
His old sword was left at the Academy when we fled.
"I only had a few years of sword fighting lessons as a child.
And I took up fencing at the Academy, for the exercise. "
"Then you have more experience than I," says Cherry, primly adjusting the fall of her skirt. "Princesses never learn such things."
Vakh snorts. "Until now."
"Of course I will teach you what I can," Marton agrees.
My jaw aches. I take a big bite of my stew and chew with more force than necessary.
And so the next afternoon when we stop to make camp, Marton walks Cherry through the basics of swordplay. How to hold the weapon and how to stand. The different poses and rudimentary moves for parries and jabs.
The next day they practice with sticks, going through the motions of a fencing match as Marton lectures about technique and building muscle memory.
I would enjoy watching the play of muscle in his arms and chest when he shucks his coat and rolls up his sleeves to work under the autumn sun, but I am too busy cringing every time Cherry makes a move that could hurt her.
Vakh growls at me for my lack of attention to our own training. I refocus on the manticore before me, and the days roll onward like that.
Eventually, in all our traveling and sparring and hunting and planning, I begin to notice something.
I notice how Cherry's eyes seem to slide away from me when we have our nightly roundtables to discuss anything she and Marton might have thought of during the day.
I notice how she avoids me as we prepare to take off every morning, how she doesn't seek me out to complain during the day like she used to.
I think she's...ignoring me.
Never responding to my comments to the group.
Never asking to fly with me, but always going straight to Vakh.
Never asking me to do things for her: find something different for her to eat, get the spider out of her bedroll, untangle the knot in her hair.
She does it all herself—or, in the case of the spider, makes Vakh do it.
It feels as if a wall has been erected between us, and I'm not sure where it came from or when it got here.
I'm not sure what to do about it.
I can't find the words to bring it up, and I'm half worried she would turn away from me if I tried.
That she would confirm what I already fear: that I have failed her in some way, disappointed her.
We are in the last stretch of our journey, the land turning to tangled creeks and the occasional marsh-like muddiness.
The lake we are searching for marks the end of the drylands, the start of the mangrove swamps that cover most of Ithyma's border with the Lwyan Sea.
Cherry and Marton are in agreement that if we have calibrated correctly, we should be coming upon the lake today or tomorrow.
I opt to say nothing to Cherry about my concerns.
I will put it off until later. That is the same strategy I have been using in most areas of my life lately.
Vakhrin has become the only person I can talk to with ease, and anytime we are out of earshot of the others, he pesters me about 'my feelings' for Marton.
My feelings, such as they are, can wait.
Marton is a familiar shape and weight on my back as we traverse the afternoon leg of our day's journey.
Vakhrin and Cherry, just ahead of us, are a storybook portrait of pink and gold.
Cherry's strawberry braid waves in the wind off Vakh's golden feathered wings, his fur ruffling like a red-lit wheat field in the breeze.
Cherry's small hands are buried in the ruff of his mane, her face tucked low to watch the ground and shield herself from wind.
They are cast in stark relief against the scene of foliage green, earth-brown, and sky blue.
If I were one for art or poetry, I might wish to capture the image in some way.
To remember it exactly as it looks in this moment, forever.
I feel a pressure against the scales of my shoulders.
Our signal that Marton has noticed something of interest.
I scan the ground, searching the earth below us, the patch of trees just ahead.
I see nothing at first, and then a flash of light catches my eye.
A glare, flashing briefly between the cluster trees.
A flash like sun glinting off something large and reflective.
Like a body of water.
Vakhrin lets out a call, half eagle's peal and half lion's roar.
He spreads his wings, banking sharply upward.
He and Cherry coast high over the tree line, and I angle upward to follow.
We are over the oaks and beyond them, and a wide stretch of blue water stretches out before of us.
There is a mile of grass and muddy earth between us and it, and I see no signs of a summer home.
But the lake is large, bordered with trees where it bends and continues on out of sight.
Up ahead, Cherry raises her arms, letting out a whoop that has my heart skipping.
This is it, isn't it?
Tombland Lake. Our last stop. Our one shot of learning something about the king before we face him.
I want nothing so badly as to grab all three of my friends and flee in the opposite direction.
But I know that I cannot.
They all want to do this; they believe in it.
And I know that it is the right thing, no matter how much my selfish heart rebels.
I feel the pressure at my back again, harder this time.
Marton gripping with the full strength of his hands and knees.
I look up in time to see Vakhrin pause.
Midflight, he seems to freeze. I have only a moment to wonder what he is doing, what he sees.
And then he and Cherry are plummeting out of the sky.