Chapter 15

Kaolin

Chapter 15

When I woke up, my first thought was, “The shield spell worked!” The second one was, “Where are the others?” Had they left me behind?

No, I realized quickly. They had left their stuff behind. At least Akeelay had. She really did trust me, didn’t she?

It was weird. I wouldn’t have trusted myself if I were them, even though I knew I wasn’t going to betray them.

I looked around the clearing I was in. It seemed rounder than it had the night before, almost as though the trees had moved. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?

I laughed nervously. The air seemed heavy, as though the world was waiting for something to happen. I watched for something, anything. The leaves rustled as a cool wind blew through the forest. I didn’t like this place. I hoped that we could get out as soon as possible.

Glancing around, nothing seemed out of place. A sharp noise, almost a barking sound, drew my eyes. When I looked back, a piece of paper was falling to the ground.

I ran over to grab it. I managed to catch it before it hit the ground.

It was blank.

“Where did this come from?” I muttered to myself. It was a scroll, really, the ends curling toward the middle.

I flipped it over, hoping there would be something on the back. Nothing. When I turned it back over, though, there were words on it. Before reading it, I realized I would want to write it down.

      Too worried about the words disappearing to focus enough to use my magyk, I looked around and saw a notebook in Akeelay’s bag. I flipped through it to a blank piece of paper, glimpsing my name a couple of times. She was writing about me?

      I didn’t have time to worry about that, though. I tore out a page, grabbed a pen, and copied down the words on the paper:

      “Hello, Kaolin Claystone. We are the benevolent trees of the Fruntieri Forest. We have vital information to tell you. Would you like to hear it?”

      “Yes,” I said, excited.

      “The malevolent trees from this forest have given Malin Lymlock a paper just like this one.”

      That was his first name? I nearly laughed.

      The words kept coming in the thin, neat calligraphy of the trees. “They have told him about your goal of reaching and retrieving the feather, the talisman of Turoi. We believe he is planning to arrange a large group of sorcerers to attempt to either kill or capture you once you leave this forest.”

      “What do you think we should do about it?” I asked. The first words were disappearing, and I was glad I had written them down.

      “We are surprised you thought to ask that question,” the words continued after a moment. “Most do not ask for our advice, they simply take our warnings and do not wish for more. We believe that you and your companions may be strong enough to have no casualties, but we would not take the chance. You may be able to avoid them. Unfortunately, we do not have enough information at this time to fully advise you.”

      At that point, Maybelle, Akeelay, and Dossik returned, Akeelay carrying some sort of eggs in a basket.

      “What are you doing?” Akeelay asked, almost laughing. I realized it was at the expression on my face. I felt worried and strained and impressed, and my face reflected that, apparently.

      “Well,” I started. “Apparently, the trees can talk. Sort of. But they’re listening.” Akeelay nearly dropped the basket, but caught it just in time.

      I explained about the paper.

      “Oh, and by the way, sorry for using paper from your journal, Akeelay. I wasn’t focused enough to cast a spell.” Spells require focus to cast. Most of the time it doesn’t take too much, but especially if you’re trying to remember a lot of things, or just distracted, it becomes a lot harder.

      “That’s fine,” she said offhandedly. “What did they say exactly?”

      “Here, I wrote it down,” I said, handing them the paper I had written everything down on. My handwriting was rushed and sloppy, but readable.

      “I’ll make us some eggs, assuming they won’t catch fire?”

      “They aren’t from phoenixes, but we don’t know what creature they came from. Hopefully just an ordinary bird,” Maybelle responded.

      “I’ll try not to blow up anything,” I said, grinning.

      As they looked over the sheet, gasping at the revelations on there, I made a quick ring of stones lying around and started a fire.

      Akeelay looked over and half-frowned. “Is that circle of rocks a sorcerer thing? I’ve never seen anybody do that but you and Renjin.”

      “Renjin?” I asked, astonished to hear that name. “Was it you he tried to kill?”

      “Yeah, and Maybelle saved me,” she said. “I’ll tell you the story during breakfast.”

      “Small world,” I said to myself, and answered her question. “I don’t think it’s really a sorcerer-specific thing, but a lot of people do that when they’re camping. It’s just so the forest doesn’t burn down.”

      She snickered. “Yeah, we’ve had enough of that.”

      I went back to heating up the pan. She went back to reading.

      Once the pan was hot enough, I carefully cracked the first blue-spotted egg. Tense, ready for anything to happen, I breathed out a sigh of relief when nothing out of the ordinary happened.

      Dossik finished reading first and came over to me. “Do you need any help?” he asked. It was obvious that he didn’t really want to help, but he was asking to be polite.

      “No, but thank you for asking,” I replied. He was very old-fashioned, but that made sense, as centaurs can live to be over two hundred.

      He trotted away and I finished cooking the eggs as the girls finished reading.

      “Is scrambled okay with everybody? Because that’s what I made, so sorry if you didn’t want that...”

      “That’s fine,” Maybelle said.

      I divided the eggs into 4 portions and plated them. Everybody took a plate and we all looked at each other, none of us really wanting to be the first one to try them.

      “Fine,” Dossik finally huffed, exasperated. “I will have the first bite.”

      We all watched as he ate. When nothing happened after a few moments, we all started eating hungrily.

      “These are actually really good,” Maybelle said.

      “They are! They don’t taste like eggs,” Akeelay agreed. “They taste like...I don’t know.”

      I didn’t know what they tasted like either. The taste kept changing from salty to spicy to citrusy and back again. It was hard to pinpoint an actual flavor.

      Our first meal from the Fruntieri Forest was delicious and strange. That didn’t surprise me.

      Once we were finished eating, none of us really wanted to start the day. Finally, I said, “We should probably go.”

      The others got to their feet (except Dossik, who was already standing. Did he ever have to rest?) and we started out.

      It was almost midday when Maybelle started groaning.

      “What’s wrong?” Akeelay, Dossik and I asked at the same time.

      Then I knew what was wrong. It felt like a sack of bricks had hit my stomach.

      “What...?” Akeelay asked. She felt it too.

      “The eggs,” I answered. They weren’t poison, but it sure felt like they were. I saw Maybelle run off out of the corner of my eye, and, an instant later did the same, throwing up.

      A while later, we all returned. Of course, Dossik wasn’t affected.

      “Does anything hurt you?” I grumbled.

      “Occasionally,” he responded. “An arrow or certain diseases.”

      “Let’s just keep going,” Akeelay said. “Hopefully that’s as bad as it’s going to get.”

      “Hold on a moment, we can ask the trees for help,” I said, then rolled my eyes, smiling. “Do you know how weird that sounds? Let’s go ask the trees! Even knowing they’re magykal, that just sounds bizarre.”

      I pulled the scroll out of my bag.

      “What kind of eggs were those?” I asked it, feeling foolish for talking to paper.

      “They were from the Adarna bird.” The words appeared quickly. “You should not eat anything from this forest without first consulting us or making sure it will not harm you. There will be no other negative effects from those eggs. However, they will sharpen your senses from now on, which will help you. Not that the centaur needs that, of course.”

Was it just me, or were the trees rustling more than normal for the wind? I guess that would be the sharpened senses.

      I read the trees’ words aloud to the others.

      “Well then, sharpened senses? Not that bad...Do you hear something?” Akeelay joked.

      “What?” I teased back, pretending not to hear her.

      “Well, then, let’s go,” said Maybelle.

      And so we went.

      Nothing happened. And more nothing happened. We did spot more than a few magykal creatures, and pointed these out to each other as we went along. We made it a sort of game, because we were all so bored.

      I saw a dragyon, a pegasus, and a gnome. The game got us through to midafternoon, and then we all kind of were too lazy to continue.

The forest was much darker green than it was when we first entered, and I wondered what that meant. It seemed like it meant that it was darker, as in more evil... I needed to stop jumping to conclusions. I freaked myself out.

      Of course, our non-being-attacked time couldn’t last forever, and as we walked between two trees, we all tripped over a nearly invisible wire and fell into a perfectly round ditch, presumably dug for just that purpose.

      I heard leaves rustle an instant after we fell and tried to look up. I couldn’t see anything but the sky until a dwarf appeared at the edge of the hole.

      “Look what I caught!” he said happily. “Some nice little travellers!”

      Before Maybelle or I could cast a spell, he continued, “And don’t try anything, if any of you three are magykans. You should know spells don’t work on dwarves or anything they build.”

      “Why did you dig this?” Akeelay asked, taking the lead.

      “Just wanted to see if I would catch anything interesting,” he said. “And I did!”

      I tried to remember if dwarves were normally good or bad, but I couldn’t. I thought that they generally only cared about their own kind, especially themselves, and that made sense. What he was planning to do, I had no idea.

      Suddenly another dwarf came up to the edge of the hole. This one was a girl though (or woman? They’re all short, so I don’t know), with fiery red hair.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You need to come home to help make dinner.”

“Honey, I’m busy right now,” he said, sounding frustrated. “I’ll come later, okay?”

So she was his wife, not his sister or anything.

“No! You need to come right now! And get these poor people out of here. You always do this. You’re going to scare away all the visitors, and we’ll never have any travellers again.”

“Fine!” he said, sighing. “Here.” He gestured, and stairs appeared in the side of the pit.

I was shocked for a moment that he could do that, but it made sense. Dwarves are creatures of the earth. They live underground and rarely come up to the surface. It makes sense that they would have control over the dirt.

We climbed out, and the female dwarf shook her head at us apologetically.

“I’m sorry. He’s really a very nice dwarf. He just likes to dig holes. Would you like to come to our house for dinner?”

“Actually, ma’am-” I began.

“No, no, I insist,” she said. She was very difficult to argue with. “It’s that way.” She pointed in the direction we were going anyway.

The four of us looked at each other.

“It wouldn’t hurt,” said Akeelay. “We’re going that way anyway.”

“We would love to,” Dossik said. Firmly, ending all arguments.

We walked. The male dwarf, who the woman told us was named Multo, grumbled to himself all the way. The woman, Diza, talked cheerfully about the forest and what to avoid in order to survive. Dossik seemed to be listening intently, but the rest of us were lost in thought.

I was thinking about what would have happened if Diza hadn’t come along. What would Multo have done? I doubted he would have killed us. He didn’t seem like that kind of person - er, dwarf. He probably just wanted to scare us, but he probably would have left and forced us to make our own way out of there.

What would I have done if that had happened? I could probably have boosted the girls out, but Dossik would have had to help me out, and then he would’ve been stuck. I resolved, not for the first time, to get a weapon that didn’t need magyk to use, and maybe get Akeelay to help me figure out how to use it.

“We’re here!” Diza said, and I looked up.

“That’s a hill,” Maybelle pointed out.

“The house is on the other side of it, Maybelle,” Diza said. I hadn’t remembered telling her our names, but Dossik must have mentioned it.

All six of us walked around the hill. There was, in fact, a door on the other side.

“The house wasn’t actually on the other side,” Akeelay pointed out. “It was inside of it.”

Diza pursed her lips. “Well, yes, technically, but you don’t need to worry about that, do you? Let’s just go inside. You’re just in time for dinner.”

“Is it just me, or did that sound a little...sinister?” Akeelay whispered to me.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I whispered back.

“Come on now, let’s go inside!” she said, opening the door and gesturing us in. We entered.

I didn’t look around the room until she began closing the door behind us. Everything in there seemed too big for the dwarves. But other than that, it seemed perfectly normal. A nice fire was going in the fireplace, a pot bubbling over it. One corner had a couple of big armchairs and a bookshelf, and there was a cheerfully red-colored table in the middle of the room that seemed too large to fit under the hill. It probably extended downwards.

“What are you having for dinner?” Dossik asked as the door slammed shut.

“Oh, nothing too special,” Multo said, suddenly looking excited.

“Just...” Diza started as both of the dwarves began to expand. “You,” she finished.

The dwarves grew and transformed into huge creatures that looked like a cross between a large bear and a human. They were about one and a half times my height, and I automatically tried to cast a spell to shrink them.

“Didn’t I warn you, traitor?” Multo’s voice was raspy and loud. “You can’t cast a spell inside something a dwarf has made. Even if they can transform into something else.”

“How does everybody know?” I asked. Yet another creature somehow knew that I used to be a sorcerer. “Was there some big evil creatures meeting I wasn’t aware of?”

“News travels fast,” Diza said. Her voice sounded almost exactly like her husband’s, only one octave higher. “And you’re all going to die.”

“Not if I can help it,” the four of us said at the same time. We really did make a great team.

“What can you do?” Diza said, laughing. Her voice sounded just awful. “You only have one weapon among the four of you, and you can’t get out of here. The door doesn’t open from the inside - unless you have our strength.”

“I think we’re seriously trapped,” I said to the others.

“No,” said Dossik. “You are wrong.” He wasn’t talking to us, but to the giant dwarves.

“We do not only have one weapon,” he continued. “We have two.”

He pulled, seemingly from nowhere, a bow and arrow. Not reacting quickly enough, the huge bear-looking Multo was killed with the first arrow. Diza roared and headed for us, no longer messing around.

“Akeelay, try to cut through the door!” Dossik shouted. “We will take care of our other opponent.”

“You killed my husband,” Diza grunted. “You are all going to die!”

“Weren’t you going to kill us anyway?” I asked, sarcastic. I had to get her attention away from Dossik, even if only for an instant.

“It’s not like anything’s changed,” Maybelle added, seeing my strategy. “Except, oh yeah, Multo’s dead. Oops!”

She roared again and spun away from Dossik, heading toward Maybelle.

I stepped in front of Maybelle, but Diza whacked me aside with a swipe of her paw.

I flew across the room, slamming into the table. I saw stars and felt blood on my chest. I couldn’t see Dossik anywhere, even with my limited vision, and the huge bear was quickly advancing on Maybelle, who didn’t have anything to defend herself with. Akeelay hadn’t made any good progress cutting through the door with her knife, and I wasn’t going to be of much use.

We were all going to die.