Chapter 16

Akeelay

Chapter 16

Right. Well. We were all about to die. So comforting. Kaolin is so reassuring.

But that was pretty accurate. I wasn’t making any progress cutting through the door. I could cut into it, but the wood or whatever the thing was made of was too thick for my knife to reach to the other side.

So I took a break, and glanced around. Everything had been going fine when I started working on the door, but I couldn’t see anything of Kaolin except his feet and a foreboding pool of blood trickling out from his chest. Maybelle was being cornered by whatever it was that Diza had transformed into, and I couldn’t see Dossik.

I moved toward Maybelle, hoping I could help, when Dossik seemed to appear from nowhere beside me and pushed me back.

“What do you think you are doing?” he demanded.

“She’s going to get killed! I have to do something!”

“I have this under control. Wait one moment.”

Diza could almost reach Maybelle and advancing quickly. Dossik silently nocked an arrow and waited.

“What are you waiting for?” I had almost screamed the words, but realized how stupid that would be. Instead I whispered angrily.

“Trust me,” he said back. Just as Diza was about to reach Maybelle, he released the arrow.

I watched its path and nearly screamed again. It was too far to the left.

Suddenly, the arrow’s path curved and hit the bear in the side of the chest. She fell back, hitting the door and crushing the wood.

“Wow,” Maybelle said. “I thought you guys were leaving me to die. How did you do that, Dossik?”

“And where did that arrow come from?” I added.

Kaolin groaned. We all looked over at him, and I gasped as I saw that he had been badly hurt.

“He stepped in front of me and she just hit him out of the way,” Maybelle told me.

“Let’s get him out of here so we can heal him,” I urged, running to his side.

There were claw marks crossing his chest and the skin around it looked pale green. I winced at the color, hoping the wound wasn’t poisoned.

I strained to pick him up and failed. Dossik trotted over to help me and we carried him out of there and to the edge of the trees.

“Is this far enough away?” I asked, tired.

“I don’t know,” Maybelle said. “I never knew that dwarves’ creations repel magyk. But it should probably work. Multo said that we couldn’t cast spells inside ‘something a dwarf has built.’ So it should work now.”

“You’re going to heal him, right?” I checked.

“Fejqan,” she said by way of response.

I watched, amazed, as the cuts in the shape of Diza’s claws vanished and the color returned to his skin and face.

He sat up, looking tired. “What happened?”

“Dossik saved us all,” I said.

A strange expression flashed across his face, then another one, then he smiled.

“I’m glad we’re not dead.”

That first expression…could it have been jealousy?

“So, anyway, Dossik, where did you go, and where did you get that bow and arrow?” Maybelle asked.

“Every centaur has the ability to store a bow and arrow – any weapon, I suppose – in a…I suppose you could call it a locker in the air. Putting it in requires almost no energy, but it is very tiring to take it out.”

“Why didn’t you ever mention this before?” I asked, forgetting about Kaolin for the moment.

“It was never relevant before, and you never asked,” he replied in his blasé way.

“Okay, well, where did you disappear to? You’ve done that before, but I always figured you went off into the trees or something.”

In response, he shimmered out of existence.

“Are you still there?” Kaolin asked, surprised.

He reappeared. “I am, but I am unable to speak while in that state, or I will become visible.”

“So you can just turn invisible and sneak up on people? That’s useful information, I think. That could be really helpful.” Maybelle seemed a little annoyed.

“And can every centaur do that too?” Kaolin asked.

“No, not every centaur can do it. It is a genetic trait, passed down to me by my father. I do not know why I did not tell you before,” he said, sounding slightly ashamed. “I thought that you might be afraid that I was spying on you.”

“We trust you, as long as Lymlock doesn’t give you any apples,” Kaolin said. I wasn’t sure if he was serious or kidding, and I didn’t think he knew himself.

“Let us just go,” Dossik said. “We still have some time before the sun sets, and I would like to get away from this hill.” He glanced back to the doorway, where the dead bear we had all had to climb over to exit still lay.

“I agree completely,” Kaolin said.

“That’s a first,” I said. The two boys looked at me for a moment and then laughed.

“She’s got a point,” Maybelle said, and for a moment everything was perfect. There we were, just four normal (as normal as possible for Mithden) people joking around. After all, all of us but Dossik were pretty much teenagers. We were actually enjoying ourselves.

At least until a loud bang could be heard from the forest. All four of us jumped at the same time.

“Well, we should probably get going,” I sighed, sorry for the moment to come to an end.

“Which way is it again?”

“I don’t actually remember either. Can we just go off a little ways and go to sleep? The sun’s going to set soon and I’m sure we’re all tired from the…um…day’s events,” I said.

“That proposition sounds good to me,” Dossik said. “For once, I am actually tired from the events of the day.”

“Stop bragging,” I pretended to grumble. “The rest of us are always tired from ‘the events of the day.’”

“That’s true,” Kaolin agreed.

“Let’s just go,” Maybelle said.

And so we went, watching very carefully for trip wires tied between trees.

We all slept well that night. At least until, yet again, we were woken in the dead of night.

Apparently, Maybelle and Kaolin had forgotten to put up a shield spell.

“What are you doing in this forest?” A voice echoed out in the night.

A dragyon had found us, and he didn’t look friendly.

A midnight blue dragyon doesn’t show up very well at night. But dragyons’ eyes glow red, so we managed. None of us spoke for a few beats, although we were all awake.

Finally, Maybelle said, “We’re just passing through. We want to travel through the forest. Our goal is to get to Lospem, the capital city of Melzult.”

“What are you trying to get?” he asked.

This was a good development. He sounded more curious than demanding this time.

Dragyons aren’t good or bad by nature. Most only consider how things affect them. So, they can be deadly (as I mentioned, my family was killed when one attacked my village), but most of the time they’ll leave humans and magykans alone.

I answered his question. “As you may have heard, the Rhellens castle was taken over by sorcerers.” I paused to see his reaction.

“I had not heard that, but go on.” His tone was neutral, what I could see of his face impassive.

“They used a potion to put the king and queen to sleep. We’re going to a museum of magykal artifacts to get a feather that’ll wake them up.”

“That is an honorable reason to be traveling, and I do hope you succeed. Good luck.” He took off. Strange creatures, dragyons.

Suddenly, he landed back down beside us.

“You have a centaur among you. Would he happen to be the same centaur who slayed the dwarf-bear creatures that used to frequent this forest?”

“I am,” Dossik said cautiously.

“Good for you. They were quite a nuisance.”

He took off again, and we all waited for a few moments to see if he would return. When he didn’t, we all sighed in relief.

I’ll say it again: Dragyons are strange creatures.

“That was…strange…” Maybelle said, trailing off at the end.

“It was,” Dossik agreed, staring up at where the dragyon had left.

“We forgot the shield spell,” added Kaolin. “Should we go do that now?”

“Probably,” replied Maybelle, yawning hugely. “There are other creatures in the forest who would like to kill us, even if a dragyon has let us go.”

“That was bizarre,” I agreed, still shell-shocked.

When the other two returned, we went back to sleep.

The next morning, we avoided all eggs and kept walking. The general excitement in our group was growing. We could tell we were getting closer, and the idea of our quest almost being over encouraged us all.

Suddenly, at that moment, I realized we would probably have to walk all the way back. I almost stopped right there, except the others looked back at me as if to say, “You okay?” I had been walking kind of towards the back, lost in thought, and we had been together for so long, we knew how each other felt.

They kept me going. I didn’t really care how tired I was or how much my feet hurt (and they were getting used to the strain by then), I would keep going.

I hoped that we would pass that day without any incidents. I really didn’t want Kaolin – or any of us – getting hurt.

Just as I was thinking that, a huge creature swooped down from above, and we scattered instantly.

Glancing up at it, I saw that it was something I had never seen before. The huge horse was a pegasus, far larger than any I had seen before, but it had a horn.

A unicorn pegasus? That was bad news.

It landed and charged straight toward me. Somewhere off to my left, I heard Kaolin mutter a spell. It evidently missed the creature charging at me. Yet again, I realized, dodging out of its path, a unicorn was charging towards me.

But this time, I wasn’t tied to a tree, and I had a weapon. I yanked out my knife and, as the huge winged unicorn spun to charge at me again, stabbed it quickly in the side.

It wasn’t enough to kill the huge horse, but it paused for long enough for Maybelle to cast a spell to kill it.

Breathing heavily after the exertion, I stared at the winged, horned horse.

“Well,” Kaolin said after a moment. “That’s something you don’t see every day.”

I gave a short laugh. “Let’s keep going.”

 We walked. Most of the time we didn’t talk when we were walking, which sometimes wasn’t very fun. I don’t know about the others, but sometimes I got in that mood where I think, “What if…?”

I hated that. We were having enough trouble without my negativity.

But enough about me. This letter was written to tell you why you’re going to die. No offense, but I’d rather get back to that.

It took another day before we got out of the forest, at almost exactly midday. There were a few more minor scrapes, but there was nothing that we couldn’t handle, and nothing with sorcerers.

We were all so relieved to get out of there. It wasn’t a complete death trap like the rumors went, but it had been a pretty rough trip.

“We made it,” was all I could say as we finally truly entered Melzult.

“We made it,” the others echoed gratefully.

And we walked, now heading toward Lospem, the capital city.

In midafternoon, Kaolin spotted people up ahead. “I hope they aren’t sorcerers,” he muttered as he pointed them out to us.

Didn’t we all?