Lost Magic (The Swift Codex Book 3) (28 page)

Valerin watched as pencil lead scraped across the white paint of the concrete, the wood biting into the glossy floor's finish when the point had dulled down. Every symbol came out perfect, straight, confident. It did not appear like I was shaking and that all I could hear was the echo of blood through my veins.

“You are making an area attack, but it's narrowed into a concentrated zone,” Valerin said, twisting his hair as he read what I left behind and started work on a portal. “How is that going to help us?”

A prisoner slammed into the ward two feet from my face, making me drop the pencil. He ginned so all his teeth showed and licked the transparent pane separating me from him. So the middle ward was gone. Only this innermost ward remained. Once the wardens elbowed their way to the front, they'd have free access to us. My fingers fumbled the pencil, numb and cold.

“Wolds, finish the portal. Make it directional, so it takes the same path the area attack uses.”

“Why?”

“How do you defeat armor, Wolds? Do you hit it with blunt force? You take something sharp and strong and you pierce it. That's what we're doing and if it doesn't work we're little worse off than whatever happens when that ward dies.”

He scrambled to cooperate, though to let him move as fast as he needed to, I almost had to sit on his back. Tight spaces were going to forever remind me of this. Of the close-pressed crowd of jeering, hungry faces clawing to break down the final defense. Valerin put his pencil down and shook his head.

“We don't have enough energy units to do this.”

Energy units was not a term I knew, but the point was still the same. “Just give me whatever strength you can.”

“I'm not as strong as Meadows. I can power one of these two things, but not both, and I'm sorry but you don't have the raw strength to make up the difference.”

I cut off an angry reply. I had gotten used to Mordon's seemingly limitless endurance. That had been an oversight on my part, to think that Valerin could substitute for him. After all, it was doubtful that the Blackwings could have kept someone with Mordon's strength in their press-gang for long. I should have realized … I could stick up a quick fey circle, goad the prisoners into unleashing spells against it, channel that energy into our spells, but it would take time and the fey circle wasn't any good against the brute force which the prisoners seemed to favor. Then I slapped my own head.

“Wolds, on my ankle is a stone. Mordon said it's powerful. It was in Josephina's, I mean it was on her person. Draw strength from it.”

“You have her soul gem?” Valerin's mouth dropped. “How did you—never mind. Give it.”

Our one and only saving grace was that it had taken the five traitor wardens this long to find access to the barrier between us and them. Valerin broke the chain off my ankle, bit his own thumb to draw blood, and smeared the gem in it. The chant he started was unfamiliar and it made the stone radiate light. Sensing that something was happening and they wouldn't like it, the prisoners grew frantic. Valerin held the stone between both palms, striking the pose of a monk at prayer.

My breathing came in shakes. Fists rammed the ward. Designed as it was to withstand an attack from within, it was deteriorating fast. Sections crumbled and fell. Fingers poked through, then those disappeared. When an eye peered at me, I jabbed my nails into it. There was a howl of pain, wet on my fingers, and a chorus of taunts from the others. Bigger sections fell inwards, blocking the smooth lines we'd made. I tossed the rubble aside, put my hand on Valerin's back, resisting the urge to tell him to hurry.

The shift to dragon form was just itching beneath my skin. It would help, but that was all. I thought of what they'd do if they laid hands on me, and spared a thought for Mordon and my parents and all my friends. These prisoners would kill me. Probably slowly. They'd kill Valerin in a hurry, but not me. I might even still be alive when the guards and other wardens made good on their promise to contain the prison break. But I would see Death after this …

Death wouldn't be happy to see me. He'd want to know why I let myself die. Why I didn't kill them instead. My heart came to a sudden halt. If I erased the directionality of the area spell, I could imbue it with two words and Valerin's strength. And I could stop the hearts of everyone within the room. How many people? Thirty, fifty? The thought made me dizzy, but as I reached to rub out the direction algorithms, the soul gem activated. It was a bright white light at first, then Valerin cried the signal to start. It knocked me back.

I hadn't been in a portal that rough since my entrance into the Wildwoods. Air whistled in my ears, deafening, boxing my head, inducing ringing. Turbulence shuddered through the portal as the attack spell ahead broke through barrier after barrier. I gripped Valerin's shoulder, he clutched me against his chest, I hated to think what would happen if I fell out of the portal, if that was even possible. Or what would happen if the attack spell ran out of strength before we made it out of the last ward, the crash would kill us.

The sensation of being propelled forward stopped and was replaced by weightlessness. Like those breathless seconds after jumping out of a swing and before being dragged down by gravity. I gasped, blinking in a bright area.

No more confined space. Open air. My eyes widened when I realized I'd let Valerin set the destination. He'd chosen freedom in the low hanging clouds and blue skies.

We were free falling towards shining water.

I'd never shifted that fast before. Whatever I'd thought was speedy before today was nothing on this. Maybe it was due to the near-panic I had been in during the dungeons. I filled my wings before Valerin's were even half-formed against his body. As he was still holding onto me, this made me a parachute, and a pretty poor one since I was half his dragon size. The shoulder I'd dislocated before started to tingle then send hot little stabs of pain.

Below us, a lush forest blanketed mountains with peaks so tall the trees stopped growing near the tips, replaced instead by white smudges of snow. Lakes and rivers glinted in the sunlight, winking with the movement of water. Civilization was nowhere to be seen. At another time, I would love nothing more than to take wing and cut through clouds. Surely there couldn't be a sight closer to heaven on earth. But I didn't want to see them like this, with Valerin dragging on me.

When his wings were formed and his neck was still elongating, he released me, fell a ways, and opened his wings with a snap. The release hurt almost as much as bearing his weight had, except now it gradually felt better.

Valerin's coloring was unique. His head and neck were dark blue, his shoulders, back, and tail a mottled blue-black. When he cut me off and faced me, his underbelly was all silver except for a patch of sapphire-blue on his chest.

“This way,” he said and tipped upwards.

What did he take me for? He was out of the dungeons. I wasn't going to keep my coven waiting for me. I started down. There was land, I could smell the earth in my nostrils.

I felt Valerin gliding through the air, his posture aggressive. Hunting me? When he was close enough, I streaked around his neck and dug my claws into the scales plating his back. He thrashed, I closed my teeth around his neck. Then he dove. I knew the maneuver from observing Mordon training with others. Speed and a sudden jolt dislodged an opponent in my position. I could use him like a launching pad by leaping when he stopped.

The air swirled around us in a sudden tempest. As I'd tucked my own wings against my back, this frayed against his tender membranes all the more. He grunted when there was a tear in his right wing. Just a little closer to the ground, and I could disappear into the wooded area.

A handful of drakes joined us, all coming to Valerin's aid. He jolted to a stop, but my escape was blocked by a pale blue and white drake so I had to remain glued to Valerin's back. I examined those I could, annoyed at their interference. Escaping now would not be so easy.

Where they had come from, I didn't know, but they must have been close in order to be upon us so fast. I berated myself for not checking the skies for reinforcements. All the energy I'd expended in breaking out of the dungeon had shortened the range of my awareness, and they were too close for me to escape. I changed the pattern of the wind to be a swift swirl around us, calm in the center, so Valerin and I could talk without the others interfering.

“This is the second time you've tried to abduct me, Wolds,” I said.

“No. Not this time.”

“You thought I wasn't a shifter. You were going to take me. And now your friends are here.”

Valerin snarled and whipped his head to an orange fire drake, yelling through the wind. “Fall back, Nabur.”

“Valerin!” said someone from the other side.

Nabur, the apparent ranking drake, roared his reply and came nearer. Something buffeted me. My talons sunk beneath Valerin's scales. Before I'd been holding him the way I would have held Mordon while goofing off, but now it would take effort to remove my claws from his armor. Valerin's body writhed with the way he lunged at Nabur, a frisson of pain passing through the both of us. It hurt to have nails beneath his hide, and it hurt to have my talons pulled. I wrapped my tail around his middle and seized.

“I scared her, Issa,” Valerin called. “You'd do the same. Now fall back. You're making it worse.”

My talons were slipping. My hold was less secure, even with my tail. I didn't know why, I hadn't decided to loosen my grip. It was like my claws were becoming shorter.

“The wind is breaking,” someone observed, drawing nearer despite Valerin's demands for them to back away. When one came too close, Valerin twisted, and the last thing I felt was the pain darken my vision and my scales slip while I fell.

It wasn't a complete black-out because it wasn't a black-out at all. I just couldn't move. Another time when I felt like this sprung to mind. Someone had struck me with a paralysis spell. It was all I could do to pad the air at my back. Without my wings extended, though, it wasn't doing me a whole lot of good. I thought that I should try to find a trinket to prevent this in the future. If there was a future.

Blue claws seized my legs. I was jerked, drawn up against a silver body, and held. They argued as they flew, but I didn't care to listen what it was about. What I gathered was that they hadn't seen Valerin in some time, had assumed that I was one of the Blackwings, and Valerin was outraged that I'd suffered two paralysis spells so close together. Once they heard that, the rest of the flight was taken in silence.

We didn't fly down. We flew up. I assumed this meant we were in for a long flight, but we entered foggy rainclouds and landed. It was solid. My tongue was hanging out of my mouth, bright pink against gray granite which was so cold it drew the warmth from my core. I should have shivered, but couldn't, and I couldn't tell anyone how cold I was, either. My body ignored commands to shift. I was stuck. Not far away, they were all arguing, voices too raised and tempers too high to be coherent to themselves nevermind to me.

A man knelt at my head. He was blond-haired with a vibrancy shining through his very being which made him hard to look at. Warm hands touched my cheek and the long bridge of my nose. He smelled of honey and sweet mead, and the words he said had the feel of old magic to them.

My scales softened, my hide thinned. My bones shrunk and joints popped and groaned, and before long I was a shivering mass of chattering teeth. The man unclasped a cloak from his throat and laid soft fur over my shoulders.

“Valerin, carry the Lady Feraline to the mineral hot springs. She has caught the chill.”

Now that he mentioned it, I did smell the distinctive tang of hard water, but it was lacking the sulfuric rotten-egg tinge. Nothing sounded as appealing as reddening my skin under a good hot spring. But where were we? Our airborne welcoming party had been drakes, but what was the man beside me, and what were the people who stood at the fringes of the activity?

With a mental effort I forced my thoughts to a halt. Something new was developing, something which involved Anna and Josephina, and I needed to keep my mind open to observing new facts. One of those was that I did not appear to be Blackwing captive and it was possible that I was among friendly people. Even if I did not understand Valerin yet. I closed my eyes, easing the stinging sun rays where it reflected off the ground.

Forcing my hip into a better position, I decided to submit for now and wait and consider what I knew. The Blackwings had in all likelihood been the ones behind the prison riot, which means if Valerin ever saw his Chief again it would be a death sentence. Were I in Valerin's position I would run to where I knew it was safe—probably back home, if that was an option. If ''home'' was an option, I could expect it to be well-defended. Being well-defended meant it was hazardous to those who did not know it. Which also meant I was safest sticking with the natives, provided they proved not to be crazies in the end.