The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (48 page)

More creatures emerged in the
gathering dusk. The rhythmic hum of insects filled the air. Somewhere an owl
hooted. The stream was filled with the splashing and croaking of frogs.

I stopped to stretch and switched
my basket to the other arm. I scanned the sky above for Valory, but the
darkness was gathered too tightly among the trees. Up above everything faded
from greenish gray to black. Hugo was up there somewhere. I could feel him
watching.

At least he had enough sense not to
leave me alone in the forest. Despite his attempts to remain distant, he was
still my shadow.

Try as I might, I couldn’t stir up
the same feelings of rage as before. The line between Lev and King Hugo was
starting to blur and no matter how hard I denied it, the boy I’d loved and the
king I loathed were the same person. Those were the same wings that had so
often carried me, the same arms that had held me tight, and the same scarred
skin, like a map that only I could read.

Memories of our night in the torn
page made me stumble in the dark. One of the eggs flew out of the basket.

It never hit the ground. Hugo
landed and caught it. “You should be more careful,” he said in that aloof way
of his.

I took the egg and returned it to
my basket. “You know, we’d get back a lot faster if you’d carry me.”

He looked away. “I’ll do no such
thing. You’ve had seventeen years to learn to walk properly. If you can’t do it
by now, that’s not my problem.”

It was such a condescending thing
to say that I just shook my head. “Bravo. Good to see that you’re still
perfecting the art of being a humongous jerk.”

His wings fluttered half open in
agitation. “Hakana nin zu ne mekinvit,” he growled.

I understood every word. “Yes, I know
I’m one to talk. I’ll tell you what: let’s settle this once and for all.” I
placed the basket on the ground, rolled up my sleeves and raised my fists. “Go
ahead. It was going to come to this eventually. Might as well get it over
with.”

Hugo balked. “Are you insane? I’d
kill you.”

I shoved him with a magic barrier.
“You can try. Use what you’ve got. I’m not gonna hold back.”

He stood there, scowling in what
was obviously disbelief, but I was dead serious. I flicked my shortsword out of
its scabbard and threw it at him. He caught it between two fingers and threw it
back. I used the move as a distraction. In the split second it took him to aim,
I hit him with another blast of my barrier magic. He fell to the ground and I
retrieved my sword.

Cursing in Slaugh, he sprang to his
feet and bounded towards me. I jumped over him, rolled, and came up behind him
with fists at the ready. He wasn’t where I expected him to be. His leg slammed
me in the knees and I fell. I cast a barrier to keep him from attacking me while
I was down but I needn’t have bothered. He’d fallen back on the tried and true
Slaugh tactic of hiding in the shadows.

I caught my breath and readied
myself for an attack from any direction. I turned in a slow circle, searching
the trees around me.

He came at me from overhead. I
didn’t get off a barrier in time and fell flat on my back. He lifted me by the
front of my collar.

“Okay, okay, okay,” I said, out of
breath. “You win.”

He let go of my collar and stood
back. Now that his guard was down, I had the perfect chance to strike.

I drew up both my knees, resting
all my weight on my upper back, and then sprang up, kicking him in the chest. He
fell to the ground. I stood triumphantly above him. “I never said I wouldn’t
fight dirty.”

“Neither did I.”

He locked his feet around my ankles
and jerked them hard, forcing me to fall. I tried to reach for my shortsword on
the way down but his right elbow came out of nowhere and busted me in the
mouth.

I felt a metallic smear of warmth
spreading near my upper lip. I touched it and my finger came away red. I
groaned. “You just had to go for the face, didn’t you?”

He was sitting up next to me,
frowning. “I didn’t mean to. If I’d know you were going to go that way…geez,
Em. Never lean into your opponent’s dominant side. It’s one of the first things
I taught you.”

I touched my lip again. “Ow. Guess
you win that round for real.”

“I never win. Not with you.”

I looked up at him in surprise. He
was no longer frowning. Instead he wore a look of resignation. “You get the
best of me,” he said. “No matter how far away I go or how many times I fight, I
cannot beat you, even at your worst.”

It took a moment for his words to
sink in. When they did, I realized I could say the same about him. He had me
and I had him and fighting was pointless because we were just trying to defeat
ourselves.

He reached out and wiped some of
the blood away with his thumb. I caught his hand and held it, letting my lips
brush against his battered knuckles. I closed my eyes, dreading the moment when
he’d pull away. 

He didn’t.

“I know I kept the truth from you
about many things,” he said, “but I
am
Lev, much more so than King Hugo.
That’s a formal name, handed down through generations. Hartwig was my mother’s
maiden name and Lev was her pet name for me. Even now I hear it in her voice.
Do you know what it means?”

That one hadn’t been covered in any
of my lessons. I shook my head.

“It means
lion
,” he said. “A
mythical beast famed for ferocity and courage. I thought that’s why she called
me that, but lately I’ve come to realize there was another reason.”

One of the quirks of having lived
in two separate worlds was learning that some of the common beasts of one were
but legends in the other. Linaeve had named her son after a creature that didn’t
exist in Faylinn anymore. “In my world, the lion is said to be the king of
beasts, but a single male lion is only as strong as the females in his pride.”

“Exactly,” he said with the ghost
of a smile. “She must have seen it coming. My life has been shaped by strong
women—Mother and you and Chloe and Othella and Florrie Finbarr. I used to
resent it. I am the king. I’m the one who should be changing the world, but
it’s not my place. Rae the Gnome told me so.”

I sat up in surprise. “You went to
see Rae?”

“A frivolous trip, as far as my
people are concerned, but she told me some things I needed to hear.”

 “What else did she say?” I asked.

His smile vanished. “She confirmed a
theory I had about Seraph’s Tear. There is a cure.”

Dispelling the curse around
Seraph’s Tear didn’t strike me as a high priority with everything else that was
going. “That’s…good. So, what is it?”

A cry rang out through the forest.

Startled, I froze. Lev did the
same. We stared at each other in bewilderment.

It came again. It was a pitiful
wail—the cry of a child. It’s heartbreaking tremor echoed like the call of a
ghost through the night.

Lev sprang up and shot silently
into the tree-tops. I got to my feet slowly, listening again for the sound.

There came a thud behind me and Lev
whispered, “There are strangers coming this way.”

I turned where I could see him.
“Enemies?”

His narrowed eyes were slits in the
darkness. “Maybe. They are near. You can see them from the treetops. It looks
like they’ve been following the creek upstream.”

“What do we do?” I asked.

“We must warn the resistance,” he
said, spreading his wings.

The cry came again. In any other
place the sad sound would have aroused pity, but in the darkening forest it
stirred fear of the unknown.

Lev drew a sharp breath. “Hold out
your arms.”

I did as he said. He hooked his
arms under my elbows and flew up into the canopy of tree branches. We were just
beyond the border where the tidal wave had leveled the forest, so we still had
plenty of cover.

He stopped and hovered midway up a
tree. The toes of my shoes found a solid branch so I settled my weight on it.

“There,” Lev said. He pointed to a
trail on the other side of the stream.

I had to strain to look. My
nighttime vision was nowhere near as sharp as his. 

“There are four people,” he said.
“I see a Brownie woman, a man and a couple of children.”

I made out the hunched figures
toiling down the path. “If there are children they can’t be enemies!”

“So you’d think,” he said. He
didn’t sound convinced.

I could finally make out the faces
of the bedraggled travelers. The man in front was small with a coat of furs and
a hat. Behind him came a Brownie woman with two children. One of them limped
along at her side, sobbing.

“That’s Trapper Toussant!” I said
in excitement. “And that’s Natty and…only two of her kids, it looks like. I
know those people! They’re from Feegman’s Boot!”

“Shhhhh!” Lev hissed.

Behind me I felt his body go tense.
His wings drew up tightly. His breath came in rapid puffs on the back of my
neck.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“They’re not alone,” he said.
“Look. Further downstream, in the brush.”

My stomach turned and I almost
threw up. Cape-clad figures flitted through the shadows, trailing the wretched
party from Feegman’s Boot.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN

Chloe’s breathing grew uneven
despite her attempts to stay calm. A search had taken them from one dark, empty
room to another. Now they found themselves in a hall where the air was sour and
the floor crackled beneath their feet like dry bones. In the deepest reaches of
her soul Chloe felt that something wrong had happened here—a crime against
nature, a blasphemy against all that was good or right.

Othella sparked her source crystal
into creating a halo of light for them to see by. There was not much to see: bits
of broken glass, blackened walls, abandoned tables, nothing more.

“What is this place?” Tobin asked.

Othella did not answer him
immediately. She wheeled herself further down the hall. Since she carried the
only light, the others followed close behind her.

“Ah,” she said as the crystal’s
glow illuminated an opening with warped bars in the front. It was a cell. The
core of the bars was made of sylph-forged metal that stood firm, but the outer
layer of iron had blistered or melted so that all the bars had the look of
half-used candles. Othella cast her light through the bars to look inside.

Violet and Chloe both screamed. At
the back of the cell sat a charred skeleton, still in shackles chained to the
wall.

He wasn’t alone. They saw that
there were cells all up and down the hallway. Each one held the remains of
prisoners. The chained corpses were all charred as the first, though some had
bits of hair or melted skin hanging off their bones.

Chloe thought she’d be sick. Violet
buried her face on Othella’s shoulder and sobbed. Tobin covered his mouth with
one hand and looked away from the ghastly corpse.

“I know where we are,” Othella said
in a strained whisper. “This is Helm Bogvogny.”

Chloe looked back at the skeleton
chained to the wall. She tried not to gag. “What happened? Fire couldn’t have
done
that
!”

Othella shook her head. Her lips
were a thin white line. “Not fire. Alchemy.”

Tobin gasped. Violet lifted her
head in surprise.

 “Someone has done something
monstrous here,” Othella said.

Despite the lurching in her
stomach, Chloe stepped close to the bars of the cell and touched the blistered
metal. She stared at the corpse in his shackles. Even though he had probably
been a bad criminal, she knew that no crimes could match the malevolence of whatever
had ripped through the prison. Some delicate balance had been tipped.

“My mother,” Tobin said shakily.
“God, where is my mother?”

Chloe knew what he was thinking.
The Pyxis Charm had brought them through on the trail of whoever had been in
Kiros Rubedo’s apartment before them. That meant that whoever had kidnapped her
had brought her to the prison. She didn’t know what to say to him.

Suddenly there came a new sound. It
was the noise of hushed voices, dampened by many walls. There was someone else
in the prison.

Without a word Othella put out her
source crystal. The darkness enveloped them again, but now it was worse because
Chloe could feel the stares of the empty eye sockets behind the bars. She had
never been surrounded by so much death. Even though she couldn’t see it, it had
a presence just like a shadow in the dark. She felt its chill sweeping over
her, hungry for the life that throbbed inside her. She hugged her arms around
her chest to guard it.

They listened. At times the voices
grew more audible, as though they’d turned a corner and come close; sometimes,
though, they seemed to be going further away. It reminded Chloe of the time
she’d gone down to Ivywild’s labyrinth to save Emma. They’d followed each
other’s voices through the maze of walls.

After a while the voices came closer
so that they could hear the soft footfalls of boots on the burnt floor. It was
a group of men from the sounds of it. Chloe held her breath.

“I’m telling you, I heard a
scream!” said one of the men.

“You’re imagining it. We’ve been
all through this place. There’s nobody here but these poor, shackled bastards.”

Someone brushed by Chloe’s arm. It
was Tobin. He pointed down the hall and said as softly as possible, “
That
way
.”

She watched in horror as a soft
glow illuminated the furthest wall. It was hazy purple—from an Amethyst source
crystal, no doubt. She gulped. They were up against powerful foes. She was just
a fledgling Amber Rank. Violet was Emerald, and Mother…well, who knew what
Mother was? At any rate the odds were grim. Chloe quickly calculated that their
greatest advantage lay in the element of surprise. They knew that danger was
coming and what direction it was coming from. That put her one step ahead.