The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (55 page)

Wilhelmina knelt down and stroked
her daughter’s soft black hair. “Tell her what you smelled, little one.”

Noemi twitched her wings as she
pointed to the southern sky. “Wots of Fay, I think. Wots of Fay and wots of
magic.”

I looked to Wilhelmina for a
translation. She shrugged. “All I can detect is a large mass moving this way.
It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen.”

One thing we certainly weren’t
prepared for was a massive aerial assault. All my worries grew larger and I
shivered despite the warm day.
What is coming for us?
I wondered.
And
where is Chloe?

***

The crystal high above the throne
room threw its wild purple light across the face of the duke. Chloe turned away
in disgust as he leered over her. They’d chained Bazzlejet to the wall. He
didn’t fight back. What was the use? They were far outnumbered and grossly outpowered.
Of all the magic flying about in the throne room, Chloe realized how precious
little of it was hers.

“So what will it be?” the duke
asked with a pompous curl of his lip. “Will you join us? You are, after all,
royalty. I cannot in good conscience strip you of all your power. It’s yours to
keep if you but pledge it to the proper cause.”

Chloe stewed. The duke had no such
thing as a conscience. Much as she wanted to spit in his face and blast him to
smithereens, she knew the most important thing was to keep him talking. The only
thing she could bank on was the duke’s arrogance.      

“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Why go to all this trouble? Why waste all this magic making Ivywild fly? It
was fine where it was.”

“To the contrary,” said the duke.
He turned on his heel, allowing for a dramatic sweep of his cape. “Why be
sedentary when there’s a whole world out there to command? True power is mobile
power. Now the castle relies on us and we rely on it. Quite a nice arrangement,
wouldn’t you say? Besides, such majestic beings as we are cannot be confined to
the ground. We are superior even to the legendary Seraphim, stuck in their
cloud island!”

Chloe bristled even more. “Has it
occurred to you that you will soon run out of subjects to rule over if you keep
draining them all?”

“For every weakling we eliminate,
we reinforce the strength of the superior specimens,” the duke said. “In a few
generations, all Fay will be perfect creatures.”

“I have seen it,” crowed High
Priestess Grimmoix. “Someday we’ll even be able to conquer the realm of the humans!
There is no place in existence that will not know our divine presence! It will
be a paradise!”

Chloe couldn’t hide a grimace at
the thought. “That may be your idea of paradise, but it isn’t mine! Why must everything
be conquered? Isn’t peace good enough? Progress through peace!”

The duke sneered. “Rubbish. That’s
a slogan for those with no ambition! Nothing was ever achieved by peace!” As he
spoke, his voice grew louder and his breathing came faster. “Divide! Conquer!
Bring all the pieces back to create a better whole! That is the new motto!”

Chloe realized that he was more
than an egomaniac. He was a raving lunatic. She’d heard such blind fervor
before. He was not unlike Marafae, who had sworn to annihilate the Fay for no
better reason other than her own vengeance. It was a chilling pattern. After
all, Marafae had been but a simple Slaugh girl. The duke, though always
unpleasant, had long been just like any other nobleman. What had triggered them
to pursue such violent paths?

Divide. Conquer.
The words swirled
down into Chloe’s memories until they snagged on a singular painful experience.
For a short time, the words had been the fire of her existence.  She’d known
only that creed.
Divide them all. Have them wreck themselves so that chaos
can thrive.

Of course, she hadn’t been herself
when she’d had those feelings. She had been a prisoner in her own body while a
wicked force beyond her control sought to ruin all that was good in her life. She
had been a puppet, acting on the dark wishes of a creature so evil that it
could not exist inside flesh that knew love.

Chloe suddenly felt sorry for the
duke. “Listen to yourself,” she pleaded. “Is this really what
you
want?”

The duke turned on her with such
swiftness that his boots squeaked on the marble floor. His cape billowed around
his ankles and he drew his shoulders up like a mounting thunderhead. “Do not
question my desires! I’m no fool, like my son. I have waited for this day,
planning my moves year by year. True genius takes time. You’d do well to
remember that! Sneaking in here without a plan in your feeble skull—ha!”

Kiros Rubedo made a whimpering
sound. By the looks of her, Chloe could tell that the draining process was just
as excruciating to Kiros as it was to the people she drained.

“What’s that?” the duke asked. “Do
I hear a complaint, Ms. Rubedo?”

Kiros’s eyes rolled back in her
head. “Must…rest.”

The duke clicked his tongue in mock
disappointment. “You just need fresh supplies.” He nodded to the red cape
nearest to Bazzlejet. “Link him.”

“No!” Chloe screamed.

Bazzlejet gulped as the red cape
looped a silver tether around his neck. He then ran the line to one of the
shackles that held Kiros Rubedo to the pillar in the middle of the room.

“Please,” Kiros begged
breathlessly. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” the duke said.
“Proceed.”

The red cape stepped away from
Bazzlejet and a crackling hum of energy rose in pitch. Bazzlejet drew in a
breath and then his whole body tensed up. He writhed as his magic was stripped
away from him and transferred to the blue stone pillar growing on the other
side of Kiros.

“Young power,” High Priestess
Grimmoix said, brushing her fingers on the blue stone. She laid her palm flat
against it and her eyes flickered even brighter. “More! More!”

The clergy formed a circle around
the pillar. They chanted and trilled, moving in a slow dance around it as they
took turns touching it.

Chloe looked away and let tears
stream down her face.

“Well?” the duke asked. He let the question
linger over Chloe’s head like a sword held aloft by the thinnest of strings.

“Well what?” Chloe whispered, still
looking away.

 “Are you with us, or would you
like to join your friend?”

Chloe felt an odd thumping in her
pocket. At first she thought she was imagining things, maybe even just
distracting herself to keep from answering the duke. Then it came again,
stronger this time.

She reached into her pocket and
pulled out
New Perspectives on Clergy Life
. The book twitched, flopped
and fluttered. Chloe tossed it to the floor at the feet of the confused duke.

There came the sound of ripping
paper. Shreds of pages burst from the book along with something else. A black,
scaly dragon the size of a large horse leaped from the pages. It had two
twisted horns on its head and its eyes were red as rubies. It also had a rider.

“CHARGE!” Garland Finbarr shouted.

Chloe rolled out of the way as the
beast and rider galloped towards the duke. The dragon lowered its head, aiming
its horns for the duke’s gut. It let out a mighty bellow.

The duke jumped to the side. His
eyes flickered dangerously. He lifted his hands.

“Garland, look out!” Chloe shouted.

Garland jumped from the dragon’s
back an instant before the duke destroyed it. The spell was so fast that all
Chloe saw was a flash of light. Just like that, the dragon was gone. Garland
took cover behind the marble throne.

The clergy, disrupted from their
foul ritual, turned back to the stone to find something very strange happening.
The duke turned to watch as the blue alchemic stone darkened towards the top.
The buzzing noise had taken on a higher note. The energy in the room suddenly
felt different.

“What is going on?” the duke
shouted, storming over to Kiros. “What are you doing to the stone?”

Kiros lifted her head, looked him in
the eye, and smiled. “Don’t you know it can work the other way? You’ve finally
brought me somebody who can handle it.”

Every eye turned towards Bazzlejet.
He, too, was smiling. The Amethyst source crystal around his neck glowed
brilliantly.

“No,” the duke mouthed. He tried to
break the tether between Bazzlejet and Kiros.

A lightning bolt seared the duke’s
hand clean off. The duke railed back in shock, staring at the crisply burnt
edge of his sleeve.

Somebody grabbed Chloe by her
collar. She started to scream, but then realized it was just Garland dragging
her to safety behind the throne.

“Stay put,” he said. “Things are
about to get nasty.”

There came another flash of lightning.
Everybody jumped as the shockwave from it tore through the room.

Nobody was hit, but when the air
cleared they saw that Bazzlejet had seared through the chains binding him to
the wall. He was free.

“Shall we play?” he said, cracking
his knuckles.

High Priestess Grimmoix pointed a
long, knobby finger his direction. “Get him!”

There was no way to keep track of
what happened next because a dozen magic spells erupted all at once. Chloe
covered her ears and knelt behind the throne. She spotted the book lying a few
feet away.

“Can we escape through there?” she
yelled to Garland over the catastrophic noises.

“No,” he yelled back. “I destroyed
too much of it when I freed that Luciferian Goredragon. My apologies. I was
growing quite worried about you two.”

A spell hit the throne. A large
piece of marble fell with a heavy clunk near Chloe and Garland.

“Well this is a fine mess,” Chloe
said. “I hope Bazzlejet is okay.”

A peel of thunder rattled the room.

“Sounds like he’s doing fine,”
Garland said. “If I may offer a suggestion, perhaps we should see about
rescuing Miss Rubedo. Maybe if we skirt around the side of the room—”

They both jumped as another chunk
flew out of the throne. It narrowly missed crushing Garland’s foot. He pulled
himself in tighter. “That is, unless you can think of a better idea.”

Chloe glanced overhead to look for
incoming spells. She caught the sight of the crystal glinting atop the tower. “I
hope you mean that, because I’ve just thought of one.”

***

I watched it come with far more
dread than I’d felt over the tidal wave. It was a spectacle pushing through the
clouds, groaning from the force of its own weight as it pushed forward, coming,
I knew, to annihilate us all. I sank to my knees on the drawbridge.

Not like this.
Ivywild was
my home. It was the only place I’d ever belonged, the only place I knew peace. The
duke had turned it into a weapon. I didn’t know how, but there was no question
that it was coming for us—a flying fortress at the duke’s command.

Lord Finbarr was speechless beside
me. His disbelief mirrored mine.
This can’t really be happening
, his
eyes said. There was no way to fight back and, even worse, I didn’t want to.
That was
my
Ivywild up there.

“Get up,” Lev said.

He was standing behind me, looking
down with eyes as hard as steel. “Get up,” he repeated.

I rose slowly from my knees. “We
can’t fight it.”

“Yes, we can,” he said. “Ask
yourself what’s more important, that castle or
them
?”

He spun me around so I could see
the rebels gathered outside of Woodman’s Hall. Every last one, from Mrs. Larue
and Anouk to Yert and the Gremlins, were watching the sky. The faces were so
familiar that they all felt like family now; the rest of Sandrine’s crew, the Terra
Cartisans, even the testy Slaugh. I knew most of them by name. Something had
happened in the old wooden lodge. New bonds had been forged. Fay, Slaugh,
Brownies, Gnomes, Gremlins and Hobgoblins had all made a stand because I’d
urged them to, and now that they saw what they were actually standing against,
not a single one of them was running.

“We’re counting on you,” Lev said.
“All miracles aside, you have to be strong. If you fall, we all fall. Home is
not that castle. Home is not a place.”

I stopped scanning the crowd of
faces and paused on his. He had changed a lot since our first meeting at
Moonlight Pass. I’d seen terrible things there, but it was one of the best
nights of my life because that’s where I’d first seen the boy with the blue
dagger.

He was rougher now, harder and
formidable in his Slaugh armor, but he still looked at me with the same sort of
curious recognition. In those first moments together our souls had reflected
each other. We were kindred spirits—two parts to a whole. Shadow and light,
dusk and dawn. I felt the connection more strongly than ever. He would always
be that boy. He would always be Lev. I finally understood what he’d tried to
tell me that day on the dock. We were both the people we’d chosen to become,
not the titles we were born with. He was not
just
a king any more than I
was
just
a Flute Keeper. 

“I have to destroy Ivywild, don’t
I, Lev?”

“You have to try,” he said. “All
the good things it stood for are here now. Fight for them.”

There was a rumble like thunder. I
couldn’t tell if it was the clouds in the distance or the castle as it grew
closer, casting the forest into shadow. I took one last look at Ivywild’s
pearly walls, its soaring towers and its crystal-topped spires. I had almost
cried the first time I’d laid eyes on it.

A single tear rolled down to my
chin. I brushed it away with one hand and reached for my flute with the other.

CHAPTER THIRTY