Dustin

He needed the Ganlins’ help.

In all his life, Dustin had never thought he would fall so low.

Yet here he was, scrambling over a mountainside in his nighttime form, naked, trying to think up the best way to kiss the Auldheim’s ass.

Promises of subservience rated high in his list, along with willing, personal humiliation. He was pretty sure the Auldheim wouldn’t just help him out of the good of her heart. She needed a deal. A bargain. An experiment.

Wincing, Dustin realized what that would have to be. The Ganlins were fascinated with beings created by their ancestors of lore. As such, they’d had plenty of chances to study the Auldhunds, but never a drake in its prime. When in natural form, a drake could cow even Agathe, and they didn’t let curious Aulds poke and prod them to see how they ticked.

He just needed to convince the Ganlins he was harmless. Harmless, and willing to buy his freedom with favors.

He needed to beg.

Dustin fisted his hands in the chains he carried. Even if he begged, Agathe would probably still laugh at him. Damn her. Damn the whole lot of them! Suspicious, arrogant, elitist, selfish bastards. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

Pathenian, as much as Dustin hated the creature, was right. Dustin had helped them, aided them in every way they desired, and then one day they had accosted him in his sleep, bound him up with spells until he couldn’t even think, and then had thrown him into a dungeon where even the light of day couldn’t touch him.

For the good of the nation, Brael had said. At least she had had the decency to appear contrite as she did it. Lately, his captors had hunted him down and returned him to his cell with all the callous disdain of jailers returning a runaway criminal.

Damn the Aulds! He hadn’t done anything wrong.

Once again, Dustin fantasized about finding that little piece of paper that spoke of a drake and the fall of the Spyre, and then setting it ablaze. Then, once the cursed thing was smoking cinders, going on a rampage and throwing anyone who had ever read it into the very same cell in which they had kept him for so long, with not even a bag of dice to entertain themselves.

Smiling at the justice of that particular thought, Dustin almost stepped into the trap.

It was an exposed pebble that saved him. Dustin stepped on it, twisted his ankle, and grunted as he fell to one knee. He was just getting back up, ready to forge ahead, when he froze, peering down at the disturbed mountain soil ahead of him.

The pit was loosely covered with dirt and stones, but when he looked close, he could see a matrix of reeds and grasses holding the soil up. Kneeling, lowering his coil of chain to the ground beside the pit, Dustin carefully brushed the covering away.

Underneath, wooden spikes rose from a floor almost ten feet below. Between the stakes, something moved. Dustin backed away from the pit quickly.

His first thought was that Pathenian had made himself a place to sleep that would also serve as a drake death trap, but then discarded the idea. Pathenian would never put himself in harm’s way. That he had been the only tszieni to survive the war was proof of that.

Dustin forced himself to take another look.

Two small tszieni moved upon the packed dirt, the bodies of what looked like former ground squirrels, endlessly circling the bottom of their prison.

Dustin suppressed a shudder. Pathenian was getting creative.

He got up and glanced at the mountainside above the path. Then, grunting, he began to climb. It would be rougher going, but at least he wouldn’t be walking into a trap.

He was halfway up the slope when his foot dislodged a stick and a boulder fell on his legs from where it had been precariously propped against the hill.

Dustin screamed as he felt both his legs snap.

Laying there, pinned under the boulder, Dustin could imagine Pathenian coming to him that evening, a smile upon his ghoulish face. You never were very smart, were you, drake? It was Rhydderch who kept you alive, when a thousand times you should have fallen. Now look at you, without your Auld to rescue you...

Dustin screamed himself hoarse, more for his own sanity than thinking a Ganlin would be traveling this far south. If he stopped screaming, he started to think.

Started to remember.

Pathenian, at his cruelest. Pathenian, with his enemies.

Pathenian, eating his soul.

When Pathenian found him, panting and in agony later that night, the tszieni reacted much as Dustin had expected. He laughed and fell to one knee beside him, patting his head. “You tried, drake. But you never were very smart.” He patted him again, then amended, “Lucky, but never smart.”

Pathenian then got up and circled him, admiring his handiwork. “You know, I thought you would notice this one, too. I had two more, higher up the hill, that I thought would serve better. Looks like I spent all night on them for nothing. Pity.”

Pathenian circled back to where Dustin could see his face. He cocked his head down at him, his form flickering like it was made of a thousand shadows, all vying for prominence. “I wasn’t lying when I said the Ganlins are dead, drake. I was actually a little surprised you didn’t believe me. When have you ever known me to lie?”

Dustin was trembling as Pathenian reached for his arm. He tried to jerk it away, but the tszieni tisked and pulled it taut with the ease of a man correcting an infant. “Now, I’m told this might hurt...” The tszieni opened wide its huge, needle-toothed mouth to encompass Dustin’s hand. Dustin tightened his fingers into a fist, but the tongues of blackness inside the Pathenian’s mouth found them anyway. They grabbed each finger and dragged them outward, coiling around them like cold clay.

Then Dustin felt the darkness pierce his fingertips, pushing upward through skin and bone, into his hand. He cried out and tried to extract his hand from the creature’s mouth, but it held him fast.

Around his wrist, Pathenian smiled. “Delicious.”

No, Dustin thought, feeling the creature’s sudden, alluring pull. No, no, no!

Pathenian began to suckle his hand like a babe with a teat. Dustin felt something shifting within him, like a great wall of rock that was losing its foundation.

No! Dustin thought, growing weak. Gods, no.

“Just let go,” Pathenian said. “It will be easier on you, drake.”

The tugging inside him was growing in strength. Dustin felt as if he were a man clinging to a rock in the middle of a raging river, with floodwaters rising all around him, burying his rock, leaving him nothing to hold onto.

Flailing weakly to no avail, Dustin was just beginning to let go when he suddenly found himself staring at a little girl that was peering at him from the rock. From inside the rock.

He felt her hand grab one of his legs. She tugged it into the boulder.

I’m hallucinating, Dustin thought.

Suddenly, he was wrenched so violently that his hand slipped free of the monster’s mouth. Dustin felt his fingers rake against the needlelike teeth, but the pain was nothing compared to the sudden overwhelming crushing sensation as the rock swallowed him. He suddenly found himself unable to breathe, and in that moment, Dustin realized that he was very much awake. He tried to scream, but he had no air. Had no lungs. He was just rock.

All around him, the rock pushed and squeezed, moving his body through its womb like a woman giving birth.

All the while, a little girl’s hand remained clamped around his leg, pulling him onward. Dustin eventually gave up struggling and just let himself be taken, wondering vaguely if he had died and his soul was being spirited off to Hell.

When the stone finally birthed them into a small, treed clearing, it was almost noon. The boulders that spat them out were wet with moss and slime, and Dustin grunted, rolling onto the grass with all the dissatisfaction of a babe that had undergone a similar experience. He opened his mouth to scream.

The little girl was holding her hand, scowling at him. “You burned me.”

Dustin bit down his cry and blinked at her. “What?”

“You burned me, you stupid prick.” She held up a hand, which was red and bubbling with blisters. Dustin looked at it, uncomprehending. Then he looked back at her face and recoiled. Her pretty green eyes were at odds with hideous scars that stretched her skin tight across her brow and jaw. Her left ear was partially missing.

“Who are you?” he asked, blinking at her.

“Who are you?” the little girl snapped. She held out her hand. “And fix my hand.”

He stared at her, then looked down at her hand. She thinks I’m an Auld.

With the easy way she spoke about magic, he realized she had to be a Ganlin. Tentatively, he said, “Are we near Ganlin Hall?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “My hand hurts.”

“I’m not an Auld,” Dustin said, by way of apology.

“Then how—” For the first time, she seemed to realize the grass he was sitting on was smoldering. “Oh.” Her brow furrowed. “You’re naked.”

Dustin covered himself, reddening. “Yeah, uh. Sorry. Can’t do much about that, unless you know a fire-retardant spell.”

She snorted, a gesture that made him think she either knew so many spells that fire-retardancy was beneath her...or she didn’t know any spells at all.

Which couldn’t be the case, considering she had just pulled him through stone.

“Please?” he asked.

“I’m not an Auld,” she said.

He frowned at her. “You look like a Rockfarmer.”

She immediately got a guarded look. “So?”

“I knew a Rockfarmer, once. Came to play chits with me every week for a few years, until Agathe took charge of the Spyre and kicked him out.”

The girl tensed. “I’m not a Rockfarmer.”

She looks like a deer about to bolt, Dustin thought. Quickly, he said, “Sorry. I just thought—” He cleared his throat. “So, uh, can you get us back to Ganlin Hall? That’s the fastest way to get your hand back in shape.”

Her eyes were resting on the shackles on his wrists, now. The chain was gone, swallowed up somewhere inside the mountain, but the enchanted blue-green bands remained. “What are those?”

“A curse,” Dustin said.

“They look enchanted.”

“They are,” he admitted. “I need Agathe or Rees to take them off.”

She tore her eyes back to his face and settled them there. “You’re a criminal?” Her voice didn’t hold condemnation, just curiosity.

He laughed. “I’m a fire drake, girl.”

“Oh.” He watched her consider that a moment before she shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“That’s probably because there’s only one of us left.”

The look of awe he was expecting did not appear. She simply gave him a flat look, like, What makes you think that I care?

Dustin cleared his throat. “As soon as I can get these off...” he hefted a wrist, “I can melt the Spyre with my body.”

She looked thoroughly unimpressed. “So?”

He frowned at her. “I can also fly.”

She shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s go, okay? I’m going back to the Spyre and the rocks are telling me I need to protect you.”

“The...rocks,” Dustin said, not knowing whether to feel ashamed he needed the protection of a kid, or wary that he was dealing with an insane auldling.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just like they told me to drag you away from that thing last night. It’s following us, you know.”

Dustin frowned at her. “How do you know that if you’re not an Auld?”

“The rocks are telling me, stupid.”

Dustin winced. “Okay. I’ll follow you wherever you want to go, just keep that thing away from me.” He stood, and let her take the lead.

“Oh, and just so you know,” the girl said, turning back to him. “I’m going to kill the Vethyles.”

Dustin chuckled, until he realized she was serious. His laughs cut off in his throat. “What?”

“As soon as we get to the Spyre.” She held up a triangular rock she dug from her pocket and rubbed it with her thumb. “It’s telling me which ones I need to kill.”

Seeing her caress the rock, Dustin began to re-assess his decision to go with her. True, the girl had saved his life, and true, she seemed to have some odd affinity for stone—which the tszieni feared—but she was clearly insane. “You have something against Vethyles, girl?”

She stuffed her rock back in her pocket and glared at him. “Yeah. They killed my friend and his whole family.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dustin said, thinking they were probably grape thieves. The Vethyles were ruthless when it came to protecting their stock.

She shrugged. “You didn’t do it.”

“Still, it must have been awful for a little girl,” Dustin said, wishing he could pat her shoulder without leaving scars. “Where’d they live?”

“Ganlin Hall,” she said, turning back to the forest. Dustin was still staring at her after she’d disappeared into the trees.