He does? I blinked. I had thought him a foppish fool before last night!
The servant must have seen my surprise because she nodded as she rearranged the linens a little. “He argues on our behalf with his sister – even for those working in the mines.” A darker look passed over the woman’s features. “Better food rations, more breaks, that kind of thing.” She looked up at me, setting aside her harrowed look. “And he speaks to us. Like we’re people.”
“You are,” I insisted, but my words had seemed to upset the servant woman, as she bobbed her head and hurried out of the room.
Dagan had been wrong about how Inyene’s people feel about Abioye, I saw. Or, even if Dagan had managed to find some of the guards who would help him try to assassinate Abioye, then there appeared to be many others amongst the lower servant class who liked the lordling.
Because he’s nothing like his sister, I thought. Or Dagan.
“I am here,” the dragon breathed into my mind. He sounded sleepy, and his thoughts were fuzzy and warm. Around them, I could sense some kind of cozying dark, and – wind in the trees?
“Young Wood,” Ymmen confirmed, saying it like it was a name, although I had never heard of the place. “It is north of you, in a valley untraveled by humans.”
He had gotten away from the mechanical dragons. “Of course!” he whistled in his sleep, and my heart felt as though one more weight had left it at last. But there were still many more.
“Montfre? Tamin?” I asked. Tamin had been with Ymmen before Dagan’s attack, and since I hadn’t seen him at the window, I realized that Ymmen must have placed him down somewhere.
“I did. Can’t fight holding an old human,” Ymmen said with a flick of his tail.
Wyrm, I thought, with an edge of playful warning.
“They are with me, here. They agree this place is beautiful. You should let me bring you,” Ymmen said in my mind. “You can even bring the Poison Berry, if you like.”
It seemed Ymmen’s distrust for Abioye had subsided an awful lot since they had their ‘chat’ on the roof of Montfre’s tower, though I still sensed a vein of humor for the young man coming from Ymmen.
“I wish I could fly away,” I sighed sadly. It was a nice thought, living free – out there in the forests and glades and mountains… and the skies.
“You are a child of the wind,” Ymmen breathed his words into me – and they came with all of the promise of the coming dawn, of the fresh chill of the rising breezes as they peeled off the mountain tops, to the higher and wider currents of the skies that brought with them the tangs of faraway places – touches of incense or woodsmoke, or green, living things.
You soothe me, dragon, I thought, as I allowed my eyes to close and my head to rest against the window for the briefest of moments. It had been like that out on the Plains. With the breeze in my hair, and the ability to read the scent of distant game as the breeze flurried and eddied. Only this dragon-sense was much, much stronger. For a second, I caught the wild possibilities that were out there, waiting for me in the future as I grew with Ymmen.
But the sound of the morning bells of Inyene’s keep erupted, and they weren’t the delicate sort of ‘tinkling’ that I would have expected from looking at the model of the Torvald citadel. Instead, they were the harsh clamors of guards beating rough-cast bells, awakening the slaves of the Masaka mines. Well, those who weren’t on the night shifts, anyway, I thought.
“I can’t fly away and leave them,” I said, my heart clenching as I thought of Oleer (if he even still survived) and the others. “I have to see this to the end. I have to stop Inyene, somehow.” Even despite Dagan’s death – or perhaps especially because of it – I was even more aware now that the danger had not passed. Everything had changed and nothing had changed. The keep had spent the rest of the night in uproar, with guards running back and forth through the halls, checking windows and doors and lighting even more bonfires as Inyene had ordered every guard she had to the walls.
At least that meant there were fewer down with the slaves, I thought glumly. It was a very small sense of satisfaction.
But now, even despite their chief overseer dying, the morning bells were ringing once again, and the slaves of the Masaka were being dispatched down the mines. The terrible, torturous ordeal of my people had only continued.
And I should be down there with them. The angry thought flashed through my mind, hot and guilty. How dare I stand up here, surrounded by luxury and with plates of fresh and dried fruits brought up to me while my people – my friends – were down there in the dark. I thought once again of those ghost stories that we had used to scare each other with, of the Daza ghosts knocking on the stones and forever lost to the wind.
“We need to stop Inyene,” Ymmen surprised me by agreeing. And not only agreeing, but by including himself in my quest.
Huh?
“Silly human. You? Me? We? There is only one thing. That is Us,” Ymmen said, and I got a sense that when he said ‘us’ he wasn’t just talking about me and Ymmen, but by something much deeper, much more profound.
“Songs,” I whispered.
“Songs. We are all a part of the same song. And Inyene threatens all,” Ymmen said, and his mind grew brighter and hotter in mine as he turned his full attention to me. It was like I had been walking through a cold corridor, to suddenly open the door to find the heat of a blazing bonfire.
In those flames of his mind, there were flashes of images, snatches of words, feelings, and faces.
And almost all of them were dark and terrible.
I saw a great, boiling thunderhead laced with purple lightning rising over a rolling, green landscape, and it howled like the voices of a thousand lost souls.
I saw a great mass of people trudging and marching over muddied fields – but these people weren’t moving like normal humans – they were shambling, and I realized that each and every one of them was one of the Dead.
“No!” I gasped at the horror, but the visions continued.
A woman sitting in an ancient cave, with hair that might have once been golden but had long since turned a platinum white, and as she cried and sobbed, between her hands grew a strange, twisted sort of vine with poisonous-looking purple thorns, thrashing and lashing out ahead of her.
And then I saw a singular white tower, standing high above the other walls and battlements of a vast castle – no, a citadel, I realized. It was Torvald, but Torvald unlike I had ever seen it before. The skies were black and boiling, and the walls of the citadel were topped with strange mechanical devices – great gears and wheels, and as I watched they moved, spewing out a torrent of lead shot – straight into an oncoming wave of dragons who were flying in formation across the sky, spiraling downwards.
“Torvald attacked dragons!?” I whispered in horror. This was against everything that I had ever been told.
“The Dark King once did, when he ruled there,” Ymmen growled, and the visions shut off, leaving me gasping and sobbing. I wondered if he was showing me these things to try and put my troubles in perspective somehow. If that had been his motive, it hadn’t worked – now the world of the Midmost Lands and the Three Kingdoms just looked like a litany of catastrophes and despots.