FictionPress.com - let the words flow
| FictionPress.com - let the words flow |
|
| Home Just In Communities Forums Beta Readers Dictionary Search | Login Register Extras |
Title: Silver Storm
Silver Storm and its characters, settings, and plot are all mine. Please do not take, alter, distribute, or archive without my permission.
Unto our world, long ago, came the dragon kin.
Beneath their wings sang the winds of change.
Forever after, from the earth to the sky
From the sea to the shore and everywhere between
Nothing they touched was quite the same again.
Chapter Five
Though it would be a month before Liana allowed Kalstralev the freedom of movement to go back to his field or to tend to his barnyard work, she was unable to keep him away from his newly adopted dragon for more than the few days he spent sleeping. After the night they had spent exhausting themselves, both boy and dragon had slept almost constantly for two days.
Liana had actually panicked upon finding them upon her initial return; Kedreeva had slipped into so deep a healing trance that even when Liana touched her she did not wake. She called the little dragon’s name several times, running frantic hands over her smooth silver scales, along the patchwork of splint and bandage still clinging to the frail-looking wings. All she could think about was how very angry Kalstralev would be with her if she’d managed to kill his charge in less than a day’s time.
But when she lifted the dragonet’s jaw in her hands she felt the ghost of breath and the flutter of heartbeat underneath the soft jawbone skin. The flood of relief had made her dizzy.
Kalstralev was not much better; he barely woke enough to eat what she shoved at him or to relieve himself. When he finally did rouse to coherency, the first words from his lips were: “Where’s Beauty?”
“She’s outside,” Liana told him softly as she changed and redressed his wrist. “She’s done nothing but sleep as hard as you have these past days. I thought I was going to lose you both.”
“What? Is she all right?” he asked, sitting up suddenly. The motion made his head spin and his stomach flop queasily. Whatever she’d made him drink upon waking was not settling quickly.
“Well, she’s alive,” Liana confirmed. “It looks like she’s made herself a nest on the side of your house. I think she’ll be okay.”
Chuckling in relief, he relaxed. “That’s good,” he murmured. His arm was tingling with the curious sensation of not being able to feel normally. “I was worried she might cause a problem while I was out of it.”
With an exasperated noise, Liana ceased her bandaging to look at him. “She already has caused a problem, Kal. She’s caused problems up and down! She broke your wrist, she savaged my arm half as well, she drove you mad the other night… You’re lucky no one’s been killed. What’s she done to you, Levvy… Where’s your head? Can’t you see she’s dangerous?”
“She’s not! She needs me,” he protested. “She-“
“She’s a wild animal,” Liana said harshly. “She doesn’t need you, she needs to be gotten rid of before she kills someone. Before she kills you. Don’t put me through that, Kal. Don’t make me bury you after everything I’ve done to keep you from that fate.”
Guilt curled in Kalstralev’s gut at her words, but he could only sigh and gently pull his arm from her grasp. He settled it on his lap and dropped his eyes to his hands. “What do you remember about when you found me?” he whispered. “Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I remember that,” she said tiredly.
“I was alone then,” he continued, fidgeting. “My parents were gone, the other kids were scared of me… the grown-ups all whispered about me behind their hands like I couldn’t hear them. They said I was the reason my dad’s ship got wrecked and you were the only one who said I wasn’t; the only one who never walked away no matter how many things went wrong.” He looked up to her then and it was her turn to feel guilty at his reminder. “But what if you had? What happens to Beauty if the only person who hasn’t walked away yet does?”
“She’s not a human,” Liana whispered softly, though she felt horrible for even thinking so with how Kalstralev’s words had reminded her of the past. “If you left her alone, she’d leave.”
“She’d die,” he replied firmly. “That’s where she was headed every time I’ve found her alone. When I found her by her parents, she hadn’t gone there to mourn. She didn’t go there to bury them; she went there to die with them. She doesn’t… they don’t…” He looked away for a moment and when his eyes returned to hers they were cloudy with thought. “She showed me a world I can’t hope to understand, a hurt that was deeper than anything human. It wasn’t grief, it was something else… something worse. They’re not like us at all.”
“Did you think they were?” she asked in gentle exasperation, looking at him with a mixture of pity and helplessness. “They’re dragons. They will never be like us.”
It was a stalemate for their words and each fell to silence, fidgeting while they thought. Kalstralev gave his arm back to her and she began to finish what she had started. She worked in silence and he stared into space, still sorting through everything the dragon had given to him. In the end it was Liana who reluctantly broke the silence.
“She was really going to die?”
Nodding, Kalstralev focused on her once more. “Yeah,” he said, voice catching. He cleared his throat and sighed. “She was… alone” he said. “But differently than I think you or I could be alone. She lost something vital when she lost them, something I can’t... I’m not… I don’t know what it is; I can’t explain it. But when I think about it, when I think about the memories she put in my head… It feels like the world might collapse upon itself around me without it. It’s so… weird. I can’t just leave her to that.”
“And if she kills you?” Liana asked, feeling tired as she gave him back his newly splinted arm.
“I don’t think she will,” he said quite simply, reaching with his good hand to peel the bedcovers off his legs and slip to his feet. He wobbled uncertainly for a moment, dizziness climbing across his skin and into his eyes with the movement. When he’d steadied, he looked over to her and smiled. “She’s afraid,” he told her. The memory of the little dragon handing him her food bowl crawled to the forefront of his mind at the words. “Or she was. But like you said… I think she’ll be okay. Can I see her?”
Though it was against her better judgment, Liana helped him into a new shirt and left him in the room to finish dressing. When she opened the back door, she found Kedreeva already perched on the edge of the steps, watching her sleepily. When Kalstralev appeared beside the other human, she clambered to her feet and yawned. Stretching, she practically melted back a few steps until her hind paws touched the grass.
“Good morning, Beauty,” Kalstralev said softly as he moved forward, taking a seat that straddled the doorway. “Did you sleep well?”
She stared at him for a moment before whining low in the back of her throat. Her wings had healed while she slept and the bindings in which Liana had first braced her broken wing was constricting. No matter how she twisted or struggled, she had not been able to reach to tear them off yet. She had seen Liana earlier, had nearly approached her to try to have them removed, but the woman’s dislike for her had been pungent in the air and so she had waited.
“What’s wrong, Beauty?” Kal asked, brow furrowing. He glanced over his shoulder to Liana, who shrugged, arms folded over her chest. When he turned back he found that Kedreeva had inched closer, extending her previously broken wing as far as she could toward him. Again he glanced to Liana and again she shrugged.
“Take it off. She could do with having her bandages replaced as well, if you think you can get her to hold still a second time.” Her fingers unconsciously flitted across the wraps around her own forearm. Though it had bled a lot, the bite she’d been given was only a surface wound- no more than a cat could do.
Uncertain still, he steadied his voice as much as he could and offered Kedreeva a reassuring smile. “You’ll have to come closer if you want it off, Beauty,” he soothed. “Liana can replace it for you and it will feel much better. I’m sure it hurts.”
While there was no way she would allow the woman to touch her wing ever again, Kedreeva inched closer and closer until Kal was able to lay gentle fingers to her bandages. Carefully he pried loose the edges of the material until he could reach the stiff splints beneath their surface. He placed the wood beside him and peeled away the rest of the bandages. The torn skin was pink where the scales had not begun to grow back yet, but the bone didn’t appear to be broken any longer.
The second the last of the cloth was stripped from her wing, she yanked it out of his grasp and scuttled back two steps until she was out of range. She looked hastily to Liana, but the girl had made no move to stop her. She flexed first one wing and then the other, making sure each would work as they were supposed to do. Slowly her gaze returned to Kalstralev, who was folding the used bandages as if they might be useful for later. “Thank you,” she said softly in her own language.
He smiled. Though the words were not decipherable to him, the tone she used was unmistakable. “You’re welcome, Beauty.”
“You know,” Liana said blandly. “She’s not the only one who has missed your attentions. There is a golden haired beauty in your barn that nearly took my hand off yesterday because I wasn’t you.”
“Charnabrin!” Kalstralev cursed, using the doorjamb to hurriedly help him to his feet. Dizziness blackened his vision for a moment. “Light, I’d nearly forgotten with all the excitement.”
“Well then you might want to go remember,” she said, raising both eyebrows in a droll manner. “Don’t you think?”
“Yes, absolutely,” he said before turning to face Kedreeva. “Would you like to come meet someone very special?”
Eyes widening a little at the offer, she simply stared at him. After a second he decided that she would either accompany him or she wouldn’t and he set off across the yard. Liana made no move to follow and Kedreeva’s skin prickled uncomfortably at the thought of remaining behind to be alone with her. Hesitantly she began to walk the same path as Kalstralev had taken toward the barn. The roof could be seen from the house but the rest was blocked by large, leafy trees. She’d been too frightened to try to visit it herself.
Ducking under the wooden fence all about the field, she quickly scanned the pasture to see what was there. Two pigs, three goats, some chickens by a little house across the way… some geese and branyiks by the muddy looking pond. Only the branyiks could have been dangerous, and they seemed content watching over their nesting cousins. Secure in her safety, she edged alongside the barn and peeked around the corner.
The building was obviously meant for far many more animals than Kalstralev had. In the loft there was yellow brown hay for bedding that had probably been rotting for years. The sides of the entrance were covered in strange gear, almost none of which she recognized, though she suspected a lot of it was for keeping animals captive outside the fences. She could see five stalls from the entrance, all of them large enough to hold several goats or pigs yet most of them empty. At the center the stall’s front wall had been knocked out and it had been filled with farming equipment. The left of that… to the left of that was Kalstralev and a species of creature she had only seen once.
A horse.
Breath like liquid in her throat, she took a step forward almost on reflex. Kalstralev was coaxing the beast from the stall, all pretty words and gentle touches. The horse was huge, as big or bigger than any plow beast Kedreeva had ever seen. He was the color of golden coins with fur spun of sunlight and amber in dapples across his flanks. Though he walked placidly into the hall of the barn every inch of him spoke of grandeur beyond his surroundings. With eyes the color of open sky and half-moon hooves made to thunder, he seemed to her a force to be reckoned with; a force that did not at all belong in a little country boy’s barn.
Their eyes met and for a moment, Kedreeva cowered.
Dragon his soul whispered against hers in acknowledgment of what she was. It had been a long time since he had seen her kind this close to Man.
She shivered at the mental touch, eyes closing in appreciation. Horses were one of only a few creatures that could speak to her kind, her mother had told her. After the Tasia dragons had created their treasured humans they had given the race something special- equines. Like the plow-beasts horses had been built to carry humans but unlike the plow-beasts, they were made for speed. In all the lands they were the swiftest of runners and there was little that could best them in a fair fight.
But as with most things the humans touched had been, the horses were eventually used for ill. What began as jousting for fun became fighting for real and turned to raiding and even to training for war in the end. So it was that dragons wove their magic into the souls of equines and gave them something that had only been given to kin and humans; cognition. Horses had scattered from mankind’s grasp afterwards and that, her mother said, was why man could no longer tame them. That was why horses were never seen under the care of men.
So what was this one doing in a human barn?
“Stallion,” she whispered, voice rasping against her teeth as she stood stock-still in the barn entrance. “Are you being held here against your will?”
Ever-so-slightly the horse’s head rose and his ears swept forward at the sound of her language. “No more than you, Beauty.” His language was slightly different, older; it tickled at something in her mind she wasn’t quite sure was hers.
“My name is Kedreeva,” she said quietly, inching closer under Kalstralev’s watchful if confused gaze. She’s sworn her name would drop from no human tongue, but she’d promised nothing of horses.
“I am Charnabrin.”
“That’s not your real name,” she hissed almost immediately, ignoring Kalstralev’s anxious fidgeting from where he stood between them.
His whinnied laughter was swallowed by the thick wood of the barn, giving it a queer sort of muffled feel. “Does it matter? It is only a word; call me by any other and I shall not change. My name is Charnabrin now and whether it was a minute ago or will be in a year matters not.”
Kal was moving forward nervously at the way Charnabrin was crow stepping about the barn hall, tail flicking as it did before he attacked any threat to his perceived ‘herd’ of mis-matched livestock. The last thing he needed was a fight between the stallion and the dragonet; who the winner would be seemed clear to him. “Woah, boy… she won’t hurt you.”
“If you aren’t being held, why are you here?” she asked simply, moving to see around Kalstralev’s legs. Tilting her head to one side, she gave him a hard look. “That fence cannot hold you. You could leave.”
“It is because I can that I don’t,” Charnabrin returned politely, pulling his head away from Kalstralev’s hands and pushing lightly into the boy’s chest with his nose in an attempt to reassure him. “Had this boy tried to harness me as others have I would have left this place.”
“He never has?” she asked, watching Kal stroke gently down the side of Charnabrin’s golden cheek with his good hand, their foreheads together.
“Not once,” Charnabrin affirmed in a whisper of breath. “This boy is… different. You’ll see,” he told her. “You won’t leave either.”
Anger bubbled up within her at the words and she snorted. “I will,” she snapped, drawing Kalstralev’s attention to her. “No human will keep me.”
“It’s okay, Beauty,” he said. “Charnabrin won’t hurt you either.”
For his part, Charnabrin remained silent, his last words ringing in the tense silence. She stayed only long enough to angrily meet the horse’s blue gaze one last time before she whirled out of the barn. There was no way she was going to stick around to listen to some animal tell her what she would and would not do. If she wanted she could leave any time, she told herself, and she would as soon as she was sure she could make it on her own. As soon as she was certain she could hunt on her own and not be caught by humans she would leave.
Of course she would leave...
“Beauty?” Kalstralev called worriedly from the barn entrance, Charnabrin was walking past him when she turned to look back at him. There was a flurry of motion as he picked up his feet, tail and mane tossing before he bolted into the pasture. Kalstralev watched for a moment before turning back to her. “I’m sorry, Beauty. I didn’t think he would scare you.”
She stared at him for a moment, the silver of her eyes misting closer to white as she thought. At last she turned away from him and began to make her way back to the house. She didn’t look back and he didn’t follow.
Don't like it, don't read it.
I'm very cranky and not in a mood for getting critical reviews from people who don't read carefully first.