Faelost Read online

  “Does your face hurt?” I asked after I slowed to match Shan's decelerating pace. We were at the back of the group, and Ragan and Rose were only specks beneath the clouds on the northern horizon.

  “Hmm?” Shan's jaw clenched as his eyes snapped toward me. “Sorry, I was somewhere else.”

  “Does your face hurt?”

  His nose wrinkled as he touched his bruised cheek. “Only when I do this.”

  “Then don't do that.” My smile was met by his scowl. “Sorry. You're quiet today. Wasn't sure if you were pissed off at the rest of us, if your face hurt too much to talk, or–”

  “I'm fine,” Shan growled. He stroked Lumin's back between the folded wings. Having bored with riding in the crate, the dragon sat in front of Shan on the saddle. My own dragon was happily curled up on a blanket tucked into the lime crate behind me. “Sorry. My mind is all over the place.”

  “Anything you can tell me about?” I asked.

  “No. Um. Maybe, I guess.” Shan cleared his throat and shifted on his saddle. “I was just thinking about my parents . . . our parents . . . and our sisters. All I want to do right now is go home, but I don't know if home exists anymore. I don't know if they're okay, or alive, or anything that has happened in Jadeshire since we left. I'm afraid we'll fight to make it home only to find we no longer have a home or anyone who is a part of it.”

  “We'll still have each other, even if something terrible happened.”

  Shan sniffed and shook his head. “I know, but I'm not done with my thoughts. Don't interrupt again or I won't say anything else on the matter. I know you're intrusive because you care, but it gets tedious when I have to allay your fears alongside my own.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Shut up, Tessen. Anyway, I had a lot of trouble accepting Daelis as my father, and now I'm afraid I won't see him again. That got me thinking about your father. Mom said that Rohir treated me like I was his own son and one of my first words was Daddy, directed toward him. He wanted to be our father, not just yours. He held me on the day I was born, played with me, read to me, loved me, but I will never remember him. Daelis was too busy being a proper elven lord to bother with being my father, but this troubled young man from a lowborn family chose to raise me as his own son. Your father was a good man, Tes, and I've heard you're a lot like him. You like to take responsibility for things that aren't yours, but then they become yours because you care for them. You had nothing to do with the situation we're in or the mess our family is in, so I don't want you feeling guilty about it. No matter what happens or what we find when we get home to Jadeshire, none of this is your fault.”

  “I didn't say it was,” I said. I shivered as my errant thoughts decided it was a good time to make something—anything—my fault. Suggestion is a powerful thing and it's too easy to find myself helpless beneath its sword. My aching joints, Shan's mood, everything that happened to my father, the transient rain . . . all my fault, and for no logical reason at all.

  “You didn't have to. I know you as well as you know me. You always find some way to blame yourself when something goes wrong.” Shan stared ahead, an ear and an eyebrow raised.

  I couldn't hide from him even if I wanted to. I kept my eyes fixed on his bruised and twitching face. “If I do, it's only because so many people told me that all of our family's problems were because I existed. I know my life was an accident. I know neither of my parents were ready for me to exist. Maybe if I hadn't been born when I was, my father wouldn't have been taken and Mom wouldn't have become a mercenary, which then eventually led to you and her and Daelis being kidnapped, which led to your family pissing off someone enough to try to kill you all and send us into exile. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like everything started with me.”

  “It wasn't you. You had nothing to do with any of that. It was Daelis. Everything started with Daelis, I'm certain of it.”

  “Why?”

  Shan cocked his head and exhaled heavily. “You know why. Anyway, we're talking about you right now, not him. I believe if you weren't conceived when you were, Rohir still would have been taken and killed because he was in love with Mom, and he'd been stealing from the aristocrats so he'd have enough money to allow him a future with her. Mom still would have needed to support me and likely would have still have become a hired sword for Mordegan Vale. All of that cause and effect would have still led to everything falling apart, but you wouldn't be here right now. It upsets me even to think about that because you're so important to me that I don't want to imagine what my life would have been like without you. None of this was your fault, but I'm so glad you're here with me right now because I don't think my sanity could survive without you to temper it.”

  “So I'm responsible for your mental health?” I asked.

  “No, you're not responsible for my behavior, I am. All I'm saying is that I'm deeply appreciative of your existence.” Shan's eyes narrowed and he pursed his lips. “What the hell is Ragan doing?”

  I turned away from Shan and looked forward. In the distance, a tawny blur sitting upon a brown and white blur circled several times around a green blur. “No idea. Can't see that far.”

  “Sorry. I sometimes forget your vision is terrible,” Shan said.

  “I see fine up close. Distance is shit.”

  “Daelis needs to send you to the glassmaker when we get home.”

  “He already did. I was waiting for her to finish my spectacle order when we had to leave.”

  Shan nodded toward the blurs. “I think Ragan must have found something. Rose is off her horse and now the other three are circling.”

  “We'll find out in a minute. Come on.” I coaxed Saragon from a walk to a trot so I could catch up to the others. Shan urged Evinlore to match Saragon's speed as he looked ahead with undisguised worry.

  The blurs resolved into my companions and their horses as we drew close. They were busy examining seven large mounds arranged in a circle upon the flat plain. Shan and I dismounted and walked to Iefyr.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Go inside the circle and see for yourself,” Iefyr replied. He rubbed his nose with one hand and kept the other on his dagger hilt.

  It immediately became clear why the circle was so interesting to my companions. The mounds weren't mounds at all. They were the corpses of seven dragons. Grass sprouted from between the scales of their backs, which gave the illusion from outside the circle that they were nothing but knolls. From the inside, I saw their legs and faces. They were each a different color and breed of dragon, but there was little variation in their sizes.

  “Come here, Sylleths,” Ragan said from near the center of the circle. He pointed at a spot on the ground in front of him. “Watch your step.”

  “This is really weird,” Shan mumbled as we walked through the knee-high grass.

  “Watch it, Tessen,” Ragan said.

  I looked down and a leathery face looked back up at me. Long, fair hair and pointed ears . . . this was the body of an elven woman. Her red robe was weathered to orange on the most sun-exposed areas, her gloved hands were folded together over her sunken abdomen, and the soles of her black boots faced the center of the circle.

  “Oh.” I stepped to her side and crouched to examine her neck. She wore no pendant to allow for identification.

  “None of them wear pendants. I already looked,” Ragan said.

  I stood away from the body and joined Ragan and Shan. Six more bodies came into view. They were arranged in a circle within the dragon circle, their feet facing center and the crowns of their heads pointing toward the dragons. All wore the same red robes, the same red gloves, the same black boots. One had dark hair, but the others were fair.

  “Dead but not rotten, not eaten,” I whispered. “We've seen vultures and other carrion feeders out here, so why haven't they been eaten?”

  “Poisoned or cursed, most likely,” Ragan muttered. He twisted to look at Shan, who crouched over something at the circle center. “That what I think it is, Shanno
n?”

  “Yep,” Shan said. He held an elliptical shape up to the sunlight. It was a black mask decorated with white lines. One line ran vertically from crown to chin, and three others intersected horizontally, with the shortest line at brow level and the longest across the mouth. “Jarrah. Seven masks, seven dead elves, seven dead dragons.”

  “Nightshadows.” I said and shivered. As far as I knew, all Jarrah were members of the Nightshadow family, and Shan was a Nightshadow by way of his paternal grandmother. These bodies once belonged to Shan's relatives.

  “Yeah. The ones I saw unmasked are dead or incarcerated now, so I don't know who these are,” Shan said. He dropped the mask back onto the pile and brushed off his knees. “I wonder how long they've been here. Clearly, this was done by the same person or people who brought us to the Faelands. They're arranged in the same pattern we were.”

  “Yeah, but we're not dead.” Ragan's cheek twitched as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Maybe we were supposed to be. Or maybe the people responsible for this circle screwed up and killed them. They don't look like they were any any pain. It's like they died in their sleep, all of them, even the dragons.”

  “Their robes are sun-bleached, so they've probably been here a couple months,” I said.

  “Yeah, I think you're right about that. Also long enough for the sweetgrass to grow over the dragons. I don't understand this. What could have done this?”

  “This was practice,” Shan murmured.

  “What?” Ragan and I asked in unison.

  Shan shook his head and squinted at us. “I'm assuming this was a failed practice for whatever they did to us. We were taken later, yet we were left alive. All of these people and dragons died without a struggle, so maybe they died when they were moved from wherever they started. Also, they have no provisions and no weapons, though Jarrah are weapons in themselves as long as they aren't around a warlock who can shade, meaning a warlock who can block other magic-skilled people from using their abilities.”

  “Like you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I'm far from the only one who can do it. Ranalae could do it, thought not as well as I can. So could my tutor.” Shan tilted his head and frowned at Ragan. He swept his hand in front of him as he turned a circle. “This is ritualistic in nature. Circles and sevens and rays. I . . . I . . . oh, damn it, I'll just show you.”

  Shan pulled up his tunic to reveal the dense and extensive scarification and tattooing on his chest and abdomen. I swallowed an involuntary gasp. He'd shown me before, but it never became any easier to see. I couldn't fathom the amount of pain he experienced when Ranalae mutilated him.

  He pointed to an intricate pattern over his sternum. Three concentric circles, with seven arrows radiating out from each of the outer two. Seven widdershins spirals and seven seven-pointed stars sat at the points of the fourteen arrows.

  Shan grimaced and traced his fingertips along the scars. “This was the first one she carved in me. She said it's a sign of the world, and that power comes in sevens. The circles are the underground, the surface, and the sky, and all light radiates toward the stars and galaxies just as it shines upon us. It is the intersection of sunlight and shadow that allows all life to exist.”

  “Did she carve the squid on your flank next?” I asked, indicating toward his right side. “What's that symbolize, the weird food choices of the aristocracy?”

  “No.” Shan lowered his tunic and shivered. “It's an octopus, not a squid, and it's part of an illusion invocation. She only told me what a couple of the spells and symbols meant, so I've been doing my own research to decipher the rest.”

  “Any spells on you that would help us figure out who did this?”

  Shan turned his head and watched Marita lay out her ritual tools. “No. I've deciphered less than a quarter of what's on my front side, and nothing on the rest of me. My legs are completely covered in mystery and I don't even know what's on my back. Could've been worse. She intended to cover every usable bit of my skin with spells, but Mom's rescue put an end to that.”

  “Well, let's just let Marita finish her cleansing ritual and we can get the hell out of here,” Ragan said. He'd spun away just after Shan raised his tunic. Shock and anguish were clearly written upon his face. Shan's mutilated skin was difficult to look upon, especially by people who cared about him.

  “Don't pity me, Ragan,” Shan said. He picked up a Jarrah mask and snapped it in half. A shadow washed over his hands and the mask disintegrated into shimmering dust. “Yes, it hurt, and it still hurts, but I can't change the past so I'm learning to live with it. Every time someone looks at me like you just did, it takes me a step back down the mountain.”

  “I . . . I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.”

  “I know. It's involuntary. Tessen still winces when he sees me. Don't you, Tes? Don't worry about it. Both of you are forgiven, but only because I know your pity comes from a place of love and empathy. It comes to the surface for the same reason that Mom tries not to cry when she looks at the scars on my face.”

  “I'm sorry. I hate that someone hurt you,” Ragan said.

  “I know.” Shan sighed and carefully stepped around a body on his way toward Marita. “And now you know why I'm no longer the person you remember.”

  “You'll always be that person, Shan. The scars can't take away your soul.” I tried to touch his arm, but he slipped away.

  “Maybe not, but they did alter it.” Shan stood before Marita. He bowed his chin toward his chest as he reached forward to hold her hand. “I'm sorry you'll never meet the person I used to be.”

  Marita fluttered a white feather across Shan's brow. “You don't need to be sorry. I like you as you are now.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  I turned away from them and returned to my horse. I needed out of the circle and away from its mummified dead. I wondered if there were more circles like this scattered throughout the Faelands and we only happened to stumble upon this one. Sevens and sevens and somehow our group of seven was still alive. I supposed there was a small comfort to be found in that. We weren't like the dead Jarrah and their dragons. We were alive and we'd continue to ride on until we safely reached our destination.

  Chapter 20

  I have a history of worrying too much, of being anxious about things supposedly unworthy of anxiety. For years, I refused to sleep next to windows because I was afraid someone would walk by outside, see me vulnerable, and break in to take me. I was afraid of waking up and finding my family gone. I was afraid of stinging bees and geese and collapsing ladders and tree branches falling on my head when I walked beneath them. To this day, I'm still terrified of bridges. And of sheep. I have no idea why, and even I know the latter phobia is ridiculous. The bridge phobia . . . well, that's one fear I can't seem to find as anything but rational and reasonable, even with the inconveniences it has caused.

  The first two fears on my long list ended up being justified. I wasn't stolen while sleeping, but my father was. I did wake up every morning for months to find that my family had disappeared and I was the only one left. Facing those fears didn't make me any less fearful. It made me realize that the world was an ugly and merciless place, and that there were far too many things worth fearing.

  That's not to say everything was awful or that my anxiety was a constant burden. It came and went like ocean tides, but the water was always there and always dangerous. Some days I couldn't bear to think about what was to come in the next ten minutes, let alone contemplate any sort of future. Other days I was able to relax into my surroundings and take pride in my meager accomplishments. On mediocre days, I could fake being functional, but Shan always saw through my disguise. He knew how to calm my racing mind.

  But then he was gone, and then he returned, but he was different. He still used his tricks to calm me, but I felt like he was repeating his past techniques out of habit and was faking normalcy as much as I was. Some aspects of my anxiety began to be about him. I was afraid that he'd always be
in pain, and that a simple touch would hurt him. After helping him through his first panic attacks, I was afraid he'd spend his life being thrashed by the same riptides that forced me underwater and only let me rise for a quick and hopeful breath before dragging me back down. I didn't want anyone to experience the inner turbulence I'd known my entire life, and it was a stab to the heart to watch my best friend—one of the two people I loved most—struggle through something far worse than any anxiety spell I'd ever had.

  I soon found I was no longer afraid of bees or falling branches because Shan had taken over their position on my list of anxiety-inducing things. In a span of six long months, we had traded places. He relied too much on me to keep him stable. I was afraid I'd do something or say something to hurt him and it would have disastrous consequences.

  Maybe Marita could help me with my brother. I'd have to talk to her about him if we could get a few minutes alone. That would be difficult, since if Shan wasn't with me, he was with her. Maybe I could get him to go argue with Ragan for a while so I could talk to Marita. Her affection for Shan seemed genuine, as did his for her, so I hoped I could trust her with him. I hoped she recognized how fragile he was, but also how much he deserved to be loved.

  I thought too much on the subjects of Shan and anxiety as we rode away from the Jarrah corpse circle and further onto the grassy plateau. Thinking about anxiety made me anxious in itself, but it was difficult to stop thinking once I started, especially since no one wanted to bother riding with me. I had Serida and Saragon, but they weren't much for conversation. I thought several times about pacing one of the rider pairs so I could join in their lively conversations, but that felt intrusive. If I wasn't already included, it seemed rude to butt in and demand attention. It was easier to remain alone than worry about saying the wrong things.

  I ended up spending the entire day of the Jarrah discovery and then most of the next two days thinking about socializing with the others without actually doing it. The plateau steppe stretched onward, and so did my silence. Too much quiet was dangerous for me, as it gave my thoughts the chance to turn into squalls.