Traitor (3 page)

“You know, we first met in here.” Felix broke the awkward silence.

I remembered that day, which had coincidentally been my first day as a student. He had sat down with me at a table just across the room from where we were sitting now. He’d stolen some of my food and then sauntered off without ever introducing himself. That was how our friendship had started.

“Someone should have warned me about you then.” I smirked at him.

He laughed and elbowed me in the ribs, then he tried to steal my last bite of roasted potatoes. “Don’t be like that. You know you’d be lost without me.”

I tried to stab his hand with my fork, but I wasn’t fast enough. I could out maneuver him with a sword any day, but when it came to stealing food—it was like Felix had some kind of divine superpower.

“I’d definitely be a lot less hungry without you,” I said.

“It seems like it was yesterday.” Felix’s eyes got distant as he chewed the last bite of my dinner. “And now who knows what we’ll be up against.”

I sighed and pushed my empty plate away so I could lean against the table. “Can’t be anything worse than usual, right?”

He grinned at that. “Yeah. One thing I know I can always count on is that when I’m with you, there’s always a chance I’m going to get kidnapped, killed, eaten alive, or maimed.”

I smiled. “Never a dull moment, right?”

“Never,” he agreed.

We sat in silence again, watching as the last few students got up to leave the dining hall. The room was empty now, except for us. It was unbearably quiet, and my thoughts were drawn to the dark possibilities of what really was waiting for us at Northwatch.

“I heard a wild rumor that someone spotted Icarus in the royal city during the graduation ceremony,” Felix murmured like it was a question, even if it wasn’t one.

I shot him a look. “If you’re asking whether or not I saw Beckah, the answer is yes.”

His grin was so wide it was almost disturbing. “And? Did you guys, you know … ?” He let his voice trail off suggestively.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” I knew it was futile to defend myself now, he’d believe whatever he wanted, regardless of what I said.

“That’s a yes,” he announced proudly, like we still had an audience. “Well, congratulations. It’s about time. So, do I get a wedding invitation, or what?”

“It’s not that simple and you know it. You’re the one who said I shouldn’t mess with her in the first place. Sile would never let me marry her. He’d probably kill me if he knew I had even kissed her.” I turned my face away so he couldn’t see how badly I was blushing.

Felix gave me a sympathetic pat on the back. “True. You picked one heck of a challenge. Not to mention, she fights better than most of us do.”

There was a suggestive edge to his words. It made me immediately suspicious that there was something he wasn’t telling me—something about Beckah.

“What?” I looked at him squarely.

His expression became reluctant, like he wasn’t sure he should tell me. “Well, it’s just something I heard. I don’t know how true it actually is.”

I squeezed my hands into fists on the table. “What?” I repeated.

“Some of the Seasoned Lieutenants were talking about it. Icarus has made a few appearances at Northwatch, too. He and his mysterious rider, who calls
himself
Seraph, have intervened in a few skirmishes. Beckah’s been busy, and apparently, she’s becoming some kind of hero to the dragonriders there. They’re talking about Seraph like
he’s
some great savior who has stepped forward to end the war,” he explained, adding emphasis where we both knew the details had been skewed.

I sank back in my seat. Beckah was still passing herself off as a man in order to fight. Women were explicitly forbidden to be soldiers, even dragonriders, and I wondered how long she could hide herself and her secret behind that helmet. I was terrified of what would happen if anyone ever found out who she was. She was playing an incredibly dangerous game.

“Don’t worry, dummy. She’ll be fine.” Felix tried to reassure me.

All I could do was nod in reply. I was worried about her. I loved her. And as much as I knew she wanted to fulfill her destiny, the fact that I might hear about her being killed in combat through some kind of rumor like this was almost more than I could stand.

But there was nothing I could do. When she got her mind made up about something, Beckah was like a force of nature. Nothing could stop her now.

Nightmares weren’t anything new for me. I’d been suffering with bizarre and terrifying dreams for years now. I’d nearly forgotten what it felt like to sleep and wake up actually feeling rested and calm. That never happened anymore.

So I wasn’t thrilled to leave Felix in the dining hall and trudge to the temporary room I’d been given in the instructor’s wing of the dormitory. The unfamiliar surroundings didn’t help. It was a small, cramped room with only one tiny bed and no windows. The sleeping remedy Felix had been slipping to me didn’t help anymore, either. No matter how much of it I took, it didn’t make a bit of difference. The instant I closed my eyes, my dreams came alive.

They usually revolved around my father being the traitorous coward who had stolen the god stone from Luntharda for some conniving, murdering gray elf warrior. The details had begun to get hazier, though, and I still didn’t understand why the god stone was so important. I’d only seen it once, completely by mistake, in a prison camp outside of the royal city of Halfax. At the time, nothing about it had seemed all that special to me. It was just a big, round, green rock—not anything worth killing kings over. There had to be something else I was missing. The god stone had to be important, I just didn’t know how or why yet.

I packed up all my things and took a bath before I tried settling in for the night. As I lay awake, staring into the darkness overhead, I thought about my upcoming journey. Tomorrow I would leave for Northwatch. Felix was going to his own estate, so we wouldn’t be traveling together. And Beckah was somewhere out there in the void of war; so far away I could barely picture her face.

I was restless even before I closed my eyes, already dreading what my dreams would show me. But as I drifted off, I saw something I hadn’t seen in a very long time …

The maw of a deep pit opened up before me. All around was the jungle, dense, deep, and filled with bizarre sounds. As I stood on the edge of that cavernous hole, I could feel something welling up from inside it. It felt like energy, something ancient that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Cold, earthy-smelling air wafted past my nose, and my eyes were drawn to the moss-covered staircase that spiraled around and around, down into the depths of that pit.

“
It’s time
,” a voice whispered right beside my ear. It sounded like a woman speaking in the gray elf language, but it wasn’t my mother’s this time.

I turned around to see who it was.

My breath caught in my throat. I froze where I stood—nose to nose with a shrike. Its lean, powerful body rippled like water as a thousand mirror-like scales on its hide reflected the beauty of the jungle. Its wild eyes were the color of amethysts, sharp and predatory. I felt its hot breath on my face.

I was absolutely terrified. Without thinking, I took a step backward. My first instinct was to run. I had to get away. I had no weapon, not that it would have helped me much anyway. You couldn’t kill a shrike that easily.

Suddenly, I felt my feet begin to slip
,
I was teetering on the edge of that pit. I flailed my arms wildly to try to regain my balance, but it was no good.

I started falling into the darkness.

As usual, I bolted upright in my bed with a cold sweat making my clothes feel damp and clingy. My heart was pounding, and I was scrambling to catch my breath. I squeezed my hand around the bone-carved necklace my mother had given to me when I was a child. I never took it off. It was all I had to remember her by.

Just like all the other times I’d had weird dreams, the pendant felt warm to the touch. I could feel it pulsing with a radiant heat in my palm. It didn’t make any sense. It was just a piece of bone strung onto a resin cord. To be honest, I didn’t even remember my mother ever wearing it herself.

It took me a few minutes to collect myself and get moving. I changed into my uniform and gathered up the saddlebag that contained all the possessions I owned in the world—well, except for my old family home. I did own that, courtesy of my older half-brother. But frankly it could have burned to the ground and neither of us would have cared too much.

It was barely sunrise when I stepped out of the dormitory and started for the Roost. Jace was expecting me by the end of the day, so I needed to get an early start. He wasn’t my instructor anymore, so he couldn’t order me around like he had before, but I wasn’t dumb enough to think there weren’t plenty of other ways he could make my life miserable if he wanted to. So being late probably wasn’t in my best interest.

Felix was already gone. I knew it because when I walked into the tack room to get Mavrik’s saddle, all his gear had already been cleaned out. It upset me a little. I’d missed saying goodbye. And he hadn’t bothered to throw a boot at my head to wake me up one last time. Things were different now. We couldn’t act like kids. He had a lot of responsibility to deal with, and part of me wished I could have gone with him to his family estate. Felix’s relationship with his parents hadn’t been very good, from what I had learned. He was an only child, and his father had passed away suddenly last year due to an illness. And I knew he had to be worried about leaving his mother alone while he went off to war. Sure, he put up a tough front. He laughed everything off most of the time. But I knew Felix had been struggling with a rocky relationship with his mother for years now. He’d talked to me about it a little, and apparently she hadn’t wanted him to become a dragonrider in the first place. Now that he was the duke of the family estate, he was supposed to be taking care of her as part of his duties. He wouldn’t be able to do that very well from the frontlines, though.

I tried not to think about it too much. It was his business, not mine. I wasn’t going to try to tell him what to do. I wouldn’t have known what to do in his situation anyway. Besides, Felix was made of tougher stuff than I was. He could handle it.

Heaving Mavrik’s saddle and all my gear over my shoulders, I started up the stairs to his stall. He was being strangely silent this morning. Usually he was already filling my head with excited questions and swirls of curious color. I just assumed he was still asleep. After all, I had pushed him pretty hard yesterday. And we had a long way to go today; a little extra rest for him was probably a good idea.

But as I came to the door of his stall, he started sending me waves of worried blue-green hues. I could sense his uneasiness. He was nervous about something. With my thoughts, I asked him what was wrong even as I opened the door to go into his stall.

Then I got my answer.

My former instructor from my fledgling year of training, Sile Derrick, was standing in Mavrik’s stall. It looked like he’d been waiting for me. Immediately, my temper caught like a wildfire. Anger made my teeth clench and my vision go hazy.

I stopped in the doorway and stared at him, waiting for some kind of explanation. He’d obviously come here to talk. I wasn’t exactly opposed to that. There was plenty I wanted to say to him, too.

“I see you managed to survive,” he said coldly. He didn’t smile.

I didn’t smile, either. “No thanks to you.”

“That’s a bold thing for you to say to your instructor, boy,” he growled.

“You’re not my instructor anymore,” I reminded him. “In fact, I’m not sure what you are … except a liar.”

Sile’s face started to turn a furious shade of red. Even though it had only been a little over a year since I’d last seen him, he looked much older now. More of his hair had turned gray, and there were wrinkles on his forehead and in the corners of his eyes. He was thinner, and there was something disturbing about the wide-eyed way he glared at me. It was as though he half-expected someone to jump out from behind me and kill him.