Traitor (8 page)

I clung to the bone-carved handles on the shrike’s saddle as we skimmed the clouds. We were flying high, using our speed and the shrike’s mirror-like scales to camouflage ourselves. I didn’t know why, but I was terrified. It was as though I was fleeing from something, although every time I looked back, I couldn’t see anyone chasing us.

Pain struck me suddenly, hitting me right in the chest. I winced, looking down at what appeared to be the broken-off shaft of an arrow. How long had that been there? I didn’t remember being shot. Just by the look of it, it had been a few minutes because there was already a lot of blood running down the front of my clothes.

I was beginning to feel faint. I gripped the saddle as my head spun. Underneath me, the shrike let out a whine of concern. It turned its head to the side, gazing back at me like it was worried—or maybe just making sure I was still alive.

“Hurry,” I heard myself say.

But the voice wasn’t mine. It sounded like someone else; someone who spoke the elven language far better than I did. Not to mention, it sounded like a
girl
.

The shrike poured on more speed. We passed dozens of plumes of black smoke that rose above the clouds. I didn’t pay much attention to them at first. There were so many, and most were far away in the distance. I just assumed they came from cities, mines, or recent battles where dragon fire had been used to turn the tide. After all, large amounts of dragon venom could smolder on its own fuel for days.

Then I got close enough to actually smell the smoke.

The awful stench made me choke. My shrike sneezed and growled bitterly. Down below, I couldn’t make out exactly where it came from. We were so far up, and there was so much of it. But that putrid black smoke made my eyes water and my throat want to close up.

The shrike didn’t want to get any closer, but I wanted to see where that smell was coming from. I already had a good idea what it was. I’d smelled something sort of like it before in a prison camp outside of the royal city of Halfax. This was much worse, though.

As we broke down through the clouds, dipping quickly into view, I got my first good look.

Suddenly, it all made sense. All the training. All the preparation. All the yelling, beatings, and hours spent learning to hide my emotion behind the steel visor of my helmet. It was because of this.

The silence was haunting. Miles of carnage and ash spread out below me as far as I dared to look. The bodies of gray elves and human men were twisted together like a flame-scorched briar patch. I saw their milky, glazed eyes staring up at me. Their gazes seemed to follow me as we zipped past.

Dragons lay with their scaly hides pierced by so many arrows they looked like porcupine quills. Shrikes were torn apart like children’s toys. They all lay together in the stillness of the cold spring air.

The smell of it all stung my eyes and burned my throat. It made my insides turn sour. I urged the shrike to pull away, and he beat his wings harder to surge back above the clouds.

I thought I had gotten away from it. I just wanted that horrible image out of my mind. But as soon as we pierced the clouds again, I looked out over the horizon and saw other plumes of black smoke.

There were more than I could ever count.

My mother’s pendant was burning against my chest like a red-hot coal. The pain of it pressed against my skin made me bolt awake. I yanked it off as fast as I could.

My hands felt tired, like I really had been clinging to the saddle of that shrike. My body was damp with cold sweat, and my heart was still pounding as I looked around the small, dark room to steady myself. Everything was calm and quiet. Jace was sleeping with his back to me, and the bucket was still sitting on the floor beside my bed in case I got sick again.

I certainly felt sick, but it wasn’t from drinking too much ale now. I was shivering as I pulled back the blankets and sat up on the edge of my bed, letting my feet rest against the cool floor. I was trying to sort it all out in my mind. I’d never dreamed about riding a shrike like that. Until recently, I’d never dreamed about them at all. The tone of my nightmares had definitely changed. I could feel it—like the weight of impending doom on my chest. Something was coming.

The longer I sat, the cooler the pendant became, until at last I was able to put it back on and tuck it under my shirt. I pressed my hand over where it hung against my chest. Sile had warned me not to take it off. He acted like it was very important.

Now I was beginning to question why my mother had given it to me in the first place.

I was lost in thought, remembering my encounter with Sile. I sat that way for hours before I eventually decided to get up. It was early, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get any more sleep.

My commotion while I was gathering my things for a bath must have woken up Jace because he rolled over to glare at me like an angry dragon. “Do you ever sleep?”

“Not as often as I’d like.”

He didn’t say anything else as I left for the community washroom. But when I came back, he was wide-awake. In fact, he was doing pushups upside down in a handstand against the wall.

I just stood in the doorway for a moment and watched because I’d never seen anyone do pushups like that before. It looked like something I might break my neck trying to do.

“You need to keep up the habit of training every day,” he warned as he finished his last set. He did a fancy backflip and landed on his feet. “You’d be surprised how much you’ll backslide in just a week or two. Too much ale and sleep will make you go soft in the waist.”

“Right,” I answered as I shuffled over to my bed and started getting out my uniform for the day.

“Hurry up and get ready. Our work shift starts in an hour.” Jace wiped the sweat off his face and neck onto one of his tunic. Then he put it on—which I found a little disgusting.

I didn’t dare say anything about it, though. I put on clean clothes, buckled my kidney belt around my waist, and kept my opinions to myself. If Jace wanted to stink all day, then that was his business.

“After our shift, we hit the training rooms and spar until dinner,” he said as he laced his vambraces around his forearms.

I was busy doing the same thing. “Jace, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

He shot me a dangerous look, like he suspected I was about to ask him more personal questions about himself. “What is it?”

“My older brother is stationed here, too. Well, he’s actually my half-brother. He joined the infantry and left home. I haven’t seen him since I started training as a fledgling. I was wondering if I could to try to find him.”

I was fully expecting Jace to refuse. Dragonriders and infantry didn’t mix. I knew that. But I couldn’t come here and not try to find him. Roland had been looking out for me when he gave me the house my father had left behind. He’d even written me a letter, which I still had crammed into my stash of personal belongings. If there was even a chance I could see him and thank him, I wanted to take it.

Jace looked curious. He perked an eyebrow like this was news to him. “You have a brother?”

“Roland Broadfeather,” I answered. “I just want to see if he’s okay. It wouldn’t take long.”

He made an unhappy, grumbling sound as he sat down to put on his tall black riding boots. Finally, he rubbed his forehead and let out a noisy groan. “Fine. But we’ll have to make it fast. We’re not supposed to be down there in infantry territory.”

He kept on muttering under his breath the whole way down a dozen or more flights of stairs, winding a path through the tower I knew I wouldn’t be able to duplicate on my own. The inside of the tower was like a labyrinth of narrow passages lit by torches, and all the intersections and hallways looked exactly the same to me.

But Jace seemed to know precisely where we were going. He led us to a place where one of the halls opened up wider in front of a pair of large, iron doors. There were a few infantrymen dressed in their battle armor standing outside to guard the entrance, keeping track of who came and went. They stared at me as Jace and I approached. I saw one of them rest his hand on the pommel of his sword, like he wanted me to know he didn’t trust me.

We stopped a few yards away from the soldiers. I was so busy watching for one of them to draw a blade, I forgot why we’d even come until Jace gave me a nudge that nearly made me trip over my own feet.

“Go on,” he huffed. “We’ve got things to do.”

I had to swallow my dread. I didn’t want to talk to these guys; they were practically snarling at me. But there wasn’t any other choice, and I couldn’t back out now.

I started toward the soldiers. As I approached, one of them rolled up a scroll of paper. It must have been a roster of names because I could see lines and lines of writing on both sides of it.

In the interest of survival, I got straight to the point. I explained who I was, and that I was looking for my brother. When I asked if I could see him, the soldiers exchanged a dubious glance.

“We don’t have any halfbreeds here,” one of them snapped. He’d apparently taken that suggestion as an insult.

“He isn’t one,” I clarified. “He’s human. His name is Roland Broadfeather. I just want to talk to him.”

They were silent for a moment. The one holding the scroll examined me up and down like he was trying to decide if he could take me in a fight or not. I knew he couldn’t, but now wasn’t the time to start that kind of nonsense.

“I know him,” the other soldier said at last. “But he’s never mentioned you before.”

“Would you have?” I asked him bluntly.

He grinned dangerously. “No, I suppose not. But you’re out of luck anyway. Broadfeather mobilized with the rest of his battalion a few days ago. They were sent to retake Barrowton.”

That was not at all what I wanted to hear. Roland was fighting. And I wasn’t there to make sure he made it back alive. “Do you know when they might come back?”

The soldiers glanced at one another again and exchanged a shrug. “Depends on if they can take the city quickly or not,” one of them guessed. “Barrowton was overrun. It’s a regular beehive of those silver-headed demons. I wouldn’t expect to see anyone come back for another month, at least.”

I thanked them and went back to where Jace was waiting, tapping his foot impatiently. He met me with another serious but curious frown. “Well?”

I saved my explanation until we had rounded a corner and put some distance between the infantrymen and ourselves. As I told him everything they had said, Jace’s expression darkened. I caught a glint of dark suspicion in his eyes as he glanced sideways at me.

“That brother of yours, can he do any of the magical stuff you can?” he asked.

I frowned back at him challengingly. “I don’t know. We’ve never really been close.”

Jace had always been a difficult person for me to read. He didn’t say anything else about it as we made our way back to our section of the tower. But I wondered what he was thinking. I wondered why he wouldn’t tell me anything about himself. Surely a man his age, somewhere in his late thirties, had a family, even if he wasn’t married. He had to have parents, or siblings, or cousins.

We’d used up all our breakfast time indulging my curiosity, so when we got back to the dragonriders’ level of the tower, we went straight to work. Our job was simple—painfully simple. We were moving crates of supplies off the pulley-operated elevator system that ran from the ground level to the top floor of the tower.

I couldn’t help but be amazed; I’d never seen anything like it. A huge shaft went straight down the center of the tower, plunging into darkness, with several stops on a few floors along the way. A wooden platform suspended on thick ropes could be raised and lowered by operating a huge crank on the ground level. Jace said they had a team of draft horses hitched to it that operated the crank and moved the elevator up and down.

“A lot better than carrying these crates up fifty stories,” he pointed out as we worked. Together, we were moving the crates from the platform onto two rickshaw carts that we were supposed to use to get them from the elevator to the storage rooms.

I leaned over the edge to peek down into the dark shaft that plummeted straight down below us, marveling at how the ropes had all be strung together so that they were synchronized perfectly.

“Why can’t we use this?” I asked. “You know, instead of walking up the stairs every time?”

Jace grabbed the back of my tunic suddenly, jerking me back into the elevator. “First, because of stupid people like you who decide to lean over the edge and fall to their deaths. Quit that. Don’t you have any sense at all?” he growled as he got back to work loading the rickshaw. “Second, because the stairs serve as a deterrent to keep people from leaving the tower any more than necessary. It’s better to keep everyone in one place in case we’re needed on short notice.”

Walking up all those stairs was definitely a good reason for me not to leave unless I absolutely had to. Doing it sober was bad enough. Trying to climb them after the members of my flight had coaxed me into drinking too much ale was absolute torture. I wasn’t eager to repeat that scenario anytime soon.