Durstin Page 4

  “The homeworld?”

  “Yes, Melamar. The world we originally came from.”

  “You’re saying you came from another world?” He ran his fingers through his hair, his gaze flitting between the two sisters. But neither of them smiled in jest. “This story is becoming more unbelievable by the second.”

  “You said you wanted the truth. It might seem unbelievable to you, but to me, it’s reality.”

  “So, your people came from another world, and you lived in a hidden fortress. Then one day you just decided to leave. Just like that?”

  “No. My father died. It’s complicated, but I felt my life was in danger, so I fled.”

  “But I thought you arrived in the River realm as a child.”

  “I disguised myself as a child when they found me. I thought I would be safer that way.”

  Another lie. How many more was he going to uncover? “Was nothing real?” he asked bitterly. “I don’t know you at all.”

  “You know all of me that matters. I may not have looked like myself, but it was me who loved you, me who married you. Me who ruled our people by your side.”

  “But the River people were not your people, not really. And when we see your real people again, how will they agree with your choice? I see your sister’s reaction to our mating. How far you’ve fallen.” He felt his lips twist into a grimace.

  “I don’t look at it like falling at all.” She slid him a look that bled with honesty. “I see it as finally finding out who I was meant to be, finding my place in this world and the person who was meant to stand by my side.”

  He shook his head. “I wish I could believe you. But I can’t simply ignore the fact that every day, every moment I’ve been with you, has been a lie.”

  “I love you. That has never been a lie. I loved King Karolus and Queen Angeline. And I love the River people. It wasn’t a lie to me.”

  “You know nothing about love. It is honesty and truth, and you have shown nothing but lies and deception and selfishness.”

  She flinched at his harsh words. “I understand how you feel,” she said softly. “But there is more at stake here than you and me. I need you with me on this. I don’t think I can do it alone.”

  Durstin eyed her, not wanting to give in, but not wanting to argue anymore either. If there was anything in this cave, some kind of strange magic power that could be gained through knowledge, they had an obligation to find it. He knew that their chances were slim if he continued down this path.

  The real question was whether he could trust her to gain the knowledge and then not turn her back on Aurora like the other elves had.

  He really had no choice. He had to trust that she wanted to save Aurora as much as he did. And if they got rid of the Ardaks, that would be better for everyone.

  “Fine.” He nodded curtly. “Let’s get access to the Cave of Knowledge together. When we’re done, we can talk.”

  She breathed an obvious sigh of relief. “Thank you. I know you don’t believe this, but you can trust me.”

  He wanted to believe her, but then he thought about their people. How much did she really love them? How much loyalty did she really have? If their people fought the elves, which side would she choose?

  He searched her eyes, and what was there appeared to be genuine. “You can trust me as well. I’ll see this through and protect you.”

  But as she went off to find her sister, he couldn’t stop the twinge of foreboding in the back of his mind. One thing he’d learned about elves from King Ardair was that they were only with you as long as your causes were aligned.

  The minute they diverged, the elves tended to disappear.

  Chapter Ten

  Kiersten

  She followed Merryth into a cave, which was clearly her private domain. A fire burned in a hearth, plants were nestled in every nook and cranny, and the decor was lavishly elven, which was something she hadn’t seen since she left Garthurian.

  Durstin stood a few steps behind her, and she heard his slow inhale as he took in the splendor. “Whatever you say about elves, they sure know how to decorate.”

  Merryth ignored the comment and strode across the chamber, fetching a small wooden chest.

  “What exactly is the Cave of Knowledge?” Durstin asked Kiersten under his breath.

  “It’s a vault of crystals that contain the knowledge of the history of our people, greater magic, and other knowledge from the homeworld. A thousand years ago, something happened. I was too young to know exactly what, but overnight, everything changed. We were told that two guardians were needed: one for a cave of crystals, and one for a cave of knowledge, and that they wouldn’t be discovered until sometime in the future when they were needed. My sister was chosen as a potential guardian, and she accepted the job. The next day, the two guardians disappeared, and the caves were hidden from us. The elves have been searching for them since then.”

  “And the one who finds it must undergo the trials before they can lay claim to the knowledge within,” Merryth finished for her, holding the chest in front of her.

  “What do these trials entail?” he asked.

  Merryth shrugged. “I do not control the trials, nor do I know what will happen. I only know that my sister must drink this.” She opened the lid.

  Kiersten frowned, staring down into the chest at two vials filled with a liquid that glowed with swirling bits of color. “Which one do I drink?”

  “Huh?” For a moment, Merryth lost her scowl as she bent her head to look down into the chest. “But there’s only supposed to be one flask.”

  “I guess now there are two,” Kiersten replied, picking up one of the vials. The liquid wasn’t still, but moved and swirled with every color of the rainbow.

  Merryth’s lips twisted. “Of course. Well, if there are two vials, you each must drink one.”

  Kiersten lifted a vial, uncapped it, and handed it to her husband.

  “What is it?” he asked, eyeing the swirling liquid skeptically.

  “An elixir that will show you the first test,” Merryth said.

  “What she means is that she had no idea,” Kiersten said matter-of-factly, sliding Merryth a sideways glance. She lifted and uncapped her own vial. “Shall we toast?”

  For a moment, his face lightened, but then he glanced at her pointed ears. “I think not.”

  She shrugged as though the words didn’t pierce her like a blade through her heart. To cover her anguish, she brought the vial to her lips and drank. The taste of mixed fruit and honey filled her mouth, and a strange feeling of weakness overcame her.

  Before she could open her mouth to speak, Durstin had done the same.

  Chapter Eleven

  Durstin

  Durstin’s vision went dark and stayed that way. For a few minutes he stood there, unmoving, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The first thing he saw were two walls of a corridor, and two Ardaks coming at him down the center.

  He wasn’t going to die without a fight. But when he reached for his sword to defend himself, it was absent. The corridor had no place to hide, so he faced them squarely, with only seconds until they met.

  They didn’t slow, didn’t seem to see him, and when they reached him, they passed right through.

  Oh gods.

  He ran a hand through his hair, his entire body shaking. More Ardaks filed into the corridor. The last one to come through the door was carrying a wooden box, and Durstin got the feeling that he was the one in charge.

  Curious, he followed them into an enormous cave filled with technology. Blinking lights assaulted him, and a huge window overlooked the valley below. There was only one place on Aurora that would have that view. The Ardak control center.

  That meant the Ardak carrying the box must be General Slash.

  The general strode to the far end of the room, where he took a crystal from the box and put it into a compartment in the wall. When he closed the compartment, the clear cover seemed to seal around the crystal.

  And Du
rstin began to float.

  Suddenly, he went straight up and out of the mountain, continuing up into the sky, until he could see the entire planet of Aurora. A strange force seemed to come from the mountain, dark and tinged with red. It flashed over the entire planet, but only for a moment. Then it disappeared, and the only red that remained was over the mountain itself.

  Then he was plunging downward, not back into the mountain toward Renwyn. He was headed straight for the ocean.

  Although he knew he shouldn’t be able to die, the sight of the water speeding toward him with such velocity made him take a breath and clench his entire body. He closed his eyes, waiting for the sting of the icy cold winter water to envelop him.

  But it never came.

  He opened his eyes, the only light was a weak filter of sunlight from above. A pain in his chest made him realize he’d been holding his breath, and he forced himself to breathe.

  A few figures became slowly visible in the distance. As they grew closer, he saw children with tall, slender bodies like the River people and tails like fish. They swam and played in the water, darting and dodging between the floating leaves of seaweed and stationary forests of coral.

  “That isn’t fair, Lehar, you cheated!” a young girl said, flapping her tail as fast as she could, chasing two others who were bigger.

  “I did not, Urmi, you’re just too slow!” Lehar laughed.

  “I am not!” Urmi cried, and as she finally caught him, a bold of lightning shot from her hand down his arm.

  Durstin drew back, startled, and so did the other merchildren.

  “What was that, Urmi?” Lehar asked, rubbing his arm. “It felt like fire.”

  “I don’t know. It’s never happened before.” The girl stared down at her hands, then rubbed them together, creating another bolt of light. She turned to the older girl. “You try, Ondi. Focus on making light.”

  Both Ondi and Lehar did as she bade, and soon all three were creating bolts of light that shot through the water.

  “What do you think it is?” Ondi asked. “Some strange new superpower?”

  “Maybe it’s from the part of the ocean. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t tell our parents,” the boy said.

  As the vision faded, Durstin pondered the implication that the dark red flash from the Ardak crystal gave the merchildren powers.

  Chapter Twelve

  Kiersten

  Kiersten was surrounded by water, the edges of her vision black, lightning flashing all around her.

  She held her breath, thinking she was going to drown, spreading her arms to swim toward the surface. No matter how hard she swam, she didn’t go anywhere, and at last, she was forced to take a breath.

  Instead of water filling her lungs, it was air, like she expected. Of course it was. She took a deep breath, steadying herself. The vision was so real that it was almost impossible to believes she wasn’t really underwater.

  “Stop, Lehar!”

  The cry drew her attention, and Kiersten searched through the semidarkness of the water for the girl. She was chasing another child, an older boy. Their forms moved so fast they seemed to fly through the water. She finally caught his arm, and he turned to face her. “We cannot do this.”

  His face filled with rage. “We must. Those strange beasts from the sky sent that red poison that’s making the elders and the babies sick. I heard Uncle say that eventually all of us will die from it. Now they’re back, killing everyone on land. If Uncle isn’t going to do something, we must.”

  Several other merchildren finally caught up to them.

  Another joined the argument. “We don’t know that the red stuff is making us sick. Besides, King Nirjhar should be the one to deal with them.”

  “You can wait for him to do something, but I think we’re old enough to decide for ourselves.”

  “Easy for you to say, Lehar. You’re related to him—he won’t kill you.”

  “He won’t kill you either, Ohar,” the youngest girl said. “Our uncle might be the king, but he is only mean to our enemies.”

  Lehar turned back to the older girl. “I heard him talking to Mother last night. He said he asked the elven kings and queens on land to teach us how to use our powers, but no one has responded. He’s willing to let them all die because they wouldn’t help us.”

  “If the cats kill the beautiful elves, then we will never learn! If they are alive, then at least we can change their minds!” the youngest girl cried. “I want to learn magic!”

  Ondi put her arms around the younger girl. “It’s all right, Urmi. We won’t let that happen. I don’t want them to die, either. What would you have us do?”

  “We can create whirlpools well enough, and I’ve been practicing with clouds. We might be able to create some storms to suck their ships into the sea.”

  “But we live down there!” Ondi protested.

  “Yes, but they can’t breathe underwater. They’re no threat to us here.”

  Slowly, Ondi nodded. “One or two can’t hurt. If it works, though, I want to tell Uncle Nirjhar.”

  Lehar nodded, swimming toward the surface. “Follow me!”

  Kiersten followed them to where they climbed out of the water and sat on a tall outcropping of rock jutting toward the shore. There were seven merchildren in all, and she guessed they were between ten and twenty years old.

  One of the children coughed, and she turned, taking in the boy’s pale skin and halting chest movements. She knew what it meant. He had just gotten sick from the red poison.

  “The ships have been flying overhead for the past hour, I’m sure more will come,” Lehar told them.

  “Shall we gather our power now?” Ondi asked. “It will probably be easier if we already have some clouds up there.”

  “Yes.” Lehar turned to the other children. “Remember what we practiced. Focus on your anger. Those flying ships shouldn’t be here. The monsters shouldn’t be killing the elves.”

  Kiersten watched, stunned, as the children waved their hands and clouds began to form in the sky. It was so quick she could feel the water being sucked up from the ocean, the air becoming moist.

  “There are three flying ships now!” Lehar said. “I’ll take the center. Ondi, you take the left. Ohar, you take the right.”

  Their faces scrunched with focus, and she could see a surprising amount of rage in their eyes for beings so young. The clouds began to spin faster, forming into funnels below the flying ships that sucked them down to the surface of the water and right into the waiting whirlpools.

  Ondi’s ship was the last to go under the surface, and then all the children jumped up and down on the rocks and hit their fists together.

  “Here come some more!” Ondi cried, and this time, three other children forced the spaceships into the sea.

  They forgot everything else, and over the next few minutes, they sucked under ship after ship.

  Then the ships stopped coming, and all the children waited, clearly unable to feel the same strange tension building in the air around them. Something was terribly wrong.

  A great beam split the sky, dissipating the clouds in seconds, hitting the water in the ocean below. The children screamed as the sea began to boil as far as they could see, and, in under a minute, the entire ocean was gone as if it had never existed.

  The Ardak ships lay at the bottom, burned and melting, and far off in the distance, the merpeople’s castle lay in the same state. Sea animals, fish, merpeople, Ardaks, all gone with one shot from that beam. The scale of it was too horrific for her to really take in the scope of it, so she shut her eyes to try to block it out.

  She didn’t want to look back, didn’t want to see what had happened to the children. She already knew. Shock gave way to grief and tears filled her eyes as she began to disappear, the children’s last shrieks still echoing in her ears.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Kiersten awoke on the floor with a cry, pain knifing through the back of her head. She sat up slowly, feeling diz
zy, and her hand went to it. It came away with some partially dried blood and she grimaced.

  Merryth hurried out from her adjoining cave. “I thought I heard something.” She gestured at a table near Durstin. “You’ll have to be careful next time you take the elixir. He nearly broke my vase with his fall.”

  “Of course.” Kiersten fought to keep the sarcasm from her voice. A thousand years alone really hadn’t done her sister’s disposition any favors.

  “Don’t worry, I’m definitely lying down first next time,” Durstin said, sitting up just as slowly as Kiersten had. “My head feels like I’ve been hit with an ax.”

  “What was your vision?” Kiersten asked him without preamble.

  He rubbed his jaw, closing his eyes briefly before speaking. “I saw the Ardaks come. When they put the crystal in their mountain base, it didn’t just cover the base like I’d thought. For a moment, it flashed around the entire planet, and it gave the merchildren strange powers.” He opened his eyes. “What did you see?”

  “The merchildren fighting the Ardaks and using their powers to suck their spaceships into the sea. In return, the Ardaks evaporated their ocean, killing them all. It was horrible.”

  Merryth’s eyes went wide, and Kiersten saw fear in their depths. “What color was your vision?”

  “It was dark. And it began with a storm of lightning.”

  “Thank the gods.” Merryth replied. “That is a vision that hasn’t yet come to pass.”

  A flash of hope burst through her. “Really? How long do we have?”

  “It’s impossible to tell. It could hours, or it could be days. The visions of the near future are usually accurate since there is less time for variables to change.”

  “But that means there’s time to change it,” Durstin broke in. “We must prevent this from happening.”

  “Yes,” Kiersten agreed, turning to her sister. “Didn’t you say that the cyborgs found a cure for the red poison? In my vision, I saw one of the merchildren succumb to it.”