SummerDanse Read online

I swallowed and didn’t meet Yallick’s gaze. Never had those icy blue-green eyes of his pierced my soul as they did now. But an explanation of why I’d left in the middle of the night without telling him would have to wait. First things first.

  “Someone attacked my home. Mama and Papa are gone, and Breyard is hurt.” I gestured toward my brother and found that Oleeda was already tending him.

  “Xyla told us these things, of course,” Yallick said, holding my eyes with his. I refused to look away first. After all, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was Yallick’s apprentice, not his slave, and I didn’t need his permission to go home to my parents. Yet he still managed to make me feel guilty.

  With a soft hrumph, he turned from me and crouched down next to Breyard. I moved closer.

  “What’s wrong with him? He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

  Oleeda had one hand on Breyard’s chest and the other on the crown of his head. “He has suffered a head injury,” she said, “but not a bad one. With the proper care, he should recover.”

  “I did the best I could!” Then I bit my lip. No one had suggested I hadn’t.

  Both of the mages looked up at me in surprise. The wrinkles around Oleeda’s eyes deepened as she frowned, and Yallick rose to his feet again. When he spoke, his gravelly voice was soft and kind.

  “Come walk with me, child. Traz and Oleeda can look after your brother.”

  He held out his arm in an expectant way. Had I felt any sense of compulsion, I wouldn’t have moved, but the vibration I felt from him was one of entreaty. I reached for his elbow, and he tucked my hand into the crook of his arm and led me away.

  We walked on for what seemed to be forever, while the pressure built up inside me.

  “How are we going to find—” I finally began.

  “Hush,” Yallick interrupted, patting my hand.

  Hush? How was I supposed to hush with all this anxiety roiling around inside me? Did he have a plan? And if so, why not discuss it in front of the others? I felt as if I were going to explode, but every time I took a breath to speak, the old mage just patted my hand maddeningly again. If he thought that would calm me down, he was greatly mistaken.

  Eventually he let out a long sigh. “You have been through much in the past few months, more than it would seem anyone ever should, especially one so young as you.”

  His words stung me into defensiveness. “I’ll be sixteen soon.”

  Yallick patted my hand. “Indeed. You are a young woman of whom your parents must be very proud. And,” he stressed the word when I opened my mouth to interrupt him, “I am proud of you, too. Perhaps even more than your parents, for they do not yet know the whole story.”

  “And what do you think has happened to them?” Why didn’t he seem to think this was a pressing matter? The longer we delayed looking for them, the harder it would be to find them.

  “Xyla said the two of you were attacked by dragonmasters.”

  “Yes, but what does that—” I stopped speaking as the obvious answer burst into my mind. My next words came out as a whisper. “Are you saying my parents were taken by the dragonmasters?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “But … but why?”

  “That, indeed, is the crucial question, is it not?”

  “Well, why do you think they would?”

  “I can think of many reasons, but would prefer not to speak of them until I know which is the correct one.”

  Typical sort of answer from the mage. I looked over at him as we walked in silence under the stars. His long white-blond hair was tied back as usual. Under the night sky, he looked even younger than Papa, although I knew that he was actually over eighty years old. Positively ancient.

  But for the first time, I wondered what it would have been like to know him when he was my age, when he was an apprentice mage learning about his maejic instead of the powerful—if clandestine—leader he was now. Much as I hated to admit it, I decided he’d probably been good-looking, maybe even as handsome as Grey. I steered my heart away from that thought.

  Yallick cleared his throat, which never managed to improve the sound of his voice. “We will address the situation of your parents presently. Right now, it is you yourself about whom I am most concerned.”

  “Me?” My heart started to beat a little harder.

  “You sound surprised. Have you forgotten in the space of a single day that you virtually ran away?”

  His voice sounded almost hurt, and my reply that he couldn’t tell me what to do died on my lips before I could speak it. Me, hurt Yallick’s feelings? Now there was an idea I would’ve thought laughable.

  “What I want to know,” he continued when I didn’t answer, “is what made you leave so precipitously, without even waking me.”

  I bit my bottom lip. When he put it like that, it seemed the obvious thing I should have done. And the truth—“I had a dream”—sounded stupid now. We walked on in silence as I tried to think of a way to answer him that didn’t make me look like a complete idiot.

  Yallick sighed. “I think it is time you understood something, Donavah. I am not your father, and though I am your teacher and bear a certain responsibility for you, you remain your own person. There are powers at work here that none of us entirely understand. If we talk about them openly and frankly between ourselves, we are more likely to gain enlightenment. Now. Will you please tell me what happened?”

  I tried to compose my thoughts in an ordered fashion. Best, probably, to be succinct about it. “It was a dream,” I said, speaking softly. I paused, waiting for him to snort derisively or otherwise express his annoyance with such a weak explanation.

  Instead, he spoke in a musing voice. “A dream?”

  Encouraged, I went on. “I’ve been having these dreams for weeks, where someone is playing Talisman and Queen with me. And they keep taunting me, saying over and over that it’s my move. Last night ...” My voice trailed off and I shivered at the memory. “It was Anazian.” Yallick stopped walking and stood frozen in place, looking straight ahead. I swallowed. “Something in his manner, the way he talked about my family—well, when I woke up, I just, well, knew with an absolute certainly that I had to get home. Immediately. Xyla was awake and said she’d take me.” Yallick still hadn’t moved, and I began to feel uncomfortable. “I see now, I should’ve woken you up.”

  “It would have been better,” he agreed. “And yet I understand why. Or at least I suspect that it was not entirely your own decision.”

  “What do you mean, not my own decision?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, and the silence stretched between us. “I think it better to say no more until I am sure.”

  I wanted to ask him why he’d brought it up at all if he didn’t intend to explain himself, but I managed to bite back the words. Instead, I asked, “What do we do now? How will we find my parents?”

  Yallick stopped walking, turned to face me, and took my chilly hands in his warm ones. “Your parents are currently beyond your reach. It will take a concerted effort to effect their rescue, and we shall do so. But in the meantime, I want you to regain your equilibrium. It is what they would want you to do.”

  “But—” I started to argue before his words sank in. “What?”

  He gave my hands a little squeeze. “Right now, you are my chief concern. I want you to take some time and focus your considerable energy on yourself, on your own spirit.”

  His gentle words brought tears to my eyes. “My parents,” I said yet again.

  “Shh. I do not ask you not to worry. I ask only that you trust me. Will you do that?”

  Looking down, I nodded. Yallick released one of my hands and tucked the other back into the crook of his arm. We walked without speaking back to the others.

  Where I learned exactly why Traz had come with the mages. Breya
rd was sitting up next to the fire with Oleeda on one side of him and Traz on the other. My brother wore a slightly dazed expression on his face, while Traz looked triumphant and Oleeda amazed. Yallick let out a tiny gasp of surprise, let go of my hand, and practically leapt the last few steps.

  Traz grinned up at him. “I told you so,” he said, laughter glinting in his eyes as he held up his staff, which he’d found on our first journey together and later discovered was a powerful artifact from another world.

  “All right, young man,” Yallick growled with gruff affection. “You have proven your point and need not gloat.” He crouched down next to Breyard, one hand on his shoulder and the other on Traz’s. “How do you feel, son?”

  Breyard lifted a hand to his forehead and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t understand. How did I get here? The last thing I remember—but no.” He shuddered. “It must’ve been a dream. Or a nightmare.” His shoulders slumped.

  Yallick and Oleeda exchanged glances. I felt a jolt of tension pass between them. What did they know that they weren’t saying?

  “Let us go. The sooner back, the sooner we can all have a hot meal.”

  We put out the fire and readied ourselves to go. Oleeda had brought a spare cloak for Breyard. He put it on, then he and Traz mounted Edin while Oleeda, Yallick, and I climbed onto Xyla.

  It was a long, cold journey back to the cave in the mountains. Generally, I loved flying dragonback—the wind rushing past my face, the way the ground sped by below, the great sense of power in the animal on which I rode. But now my mind was elsewhere. I wondered that I hadn’t felt the cold last night. Had that been part of Anazian’s enchantment? The thought that I’d been so thoroughly taken in made me feel hot with both anger and embarrassment. Yet something had obviously gone wrong with his plan. I just couldn’t figure out what. None of it made sense, but I had the feeling that the answer was important, if I could only puzzle it out.

  My thoughts wound themselves into knots as I tried to make sense of everything, but none of the pieces quite fit together. Why would Anazian go to so much effort to get me to leave the safety of the mages and go home? Why had dragonmasters kidnapped my parents and left my brother for dead? Why did Yallick act as if finding my parents wasn’t important? How did all this fit together?

  Finally, Xyla began to descend. Before long we were back on the ground. To my surprise, mages bustled everywhere.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Oleeda as she dismounted.

  “Why, we are getting ready to leave, dear. Surely you knew, did you not?”

  I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. Why?”

  Yallick slid down Xyla’s back. “The dragonmasters know where we are. We must go.”

  “But where to?”

  “The dragons have told us of a lake in the desert. Several of them flew there today and found that it is uninhabited.”

  “Of course. Delaron,” I said. That was the sage community on Stychs, a world exactly like our own; at least it was physically the same. The red dragons had somehow magically transported themselves to that world a thousand years ago, and when the dragonmasters attacked the mage encampment in the mountains a few days ago, Xyla had taken Traz, Grey, and me there to escape. We’d found the red dragons in their city of Delaron and convinced them to return with us. We’d stayed there several months, but when we returned to this world, Hedra, it was the same instant in which we’d left.

  “Yes,” Oleeda said. “The dragons say this is the name of the place in their world.”

  Yallick nodded. “So we will go there while we determine our next move. Let us go inside where it is warm.”

  He led the way, and Oleeda and I followed. Breyard and Traz came in a few minutes later. The meal was full of conversation about the move to Delaron, but I didn’t pay any attention. I wondered how we were supposed to find my parents if we went a hundred miles farther away from here—across the mountains, even. I didn’t care that Anazian would be far, far away and wouldn’t be able to torment me anymore. What did that matter if the dragonmasters were tormenting my parents?

  Later, as Traz and I packed our things, he burst out, “It was great!” he said. “Oh, I wish you’d seen.”

  “Seen what?” I pulled my thoughts away from Mama and Papa and our burning house.

  “Breyard. And Oleeda’s face, too.”

  “Oh, right. What did you do?”

  “All I had to do was touch his head with my staff and concentrate for a moment. No effort at all. His eyes blinked open, and he asked where he was. You should’ve seen Oleeda. She couldn’t believe it.”

  “I know how she feels. I couldn’t believe it, either, that time when you woke up after breaking your leg, and it was all healed.” I gave him my warmest smile. “I really appreciate it.”

  He gave a little shrug. “What’s the point of having power if you don’t use it?”

  What point, indeed?

  It took forever for me to fall asleep. I lay trying not to toss and turn as everyone else’s breathing slowed into the rhythm of sleep. First, I thought about my parents. Why had dragonmasters taken them? Why had they left Breyard behind? Then Anazian’s handsome face floated in my imagination, laughing at me as I tried to escape his gaze. And how would we be able to resettle at the desert lake with no resources? Overriding everything: why were the dragonmasters after us?

  Eventually, my mind wearied of its frenzy, and I fell asleep.

  A woman stood before me wearing a brown robe, her face shrouded in a deep hood. I stood there on my guard, poised to flee if necessary. Yet there was no threat from her. Music filled the air, a high-pitched melody that pierced my spirit. A voice began to sing in harmony, and after a moment I realized it was the woman. She lifted her hand and beckoned to me, and when she turned, I followed.

  Her movements were silent, and I summoned my maejic so that I could walk silently, too. The woman led on, through the trees, silent as a ghost. After awhile, I recognized where we were going: just ahead was a stone circle, an ancient monument from time out of memory.

  I hesitated at the edge of the circle, wary of entering it with the unknown woman who now stood in the center. Just as I summoned the courage, someone placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Donavah, what are you doing here?”

  I jolted awake to find that I really was standing at the stone circle, and Grey stood next to me. I shivered in the cold air. “Grey? What happened?”

  “You were sleepwalking. Chase got me up.”

  I looked around for the hound. “Where ...?”

  “I told him to stay at the cave. I was afraid he might try to wake you.” He put an arm around my shoulder and led me a few steps away from the circle. “Then I end up having to wake you myself. Are you all right?”

  “Cold,” I said. “I don’t understand what’s happening. I’ve never walked in my sleep before.” Then I remembered that night on Stychs when Shandry had followed me. We’d never told Grey about it, because I’d been on watch and didn’t want to admit to him I’d fallen asleep.

  He glanced back toward the stone circle and shuddered. “There’s something evil there. Can’t you feel it? Something horrible would’ve happened if you walked into there. C’mon, let’s go back before you freeze.”

  He drew me close to his side, and I felt a little warmer. And not all of it was due to his body heat. It felt both good and confusing to be so near to him. My heart sped up a little, then I worried that he would perceive it. I told myself not to be stupid; after his relationship with Shandry, which had ended only days before when we’d returned to Hedra, it couldn’t be possible that he’d be interested in me, not that way. Could it?

  But as if my thought triggered something in him, too, Grey stopped walking. We were almost to the path but still under cover of the trees. Silver moonlight filtered through the branches, not providing enoug
h light to see details clearly, but instead making everything glow with gentle luminosity.

  We faced each other, and Grey took my shoulders in his hands. My blood pounded in my ears as he bent his head toward me. For a split second, my mind said I should push him away, but when my hands touched his chest and I felt his heartbeat through his shirt, my own heart flopped over. I let him kiss me.

  Colors exploded in my soul, and the taste of his lips left me breathless. One of his hands rose to my neck, and the touch of his skin on mine sent a shiver of pleasure through me. I broke off the kiss for a moment and lifted a hand to touch his face. He smiled and pulled me close again. I closed my eyes as his lips touched mine.

  Then he let out a strange little gasp, and the full weight of his body fell against me. I staggered backwards.

  “How very touching,” someone said with a nasty laugh as Grey dropped to the ground. There, bloody knife in hand, stood Anazian.

  Word has arrived from Barrowfield, and I am displeased. Oh, Tegar and Mellas are taken, and that is good. Yet not all has gone according to plan.

  Idiot Royal Guardsmen! I gave explicit instructions that none were to be harmed, yet they left the brat behind, dead. That he fought is no excuse, and I shall have the tongue and hands of the man who killed him.

  Further, the dragon and the girl escaped! Again! Responsibility for that can be lain on Tegar. Ironic, for he does not know that slaying several of my dragonmasters, while fruitless in regard to himself, saved his own daughter from capture. Temporarily, of course. I have already sent my son a bird with tidings. He will know what to do to correct the situation.

  Ah, I shall savor the look on Tegar’s face when he learns into whose power he has fallen, when he looks on me again after all these years.

  I stood frozen in shock, unable to speak or think as I stared down at Grey. Before I could gather my thoughts, Anazian grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me toward him.

  “You will not escape this time,” he said, his voice threatening and assured. He stood tall, took a huge breath, and whispered a single word, one I’d never heard before but overflowing with power.