Gift or Curse?

Chapter Three

Kite stretched, feeling the muscles in her shoulder strain. Today, she would meet with Cinder, have breakfast, and try to get back to the library to keep looking for any of Eagle's living descendants. They had barely begun looking again after she had told Cinder what she was doing when Goose the librarian had appeared and demanded to know what they were doing. Unable (obviously) to tell him the truth, they had taken too long to come up with a good lie. Goose had ordered them to leave, his tone making Kite mentally question where the rule of being quiet in a library had come from. He had sworn that if they came back without a good reason, he would make them shelve scrolls for the next decade, and that he just might burn the labels off the ends before they did it.

Kite jumped from her cave and glided over the ocean. She poked her claws into the water, scattering a school of fish before pulling up and heading for Cinder's mountain. A smoky haze hung in the air around the mountain, and as Kite crested the peak, she wondered if Cinder had already found them something to eat.

But her heart sank to her claws as she saw the source of the smoke. The ground at the mouth of Cinder's cave was scorched black, the bushes reduced to piles of ash and a blurry heat haze rising from the stone.

Kite flapped as hard as she could, flying with every ounce of speed a SkyWing could produce. She landed hard outside the cave, hissing in pain as her claws pressed into a bed of coals. She ran into the cave, coughing on the ash that she kicked up.

"Cinder!" she yelled. The inside of the cave was scorched as much as the outside, with charred walls and ashy remains of scrolls and furniture. Kite felt as though she were inside an oven. But nothing dragon-shaped appeared, and Kite sighed in relief.

Something flapped in the wind, and Kite whirled around at the sound and sudden motion. She inhaled sharply, instinctively preparing a fireburst. But it was just a piece of paper, stuck to the wall, and Kite turned her head, sighing out the fire.

Her gaze was drawn back to the paper on the wall. Why wasn't it burned? And how was it hanging on the wall?

She stepped closer, and saw that a spear tip had been driven through the paper and into a crack in the wall. But the writing on the paper chilled Kite's heart more than any of the devastation around her.

This is what we think of animus magic.

Bring us the necklace to be destroyed tonight.

If not, your associate dies.

Kite's eyes stung, whether from the smoke or from tears, she wasn't sure. She raced out of the cave and took off, flying hard. She didn't know where she was going and didn't much care. If only she had lied to Cinder in the library, if only she had hidden the necklace instead of wearing it where anyone could see, if only she had never gone into that stupid cave to eat the stupid albatross in the first place.

She thought about what the dying dragon had said. Take it... But be careful. There are dragons... Who would not... How could she have forgotten? How could she have so idiotically flaunted the necklace, when she had been expressly told to be careful, and had seen a murdered dragon to back it up?

Tears stung her eyes, and the sky and water and land blurred into blue and brown and green blobs.

It was only when her wings began to ache and each breath felt like inhaling sand that Kite landed at the mouth of a cave and fell to the floor, wings pressed over her head. Her breathing slowed, but she still couldn't think clearly enough to come up with any sort of plan.

"What are you doing in here?" came a voice from inside the cave.

Kite peeked out from under her wing and saw a light green SeaWing frowning at her with narrowed eyes from several feet away.

"First of all, this is my cave," he continued. "Where I live. Second, my cave floods at high tide. Not that I particularly care what happens to you, but I don't want to have to deal with a heavy SkyWing corpse floating around near my roof."

"Well, I do apologize," Kite snapped. "But my best friend was just kidnapped by a bunch of psychopaths who are using her life to threaten me into giving up a responsibility I'm not even sure I should have, but I know if I give it to them, there's no chance of anything good happening, so you'll excuse me if I don't feel like catering to the whims of every SeaWing in the Sky Kingdom."

The SeaWing cocked his head. "Your friend's kidnapped, eh? What are you going to do about it?"

"What can I do about it?" Kite asked. "I don't know who they are, I don't know where they are. I only have until tonight to give them what they want, and even if I do, I have no way of knowing that they won't kill Cinder and me anyway."

"Well, it depends," the SeaWing said. "If they're after something you know or something you can do, then they'll probably kill you, and your friend if she knows it too. But if they're just after something you have, then you're right, it's impossible to tell."

Kite scowled at the SeaWing. "Thank you, that's very comforting. I feel so much better now."

"It wasn't meant to make you feel better," the SeaWing retorted. "I don't do comforting."

"So what would you do?" Kite snapped, standing and spreading her wings for emphasis.

"Me?" The SeaWing thought for a moment, then snapped his claws. "I know what I would do. I would leave you to your own devices and go find lunch. But if I were you, I'd go and find those kidnappers, get this Cinder back, and then make sure they won't bother me again."

"And how would you do that?" Kite said skeptically.

"First tell me what they want from you," the SeaWing said.

"I can't tell you that," Kite said.

"Then I can't tell you how I'd do it," the SeaWing. "But I'm bored, and I'll make a deal with you. I'll help you get your friend back if you'll pay me a reasonable amount."

"But I don't have anything I can give you," Kite informed him.

The SeaWing glanced at the animus necklace, then looked back at her, raising a brow.

"That's not mine to give," Kite said. And it was true. She didn't think of the necklace as being hers. She doubted she ever would. She felt more like she was its keeper, ready to give it away when she found its real owner.

The SeaWing waved his claws dismissively. "Yes it is. But how about this. I get to take whatever I want from the dragons who kidnapped your friend."

Kite nodded her assent. "Do you have a name?"

The SeaWing scooped a rock off the floor and rolled it between his claws. "Sturgeon. And you?"

"Kite."

"Now tell me what you know about your friend's disappearance."

"I was going to meet her for breakfast before we went to the palace library," Kite said. "But when I got to her cave, the entire place was burned. There was a note stuck to the wall of the cave that said 'bring us what we want tonight, or your associate dies'."

"Associate," Sturgeon mused. "Sounds very mysterious and dramatic. Now this Cinder, what does she look like?"

"Almost seven years old," Kite listed. "Orange scales, yellow-orange wings. Yellow eyes, with a patch of red down her nose. She has red-brown horns and a small scar on her right foreleg."

Sturgeon smiled in a somewhat creepy way. "I do believe I know where she is."

And he walked past Kite and out of the cave.