First Apprentice

Chapter 30 Part 2

My toes hit dirt, hard packed and dry like my training ground in late summer. Grit clung to the soles of my feet as I passed through the doorway and stepped into a glen. Wind whispered through trees larger than any I'd encountered in my life. Moss covered their roots. A brook burbled somewhere nearby.

Strange, I couldn't smell water.

Branches parted as if giant hands pushed the trees themselves back, revealing a dirt sparring circle and Joel.

Dark hair dusted his bare back. Muscles rippled on his arms and shoulders, drawing my eye to the white scars littering his skin like jackstraws.

Joel spun, right arm moving in a circle along with his body. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a pink scar bisecting his chest. The puckered one on his right shoulder looked like an aes scar. I knew that if I looked closer, I'd find others. One didn't survive as long as Joel had without the scars to prove it.

But the white scars on his back told a grimmer tale. They spoke of live blades and harsh lessons learned in early childhood without the benefit of either a half-state or a healer. Uncle Manfred, and later Aunt Sumati, didn't exactly wrap me in cotton wool, but he didn't inflict injuries just because he could either. Every lesson ended with the Central Keystone and Xian. Only in the last two years did they expect me to tend my own injuries and trust me to know when I should heal myself versus summoning a healer. Joel's teachers weren't that kind.

His movements flowed like water — smooth, always seeking the path of least resistance, beautiful, and utterly foreign. It wasn't a standard form like the ones we all learned and performed on command like trained monkeys. An unexpected style for a man of Joel's height and build, but no less effective.

Shadows solidified into a chestnut-skinned man with straight black hair pulled back in a low braid. At first glance, he resembled Devadas with higher cheekbones and a weaker jaw. A family resemblance?

The man's sword whistled through the air. Joel spun away, placing his body in line with his attackers, right where Joel could do the most damage in the least amount of time. Efficient.

The world froze. The brook stopped burbling, birds ceased chirping, shadows no longer moved, and the man's eyes remained closed mid-blink.

Joel stared at me. "Alannah?" He shook himself like a dog. "You're real."

Of all the stupid things for him to say. He was the imaginary one, not me. But Grandfather never mentioned childhood scars, and I hadn't seen Joel's bare back before so why did my mind conjure up scars? "Maybe I'm a figment of your imagination," I replied.

"Marstow," he reminded me. "I know what's real and what isn't. How did you get inside my dream?"

His dream? My thoughts turned unerringly back to the doorway.

The first time I dreamed about the Dracon torturing Melantha I wrote it off as a nightmare. The second time I looked up recurring nightmares and started keeping a dream diary. Then I woke up with a broken nose and bruised ribs, exactly like happened to the woman in my dreams. That's when I shared the dreams with Selim and learned Melantha was the Dracon Gate's oversoul, not a long-dead historical figure Endellion brought up during her frequent 'unsupported transformations are deadly' lectures.

If I could fall inside Melantha's head and wake the next morning with matching injuries and memories that Selim confirmed by asking Melantha herself, who's to say I couldn't do the same with Joel?

"Care to join me?" He spun away from an imaginary blade, placing his body in line with an imaginary attacker's. Right where Joel could do the most damage in the least amount of time. Efficient.

My right eye twitched as my thoughts drifted back to Mei's latest report. "Will it help me think?"

He paused. Weight balanced on the balls of his feet, left arm bent, and fingers outstretched as if he froze mid-motion. "Sometimes, it helps. Others," he shrugged. "Letting go, losing yourself in the movement, forcing your mind to focus only on the now, that's its own sort of help. What did they do now?"

"They?" I hedged. I trusted Joel the man, but Joel-dae the War Chief and third of the Seven was largely unknown to me. He handled Grandfather's deception well enough, but trickery was ingrained in Grandfather's being. Everyone expected half-truths and lies from him. Diane, Amit, Terry...did Joel trust them or did he just see them as necessary evils?

"The Seven. I know them, Alannah. I know their plans, how they've plotted Terry's death for the last thirty years, and who they tapped as his replacement. We all had plans."

"Had?"

"Discovering an unknown master sealer with two newly invented seals to her credit and dozens of new uses for older ones changed the game. You also landed a killing blow on Terry. Caed's a decade away from that. He'll get there eventually, but he would be there now if Isadora and Kavi hadn't coddled him. They nearly ruined the boy."

"So you traded a ferepris for an ancient. Let's not pretend. You recruited me for the same reason Grandfather adopted me, the same reason Endellion stayed. Power."

Head cocked, Joel stared at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. "Is that what you think? For thousands of years, we balanced ferepris. The Dracon had Donovan and Saar. Guardians, true, but any guardian can be released at any moment. We all know who they'd fight for, willing or not."

"No one knows if Donovan is a ferepris."

"Donovan captured Rainer-dae during the First Clan War and later fought Endellion to a standstill," he countered. "You treat him with extreme caution, or you die."

Flee. Uncle Manfred's single word description of how to best fight Donovan head to head rose to my lips. I pressed them together, swallowing the word before it escaped. If I interrupted now, I might never hear the rest. Even if this dream was the demented workings of my own mind, I needed to hear the rest.

"So they balanced them with you. Two to one? That's not balance."

He flashed me a fang-filled smirk. "Saar is not the greatest aes master the Dracon ever produced. That honor belongs to his baby sister Katia. That woman" — his lips twisted into a half-smile, and he shook his head — "she had half Saar's reserves and was twice as terrifying. If she'd entered the war, we'd have lost within ten years.