The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) (36 page)

“I’ve caught you doing that a few
times now,” Valory said.

I withdrew the sword from its
scabbard. “You know how I told you about the flute? About how I’m not supposed
to have it?” I flicked open the hilt and pulled the flute out.

“Criminey!” Valory exclaimed. “
That’s
the flute that can destroy whole armies and level cities and stuff?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of small,
huh? This is it. If I were to summon one of the beasts, we could make better
time. There’s a huge wolf that could probably get us there in a day.”

Valory stared at the flute like it
was a gigantic spider that had just crawled out of my pocket. It was a far cry
from Marafae’s hungry leer the first time she’d seen it.

“Nu-uh,” Valory said. “Not if it
means tinkerin’ with big magic like that. Anyways, we can’t risk being spotted.
Put it away.”

I obeyed, admitting that I’d given the
very same reasons to myself. Still, the idea of more travel by foot exhausted
me. I swatted the gnats and leaned against a tree trunk. “We need to take a
break.”

“You do look rough,” Valory said.
“I saw a brook just a little ways up. You could take your bath and I could fly
ahead and see if I can spot the best route to go north.”

We parted ways. I found a clear,
shallow pool in the brook Valory mentioned. I waded in up to my knees. The
water felt blissfully cool. At first I was hesitant to strip down, but my clothes
were heavy and reeked of sweat. Ignoring the giggling of the Dryads in trees
nearby, I took my clothes off and scoured them clean as best I could. Then I
hung them over a bush to dry while I soaked in the pool and pretended I was
home in my own floral-scented bathtub.

“Look at all those scars,” said one
nosy Dryad.

“I’ll say,” said another. “Did you
see her clothes? Filthy!”

“She’s not nearly as pretty as the
last girl who bathed here,” said the other Dryad.

I sat up with a tremendous splash.  “Did
you say there was another girl here?”

“Why should I tell you?” said the
pert Dryad.

“Ewww, her knees are all scabbed up!”
said another.

I glared at the trees, naked and
fuming. “Look, it’s a simple question. Who was here? How long ago?”

“Oh, ages,” the first Dryad said.
“Before the winter, I suppose. It was a Fay girl. Her figure was better than
yours. Aren’t you going to cover up? You’re embarrassing us.”

 “You’re just jealous.” I wiggled
my hips and tossed my wet hair like somebody in a shampoo commercial.

“What on earth are you doing?”

I let out a squeak and jumped back
into the brook. “Valory, when did you get back?”

She fought to keep a straight face.
“How’d that go? Like this?” She mocked me by shaking her hips and tossing her
hair.

I sank down into the pool until
only my head poked out. “What did you find?”

Valory’s mirthful expression turned
dark. “Bad news. The forest gets thick as a Brownie’s chest hair just ahead.
It’s going to slow us down a lot.”

“Rats,” I said. “And I was just getting
my hopes up again. These Dryads said a girl bathed here just before the winter.
I thought maybe it was someone from the resistance.”

“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
Valory said. “Why would they come through that mean patch of forest? Surely
there’s an easier route.”

I groaned. “I don’t know, but I
guess we shouldn’t waste any more time. Don’t look. I’m going to get dressed.”

Valory turned around and picked at the
moss on a nearby tree. The Dryad inside complained that she was tickling her,
so Valory did it with more zeal.

I wrung out my hair and went to
grab my clothes from the bush I’d draped them over. I had pulled on my
underthings and was just tugging on my pants when a bird swooped down and
snagged my shirt. The bird made a screeching noise and flew upstream with its
prize.

“Noooooo!” I shouted. I stumbled
the rest of the way into my pants and chased after the bird.

“Can I look now?” Valory asked,
having tickled the Dryad delirious.

“Get it!” I shouted, pointing at
the bird.

Valory flew up in the air, but the
Dryad got its revenge by twisting a large branch into her flight path. The
branch caught Valory across the stomach. She grunted and fell to the ground.

“I need a minute,” she panted, clutching
her stomach. “The damn Dryad knocked the wind out of me.”

I saw the bird flying lazily back
and forth across the stream, clutching my shirt in its talons, like it was
taunting me. It lingered just out of reach as I ran along the banks of the
brook.

“Come back here!” I shouted. “What
kind of bird steals a shirt? Come on, give it up!”

I lunged forward but the bird beat
its wings and lifted the shirt just out of my grasp. I tripped and nearly fell
over a big boulder. The stream cut through a bed of large rocks. It became a
game of hurdles as I leaped over the boulders. The obstacles dotted a trail all
the way up the side of a small hill.

Panting, I got near the top to find
the bird perched on one of the rocks. He’d dropped the shirt on the ground
below. I snatched it up and pulled it over my head.

“Cheeky critter!” I scolded the
bird. “Did you just feel like playing a game? That’s not very nice! That’s—”

The words stuck in my throat. I had
just spied a Fay symbol scratched into the rock beneath the bird’s talons. It
wasn’t just any symbol, though. It was the symbol for Ivywild. The very same
symbol was on all the Pyxis Charms and on the door beneath the castle cliff.
What was it doing here, in the middle of a forest hundreds of miles away from
the castle?

The bird pecked at the symbol. He
cocked his head and stared at me with black dewdrop eyes. He was a chubby
little fellow with a soft, cream-colored chest and long tail feathers. He
chirped and flapped his wings.

“Cinder?” I asked.

He flew around my head and alighted
on another rock beside me. I glanced over and received another shock.

“Did you catch him?” Valory asked
as she climbed up the hillside. She was still clutching her stomach.

“I think I know how those Fay came
this far south without crossing the dense forest,” I said. “Look.”

I pointed at the mouth of a cave
that had been hidden from view below. The bird stood near the opening. He
chirped, flew around my head once more and then vanished into the forest.

“Friend of yours?” Valory joked.

“Maybe so,” I said. I rubbed my
fingers over the symbol of Ivywild in the rock. The pieces of my life were
finally starting to come back together. “This is the right way. I’m sure of
it.”

Valory stared into the black mouth
of the cave. She gulped. “I don’t know, Em. It looks a little…scary.”

I held my breath and tried not to
giggle. The idea of a Slaugh being scared of the dark was too much. I grabbed
my sides and burst out laughing.

“You hush!” Valory said. “If you
keep laughing at me I’m gonna keep doing
this
!”  She made an exaggerated
motion of wiggling her hips and tossing her hair.

That just made me laugh harder, so
Valory kept on making fun of me until we’d peeved off all the Dryads in the
surrounding area. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so happy.

Somewhere in the forest a bird
chirped. I heard its call with a deep sense of contentment and dared to hope
that I was closer to home than I thought.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

Death is my maker. Its black
wings enshroud me. Its silence is the only truth. I have beheld it; the shadow
of life. From darkness born, to darkness I return.

Lev could not help but think of the
old Slaugh funeral dirge as he gazed upon Seraph’s Tear and its frightening new
inhabitants. The mechamen marched through the city like ants in a colony.
Numbering in the thousands, they filled the streets with the jarring sounds of
metal and bone. Their stench infected the air even high atop the bridge tower
where Lev and two other Slaugh stood watching.

“Scavengers,” Katriel said,
lowering a spyglass. She handed it to Lev. “It’s a miracle they don’t have the
buildings down to bare frames by now.”

He took the spyglass and tried to
hold it steady against his right eye. The curse was taking its toll. The
vestiges of his mother’s magic recoiled from it and faltered, causing his limbs
to grow weak. He’d been trying to hide it, but he could tell by the increasing
frequency of Katriel’s sideways glances that she was onto him.

“Wilhelmina, what’s today’s
number?” he asked as he trained the spyglass on a group of mechamen near the
city’s outskirts.

“Same as the day before,”
Wilhelmina replied. Her voice was less harsh than Katriel’s, having been
smoothed by a couple years of lullabies and bedtime stories. Her daughter was
waiting for her back on the ship. For the millionth time, Lev wondered if he’d
been foolish to let her bring the child, but the ship seemed safe enough so
long as it kept at sea. The mechamen couldn’t fly and if there was a battle to
be fought, it would happen here in the cursed city.

A light blossomed behind Lev’s
eyelids and he cringed, feeling at once the full power of the curse of Seraph’s
Tear. His gift was trying to show him something, but he couldn’t reach it
through the film of pain inflicted by the ancient curse.

“Sir?” Katriel asked, grabbing his
arm.

He steadied himself. The light
dimmed, leaving behind the barest traces of an image and two whispered words
that drifted up out of his subconscious like dust set aloft by a slamming door.

Not yet
.

“What did you say?” Wilhelmina
asked.

He had not realized he’d spoken
aloud. Katriel and Wilhelmina were both watching him apprehensively.

Suddenly there came a rumble that
caused the bridge tower to sway. All three Slaugh spread their wings on
instinct and hovered above their perch, watching the massive structure wobble.
In only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough to make Lev keep his wings
partially open after he landed.

Katriel cursed in Slaugh. “Just
what we need,” she said, carrying on in her mother tongue. “An earthquake!”

“A blessing in disguise, perhaps,”
Wilhelmina said, nodding towards the city. The mechamen were scattering towards
its edges in a frenzy. “Maybe it took care of a few of them for us.”

“Not likely,” Lev said, raising the
spyglass again. Where Wilhelmina saw panic, he saw order. The mechamen were not
so much scattering as moving in force, with purpose and direction. “They
increased their population by up to a third every day until last month. Now
that they’ve stopped adding to their numbers, it begs the question of what
they’ve been doing.”

“Why have they been tearing down
buildings?” Katriel said.

“Right,” Lev said. “Where is all
that metal going?”

“You think they’re building
something else?” Wilhelmina asked.

In answer to her question, a chunk
of the city rose from its foundations. The earth shook again, but this time it
didn’t stop. It continued to tremble as thousands of tons of metal and stone
became mobile.

Wilhelmina gasped. “How?”

Lev, who was watching through the
spyglass, could hardly bring himself to answer. The mass was rolling towards
the harbor on the backs of thousands of mechamen working in tandem with
gigantic gears and levers. “More machinery. We have underestimated them.”

“It’s coming this way,” Katriel
said, spreading her wings.

“To the harbor?” Wilhelmina said.
“But why? Surely it’s not—”

Lev collapsed the spyglass and
watched the ungainly structure close the distance between edge of the city and
the frothy water lapping at the shore. He turned to Wilhelmina. “Get to the
ship. Tell the captain to pull up anchor and ready the sails.”

Wilhelmina gave one quick nod and
she was off.

“
Kekist nin!”
Katriel hissed
as the bridge tower swayed beneath them. The mechamen and their impossible
construction were at the water’s edge now. The displacement sent waves inland,
turning streets to rivers.

Lev watched in horror as the true
nature of the monstrosity was revealed. Against all odds, the thing could
float. The gears that had borne it overland acted as propellers powered, he
knew, by thousands of undead sailors working within the bowels of the machine.

Katriel was slack-jawed. Such an
expression of fear would have gotten her a beating from any traditional Slaugh
ruler, but under the circumstances Lev thought her reaction was more than
appropriate.

“A ship,” she said, her
near-masculine voice creaking upwards of soprano. “Th-they’ve made a bloody
ship!”

Lev took to the air. “Let’s go.”

They wasted no time getting back to
their own modest little ship. Lev was relieved to see that the Gremlins already
had the sails unfurled.

The moment Lev’s boots hit the
deck, A blindfolded Hobgoblin in a feathered hat pointed her cane at him.

“There you are! Mind telling me
what the blazes is going on?”

“I’ll explain later, Sandrine,” he
said, rushing past her to get to the helmsman.

“That’s
Captain
Sandrine and
you’d do well to remember it, king or not!” She kept up with him, navigating
the ropes and bulwarks that littered the deck easily despite her blindness.

The helmsman, a leathery brown Fay
with shorn golden hair, turned and gave Lev a questioning look.

“Hard to starboard and point her
due east,” Lev said.

“Delay that order, Bayard!”
Sandrine barked. “I plot the course on this ship!”