DRAGONSGATE: Preludes & Omens (Bitterwood Series Book 6) Read online

  DRAGONSGATE

  PRELUDES & OMENS

  DRAGONSGATE

  PRELUDES & OMENS

  James Maxey

  Cover art by Keven Spain

  Internal art by James Maxey

  Copyright © 2018 by James Maxey

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First Printing

  The author may be contacted at

  [email protected]

  For anyone hunted, haunted, or hurt.

  HUNTED

  GRAXEN CROUCHED on a sturdy branch in a tall oak at the edge of the forest, watching the meadow beyond. It was late evening, in the heart of summer. The meadow was alive with birds and bees, with verdant grass and blackberry vines giving the air sweetness, but the life that had caught Graxen’s eyes was the stag. The stag one of the largest he’d seen, far too large for him to carry much more than a hindquarter back with him, and he was already regretting all he’d leave behind for the buzzards. The meat they’d smoked and dried from Nadala’s last deer would be gone in a day or two, even though Graxen ate only a fraction of his share. Without a fresh kill, the grim prospect of starvation loomed.

  The stag looked around cautiously as it chewed. Graxen sat motionless, feeling the breeze lightly teasing his feather-scales. The stag was upwind, unable to smell Graxen, and almost perfectly due south across the field, so that his shadow wouldn’t cross the stag’s path as he approached. The one potential obstacle was noise. Graxen could glide silently, but the deer was a quarter mile away, much too far to cover the full distance without flapping his wings. With a twenty foot wingspan, a single beat of his wings would be enough to alert the stag.

  Graxen shifted Nadala’s spear from his fore-talon to a hind-talon, still weighing his options. It would take no more than fifteen or twenty seconds to cross the field. He could launch with a beat of his wings, gain altitude, and glide the full distance, hoping the noise of his initial wingbeat didn’t reach the buck. Or, he could spread his wings silently and glide half the distance, then beat his wings for a burst of speed, alerting the deer. At full speed, he could cover the remaining ground in seconds. The stag was no more than a hundred feet from the opposite tree line. Could the buck reach the trees before Graxen overtook him?

  The shadows were growing longer. In a few more minutes, the sun would vanish. The stag turned his back to Graxen, walking nearer to the tree line, ten, twenty, thirty feet, before lowering its head again to nibble a fresh patch of grass.

  Graxen spread his wings and fell forward, grasping his hunting spear tightly with both hind-talons. The branch creaked as his weight lifted, his wings clipping twigs and leaves as he emerged from the canopy. Graxen didn’t even breathe as he waited for the deer to react. No reaction came. Graxen advanced silently on the wind, dropping lower, lower, the distance closing, but not as swiftly as he hoped. The weight of the spear slowed him, causing him to drop at a steeper angle than he’d calculated, until he was low enough that the tip of the spear grazed one of the taller bushes. Now!

  Graxen flapped with all his strength. The buck startled, its head lifting high. Graxen kept flapping, racing toward his target, still low to the ground. The buck leapt, reaching nearly the same height as Graxen as it bounded through the high brush. Graxen’s heart beat rapidly as he realized he stood a chance, that he was closing on the deer faster than it was gaining on the forest.

  Unfortunately, if he kept moving at the same speed, he’d be so close to the trees when he overtook the stag he was certain to crash. Injuring himself here, twenty miles distant from Nadala, could prove fatal to them both. He veered upward and hurled the spear. His aim was true… if the stag hadn’t swerved suddenly to the left. The spear buried itself into the earth with a loud THUNK mere feet from the deer’s hooves. The noise seemed to fill the beast with a supernatural power and it gave its farthest, fastest leap yet, seeming to fly into the shadows of the forest.

  Graxen landed on a high branch, breathing heavily, listening to the crash and crunch of the stag in headlong flight through the forest, the noise growing fainter with each second as the stag gained distance. With a sigh, Graxen glided down to the meadow, landing beside the spear, which jutted from a thicket of blackberries. Thorns raked his sensitive fore-talons as he grasped the shaft. He pulled it free with a grunt. In the fading light, he studied the iron spear point. The tip was bent again. Hopefully it would survive being hammered back into shape once more.

  As the last of the light faded, he rose into the air and headed back to the new cave he’d found. He vowed to rise before dawn and return to the meadow. The stag couldn’t be the only deer that found the meadow attractive. When he returned tomorrow to lead Nadala here, he knew the prospect of fresh meat waiting for them both would buoy their spirits.

  Unfortunately, a long day of exploration had left him exhausted beyond words. When he finally woke, the sun had been up for hours, and the deer were long gone from the meadow.

  GRAXEN WAS WEARY, hot, and hungry. In flight, he could have covered the distance they’d slogged along the stony, steep mountainside in minutes. On foot, it had taken all day, and he estimated their progress to be only a few miles. Even those few miles travelled might have felt like progress, if only he had more confidence about where they were going.

  Nadala followed close behind him, using the spear as a staff, treading carefully among the rocks and roots to keep her balance. Sky-dragons were ill-suited for hiking, but Nadala’s pregnancy had advanced to a stage where flight was no longer an option. Her center of gravity had shifted, making her unsteady in the air, and her landings on her last few brief, tiresome flights had been less than graceful.

  “We should rest,” said Graxen, as he skittered down a steep slope to a large, flat rock. Beyond the edge of the rock, the mountainside dropped sharply, not quite a cliff, but a fall descending it would almost certainly lead to an unstoppable tumble all the way down to the rocky creek far below.

  “We can’t rest,” said Nadala, sounding even more aggravated than the last five times he’d made the suggestion.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself, pushing too hard to keep walking when you’re worn out,” said Graxen.

  “I’m a valkyrie,” said Nadala. “I’ve trained to fight after days without food or water or even sleep.”

  “Did you train to fight when pregnant?” asked Graxen.

  Nadala’s eyes narrowed. “Obviously not.”

  “You don’t need to prove to me how tough you are,” said Graxen.

  “Don’t I? I feel I’m constantly needing to remind you I’m not fragile,” said Nadala.

  “I’m only wanting you to take care of yourself.”

  “Which is why we must keep walking,” she said, moving close to the edge of the rock and peering over. She looked up, shielding her eyes with her wings to study the sky. “Things look clear now, but we’ve seen how quickly storms can come out of nowhere in this heat. Getting caught on this exposed rock in a storm would be dangerous. How much further until we reach the cave?”

  Graxen studied the ridge across the valley, then consulted the map he’d sketched out on rawhide with a charcoal pencil. When they’d first crossed over the Cursed Mountains, they’d lucked into finding a cave with a southern facing. It had been large enough to build a fire inside without the smoke becoming overpowering, and received enough sunlight during the day to not make them depressed about the reality that they were living in a hole in the ground.

  As a former messenger for the dragon king, Graxen was used to sleeping outdoors, though he’d seldom had to do so more than a few nights in a row. He’d grown up in the College of S
pires, an outcast among his colleagues because of the accident of birth that had left him with pale gray scales instead of the sky blue hue proudly worn by other members of his species. Sky-dragons glorified perfection in both body and mind, and though his mind was as keen as any of his fellow dragons, and his body just as strong and swift, his freakish coloration had excluded him from both the path of scholarship and a position among the aerial guard. Messenger duty wasn’t the least dignified job a dragon might be assigned to, but while sky-dragon history was full of glorifying tales of heroic guards and wise biologians, there were no hagiographies written of the lives of letter carriers.

  Still, even with his low status, he’d been used to eating well prepared meals and sleeping on cushions in rooms cooled by breezes in the summer and warmed by furnaces in the winter. His duties had also allowed ample leisure time to read, a birthright of all male sky-dragons, so fundamental that even a freak such as himself had not been denied access to the libraries that dotted the kingdom. Six months into their exile in the wilderness, Graxen had learned to endure without regular meals or comfortable beds, but he grieved at the idea that he might never see a book again.

  He also found it depressing that he might never see another map drawn with any degree of competence. His skills as a cartographer were somewhat lacking. The more he looked at the mountains surrounding them and compared them with the scribbles on his map, the less sure he was of where they were.

  “Are we lost?” asked Nadala.

  “If you mean do I know precisely where we’re at in relation to the new cave, then, no, I don’t, and yes, we’re lost. But if you’re asking in more general terms, I’m still reasonably sure we’re heading in the right direction, and have hope I’ll soon be able to spot a landmark I recognize. The mountains look different from the ground than from the air.”

  Nadala shook her head. “I’m the one who can’t fly. Why you stubbornly persist in acting like your wings don’t work eludes me.”

  “I want to be by your side in case you fall again,” said Graxen.

  “Again, you equate pregnancy with fragility. I’m tired. The terrain is difficult. Yes, it’s not completely impossible that I might trip. When I do, it’s doubtful you’ll be fast enough to catch me, and I’m not so frail I can’t pick myself back up. Get into the sky. Find out where we are. If it’s feasible to reach the new cave before nightfall, we’ll push on. If it’s not, you’ll need to find us shelter for the night. While you’re above, keep an eye out for game. Once we eat tonight, that’s the last of the meat, and neither of us will survive on berries alone.”

  “Of course,” said Graxen. “And, while I explore, you can rest. Perhaps even catch a nap.”

  Nadala threw him her spear. “Very well. While I catch a nap you catch some fresh food. I don’t want to have walked all this way for nothing.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  “Do better than that,” she said. “Remember, it’s hunting, not chasing. You’re fast, but game is faster among trees. Your advantage is your mind. You have to know where the prey will be before it does.”

  “So you’ve said,” he said, with more strain in his voice than he intended.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry. “Am I repeating myself? Are you tired of my advice?”

  “I’m more than grateful for the advice,” he said. He shook his head. “I’m only frustrated. Hunting seems to come so naturally to you, but for me—”

  Nadala interrupted him with a short, joyless laugh. “Naturally? There was nothing natural about my learning to hunt. If you find my tone grating, you’re fortunate you weren’t taught to hunt by elder valkyries. I’ve never berated you, let alone beaten you, for letting your prey escape. I haven’t refused to share the meat from my kills until you’ve caught a deer of your own.”

  “I’m sorry you weren’t treated with more kindness in your youth,” he said.

  “I’m sorry you weren’t treated more harshly,” she said. “While I was being trained to hunt, you were likely lost in some book. If it were possible to fill our bellies with philosophy, you’d have all the skills we could wish for. Unfortunately, you won’t capture a deer with some clever argument or pretty words.”

  “I captured you with those, didn’t I?” he said, tracing his fore-talon along her cheek, just beneath the single gray scale near her eye that resembled a teardrop.

  “Yes,” she said, tenderly taking his talon in her own. “And I have no regrets. If I could live this past year over, I would change nothing.”

  “Nor I,” he said. “Except I would have thrown the spear yesterday a foot to the left.”

  “There are other deer in the world,” she said. “Bring me one.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  Graxen tossed the spear into the air, flapped his wings, and caught the weapon in his hind-talons as he rose onto the wind. He swooped out over the valley, falling slightly, gaining speed, then turned west as he started to climb higher. From the air, the terrain felt more familiar. Familiar and disappointing; they’d covered barely any distance at all on foot, three miles perhaps, five at best. The new cave was still at least fifteen miles away. There was no way they would make it tonight. With this rate of progress, even tomorrow felt doubtful.

  Almost as doubtful as the odds of Graxen successfully hunting anything worth eating. When they’d first came to the mountains, Nadala had proven an able hunter. Valkyries trained in hunting deer with spears. Male sky-dragons, as a rule, saw hunting as an antique practice, not disreputable, but wholly unnecessary. The colleges were supplied with beef, pork, and poultry via farms they managed with slave labor. Nor did they customarily eat meat raw, save for fresh fish.

  Graxen had been hungry enough when they first came to the forest that he’d gotten past his squeamishness about eating meat raw. Nadala had been trained to start a fire by striking a flint against her iron spearhead, but during their first week in the wild, endless rain had left absolutely nothing receptive to combustion. She’d brought down a small doe on their second night in the forest, and Graxen had found the raw meat somewhat bland and tough, but filling.

  Alas, months later, he still hadn’t successfully taken a deer of his own. He was fast and nimble, more agile in the air than even Nadala, but he didn’t have her lifelong practice throwing a spear at a moving target. His speed and precision might have been of use if he’d ever spotted a deer in the center of a large open field, but any he saw always seemed close enough to forest lines to flee the second they caught his scent, or spotted his shadow, or heard his wings flap. Nadala could easily adjust her path so that the deer never saw, heard, or caught her scent until it was too late. The principals of doing so seemed plain enough to Graxen, but he lacked the muscle memory to pull it off. To perfectly aim his approach so that his shadow wouldn’t startle the deer, he would accidentally put himself into a wind that carried his scent. If he traced the wind carefully, keeping his scent behind him, he’d try too hard to keep his path steady, flapping with a touch too much force, and the deer’s ears would twitch, a prelude to bounding to safety.

  When Nadala’s flights became shorter and shorter as the new life within her grew larger and larger, she’d supplemented their food by catching small game with snares. Alas, the diets of two sky-dragons provided a crash course in evolution among the local fauna. Within a matter of weeks, all the prey that would fall for the snares had been caught and the rest were too skittish to take the bait. Thus, their decision to seek out new hunting grounds, despite the difficulty of the journey.

  Now that he knew the cave couldn’t be reached before nightfall his attention shifted to finding shelter. The sky was cloudless but the air possessed a quality, something not quite a scent and not quite a taste that made the back of his throat feel tight. The evening would bring storms.

  Scanning the ridge, he spotted a rocky outcropping. He veered toward it, tilting his wings to slow his flight, surveying the rocks more closely. The space beneath the out
crop wasn’t deep enough to be a cave, only going back about ten feet, and looked barely tall enough to stand under. He landed on a tree limb overlooking the entrance, studying the space more closely. It looked snaky. For much of his life, the only poisonous snakes he’d seen than been in glass cases in the College of Spires. Since they’d entered the mountains, they’d had more than a few encounters with rattlesnakes. Nadala would fearlessly kill them, making a snack of their meat. Graxen preferred to keep his distance, though at the moment he’d rather return with a snake than nothing at all.

  He hopped down into the rocky shelter. He hunched over, his serpentine neck bringing his face inches from the ground as he studied a ring of rocks there. It looked almost like a fire pit. Looking up, he found the rock blackened by smoke. His heart raced. Someone was nearby! They hadn’t found any signs of intelligent life since crossing into the mountains. In dragon lore, the mountains were haunted. Few dragons ventured into them, though he’d heard that some humans had villages within the mountains where they worked in mines. But they’d found no evidence of humans this far into the mountains, at least not contemporary humans. From time to time, they’d stumbled across ruins, old walls, strange bits of twisted scrap metal, broken shards of glass and pottery, evidence that someone had lived here long ago.

  He studied the dusty soil beneath the outcropping and saw no sign of footprints, either dragon or human. And despite the blackened roof, there was no smell of smoke. He dug through the pale tan dirt within the stones, sifting through a few inches of soil before he found a layer of ash. This fire had been built long ago. Centuries, perhaps.

  Graxen had never believed that the mountains were truly haunted. He was far too educated to believe in ghosts. But, the fact that the land had once been inhabited, and now lay so barren, hinted at some terrible, unfathomable tragedy, and made him ponder whether the danger that had driven both men and dragons from these lands might yet exist.