Waking fire, p.1
Waking Fire, page 1
“A searing-hot fantasy debut, full of wit, sacrifice, and the bonds that make us family. Naira is the hero I wish I’d had growing up. Jean Louise understands that the best fantasy is horror and doesn’t shy away from the darkness. Her writing is a fire that scorches everything in its path.”
–Jaida Jones and Dani Bennett, coauthors of Master of One
“Propulsive and full of heart.”
–Sara Holland, New York Times bestselling author of Everless and Havenfall
Waking Fire
Jean Louise
This one’s for Sara, Barbra, and Shyla,
who’ve been on this journey with me since our Whittier days.
Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Jean Louise currently lives in Queens, New York, with her cat, Martha. When she’s not writing, she can be found with her nose buried in a graphic novel or taking down bad guys in her favorite video games. She received an MFA in writing for children from the New School. This is her debut novel.
@WriteJeanLouise
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
Everything that happened before will happen again.
The names will change. The faces will be different. The kinships and experiences will be unlike those of their historical counterparts.
But the betrayals will be the same.
The hurt, the anger. The love and ecstasy. The greed.
The desire for power, the need to obtain what’s owed.
Those never change.
Let me tell you a story.
I was once a prince, my father the King of Volsgaria. He was a cruel man, and his cruelty tore our country apart. As my father lay dying, he called my older brother Wallen and me to his bedside and warned us about a bastard he had fathered before the birth of his first true son, Wallen. The mother was a lowly scullery maid—her name not important enough for my father to remember. To him, she was simply an obsession that had turned into annoyance, a plaything to be discarded when something shinier caught his eye.
Except his plaything refused to accept her fate and fade away.
When Wallen was born, she confronted my father and tried to claim the throne for her son Soras. In return, my father banished them both to the Bernoks. He called the banishment a kindness—he felt pity at the rotten hand dealt to her by the Three-Faced God, so he sent them away instead of killing them. When I reminded him that banishing a mother and child to a frozen wasteland of ceaseless night was essentially a death sentence, it was his illness that saved me from his wrath. He was too weak to smack me across my mouth, knock my head against a table, or slam me into a wall for my insolence as he had done many times before. This illness had come upon him swiftly, rendering his legs useless within days and filling his lungs with thick, dark phlegm that crowded every hall and room with the sound of his hacking. Even when dying, he refused us peace.
His last words were a warning: the kitchen wench’s son was now calling himself the Bastard King, and he was coming to get what was owed.
Soon thereafter, the old king was dead and Wallen was crowned the new King of Volsgaria. But my brother was too kind for the throne my father had molded into a seat of treachery, suspicion, and faithlessness. Wallen saw his reign as the start of a new age—one of peace and enlightenment—and didn’t heed our father’s warning.
We had hardly finished Wallen’s coronation, the throne barely warmed beneath my brother’s ass, when the Bastard King arrived at our gates.
Soras came bearing gifts for the new king, and Wallen trusted him. Believed him when he called himself a friend. As I said, Wallen was too kind for the throne our father had built.
I tried to warn him. You must remember that I tried.
I walked into the throne room one morning, expecting it to be empty, only to find my father’s bastard sitting in Wallen’s place.
Sitting in the place reserved for kings.
“Don’t get too comfortable up there, Soras,” I said. “The throne will never belong to you.”
Soras grinned, his teeth yellow and sharp. “If there is something I want, then there is nothing that can stop me from obtaining it. Especially someone as weak as you.”
Like I had done with my father, I saw the true intent behind Soras’s words. “So you admit it—you’re not a friend. You’re only here to unseat my brother.”
“Our brother, young Gamikal.” Soras motioned for me to come closer, and when I remained where I stood, he rose from the throne and approached me. “I know you’ve been whispering in Wallen’s ear, telling him I’m going to betray him, that I’m pretending to care for him when I’m really only after the throne.” Soras leaned close. “You’re right, of course. Too bad no one else will ever know.”
Before I could react, Soras knocked me out with a blow to the head and I awoke in the dungeon beneath the castle. For years, I had to learn about what was happening above through offhand comments by his guards, by begging for information from the servants who brought my meals, and from imprisoned courtiers who had crossed Soras in one way or another. And what I learned only confirmed what I had suspected of Soras since the day our father told us his name.
Soras quietly replaced most of the castle guards with his own men before striking Wallen and those loyal to him. Only one knight, Theda, survived the slaughter to defend Wallen. Together, Wallen and Theda escaped the castle and fled to the Bujarbi Desert to reach safety at her estate.
With that, war erupted in Volsgaria. Those who supported the Bastard King thought Wallen to be nothing more than a newer version of the dead sovereign, while others followed Wallen, the Rightful Heir, in his quest to free Volsgaria from Soras.
Many, though, waited for a sign from the Three-Faced God, who during periods of deep unrest, when humanity had lost its way, would favor us with dragons to set us on the right path. Over the course of history, there had been twelve dragons of benevolence to walk among us, guiding us, protecting us—starting with Maganor the Never-Ending and most recently Zulgaron the Curse-Taker. If there was ever a time to send another dragon, it was during the war.
And then Soras revealed the dragon Ergenegon, loyal to his cause.
The dragon’s very existence seemed as if the Three-Faced God had taken Soras’s side and abandoned the rest of us. No army could defeat a dragon, and I knew my kindhearted brother’s end was near.
I cried when they told me Wallen had died on the battlefield, engulfed in Ergenegon’s blue flames. But the Three-Faced God hadn’t forsaken Wallen’s cause after all, for a few days later, Theda emerged from the Kilmare Mountains with a dragon of her own. Like the dragons of legend, Crafulgar was born in the godfire, a sacred lake of fire that had been tended to for centuries by the Hands of God, a band of secretive warrior monks devoted to serving the will of the Three-Faced God.
Not since the twin dragons Enog the Sorrow-Ender and Nurega the Joy-Provider had there been two dragons alive at the same time, and never had they fought against each other as Ergenegon the Chaos-Bringer and Crafulgar the Fiend-Slayer did.
Despondency settled into the vacant throne of Volsgaria as Crafulgar chased Ergenegon through the skies, battling him over the villages Theda had sworn to protect, shielding with her wings the people who still loved Wallen. The world was a place of confusion for believers of the Three-Faced God, left to question why it had seemingly sent one dragon to destroy and another to defend.
I remained in the dungeon for months as the war between the dragons raged on the surface, wondering why Soras hadn’t killed me yet. Whispers that the tide was turning, that Crafulgar was forcing Ergenegon to retreat to the Bernoks, grew louder and louder, until the castle itself was abandoned. Theda was coming to avenge Wallen, and anyone who had aided Soras would be killed in Crafulgar’s righteous flames.
Locked away in my cell, I was forgotten. Days passed with no one to talk to, no one to bring me news, no one to tell me if Soras was finally dead. I figured I had been left to rot, but I was wrong.
One night, two of Soras’s soldiers unlocked my cell and dragged me outside to a waiting horse. We galloped into the night, heading north toward the Bernoks, the air growing crisp and then cold, until the exposed skin on the tips of my nose and fingers turned blue, then purple, then a deadly black.
Before my eyes, the snow on the flat, frozen ground began to swirl, growing and growing, until the sky was filled with a whirling vortex of ice and wind. And in the middle of the vortex, a dark void appeared. As we moved closer, a coldness I had never felt before seeped into my bones. My ears filled with the howls of something ancient, something voracious, something deadly, and my horse reared back, throwing me off.
Rough hands dragged me to the void, where the wind stole my breath and an invisible power tried to pull me into the blackness. A roaring noise of human screams and monsters shrieking filled my ears until blood trickled from them. I dug in my heels, grasped at the frozen ground with my frostbitten fingers as the abyss tried to pull me into its ravenous embrace.
I would have understood if Soras had killed me in front of everyone like he had killed my brother—but why bring me to the Bernoks only to have me disappear into an abyss in secret?
It didn’t take long for my question to be answered.
Ergenegon swooped down out of the sky, landing next to me at the edge of the vortex.
I expected him to look like the twelve dragons of yore: human in shape with large leathery wings and a chest that glowed before fire burst from its mouth.
The swirling, crackling energy of the abyss revealed Ergenegon’s true form. He had no lips, only sharp yellow teeth that were too big for his mouth, and he stared at me with black lizard-like eyes. Emaciated and hairless, his body was covered in scales the color of night. His sharp bones stuck out at odd angles, his wings tattered and thin. Thick, black claws erupted from the ends of his fingers and toes, and a long, whip-like tail snaked behind him.
Ergenegon was a dragon of nightmares. An abomination clearly not created by the Three-Faced God. He came from something darker, something older, something best forgotten and undisturbed.
He dug his claws into my shoulders, wrapped his tail around my waist, and beat his wings, keeping the both of us from being sucked into the abyss. But instead of flying away, he hovered above the vortex.
“O you ancients of the abyss,” he called into the whirling blackness, “bind us together soul to soul. Make his life mine, and make mine his, and through him I shall be immortal.”
Immortality for a creature like him would only mean ruin for the rest of us. But he was a powerful and dangerous simulacrum of a dragon, and I was a mere man. There was nothing I could have done.
When the ritual was complete, the abyss faded and Ergenegon tossed me aside. He got what he wanted, and I was left in the Bernoks without food, water, or shelter. But I did not die. I could not. Ergenegon and the ancients had made it so. My wounds healed, life returned to my frozen extremities, and I survived months in the Bernoks with nothing but the clothes on my back.
By the time I returned to civilization, Ergenegon and Crafulgar were both dead. She had chased him to the godfire in the Kilmare Mountains, where he struck a mighty blow. She threw him into the godfire before dying herself, trapping him in the ever-burning lake of flames.
And yet, I was still alive. Which meant Ergenegon was not dead.
He is down there, in the godfire, waiting.
As the years passed, chaos rampaged through what was once Volsgaria. Anyone with the ability to raise an army fought for control of the throne. After more than a century of fighting, those who remained agreed to break Volsgaria into four distinct nations: the islands in the west formed Nauvia, the forests of the frigid north became Waldyria, the vast countryside ringed by mountains in the east was named Johtan, and the arid lands to the south below the Turka Sea were designated Merza.
Each country formed its own distinct culture and language until Volsgaria was no longer even a memory. Time had taken everyone who lived through those decades of fighting.
Everyone except me.
But as I said, everything that happened before will happen again.
Unrest will brew. Complacency will lead to the deaths of thousands. Trust will lead to love, which will lead to betrayal.
I’ve seen it all with my own eyes.
Everything that happened before will happen again.
In fact, it has already begun.
—from The Foretold, by the prophet known as
Gamikal the Long-Lasting
CHAPTER ONE
“FIVE SILVERS FOR TWO kuffas of rice?” I shake my head at the exorbitant price and back away from the grain merchant’s stall. “My mother would kill me. I’ll give you two silvers.”
The merchant’s eyes widen in shock. “Two silvers? I can’t do that. My children have to eat too!” He holds out the sack of rice. “I’ll give it to you for four.” When I don’t immediately agree to his offer, he shakes the bag. “The market’s closing. You won’t find a better deal anywhere else. Here, take it.”
He’s right that my options are limited. The stall my mother usually purchases grain from has already closed and most of the other merchants are putting away their wares and boarding up their stalls. But four silvers is still too much.
“Two and a half.”
The merchant grimaces as if my counteroffer hurts him. “Three, and I won’t go any lower.”
I can tell he’s finished haggling, so I have no choice but to agree. “Fine.”
While he fastens a rope around the opening of the sack, I fish out three silver rubes from the leather money pouch tied around my waist. Omma’s not going to be happy. She sent me to the market to buy spices and rice for dinner when the sun was six hands from the western horizon, but I took so long picking out incense at my favorite shop that by the time I got around to the errand my mother sent me on, the market was shutting down for the evening.
I hand the merchant the money and he passes me the sack of rice.
“Thank you for your business, samida,” he says with a smile. “See you again!”
The merchant bows and I roll my eyes as I return the gesture. I’ll never come back to his stall even if he were the last grain merchant in all of Lagusa. We both know he’s ripped me off, and his satisfied grin makes me scowl even more.
I only have three silver rubes and four coppers left to buy the rest of the ingredients on Omma’s shopping list: cumin, ground red chilis, honey, and dried orange peels. The chilis will be the most expensive, so I’ll buy them first and then see what I can get with whatever rubes are left.
Even though the market’s closing, the roads squeezed between stalls and mud-brick buildings where one buys spices and cloth, jewels and swords, livestock and produce are still busy enough that I can’t run to the next open spice shop. The remaining merchants and customers haggle over prices while dirty children hold out their hands for scraps and coins. The savory aroma of charred meat cooking on a grill makes my stomach grumble as I pass the crowded food stalls, but that’s quickly replaced by the flowery scents coming from up ahead. Perfumed air engulfs me as I cross Honey Street: the place where those who can afford it go to soak their bodies in cleansing oils and fragranced water.
I find an open spice shop with a bowl of ground chilis right out front. I motion to the owner, but she ignores me, her eyes on something farther up the road.
“Excuse me, samida,” I say, trying to get her attention. “I’d like—”
The owner shoos me away with a wave of her hand without even giving me a glance. Annoyed, I follow her gaze to see what could be so important.
A few stalls down, a plume of black smoke rises above the open market.
“Is that a fire?”
The woman nods. “I think so.”
As we watch the pillar of smoke grow, more and more people gather in the street, their eyes transfixed on the dark clouds bisecting the sky.
“It’s those Haltayi,” a man next to me says, a sneer in his voice. “They brought in one of those mangy desert animals, what do you call it?”
“A maugrab?”
“Yeah, the damn thing went berserk. There was some kind of scuffle and a lantern got knocked over and set their tent on fire.”
