The Queen's Opal: A Stone Bearers Novel (Book One) Read online

  “So they all went.” The maid gripped her knees.

  “Not all,” the man replied. “Many of them were more wary and stayed behind, but the rest crossed a portal to come to this world. The portal is still open today, right in the middle of the forest.”

  “Can I see it?” The maid’s words seemed so bright with youthful innocence that Drynn would have smiled if he had any means to do so. No matter how outlandish this man’s story was, there was just one answer to the girl’s question. The only reason an elf would enter the sacred realm of Falberain was to leave this world and meet the goddess face-to-face.

  “Not anytime soon,” the man said. “Falberain is a wonderful, sacred place that should never be disturbed lightly. When the first fairy came through the portal, everything seemed to be working fine, and some of the others followed him. But then the ground shook, the wind picked up, and the trees swayed like wheat.” His eyes grew distant as if fully picturing the scene.

  “Why?”

  The man shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the world wasn’t used to all that magic at once. A force ripped through the fairies who had already left Falberain, and they collapsed to the ground as still as a human’s dead body. And those who went out to help had the same thing happen to them.”

  “Then what?”

  “The ground stopped shaking, but the fairies were changed. Their magic was gone.”

  The maid nodded as if the answer was just as she expected. “All of it?”

  “Well . . . they could still do some things the humans thought were magical. I don’t think they could’ve survived if they lost it all. But the magic wasn’t what it had once been. This scared off many who had not crossed over, but some still came anyway with similar results.”

  “How many?”

  “Oh, hundreds. Maybe a thousand. They all came into the forest where they spent a rather unpleasant year. See, they had to learn how to provide for their mortal needs without magic. It was hard work, and they did a lot of dumb things at first.”

  “Like what?”

  “Think of Tyla’s baby. She sticks just about anything in her mouth. The former fairies were the same.” He stuck out his hand. “The first time I cut myself on a thorn, I had no idea what happened! And your mother thought the blood was pretty.” He laughed in a conspiratory way, one that said if her mother knew he had shared that particular detail, he might be bleeding again. “Luckily, we found a friendly human settlement. The humans took us in. Gave us new names—couldn’t pronounce Aldrayndallen for some reason.” The words confirmed Drynn’s previous suspicion. This man wasn’t just telling a story; he was claiming Falberain as his homeland.

  But it didn’t seem to match any of the records Drynn had read. Aldrayndallen was a family name, originating with the first queen’s father, but the rest . . .

  “They call you ‘Aldyn,’ and they call me ‘Saylee,’ but that’s not my real name,” the girl said, like she carried a great secret—one that Drynn was desperate to hear.

  Cindle had tried to call Drynn “Allen,” and “Saylee” sounded familiar too.

  “That’s right.” Aldyn stood, ready to tuck the girl in. “The humans called us elbans or elves after the Forest of Elba. They taught us much more than we could’ve learned on our own. It took years for us to master it all, but in the end, we even built our own settlement. And something even more wonderful happened.”

  “I was born,” the maid said as if she had personally orchestrated the whole event.

  Her father shook his head. “You’re skipping ahead. Your brother was born first.”

  “Marryll won’t mind. He isn’t even here.”

  Aldyn laughed again and ruffled the girl’s hair. “That’s because he went to bed right when I asked him to. He also was the first child born and raised by an elf. He was a miracle. And then yes, many others were born including you, Starrillaylee.”

  Drynn wanted to cry out. There it was. The first queen’s name.

  The green mist surged from the background and swirled between the girl and her father, swallowing everything up at once, churning around Drynn in a mass of blurry confusion.

  Drynn woke with a start, the green mist now contained to the opal in his hand. He whirled around, trying to orient himself. He was no longer in the place of dreams or even the Forest of Elba. An unnervingly open grassland stretched before him, Tayvin and Cindle camped a few yards away. Mud and morning dew spotted his cloak, and the first sun rays peeked over distant trees.

  Drynn stared back at the opal. He vaguely remembered fiddling with it last night before he fell asleep. Had that sparked the dream somehow?

  It was strange, confusing, and even a little draining, but at the same time it seemed familiar, as if he had seen it all before. He sighed. One day out of the forest and already he wished he were home, if only so he could check the library for a book that contained the story in his dream.

  The only thing he was certain of was Starrillaylee’s name. There was not a man, woman, or child in the elven kingdom who did not know that name. The Lady was a legend.

  In the Drow War, The Lady had driven back the drow and banished them underground—dying in the effort, but saving her people. The elves didn’t have royalty before then. To honor her, titles had been given to her blood relatives after her death, all the way down to Drynn’s father.

  One family name, like Aldrayndallen, seemed a coincidence, but two of them together, sharing the proper relationship, had to be something more. And while using names from The Lady’s family was quite common, using her name was different. No one would do it unless . . . was the girl really meant to be The Lady herself?

  But it couldn’t have been that Starrillaylee. Elves weren’t magical, they weren’t fairies, and Lady Starrillaylee had no siblings. At least, that’s what he had always been taught.

  The dream had been wrong.

  Cindle rose to her feet a few yards away, all the metal she carried clinking together. According to her, the humans could be hostile, so she had been up already, taking the last watch. “Have you been lying on your back like that all night? How can you stand it? Mine’s still burning and that cat barely scratched me.” She rolled her eyes as if she already knew the answer. “Elves.”

  Drynn sat up, reaching for a pack full of food and other odds and ends that Cindle had suggested they bring. He might not get all his questions answered, but with a dorran guide, he might get closer on a few of them. “I wanted to ask you something.” He found a stick and carved some runes in the dirt—the older characters he had struggled with before. “What does that mean? I’ve seen it in a lot of the dorran histories, and I’ve always wondered.”

  Cindle laughed. “You read dorran histories? I don’t even read those.” She shook her head, but she still squinted through his writing. “It’s a stone.”

  He knew it!

  “But more than just a regular stone—the legends say they had the powers of deities called the Stone Shapers.” She tilted her head at the opal in his hand. “We have lots of myths and legends involving stones. Don’t you have stories about them, too?”

  “This?” Drynn glanced at the green stone and shrugged. “It was my mother’s. All the queens wear it, but it doesn’t do anything.” Its famous owner made it interesting, and the maids thought it was pretty. That was all.

  “None of them do anything anymore, if they ever did. Those old gods are mostly used for cursing.”

  Tayvin rolled over on the grass and stretched out his arms. “You’re teaching my brother how to curse? Can’t that wait until we actually meet a few humans?”

  Cindle didn’t turn, keeping her gaze fixed on Drynn. “Oh good. Your brother’s awake.” Everything in her tone said that she would rather Tayvin sleep indefinitely, and she stomped toward her pack. “Cover your ears up, both of you.”

  Tayvin pulled at the hood of his cloak. Grumbling, he reached for his sword belt and slipped it over one shoulder. “If you don’t want me to wake up, quit shouting.”

/>   Cindle whirled back around. “This is my normal tone of voice!”

  A few songbirds started from the brush. Drynn sighed and put the stick down. There went his chance of getting more questions answered. Cindle and Tayvin argued as they ate breakfast, they argued as they packed up camp, and they argued as they started down the road. Just as they had done yesterday. And the day before. And every day since they had left the mines.

  “There is a small settlement up here,” Cindle said, speaking in Dorran as she had instructed the elves to. “But I would not expect to find too much in the way of healers until Wildred. Sheargreen’s a mere stopover for the merchants on their way to our mines, and the local farmers and shepherds flock to them. There might be an inn and a few tradesmen shops, but the only healer we’ll find will be a journeyman.”

  “That wouldn’t be too bad,” Tayvin said after the function of a journeyman—a healer out of apprenticeship but not quite a master—had been thoroughly explained to him. “A journeyman could give us a location of a master.”

  Cindle sniffed, objecting to Tayvin’s continuing optimism about everything—and just Tayvin in general. “It would be better if he gave the location of the guild. Not many masters are up to the challenge of identifying the cause of a described epidemic and then training a couple of boys to treat it. They won’t do it at all unless you show them your ears and convince them you’re actually a couple of elves and aren’t just trying to mock them. So not only do we have to find someone able, we have to find someone trustworthy enough not to blab about you all over the countryside.”

  Drynn let his eyes wander up the dirt path as Cindle talked. Then he froze.

  “I never thought we could do it overnight,” Tayvin said, before almost running into Drynn. “Uh—Drynn, what’s wrong?”

  Drynn pointed to the hill in the distance. “There’s a human over there with a bunch of white animals. He is so . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Can you see him?”

  Tayvin followed Drynn’s gaze. “Yeah. He has some kind of a funny stick.”

  Like the books said, the human was tall—a good head over Tayvin and Cindle, with several more inches on Drynn. Dark hair covered his bearded face and he had tanned skin like a dorran, but he wasn’t as wide. And he dressed strangely. Instead of a tunic and leggings, this man wore a white collared shirt and dark trousers held up by straps. He wasn’t wearing any shoes at all.

  Cindle grunted. “If you’re like this for a shepherd, I don’t even want to know what you’ll be like in a town. People get nervous if you stare at them like that. Lucky we’re still too far away for him to see us. All I see are white spots on the hill.” She continued walking the dirt path, forcing the elves to follow.

  The silence stretched out until Tayvin started whistling, and Cindle snapped at him again. “Can’t you stay silent, even for a moment?”

  “Why should I? No one’s around.” Tayvin swung his hands wide at the empty field.

  “Because it’s annoying me.”

  “Everything annoys you. Can’t you cool off, even for a moment?” He smiled, a glint in his hazel eyes. “We can sing a dorran song if you want. Do you have any that aren’t about rocks? In the one I heard, they repeated the same thing over and over—all about swinging at rocks.”

  Cindle stomped her feet. “How did you get so insufferable? And don’t tell me it’s another elven thing because Drynn doesn’t have trouble keeping silent at all.”

  Tayvin looked at his brother and shrugged. “Well, that’s just Drynn.”

  Drynn wished they wouldn’t bring him up when they argued. He wasn’t about to pick sides. “Dorran songs are there to help with tempo while they’re working,” he said. “They don’t bother messing with lyrics much.”

  “That explains it then. Wait, someone’s coming.” Tayvin crouched down, ears to the ground. “Sounds like an animal. Two or three of them. Not an animal I’m familiar with . . . horses, maybe?”

  Cindle hitched up her pack and walked into the grass, rolling her eyes. “That’s no mystery. We are near humans, and humans ride horses. Get off the road.”

  “Why?” Tayvin asked as Drynn followed her into the grass.

  “It’s the rule of the road,” Cindle said. “Riders are bigger and faster than walkers, so the walkers give way or get trampled.”

  Tayvin’s hazel eyes went wide. “They trample walkers?”

  “Just get off the road!”

  Tayvin shrugged and joined them in the tall grass, waiting for the humans. The three massive horses ranged from a muddy brown to a patched gray with leather straps that had seen a lot of use. The mounted riders stopped their horses, laughing and carrying on in their foreign tongue to the clank of metal and cloth, calling to Tayvin in greeting.

  Tayvin stared with the same wonder Drynn felt, leaving Cindle to answer for him.

  Drynn tried to pick out the human words he knew, but they talked so fast he relied mostly on expression and other details. The dull exchange heated into an argument, something that often happened when Cindle was present.

  “What’s going on?” Tayvin asked after a while of listening to the human gibberish.

  Cindle shrugged and switched back to Dorran. “Posturing. Human soldiers are a pack of useless bullies and they like the look of your sword. It’s a dorran blade, better than their lot could do, and they think they can match you for it. Just keep quiet and I’ll take care of it.”

  “If they want a match, I don’t mind. It could be fun to try a human.”

  “What? Tayvin, Kalum’s a bit rough right now. Guards are almost as bad as bandits and they can tell you’re foreign. They’d leave you in some ditch and not lose a wink of sleep over it.”

  Tayvin laughed. “I’m not exactly a novice.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it. You shouldn’t be calling attention to yourself.”

  “Um . . . Cindle?” Drynn didn’t like the way the humans were looking at them. They said something else in their language, sparking a fit of laughter that reminded him of a pack of predators.

  Tayvin pushed in front of Cindle. “This will only take a minute.”

  CHAPTER 7

  ONE OF THE soldiers kicked his gray mount, charging forward with his sword bare and gleaming. Tayvin ducked to one side, barely remembering to put his hand on his hood so it wouldn’t fall.

  The horse reared. It threw its rider before trotting off a few feet, voicing its displeasure with grunts and whinnies. The man picked himself up from the dirt, red-faced and glaring. The other two men yelled something in Human, but the grounded man brushed them off.

  He charged.

  Tayvin smiled. Other problems faded away when he had an opponent he could see and defeat. Tayvin pulled his blade out of its shoulder strap that acted as both his quiver and scabbard, meeting the other man’s sword.

  This, it turned out, was a mistake. The man was strong. Pressure nearing pain shot down his arm. Tayvin gave ground and rolled away. The man swung at him.

  Tayvin weaved to either side. If only he didn’t have to worry about hiding his ears. He was used to holding the sword with both hands, but he couldn’t do that and hold his hood in place at the same time. Tayvin felt as clumsy as—well, a human. Though not quite as clumsy as this human who stuck his sword in the dirt and foliage several times while coming after Tayvin.

  The human’s breath became labored. Pity surged over Tayvin at the sight. The man moved slower than a forest sloth and really had no business holding a sword at all.

  The human signaled to his cohorts. One stepped up, but then Cindle pulled out her hammer. They reached a silent truce, neither joining the fray.

  The man gave another frustrated charge. Tayvin slipped to the side. He hit the human’s back with the flat of the blade and then the hilt as he passed. The man fell to the dirt. He came up cursing in human gibberish, but the fight was out of him.

  Tayvin grinned, stepping back to where Drynn waited.

  “Are you all right?” Drynn’s e
yes were wide with concern.

  “Fine,” Tayvin said. Then he frowned. Drynn had the opal again, fidgeting with the chain as he watched the human soldiers. Tayvin had tried to hide the stone from his brother a few times before they had left the forest, see if that was enough to break the curse, but Drynn always found it in seconds, a bat that didn’t need sight to find its prey. And even now, in the human lands, he never seemed to put it away. Completely possessed.

  But Drynn didn’t trip, didn’t sleep any longer than he had before. Their mother had carried the illness for decades before she had faded. They could find the cure in time if they just kept moving. And if Tayvin kept smiling, Drynn wouldn’t have to know he carried the illness at all. At least, not until they had gained some better clue on how to fix it.

  If all else failed, they could leave the cursed stone in the human lands, and Tayvin could haul Drynn back home by force. Though Tayvin couldn’t picture himself strong-arming his brother like that. Even the thought of describing the curse aloud and their father’s apparent compliance with it set his heart racing.

  Drynn was his younger brother; caring for him had always been Tayvin’s responsibility. Tayvin might not have been chosen to carry his family’s curse, but he would shield his brother from the burden of knowing about it for however long he could.

  “Do you know what they are saying?” Tayvin cocked his head at Cindle and the soldiers. Drynn was so much better at languages, and maybe the distraction would help.

  “Not really.” Drynn paused, squinting as the human words continued. “They . . . are asking where you learned to fight. They think you are faster than you should be. They want to know if you are a ‘mercenary,’ but I don’t know what that means. Cindle’s upset.”

  Tayvin chuckled. “I could tell that.” The dorran shouted and gestured wildly, though for Cindle those kinds of reactions seemed rather typical.