EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (23 page)

“I want to be here,” she said with a raise of her chin. “It’s peaceful and
was
quiet.”

He took an exaggerated look around. “It is that. Lonely, as well.” His voice hinted at mockery.

She raked her eyes up and down his form. “You’re one to talk. Wandering through the forest without anyone else. Sneaking up on people who don’t want to be found.”

Sara gestured at the crowd of women and men in the distance. Their shouts of laughter could be heard up and down the lakeshore. “If I want people, I have them.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What if you want
friends
?”

She smiled sharply. “Then I wouldn’t approach strangers.”

He put his hands in his pockets and smiled. As he did, it was as if the clouds of the sky dissipated a little more to reveal parts of his face in shadow. For the first time, she saw a hint of alabaster skin and dirty blond hair curving around a sharp cheekbone.

“Everyone’s a stranger…until you get to know them. Besides, considering who you are, I’d take what I could get, Fairchild.”

“How do you know my name?” she snarled.

He stayed half-hidden in the shadows. She couldn’t see his eyes. Couldn’t test his intent.

“I know a lot of things,” he said smoothly. “But more importantly, I know a lost woman when I see one. A woman with the strength of ten men and the broken heart of one.”

She blinked at the unease rioting through her.
 

How does he know that? And me so well
?
 

“You don’t know that,” she said as she started to walk closer. “I’m going to take you back to camp and they’re going to have some questions for you.”

He laughed. “Kitling, I’d be more worried about where I will take
you
.”

Sara froze in her tracks. That nickname was one she hadn’t heard in over a year. It was the name her father called her whenever she got in trouble. It was their secret and no one else used it. Certainly not a man she had never met.

Disbelief crossed in her eyes as she wondered how he could know it. She had only one explanation.

“Are you
a
geist
?” she said, using the old language word for “ghost.”

“I’m no ghost,” said the man in front of her as the shadow surrounding him suddenly moved and she realized that it was a natural shadow that cloaked him. When the darkness fell back from his form, she was met with the strangest eyes she’d ever seen.

Sara knew she didn’t know him. Those eyes, that face, and that voice would have forever been imprinted on her mind if she had. Vivid, purple eyes framed by long lashes.

“What are you, then?” she whispered as she stared.

He smiled sadly. “A mirage.”

Then a voice called out from behind her. “Sara!”

Sara didn’t flinch and didn’t turn around. She recognized its owner. As Ezekiel came running toward her, she kept her wary gaze on the man in front of her. She didn’t know who he was or what he wanted, but he might be insane.
 

“Why don’t you tell me your name?” commanded Sara.

But he didn’t answer. Instead, before her eyes his body faded away in a wave of light like a whirlpool in the middle of the ocean that opened and disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Sara stared, flummoxed. Unsure if she should move and scout the area or stand her ground in case he had just dropped a sight and sound shield around him. But she
knew
what a sight and sound shield looked like, knew what the gathering of magic for that particular spell felt like, and what he had just done had been neither.

He had just…vanished.

Finally, Ezekiel’s panting breaths stopped beside her.

“What are you looking at?” said Ezekiel with his hands on his knees, breathing heavily.
 

He leaned over so far that the arrows in his quiver slipped out over his head and tumbled down to the ground. Ezekiel grumbled and gathered them back up.

As he did, Sara answered his question. “A mirage.”

Ezekiel stood while holding half a dozen arrows lopsidedly in his hand. Quite a few of which were poking Sara sharply in the side. She didn’t move away because she was honestly wondering if the painful poke would make her snap awake from a dream or a nightmare.
 

She felt Ezekiel turn to look at her. Then he did something so annoying that she almost slapped him. Ezekiel whistled with a sharp pitch directly into her ear.

She pushed him away with a yell. “What the hell, Ezekiel?”

Off-balance, he stumbled back and nearly fell. He ended up dropping half the arrows in his arms again.

Sara turned to look behind her but the stranger had well and truly vanished. She felt no other presence aside from herself and Ezekiel. With an irritable sigh, she sheathed her sword and walked a few steps over to apologize.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “You really jolted my concentration.”

 
“That was kind of the point,” he said irritably. “You’ve been standing on this beach staring at
nothing
for the past fifteen minutes. When I came up to you, you muttered nonsense. I thought you were in a trance.”

“What are you doing here?”

“
Oh, thank you for checking on me, Ezekiel
,” he muttered. “You’re welcome, Sara, even though you’ve been throwing a hissy fit for the last day and a half.”

“Are you through?” she said with her arms crossed.

“Are you done being crazy?” he shot back.

“I’m not crazy,” she said. “I saw something.”

“Saw what? A shade?” he said.

“No, a person.”

Ezekiel’s gaze transformed into something close to panicked. “We’re near the battlefront, you know. If you saw a Kade soldier, we need to warn the others.”

Before he could turn and head off, she held up a warning hand. “No. That’s not what I meant. I came out here for the quiet. But after I got here, someone else came. A person I think was a vision…a vision called a mirage.”

Ezekiel shifted uncomfortably. “A mirage? Like the kind of vision that hallucinating people see in the desert?”

She turned and looked over at him. “I don’t know how to explain it. It—
he
—was a man. Tall and wearing non-descript white clothing.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“Not much,” muttered Sara.

Ezekiel bit his lip. “It might have been another mercenary wandering by.”

Sara shook her head. “He was no Corcoran. I can tell you that right now.”

“Then who was he?”

“I don’t know,” Sara said, “but he had purple eyes.”

Something flooded Ezekiel’s eyes that moment. Something dark.

“What did you say?” he choked out.

“He had purple eyes,” she said defiantly. “Does that mean something to you?”

“It might,” he whispered. “We need to get back to your campsite. I have to show you something.”

Sara shifted uncomfortably.

“What?” Ezekiel asked.

“I don’t have a campsite,” she said.

“I do,” Ezekiel said firmly, “and if you’ll have me by your side, so do you.”

She raised her head. “What? We’re not even going to talk about the fight?”

He flashed a grin. “Lucky for you, I have something
much
more fascinating to discuss. Otherwise I would lay into you on your behavior these last few days.”

He started walking back. Having no choice, she grabbed Danger’s reins and followed him.

“My behavior?” she said, affronted.

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard some stories,” he said. “You’re the talk of all the mercenaries.”

She scoffed. “They put rats in my tents, slashed the holders on my saddle, tried to pick fights with me, refused to aid me in getting dinner, and…”

Ezekiel cut her off as he untied his own horse from a nearby tree limb. “Trust me, that argument is going nowhere with me or anyone else. There’s too much ‘me’ involved.”

Sara clenched her jaw.

She watched as he tried to jump up on his horse and failed.
 

“Do
you
need some help?” she said pointedly.

“Maybe,” Ezekiel admitted.

Sara came up behind him and held out her hands to give him a boost.

“Thanks,” Ezekiel said as he vaulted into the saddle.
 

She held his horse’s reins for a second, holding him in place. “Why can’t you tell me what you know here?”

“Because,” Ezekiel said as he snapped the reins and his horse broke into a trot as she mounted up, “I need my books!”

Sara watched him gallop off with her jaw dropped. She urged Danger to follow quickly and Danger leapt into the race with joy.

Gaining speed as they ran side-by-side, Sara yelled at Ezekiel, “I can’t believe you brought your books to
war
.”

The grin on his face as he said, “We need them,” left her shaking her head in disgust.

Chapter XVIII

H
ER
HEART
RACED
AS
THEY
rode to the hill quickly. When they got to the first and clearest path up to the top, Sara expected Ezekiel to slow and turn his mare for the slow and arduous process of climbing the hill. But Ezekiel didn’t stop. He urged his mare to continue around the far side of the hill at a fast trot as they weaved around soldiers walking about. When they continued south, Sara followed, wondering where he could possibly be going.

When they had gone clear around the front and were approaching the lake again, she yelled, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“There’s a path up ahead,” Ezekiel yelled back, his butt bouncing up and down in the saddle like a sack of potatoes. She winced just watching him. It was her first time back in the saddle in months. So she was shaky. But he looked like he hadn’t ridden anything but a mule since birth.

She waited for this mysterious path to appear as Danger followed along the mare’s right side. Then Ezekiel turned his mare north again, straight into a bunch of trees. But not between them. Sara watched with something akin to anger flaring in her gut. She knew what she was seeing immediately. As Ezekiel rode straight through the copse of trees like it wasn’t there, it was clear as day. She had been tricked. As she went through and they emerged riding on the other side, she turned to her left and right to see two mages standing on either side of the pathway.

Mercenary mages hired by the guild, both of them. They sat with bored eyes and lazy expressions as they kept their illusion standing.

Ezekiel took note of her expression as she turned to look at him with stubborn tilt to her mouth. “You didn’t know, did you?”

“No,” she said. “No, I didn’t.”

Sara looked up to see a winding incline leading straight up to the top of the hill. No rocks, no branches, and nothing hazardous lined its surface. With a sinking stomach, she realized that the entire company had probably been laughing behind her back as she nearly broke her and her horse’s neck trying to get up and down the front.

“Those idiots,” said Ezekiel. “You could have broken your neck.”

Sara snorted and urged Danger forward. “You know…I don’t think they care.”

Ezekiel followed behind her silently as they crested the hill, and then he took her to a small cluster of tents with a standing area of wood poles where two other horses were tied up.

He quickly jumped, or rather
fell
, down from his mare’s back and tied her up. Sara did the same and walked calmly behind as he ran and tripped his way to his cream-colored tent.

As they entered the tent, she saw one cot against the left side of the tent, a wooden trunk with a lock directly at the head of the tent, and Ezekiel’s red bag in a lump on the floor.

Coming in slowly, she ducked and sat on the cot while Ezekiel hurried over to the trunk and got busy unlocking it.

As she did so, she said, “How exactly did you swing that?”

“Swing what?” he asked while fiddling with the double-breasted beast he used to keep his secrets hidden away.

“A fifteen-pound locker on a march to war,” she said dryly.

He looked at her from his perch on the ground with a guilty expression. “I know one of the cooks. In exchange for her storing my trunk on the food supplies wagon, I gave her some plants.”

“Plants?”

“Some rare ones, actually!” he said smugly.

“Laudanum? Lavender?” Sara asked, naming off two that she knew would be useful for their properties and were not easily acquired on the long road. The first was used to ward off pain. The second was great for the scent it gave off in even the mustiest environments.

“Thyme, coriander, and parsley,” he said as he finally opened the trunk with a loud creak.

Sara stared at him in amazement. “Herbs?”

“Yep,” he said as he dug in and pulled a book from the side. “She’s quite proud of her cooking skills.”

He put that book back.

Then he pulled out a small diary-sized book with a vellum cover and a tassel marking his last page. He quickly flipped through its pages until he found what he was looking for at the very end. Then he read a few lines from what she could tell, flipped a few pages more, and then closed the book with a snap of its pages.

“I know what we need!” announced Ezekiel triumphantly.

“That wasn’t it,” she said.
 

“Nope.”

He pulled out another, and Sara watched while the trunk lid closed on a space that, as far as she could tell, was filled entirely with books, and Ezekiel flipped around to face the entrance to the tent with his feet crossed.

She sat forward with eager attention as he dusted off the book he held in his hands and opened it. She expected parchment pages filled with writing and perhaps some illustrations to meet her eyes. Instead the open book revealed a secret compartment, and inside that secret compartment lay a vial.

As Ezekiel reached inside to pick up the small vial of dusky colored red glass, he unstopped the vial.

What floated out caused Sara to sit back alert as she said, “Ezekiel Crane, what have you done?”

Ezekiel looked up at her and said, “Found the answer to our mysterious visitors.”

“And broken more laws than I care to count,” she snapped.

Ezekiel held out a hand to the winged creature that fluttered in the air, dust drifting down slowly from its wings. The dragonfly alit on his outstretched palm with its four gossamer wings outstretched.