Dragonoak: Gall and Wormwood, page 1
DRAGONOAK
Gall and Wormwood
Copyright 2017 Sam Farren
Published by Sam Farren via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
Cover art copyright 2017 Cécile Jaubert Zellk
Art by Elly Beck
All cover work by G. Koike
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Amazon.co.uk or your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For my wonderful friends who have read my endless, typo-ridden drafts, endured me bouncing ideas off them at 3am, and have met me with enthusiasm, feedback, and book-altering suggestions; for those who have kept me motivated with art, fic, and rampant keysmashing; and for anyone who has delved into a fantasy novel and not seen themselves reflected in the world therein.
Table of Contents
PART I
PART II
PART III
PART IV
Epilogue
Endnotes
About the author
Upcoming titles
Connect with the author
PART I
CHAPTER I
The phoenix wasn’t all orange and golds, no matter what festival banners and long lost statues had led me to believe.
His tail feathers trailed behind him, purples as deep and vibrant as the sun setting on the horizon, and an arrowhead was speared against his collarbone in the same hue. The colour spread across his wings and turned to a dark red, before resolving itself as purple at the tips. He flew as fluidly as the Phoenix Fire twisted in on itself, and made certain it was impossible for us to look away.
He beat his wings and outmatched the wind, not sparing a thought for the hundreds of years he’d spent as bones in a box.
Claire and I hadn’t convinced him to come with us, hadn’t lured him away from Phos. He’d followed us out of the Bloodless Lands of his own accord, and didn’t have to strain his eyes against the endless white surrounding us. He wasn’t confused by what he saw: if the phoenix remembered Myros as a land of colour and life, he understood why it had become as it was, too.
Kouris, Claire and I sat beyond Kyrindval’s dragon-bone gate, and the phoenix spent hours tearing through the sky and taking solace in the clouds. He shot off through the open fields and dense forests, but always returned to land gracefully on Claire’s outstretched arm. That alone was a testament to how utterly enthralled Claire was: the phoenix was no small bird.
“That’s quite the feat you’ve pulled off, yrval,” Kouris murmured, unable to take her eyes off the phoenix. “Suppose I shouldn’t be expecting any less from you, though.”
“I didn’t pull anything off,” I said, and leant against her side. “Claire did it. She had the bones. She threw them into the Phoenix Fire. And she’s the one the phoenix seems to like the most.”
Kouris spared Oak a glance and raised a sceptical eyebrow, but her expression settled into a smile.
Since his rebirth, the phoenix had only left the sky to perch on Claire’s shoulder and arm. He stretched out his wings as he landed, making a mess of her hair, but promptly used his beak to brush it back into place. Claire made her way over to us with the phoenix stood vigil on her shoulder, and he didn’t get off until she crouched and sat down. He jumped onto the rock next to her, and stretched out his wings further than I could stretch my arms.
“Well,” Claire said, brushing a hand across her shoulder and frowning at the scuffed fabric and frayed hems. “This may be a sign that I ought to invest in some tougher clothing.”
“Any luck getting through to him?” Kouris asked.
“I’m afraid not. He clearly understands spoken language well enough, but even if he learnt any Mesomium while Mesomia itself still existed, it’s evolved far too much for it to be recognisable,” Claire said. “Unfortunately, those who speak Myrosi are few and far between.”
Well aware he was the topic of conversation, the phoenix hopped restlessly from one rock to another and pecked Kouris’ horns.
“Wanna jump on Oak’s back and get Kondo-Kana to help?” Kouris teased.
Oak perked up, excited by the prospect, and the phoenix jumped on the spot.
He wrapped his talons around Kouris’ horns and leant forward, beak pressed to her nose as he tilted his head this way and that, impatiently expecting more.
“… Kondo-Kana?” I said slowly. His head snapped towards me and I pointed to him, asking, “Do you know Kondo-Kana?”
He made a guess at the question and nodded sharply, eyes no longer full of the wonder of a world returned to him. I bit the inside of my mouth and recalled the few words I’d learnt from Kondo-Kana. I placed my hands against my chest, bowing my head as I introduced myself.
“Aejin yu ka Aejin,” I said, and there was a spark in his eyes again.
He looked between Kouris and Claire as he shifted his weight from one foot to another. They both nodded, but the phoenix remained sceptical. I repeated the words, nodding slowly as I spoke, and the phoenix closed his eyes, bowing deeply with one wing folded across his chest. He held the pose and didn’t stand up straight until I mirrored the gesture.
“Rowan. My name is Rowan,” I said. The phoenix nodded and pointed curiously at Claire with his wing. “That’s Claire. Claire Ightham.”
Brushing his wing feathers across his beak, the phoenix scurried over to Kouris and perched on her knee.
“Kouris. Nice to meet you,” she said, grinning, and tapped a claw against his chest. “You?”
After a few seconds spent blinking, the phoenix decided that he understood the question. He made a few sweeping motions with his wings that were indicative of something, and grew irritated when the three of us stared blankly at him.
“I can sign,” Claire murmured. “But once again, there is a language barrier present.”
Huffing, the phoenix ran through the long grass and stopped where a thousand footsteps had worked a path into the hard-packed earth. He picked up a stick with his beak, used a talon to snap off a length of it, and balanced on one foot as he wrote in the dry dirt.
With the strange letters scraped into the ground, the phoenix stepped back and stared up at us proudly. Nobody said anything. He spread his wings, gesturing as though we could’ve possibly missed the markings on the ground.
“I have no idea how to read that,” Claire said, holding her hands out apologetically.
The phoenix squawked, convinced we were willfully ignorant, and Kouris knelt down next to him. She used her long claws to write something next to the phoenix’s name. He leant in close, tilted his head towards his shoulder, and held out his wings in a shrug.
“Kouris. It says Kouris,” she said, tapping each letter. “K-O-U-R-I-S.”
The phoenix ran a wing beneath his beak to show that he understood the situation, and decided to deal with things by setting off into the sky.
“Michael told me the pane have books recording things that were going on thousands of years ago. Maybe there’s something about the Myrosi language that might help us in one of the libraries?” I suggested.
“Worth a shot,” Kouris said.
With Kouris ever in exile and Claire’s clear eye fixed on the sky, I’d become the best candidate to track down a book. Claire had been smiling all day, and before I headed to the tribe, I stopped and took her in. She sat on a rock with Kouris, idly chatting as they searched for some sign of the phoenix in the midday sky.
The sight of them together was as hard to look away from as the Phoenix Fire.
We’d taken the long way around Kyrindval to reach Kouris, and no one had caught a close enough glimpse of the phoenix to realise he wasn’t just another hawk drifting on the breeze. There’d be no end to their questions once they saw him for what he was, and I didn’t want the phoenix being overwhelmed. Not when he wouldn’t understand any of it. He needed to see how the world had changed around him, first. More than that, he needed to enjoy being alive again.
When I’d washed up in Canth, I’d had Kouris and Akela with me. The phoenix had nothing but vague gestures to get by on.
“Rowan!” Michael called to me. He cut out of a small side-street and I stopped with a smile. Just the person I was looking for. “There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been? Oh, never mind that. There’s something I want – need – to say to you.”
I raised an eyebrow. Never mind venturing deep into the Bloodless Lands. Never mind bringing the first phoenix back to life in fifteen hundred years. Never mind any of that. Clearly he had something much more momentous to say.
“It’s not your fault. Us having to leave, that is. Rylan would be coming for Claire whether you were here or not,” he said, falling into step with me when I set off again. “I know I’ve made myself a home here these past few years, but I want you to know that I’m not angry with you. I understand that things are beyond your control, and that you didn’t wish any of this upon me.”
He was unduly pleased with himself. I grabbed his arm, tugged him in the direction of the closest library, and said, “Great. That’s great. Thanks. Anyway, listen. I need help finding a
I hurried Michael along, pointedly ignoring all of his curious questions and cutting remarks, and practically had to shove him through the library doors. It’d never been difficult to lure him into a building full of books before, but by the time I’d dragged him to an arbitrary bookshelf, he was making a stand, hands on his hips.
“I need books on Myrosi,” I explained. “On the language.”
When he did nothing more helpful than frown, I said, “It’s for Claire. We’re looking something up.”
“I should’ve known!” he said. He was relieved to realise I couldn’t possibly be interested in anything printed on paper. “Follow me, my dear sister.”
He treated the library like a maze only he had a map of. The books related to Myros were at the very back, on a shelf a pane would’ve had trouble reaching. He explained that few books housed there were the originals; those were kept under lock and key to protect them from sunlight and grubby hands alike. Those on the shelves were reproductions of reproductions, and had only been around for a few hundred years. Only. He climbed the ladder and I kept it steady as his fingers trailed through the air, mouth silently forming the titles his eyes were glossing over.
“Ah!” he said, pulling out a book as thick as a house brick. “The Origins of Myrosi. I’ve read this one myself, so it comes highly recommended. It’s an excellent account of how the language developed in the millennia prior to the war. How it gradually outgrew any similarities to its Canthian origins, and how it influenced surrounding countries, ultimately bleeding into Mesomia’s tongue to shape the grammatical structures we have today. That sort of thing.”
I frowned at the book, feeling oddly sorry for it. I didn’t understand how it could be of interest to anyone.
“No, um. Not exactly. I need a book that…” I twisted my hands in front of my chest, making circles in the air. “It has words in Myrosi, but it has words in Svargan too. So you can look at one and know what the other means. But Myrosi is written differently, so maybe it shows you what sounds the Myrosi words are supposed to make…? Is that a thing?”
Michael stared down at me, appalled by my question.
“You want a dictionary, Rowan.”
The book he chose for me – the dictionary – was so large that getting it from the shelf to my outstretched arms was a struggle. It was as heavy as a net full of fish. Michael didn’t offer to help. While the dictionary was older than most books I’d encountered, it was far from falling apart. A thick leather cover had been wrapped around it to protect the pages within, and as I lugged it through the library, Michael said, “Did you know that the pane still use some Myrosi? The sca-isjin and sca-sino don’t exactly share much in common with other Svargan words, do they? Sca is simply the word for an open patch of land, and the word that follows describes its purpose. So the sca-isjin is a place of creation, or light, and the sca-sino is a place of growth, or healing, and…”
“Thanks!” I said, cutting him off once the door was in sight. “You’ve been a big help.”
I tried to walk out, but Michael caught me by the collar of my shirt.
“You can’t simply take it and leave,” he said with a long-suffering sigh. “You’ll give humans a bad name. Quick, quick. Come here.”
Michael led me and the book to a pane sitting behind a desk, with yet another book folded open in front of them. Taking hold of a quill in a nearby inkwell, Michael glanced at the spine of the dictionary and copied the words onto the book’s open page.
“I’m saying that you took it, even if Claire wants it. So it’s your responsibility. Remember that.”
The last thing he wrote was supposedly my name. I followed the tip of the quill but didn’t understand how a few quick strokes could sound like Rowan.
“Thanks!” I said again, and escaped before he could barrage me with another round of questions and accusations.
With the book wrapped securely in my arms, I bounded through Kyrindval, letting it sink in that I was about to help Claire and Kouris talk to a phoenix. A phoenix Claire had brought back fifteen-hundred years since the last one had been seen.
“I’ve got it!” I called out to Claire and Kouris, holding the tombstone of a book above my head. “It’s a dictionary,” I added.
“That’s the one,” Kouris said, grinning as I dropped it onto the rock next to her. The phoenix, having exhausted himself in trying to reach the sun, sat slumped against her side, and Oak had crawled a little closer to the group.
Claire carefully pulled the leather cover back, revealing the yellowing pages within.
Together, Claire and Kouris leant over the open book, scanning blocks of text and flicking through pages in search of something that would explain how a squiggle of ink could sound the same as an entirely different squiggle of ink. Having retrieved the book, I was happy to be of no use whatsoever, and sprawled against Oak’s side as I soaked up the sun.
“If I could read, do you think you’d be able to as well?” I asked Oak. His discoloured lips curled into something reminiscent of a smile, fangs gleaming in the light.
There was a great deal of muttering from Claire and Kouris, and every few minutes, one of them would say, ah! – no, wait, that’s not… The other would sigh, but have no more luck themselves. After flicking through the book half a dozen times, Claire stumbled across something remotely promising, and Kouris held out the book, lining it up with what the phoenix had written on the ground.
He scraped the words a little deeper into the dirt, afternoon breeze threatening to steal the shapes, and Claire scrutinised the page, silently mouthing syllables to herself.
“Hm. Ha… Hara-Taigo?”
The phoenix puffed out his chest and took to the air, offended. He shook his head, beat his wings, and landed with one foot on Claire’s head. He pointed down at the book and squawked loudly.
“Alright, alright,” Claire said, tensing as she attempted to ease him off her head. “Your writing isn’t the clearest in the world, you do realise.”
Leaving his perch, the phoenix tapped the characters causing Claire trouble. After consulting the book a few more times, she ventured, “Haru-Taiki? You aren’t going to jump on my head again, are you?”
The phoenix was far too pleased for that. Bowing to each of us in turn, he waved a wing at the words he’d written and chirped in delight.
“Haru-Taiki,” Claire said, holding out a hand. Recognising the gesture, he brushed his feathers against her palm. “It’s an honour to meet you.”
Haru-Taiki shared his first meal since rebirth with Kouris and Oak, no fonder of cooked meat than they were. I ran back to Kyrindval, made something for Claire and myself in my kitchen, and spent the afternoon watching Claire as she flicked through the dictionary, trying to explain what was happening to Haru-Taiki. He chirped each time she pronounced something wrong and impatiently tapped his talons against the pages. Kouris shared in his laughter, but when she pulled the book into her own lap, she didn’t have much more success.
“I’m attempting to explain how long it has been since the Necromancy War, but Haru-Taiki either doesn’t understand or doesn’t believe me. Perhaps I’m forming the larger numbers incorrectly…” Claire murmured. “I know nothing of Myrosi grammar. All I can do is throw out a string of words and hope he discerns my meaning without misinterpreting it.”
She’d been working for hours but was far from frustrated. Curiosity claimed her, and she grew more driven with each passing minute. When it took her particularly long to track down the word she wanted, Haru-Taiki would duck under her arm and bump her wrist until she idly scratched the back of his neck, continuing her search with one hand.
“I’m gonna go ahead and guess he’ll be wanting to come with us to Thule,” Kouris said, playing with one of the feathers he’d dropped and sticking it behind her ear. “Still, best that he knows what he’s getting himself into. Maybe having Kondo-Kana around wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world.”
“Yes, let us invite the woman who created the Bloodless Lands to the edge of the Bloodless Lands themselves, and have her explain why she created them so very long ago, to someone who was likely there,” Claire said, and Kouris snorted.
“In the middle of yet another war,” Kouris added. “Great idea.”
