“Hey, why don’t you ask the old boys?” Lila said.
One of the other things that had saved our bacon was the fact that while the old Jinn masters had left off possessing Maks, much of their knowledge had stayed in his head. While it wasn’t always at the front of his mind, he could access what they knew, and that knowledge was a gold mine. Kind of like his own personal library, though there did seem to be a few holes here and there.
Knowing our luck, this would be one of those holes.
Lila and I watched as Maks closed his eyes, and his breathing slowed.
He was quiet for a good minute before a low groan escaped him. “They have nothing on this sort of an event. It’s like everything we’ve gained, everything we’ve fought for, was just snatched away. But by whom?”
Lila growled. “Yeah, I’d like to know who is doing this? If Merlin wasn’t dead, I’d say it was him. Or the Emperor.”
She wasn’t wrong. Except Merlin was dead, and the Emperor, my grandfather, without any power so much as in his pinky finger left to him after I’d finished with him.
“This is a fucking mess,” I muttered. No weapon, no direction for the dragon eggs, and now no magic or abilities we’d worked so hard to gain. I frowned. “The hyena, she said something like the power would be stripped? Shit, she was literally telling us to watch ourselves and we still walked right into it!”
“I feel like saying all the things we had in our arsenal out loud cursed us to lose them.” Maks stared up at the bright blue sky as if the answer would be there.
I wasn’t sure that was the case at all. But as that place between my shoulders began to itch, I had no doubt someone was watching us. Waiting to see if we’d run away or keep moving forward on our path.
“The hyena warned us. Warned us and we came here anyway.” I grabbed Balder’s reins and mounted. “We need to continue on. The dragon eggs and hatchlings aren’t going to save themselves.”
“We have no magic! I’m a shrimp again!” Lila yelped, hopping to stand on Balder’s neck so she could glare at me, her big eyes watering with tears.
“How is that different from when we went to the Witch’s Reign? We did that as little shits, with no magic, and we beat her. Maks wasn’t using his Jinn magic then for fear it would bring his father down on us. And we survived. We survived the Dragon’s Ground the same way. So we go on, we find the eggs, and figure out along the way who the hell stole our abilities. And we get them back. That’s the plan.”
Maks pulled himself up onto Batman. “I agree. We have no choice but to go forward now. Anything strong enough to take our magic with such subtlety won’t be satisfied with that. Now with the Emperor and Merlin gone, there is a wide open desert for any other power that might come along. What if . . . what if whoever this is knows about the jewels? Sure, we destroyed them, but they might not know that.”
My stomach clenched. Yeah, that would be bad. No magic, moving forward, and headed to the east where some unnamed beast awaited us.
Awesome, just fucking awesome. But maybe I grinned a little. Because I was, if nothing else, comfortable in the position of underdog—undercat. Better to be treated as if we weren’t capable and then come out on top. Better to be underestimated yet again. And hope it was enough to slink by the radars out there.
We rode east, leaving the Blackened Market behind, but not without looking back several times. Those orbs I’d seen, they’d been faint, barely visible, yet I was sure they’d been there. Were they what had taken our powers? Or were they what I’d felt watching us?
Maybe both.
I shook my head and urged Balder into a trot. This part of the desert was softer with loose sand and more than a trot would put more strain on the horses’ legs than I wanted to right then, no matter that they were fit and used to different surfaces.
The last thing we needed was an injury when we had no way of healing it.
I shut down that thought as soon as it came up, part of me horrified that by thinking it, I would make it happen. Just like Maks had said talking about our abilities had jinxed us.
I wanted to ask Maks what his Jinn knowledge knew about the eastern side of the realm. Then again, he might actually know all on his own. He’d been raised by the Jinn and they were all about taking over territories and controlling other creatures. But again, I hesitated.
I couldn’t even say why, and I didn’t like it. I forced myself to speak.
“Maks?”
He turned his head and lifted his brows. “Yes?”
“Do you know much about this area we are going into?”
“You mean as we head toward the far eastern wall?” He sat deep in his saddle, his back slumping a little. “Probably not enough to help us.”
I waited, knowing him well enough to see he was gathering his thoughts. Lila, on the other hand, was not so patient.
“Come on, Toad! Spit it out!” She leapt between the two horses, landing on the pommel of Batman’s saddle so she could reach out and grab Maks’s shirt. “We haven’t got all day.”
“That’s not true,“ Maks said with a grin. “We actually do have all damn day.”
“You know what I mean!” She snapped her claws up at him as if that would hurry him up.
He sighed. “What little I know could fill not even a single page of paper. Marsum, when he was looking at territories to conquer, never looked at the east. I asked him once why. His answer was that some pots were better left unstirred. And the memories of the others are similar. Almost as if . . .”
My eyes widened, as did Lila’s. “Marsum was afraid of what was in the east?”
Maks rolled his shoulders as if that thought made him as uncomfortable as it did me. “He never came right out and said it, but yeah, I think that was the case. Or he knew he was outmatched maybe. Maybe that was why Davin was trying to gather more power? There are mountains between us and the far eastern realm. Wide ranges that are extremely dangerous, full of wild creatures looking to hunt and kill. Not like the desert you cross to get to the base of the mountains.”
He let out a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair.
I considered for a moment, gathering my thoughts. “You think that memories of the other Jinn masters could have been tampered with to keep the knowledge about the east from getting out?”
“I think the only other person who might be able to tell you anything is your grandfather,” Maks said. “You think you could walk in the dreamscape to find him?”
I grimaced. “The dreamscape broke apart when everything went down.”
And that left us with nothing to go on, our abilities stripped, and an unknown realm to face.
If only we’d truly understood then what we were up against, we might not have been so fucking flippant.
4
As we trekked through the desert beyond the Blackened Market, Lila flopped to the side of Batman’s neck, hanging from his mane with one set of toe claws, her wings limp, her other arm flung over her eyes. A case of the dramatics that was good even for her. “Like a dull actor now, I have forgot my part, and I am out, even to a full disgrace.”
“I know that one,” Maks said, grinning wide. “Coriolanus. I think even I can say that it was scene five. And really, rather fitting with the poor acting there.”