The Dragon and the Witch Read online

  “Father! You need me.”

  “I said no,” he growled.

  “Father! Please. Listen to me.” I reached out and grabbed his arm to stop him from moving any farther. My fingers barely circled around half his bicep muscles. I seemed small next to him, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t fight.

  “They will be here in an hour.” He glanced down at Piku. “Gather the hunters in your family and any other species of hunters you may find. I will not let them push us out of our home and off our land.”

  Piku took off running, the muscles beneath his shoulders and across his back danced in rhythm with his stride. He was a warrior tiger. A fighter just like me and although he often tried to talk sense into me, I wouldn’t stand by and watch my family go into battle while I sat somewhere and waited.

  “Father!”

  “No.” Tolbalth pointed his finger and me with a stern look on his face. “I’m not losing you, Zadie. This is what I should have done prior when there were only two hunters roaming our forests.”

  “You’re going to kill them.” Although it sounded like a question, it was more of a statement—a statement I knew wouldn’t sit well with my father. If anyone threatened him, his family or his land, he’d do whatever was needed to stop them. Our views on life and death were completely different. I believed things never had to resort to death.

  “I’m going to destroy them.” He squeezed his hand into a fist, flexing the muscles up and down the length of his arm. “I will do what I must to protect what’s ours.”

  “No, Father. There’s another way.”

  “Always trying to save others, aren’t you, Zadie? Even though they’d shoot you without thinking twice.” Tolbalth turned and scanned the forest from south to east and west. “We shall go, now.”

  I took a step away from him. My heart ached. Everything in me wanted to keep this secret from him, but if this tidbit of information could help us right this wrong and no one needed to be killed then he needed to know.

  “Father.” I swallowed hard. “I can fix this. I know what to do.”

  He glared at me, his eyes turned three shades of colors as he filtered through every emotion he had. Over the years, my father had learned to raise a daughter and practice patience, although he wasn’t very good at it.

  “I can stop them,” I said again.

  “You’re not fighting, Zadie.”

  “Listen to me, please.” I hesitated. “I’m a witch!” I blurted it with so much emotion that tears fell from the ledge of my eyes and dripped down my cheeks.

  He tilted his head and stared at me. Not with the expression I expected. Not with hatred or anger. Tolbalth stared at me with something more—a look of hurt and pain but mostly, the expression of knowing what I was before I knew what I was.

  I cupped my hand over my mouth. “You know? You’ve always known, haven’t you?” Something close to rage swam through my veins. A rage that edged me on to strike him. To slap him across the face for knowing something so important, yet refusing to tell me.

  “It matters not. You’re pure and good. You have a heart of a saint and that’s at your core.” He snarled. “I care about nothing else.”

  I searched the ground as if answers were going to pop up like a trail of weeds. But, in reality, I had a hard time looking at him now that I knew the truth—now that it was clear that he was aware of my heritage. “The woman? The one in my dreams. She’s my mother, isn’t she?”

  This time, his stare turned into a glare. The subject was one he wanted to avoid and I wouldn’t let it go.

  “Isn’t she?!”

  “Yes! She’s your mother.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why would you try to keep me from her? What is so bad about her that you’d do this to me?”

  “Zadie…” He reached out for me, but I took a step back. “We don’t have time for this. We have to go. I promise to tell you everything I know when this battle is over.”

  We both heard the footsteps of hundreds of men stomping and marching through the forest trees, closing in on us. I knew there wasn’t time, but my rational side didn’t care.

  My mother had been trying to reach out to me and I’d pushed her away for years. It wasn’t until the other night when I’d followed her into the cave that I knew the cave held answers that I needed. The forbidden Crens Peak was only off-limits because Father didn’t want me to find her. He didn’t want me to know. “Go ahead and kill them, Tolbalth.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. It was the first time ever I’d blatantly called him by his given name to his face. “You don’t understand, Zadie.”

  “I don’t care. All these years, I thought my mother left me, that she didn’t love me. For years! All the while, she’d been trying to reach me and you lied to my face in order to keep her as far away from me as you could.”

  “That’s not what happened.” He whipped his head back when we heard the humans chanting to kill the beast. “I can’t do this with you right now. I’m taking you as far away from here that I can and when this battle is through, I will tell you everything.”

  “No. I will stand beside my friends and use the power raging inside of me to stop the bloodshed, once and for all.” With those final words, I pulled out my dagger and took off running toward our home where the animals waited for the command to stop the humans from moving any further through the woods.

  My father transformed back into his dragon form and glided through the sky past me. I ran fast, like a tiger, and arrived seconds after he’d landed and transformed back to human. Hundreds of tigers and lions paced, growling at the impending attack. My father could not understand them, but they could understand him and so, he stood in front of the ferocious beasts and took command.

  “Our land, the land of Golth, is under attack by the very hunters who have slaughtered our friends in that forest. Today, we will seek our revenge and destroy them with a vengeance. Today, we will no longer run in separate packs, but instead, unite as one in the battle of the century.”

  Piku turned toward me. “Zadie, ask your father how many there are.”

  “Tolbalth,” I said, wincing at the pain I saw in his eyes when I addressed him formally. “How many are there?”

  He moved his gaze back to the animals. “There are about three hundred men who are minutes away from clearing those trees. When they do, they will have exposed themselves to us. It will be then that we pounce. Now, we must move before it’s too late.”

  The animals scattered into the forest trees, navigating with stealth-like movements through the area they knew so well. Tolbalth turned toward me. “I’m begging you to stay behind and let us do what we must.” Before I could answer, he took off running, transformed and flew into the air, dipping into the trees and out of sight.

  I knew what I had to do. With the anger and rage balled up inside of me, my father had told me what to do for the last time. He had lost the privilege at the moment I’d discovered he’d lied to me. The pact we’d made to never lie to one another no longer carried any weight in our lives. I took off into the woods and maneuvered toward the hunters who came searching for a battle.

  Chapter Fourteen

  With each hunter who fell to the ground after a deadly wound, I managed to heal them and bring them back to life. It wasn’t that I was a strong witch, I just knew how to do certain things and with each wound and each resurrection, I grew stronger in my abilities to heal.

  As if the old witch doctor had parked the right spell inside my head, the words were there in my mind. I said them, but I hardly knew what they meant. After resting the palm of my hand across the healed hunter’s forehead, I repeated those words:

  Wander through the trees from where you came,

  Your destination no longer the same.

  Forget this place for it does not exist,

  Therefore, from this moment, you will desist.

  I watched each man I healed stand and move in the opposite direction of the fight. Confused and baffled, they left their
men behind on a mission to leave. My words had worked. How? Why? And yet, in some foreign place in my mind, I knew the answer to that. I understood the powers I had inside of me. With each man who’d died, I’d brought him back to life and with each animal that had faltered, I’d restored him.

  But I felt his eyes on me. I knew Tolbalth watched me undo what he’d done and yet, I didn’t care. I wanted the bloodshed to stop. I needed life to go back to the way it was when nothing had seemed this final. But in my rush to save lives while the rest destroyed them, I realized that my powers only went so far and thus, if a major organ was shattered, it would remain so. Those I could save disappeared into the forest on their journey home and those that I couldn’t lay to rest there at our feet. And those who were burned by Tolbalth didn’t stand a chance.

  Through my tear-blurred eyes, I saw the hunter lift his gun at me. It was the hunter I had saved from Tolbalth the first time he and his friend had ventured out this far. The one who had returned to the city and brought hundreds of men back with him.

  He lifted that rifle toward me and I could see the barrel aimed at my chest. I wanted to move, but it was all happening so fast and so, I sucked in my breath, glanced at Tolbalth and waited for the bullet to rip through my skin. But instead, a white blur jumped in front of me at the same time the echoed explosion of the rifle rang in my ears.

  I heard his yelp and then a thud. The bullet threw Piku to the side and he landed against the dirty ground with a hard hit. His body lifeless. When my eyes met that hunter’s face, I saw Tolbalth behind him and turned to help my best friend.

  “Noooooo!” I slid toward Piku and pulled him into me. “You’re okay, Piku. I’m here with you. You’re going to be okay.”

  He felt limp in my arms. Lifeless. My heart punched my chest and uncontrollable tears welled up in my eyes. I placed my open palm on the wound at his temple. And a glow formed between my hand and his head, but when I pulled my hand away, the hole was still there. I pulled him into me and cried into his fur. “Don’t do this to me, Piku. Please don’t do this. I need you. You’re my best friend.”

  The fighting around us left me like a sitting duck. I scooped him up and although he was heavy, I found strength within my adrenaline to carry him in my arms. I glanced at Tolbalth and kept walking, carrying my best friend away from the fighting—away from the chaos. As far away as I could possibly take him. I walked and cried and reassured him that he’d be okay. Even though I knew he wouldn’t be.

  Before I knew it, I stood deep inside the cave of Crens Peak where I’d followed my mother. I didn’t remember walking to the cave or even entering, but there I was, with Piku in my arms. I set him down next to the dripping fountain.

  Crying against the wrenching pain in the pit of my stomach, I reached my hand into the water and washed the red blood from his white fur. “Don’t leave me, please. How will I get through my days without you? Who will race me the way you do? Please, Piku.”

  I knew he was dead. Everything about him said as much, but I’d do anything to change that fact. In the distance, I could hear gunshots ring and men scream, I knew that they were dying and I didn’t care. I cared about nothing except my lifeless friend in my lap. I tilted my head back and released an agonizing cry. “Why? Why would you take him from me?”

  I placed his head gently on the ground as I stood. I felt anxious and angry. I wanted to march out to that battlefield and slaughter every last hunter. A need to destroy them ran through every vein in my body. As I sobbed uncontrollably, shoving my fingers through my hair, I sat down on a low rock and placed my wet hand down on the ground. It felt sticky. I pulled up my hand and with the limited light filtering through the cave, I saw the red blood on my hand—blood that wasn’t Piku’s or mine. Blood that had long dried up, decades prior.

  A vision shot through me. It played out as real as anything I’d ever seen. And like a movie, I eavesdropped on the past—on the night of my birth. I moved off the rock and toward the wall as I watched the events unfold. Hazy as it was, I could see everything detail of every second of that night of my birth exactly eighteen years prior.

  My mother sat on the very rock where I had been sitting and as blood covered her nightgown, she delivered me on that rock, her hands reaching down and pulling me from her womb. Nude and crying, I sucked at my fingers.

  As I watched the scene unfold, I saw a love in her eyes that I’d never known she’d had for me. The way she cradled me in her arms, her soft voice singing a lullaby. She placed her finger in my mouth and I suckled it, my nude body warm against hers. As I watched the past unfold, tears streamed down my face.

  She loved me, so why did she get rid of me? I wondered.

  My mother moved me from her finger to her breast and she fed me, my eyes barely open, the cave dark with the moonlight shimmering through small pinholes in the cavern above and reflecting off the water. With the utmost care, my mother carefully wrapped me in a shirt, swaddling me as she used the water from the fountain to clean my face, eyes and mouth.

  I’d never known how much she’d loved me until that moment—until that vision played in my mind with perfect harmony. Her touch was gentle. Her humming voice was soothing and as I watched, I saw a shadow as big and fierce as I’d ever seen come into the cave.

  I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Run! Mom, run!” But she couldn’t hear me. This was an echo of the past and nothing I said would change the end result. So, I had to watch her softly give me a bath as a predator stalked her in the cave.

  With my hand over my mouth and tears running down my face, I shook my head, begging the vision to stop, needing it to end at that moment. But I realized my needs would not be met. And so the ghastly beast stepped out from behind the shadows and showed its grotesque face and all I could do was cry out, “Nooooo! It can’t be. Not you!”

  A younger Tolbalth stepped out and stood in front of my mother. His eyes were glossy with fierce anger and he stepped down hard, shaking the ground. My mother glanced up, gasped and pulled me into her chest, stepping back and away, almost slipping on the blood from my birth.

  “What do you want?” she said. “You can’t be in here. You have to leave.”

  Tolbalth said nothing. Instead, he cocked his head back, preparing to spit fire at my mother. She pulled baby me into her chest.

  As I watched the past unfold, a desperate scream was lodged in my throat.

  My mother threw up her hand. “Wait!” She cried out. “Not my baby. Kill me, but don’t hurt her. Zadie doesn’t deserve to die.” She softly kissed my head and set me down on the ground in front of the fountain of water. “It’s me you want,” she whispered, as her frantic eyes moved from the huge dragon to her newborn baby.

  He cocked back and blew a stream of hot fire toward my mother, but instead of engulfing her in flames, he used the flames to encircle her and cage her in. Then he transformed into his human form—the man I knew so well—the one I called my father.

  He glared at my mother as the infant Zadie cried uncontrollably, wailing out against the heat of the cave. He stepped toward my mother and in a rough almost unrecognizable voice, he said, “You will know the pain of losing a child. You will suffer the fate of such a loss because killing you would be too easy—killing you would only end your misery in seconds.”

  “I don’t care what you do to me, but you better not hurt her or I’ll rain hell down on you,” she screamed out from behind the circle of flames.

  “I’m in hell,” Tolbalth roared. With those words, he picked me up and glanced down at me. Not with the same loving eyes I had grown to know, but with a disgust I’d never seen before. And then, he held me in the air and chanted:

  On this sacred ground where we stand,

  From this child, you are banned.

  Until the day you concede,

  With me, she’ll live and breathe.

  You will wander through dimensions’ doors.

  Blood for blood will right the score.

  I remembered that chant
. My heart ached. It was Tolbalth who had chanted that spell. And it was my mother and me who were at the receiving end.

  How could he do this?

  But while he chanted, I heard my mother chant a spell about my eighteenth birthday and the powers within me, seeking the truth in order to right the wrong. I heard her whispers at the same time that Tolbalth cast his spell and I understood what she wanted me to do—I knew that I’d have to kill him in order to break the spell he had cast to separate us.

  The vision disappeared. But my mother remained. She stood in front of me in her flowing white gown, staring at me with pained eyes. Then she glanced toward the cave opening and we both saw the large dragon shadow of Tolbalth step into the cavernous area where he’d been the night he stole me. The past was replaying in the present and I was no longer a baby without a choice. This time, eighteen years later, I’d have to choose.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A burst of uncontrollable rage toward Tolbalth thrust out of me. Running toward him, I slammed my palms into his beastly chest, barely budging him backward. “Why? Why did you take me from my mother?” I cried with fierce anger at the vision I’d just witnessed seconds prior.

  Tolbalth shook his dragon head and his bulky body stepped back, away from me. “Zadie, let me explain.”

  Moving away from him, I tried to get my thoughts straight and calm my adrenaline-induced nerves. I took three more steps back next to Piku’s body and a burst of light thrust up from the water. We were aligned. Exactly the way we all had been that night that Tolbalth had placed a spell on my mother. As if the past moved forward, my mother stood in a circle of flames, able to speak, yet still trapped within the curse he had cast on her.

  “Zadie,” she whispered.