Page 15 of The Dryad Storm

Panic breaks through her lightlines like a crimson tide. The image of the Wand of Myth blasts through her mind and strobes there, as if in blaring warning. Gwynn darts off the plaza and into the shadows of an alley, then down a side street. Reaching into her tunic’s pocket with a shaking hand, she grabs hold of one of the Issani demon-diversion rune stones she’s pilfered from the Valgard armory’s cache of magical tools from all the lands, the golden-rune-marked Issani stones able to draw off a pyrr-demon’s sight tracking. She presses its center, activating the rune, then hurls the stone into a side alley before swerving down another street, inwardly flinching as an intimidating mob of male Mages pass by. Their gazes slide over her strict Styvian garb and white armband as they pass, nodding with looks of approval.

Every nerve blazing, Gwynn purposefully bumps into a Mage at the mob’s rear, murmuring her apologies as she surreptitiously slips another activated stone into the stern young man’s pocket before she turns around a corner.

Her gaze alights on a Wanted poster tacked on the storefront window beside her, and she skids to a halt before it. There are identical postings tacked up all over the city, a drawing of a young, wickedly striking Mage printed on them. He glares at her with a conniving expression, his feral green eyes seeming to peer straight into Gwynn’s soul, a dark wand raised menacingly in his hand.

Wandmaster Mavrik Glass.

Traitor to the Magedom. Wanted by the Mage Guard.

Gwynnifer’s eyes slide toward the Wanted poster to the right of Mavrik Glass’s,a posting Gwynnhasn’tseen before. Paling, she takes in the female emblazoned on it, a sinister Alfsigr Icaral demon with evil silver eyes, her black wings fanned out threateningly, a green Wand-Stylus with a spiraling handle in the Icaral demon’s bone-pale hand.

Wynter Eirllyn, the posting says.Icaral beast and runic sorceress. The Icaral and her Wand of Power wanted by the Mage Guard.

Gwynn’s gaze zeroes in on the Wand, the whole world receding as the image of the verdant Wand pulses through her mind once more and an astonishing realization punches into her.

The Wand of Myth... it’s in the possession of an Icaral demon.

The sulfuric red gaze of Vogel’s pyrr-demons invades Gwynn’s mind. She remembers how those same demons relentlessly tracked the Wand so many years ago, before she sent it away with Sage Gaffney. Demons aboveground and demons below, all wanting the Great Wand of Myth. And now, one of them has it.

But this Icaral demon... Gwynn’s been assured by the Resistance that Wynter Eirllyn is an ally.

Bent on trusting the Resistance, Gwynn lurches back into motion. She rounds another corner and finds a bonfire aflame in a small plaza’s center. The bonfire’s heat licks over her as she cautiously passes and takes in the great pile of Gardnerian women’s clothing being eaten by the flames. Four conservatively garbed Mage women stand beside the fire, slim torches gripped in their hands. Their searching gazes look over Gwynn, and they nod at her equally strict garb, devoid of the forbidden Fae colors Gwynn spots on the burning fabric—vivid purple embroidery edging the hem of one; saffron daisies fashioned from delicate ribbon scattered over another.

The forbidden hues sizzle through Gwynn’s Level One lightlines, and she tenses her wand hand against their pull, shuddering to think of what might have become of the owners of that garb since wearing Fae colors became an imprisonable crime.

Her own attraction to Fae colors now an imprisonable crime.

Every night, mobs with torches stalk the streets, rooting out the “impurities” of the city, burning books and other “blasphemous” items. Ransacking stores thought to be impure and setting them alight with Blessing Stars. And every night, Urisk are at risk of being beaten and having the points of their ears viciously cropped.

In the narrow alley that leads to her home, Gwynn slows and focuses on two small cloaked figures huddled there. Relief floods her—the two Urisk girls are waiting just where she told them to be.

Ten-year-old Bloom’ilya and skinny six-year-old Ee’vee fearfully meet her gaze. Little Ee’vee is pulling in stacatto breaths, the blue-hued child’s large sapphire eyes glancing repeatedly at the alley’s ends, her threadbare cloth toy fawn clutched in one arm. Bloom’ilya looks wan and equally frightened, hunched low and holding on to Ee’vee’s hand.

Gwynn’s heart twists at the sight of the girls’ mutilated ears, her own pain forced away as she’s faced with the nightmare bearing down on these two children.

“Are you ready?” Gwynn whispers, and the girls respond with jerky nods. “Wait here,” Gwynn directs, summoning a hard edge of courage on their behalf, hating to leave them, but certain that they’re safe here for the moment.

When she exits the dark alley, Gwynn’s home comes into view.

Her emotions seize at the sight of the beloved, charmingly vertical house, sandwiched between Valgard’s sprawling armory and Mage Council offices, one room to each story. All Gwynn’s happy childhood memories are wrapped up in this wedged-in space. All her happy adult memories, too, the one-room apartment she shares with Geoffrey located high up on the dwelling’s fifth floor.

Gwynn’s gaze sweeps toward the armory, determination firing as she takes in the threadbare force of two Level Five soldiers standing sentry before it, the six additional soldiers who are usually stationed there attending Vogel’s rally. The soldiers nod to her in greeting as she approaches her home’s Ironwood front door, Ironflowers carved into the door’s dark wood to convey a protective blessing.

Forcing measured breaths, Gwynn retrieves her keys from her tunic pocket, unlocks the door with a trembling hand and slips inside. She shuts the door firmly and relocks it, glancing toward the unlocked kitchen window across from her that Wandmaster Mavrik Glass is supposed to slip through any moment now, the window’s forest green curtains slid open.

Leaning against the front door, her palms to the polished Ironwood, Gwynn forces measured breaths and closes her eyes as she summons every last sliver of will. Doggedly setting back into motion, she opens her eyes and races up and up and up her home’s spiraling staircase, until she reaches the tower bedroom of her childhood at its apex.

She pauses, struck hard by grief.

Her mother has kept the space frozen in time. White birds and Blessing Stars Gwynn fashioned from paper years ago in a rush of religious zeal hang from slim strings throughout the room in happy flocks and constellations. As they are onevery floor, dead Ironwood trees are set into the walls, their leafless branches tangling overhead, the dead trees symbolic of Mage dominion over the Fae wilds. Countless religious books and pious journals line the shelves set below the tower’s ring of windows, which afford a panoramic view of nighttime Valgard. Gwynn pivots to her craft table, pushed up against one of the windows, the surface still littered with multiple replicas she carved, so many years ago, of the Wand of Myth.

The Wand now in the hands of an Alfsigr Icaral demon.

Her pulse a steady, pounding rhythm, Gwynn lowers herself to the Ironwood floor and searches under her broad bed. Her breath catches as she finds all her forged and stolen grimoires gone, smuggled away as she was told they would be, her sacks of carefully fashioned and pilfered rune stones taken, as well.

She straightens and peers out the windows at the unimpeded view. The Ironflower trees that used to stand around the tower were mercilessly cut down, as were all the living trees in Valgard, to cleanse the city of their “Fae stain.” For a moment, she’s overcome by the bittersweet memory of how, for years before she and Geoffry were Sealed, he would climb those trees and visit her on the sly.

Swallowing back a suffocating swell of misery, Gwynn grabs her stuffed travel sack and moves to throw its strap over her shoulder.

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