The Dream Keeper's Dragon

3.29 Do Not Speak His Name

Kaiden and Orken decided that four shadow walkers were enough and that if the witches had something sinister planned, the sheer number would not matter as they'd be prepared for an army. Nobody liked it but with the King dead, Halbrook had little reason to keep their grudge or to seek vengeance over peace and there was nothing on earth that could change Aurelie's mind. She was going.

They were on the guest balcony, preparing to leave while Daerious and Orken to feast on what they could scavenge from the wedding feast downstairs. It had turned into more of a memorial meal but they didn't mind that much either.

Orken had received another letter that morning and told her very little other than that he was confident everything would go over well. She tried to pry but he was having none of it and if she hadn't had so much to do, she'd force the information out of him but then Kaiden found her for the fifth time that morning and the conversation shifted toward her safety . . . again.

"If anything goes wrong," Kaiden said, "set the whole bloody place on fire and run toward the mountain."

Aurelie nodded. "Let's get going, shall we?" She looked the men, clenching her jaw. Since the crack of dawn, she'd had Kaiden chirping in her ear, saying the same damn thing over and over again. She'd grown tired of it and a swirl of irritation turned and twisted in her chest. "Do you mind, uncle?" she said as a hesitant shadow walker tried to find a place to stand near her.

He stepped back, wiped at his dry lips and took a deep breath, nodding to himself as if he had just come to an agreement in his head.

Aurelie extended her hand impatiently toward one of the shadow walkers and waited for him all to lock hands. They were quite young. Perhaps three or four years her senior. Only one looked like he had signed up for the job, the others looked like they were saying silent prayers.

The eager one started first. Aurelie felt the pull from his portal almost instantly. It all reminded her of Kirin quite terribly. She had kept her tears back over her father's funeral but the dark windy swirls of the portal caught her off guard. As the darkness engulfed her and she felt the edge of the drop tug at her stomach, she heard a faint scream come from the grounds below them.

"Aurelie!" Deborah screamed. "Princess Aurelie, we found Kirin."

"What?" Aurelie asked rhetorically, already trying to pry her hand out of the shadow walker's grip, only to have him hold tighter.

"We found him and they won't let us see you!"

Aurelie heart sank, whether from the final drop of the portal or the news she didn't know. "Let go," she said but her voice disappeared into the void of the portal

***

The shadow walker's dragged their feet as they followed behind her, exhausted from the travels.

They walked for hours and still had not found the compound. Aurelie's impatience grew stronger by the second. She thought about sending them straight back to the castle but there was no way that the four of them would handle another trip.

An abandoned hut stood awkwardly in the middle of a dry field of long grass. From afar, it had looked identical to a long-drop that they had at the cottage, but once Aurelie neared it, a small crescent moon appeared on the wall.

"Three knocks gets you an answer and four gets you the floor." Aurelie read aloud, and frowned, looking back at the shadow walkers who clearly had no idea what it meant either.

Aurelie knocked three times and waited. She had been stuck in her wedding dress throughout the whole ordeal.

"Yes," an old man's croaky voice sounded out of the gap created by the crescent moon carving on the door.