I hope that I find what I seek in the mountain, and whatever power raised it is long gone. I beg all of creation that this spell fades, and the iele can be chased off by the threat of zmeu's breath. A scroll would have been better. She could have rested in wait for an eternity, a proper sentence for wanting to kill me.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

  Dragos blinked rapidly, then stilled again, back against the slowly warming stone. The hearthfire flickered merrily beside him, but few steps away, water whirled in the air. The enspelled iele vented her frustration with fists clenched, lips peeled back. Her hair whirled upward in a frenzied fountain around her.

  He couldn’t tell if she was mad at him for capturing her, or for the spell. Regardless, she was angry with him. He usually didn't care, but this time it felt distinctly uncomfortable for a reason he couldn't name.

  Fists dripping at her sides, she repeated, “What did you do to me?”

  Dragos pressed roughened fingers into his eyes and sighed. “Less than what you would have done to me, I promise you.”

  “All I want to do is be near you. Why? WHY!”

  Maybe he should have let her kill him. This constant questioning was almost worse. How could she not understand?

  “You don’t have to stay. Go back to the forest and live a peaceful existence with your sisters,” Dragos murmured, dropping his hand to look at her.

  Nature’s beauty, primal rage, and a spirit’s confusion confronted him. As he watched her, the waters of her body seemed to calm. Her expression melted into a wistful look. Her hand pressed to her belly, and the other to her chest.

  “Why do I feel things here… and here? I don’t understand…”

  “Feelings are not natural to your kind?” Dragos shifted to face her fully, his curiosity overriding his bone-weariness.

  “Not like this,” she whispered, drifting closer. She eyed the fire with a distinct wariness as she came to kneel beside him. His body blocked the heat that whispered from the hearth.

  “Interesting. Tell me more,” Dragos said. Before, he’d wondered what they could have to talk about when he promised they would. This was the answer.

  Would her feelings change over time? His name-gift spell had been powerful enough to bind the zmeu, and his commands were apparently still strong enough to keep it from indulging in its legendary lecherousness. From what he knew of love spells, they didn’t last. A day, a week, a year, a decade at most.

  “Right now, all I want is for you to look at me. Touch me. I want to hear your voice thrumming in my waters. I want it so badly it aches every part of me,” she said. As she did, she lifted a shimmering hand to slip into his.

  He didn’t resist but raised his hand away from his body, so she wouldn’t drip all over him. His clothes had just finished drying out.

  Her description was painful.

  It fed his ego, assuredly, but he recognized what he’d done. A fundamental alteration had happened. His spell had broken her nature in some way. A part of him was glad. One less iele selfishly murdering innocent wanderers, and yet… it was still wrong.

  Iele weren’t evil. They weren’t good, either. They were forces of nature, beyond such things as subtle emotions. Not that Dragos understood the things that churned his heart from time to time, but he’d thrown this being into a whole different world of sensation.

  She deserved it, but he’d still done her wrong.

  He looked into the glittering orbs of her eyes. “You’ve lost your ignorance of such things. That’s all. My spell gave you something you never had before. It should fade over time.”

  And then she’d probably kill him. Oh, well. He hoped that, like Zgavra, she’d start to wander. Until then, it was the three of them on his quest to gain an understanding of the powers that were taking hold in him.

  “That zmeu,” her tone darkened.

  It shook him out of the reverie of her gaze. She was quite pretty. His head tilted, a brow arching. Her hand tightened on his.

  “Why is it with you? I heard you two talking.”

  He distinctly didn’t like the note of jealousy in her tone.

  “We’ve been companions for a long time. I gave it a name-gift. It’s bound to me,” Dragos explained.

  “Fire-breathing menace,” she grumbled, frowning over her shoulder at the door.

  “Don’t fight with it. We’re all in this together,” Dragos said, his own grip tightening on her. He gave her hand a little tug to pull her attention back to him.

  “What are we in?” she asked.

  A bitter laugh escaped him, and he let go of her. He rubbed his palms together and then scrubbed his face with his damp hands. It felt cleaner than the sweat that slicked his skin.

  “My power is growing. I can only guess it’s because of my continued exposure to the eminence of the Umbregrin and the Zioruluc, but it’s been changing me. I have to learn how to control the changes before they consume me. We’re on a quest to find my teacher’s grimoire and her tools, so I can harness it.”

  “What happens if you fail?” she asked, leaning forward.

  “I die. Or worse, I become Sangestriga.” The squeeze in his chest at the thought was not from the idea of becoming one. It was from memory. Chinhua’s wild hunger and explosive end were seared forever in his memory.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Water brushed his chin. The iele’s digits ran along the curve of his lips. Her face mimicked the frown he felt on his face.

  “For your sake, I’ll help you. I don’t like this,” she murmured, her finger pausing on the corner of his lips. She gave it a gentle push upward. “I like this way better.”

  A brief exhale of a chuckle left him.

  The door’s rattle drew his gaze from her. Zgavra stepped in, it its dragon-kin figure on two legs, claws gripping the door frame as it peered in. “Oh, should I come back?”

  Dragos rolled his eyes. “No. Come in. What did you find? Is there a passable way in?”

  The monster swept in and shut the door behind it, then went over to the fire and sat on the other side of the hearth. The str?luciele’s hiss resembled water spraying from a clogged fountain.

  Dragos snapped a look at her. “Stop. We’re in this together, remember?”

  She inched closer to him and shot the zmeu a dirty look, but silenced herself. Her dislike was palpable. The zmeu, on the other hand, seemed as relaxed and carefree as ever. No doubt it was more powerful than the water spirit, and enjoyed the drama of her dislike.

  “Ash. Whatever went through ?oloman?? melted handprints in the stone walls. I found—remnants. Bits of bone in the ruins.” Zgavra leaned against the stone and casually bruised its hand through the dancing flames. Its nostrils flared briefly, then it spoke again. “There was a passage that let out above a spring. You should be able to walk through. It led to a reservoir inside.”

  Lavina had said Hana was on fire. The sickening thwack of an axe echoed in Dragos’s head. He closed his eyes against the memory. Licking his rough lips, he nodded briefly. When he looked at Zgavra again, he asked, “What else?”

  “Something is still there,” Zgavra said, its tone dark.

  Dragos raised a brow. “Such as?”

  “Whatever it was hid from me. I moved quickly, but couldn’t find anything, though, I confess I didn’t search every dusty chamber.”

  ?oloman?? was vast. Dragos wasn’t sure he even knew every chamber there was. The Solomonari liked their secrets to stay secret, even from their students. The ancient complex of tunnels and worked stone existed long before Mirel’s time.

  That something could melt handprints in walls…

  “Do you think something human did it?”

  “Only with a power that is too great for a human,” Zgavra replied, plucking up an iron poker to toy with the burning wood in the fire.

  The str?luciele flinched and shuffled further around Dragos to use as a shield from the fire and the zmeu, both.

  “What about the Solomonari?” Dragos asked. Was it not Necaz, but someone else? Had the brotherhood been betrayed from within? The Solomonari had appeared to have a fine-tuned balance. They did not seem to have associated very closely most of the time. Each had a remoteness about them, though most of them did laugh or smile on occasion.

  “Not likely,” the zmeu commented. It twirled the iron, its smug orange gaze looking past Dragos. At the water spirit. “They are weak in fire magic. That’s famously why they choose fire spirits for mounts.”

  “Oh, is it that famous?” Dragos scoffed. As the zmeu stared at the str?luciele, irritation bubbled up. Dragos snapped his fingers at it. “Stop taunting Luci and tell me more about what you sensed.”

  Luci?

  “Luci?” As if Zgavra read his mind. It tossed the iron shaft away to clang on the floorboards. “You gave that wretch a name?”

  Not on purpose. It just slipped out. Dragos hadn’t thought about it at all.

  “I’m not a wretch! You are!” Luci shot up to her feet, slashing an accusing finger at the zmeu. “Fire spirits, always clinging to human striga, as if you can’t exist on your own!”

  Dragos scowled. That sounded like an indirect insult towards himself. He wasn’t striga. Not really. Was he?

  “Moroi viu,” Dragos mumbled, but that really wasn’t much better. When ‘cursed and alive’ is a mere gradient of ‘abomination of life,’ was there a point to mincing the words, anymore?

  Zgavra stood up. Dragos shot to his feet, squaring himself between them. He stared into the zmeu’s blazing eyes. His jaw worked for a moment before he stated with controlled calm, “We are what we are. Those things don’t matter. What we do matters.”

  The zmeu snorted steam and folded its arms over its chest, but its spine was less stiff. It turned its head away from both of them dismissively, but stayed still. Dragos took that for a begrudging agreement and shifted to face the str?luciele.

  “I apologize for the name. If you don’t like it, I’ll continue to call you str?luciele.”

  If water could blush. Her bristling flesh calmed, the ripples smoothing over right away. The waves over her eyes that looked like eyelids dipped. “I don’t mind.”

  Something was endearing about that. Dragos grinned a little at her reassuringly. Something itched in his thoughts, something he should have been considering. He couldn’t think of what it was, so he didn’t bother chasing the thought into the darkness of his mind.

  “Luci, this is Zgavra. Zgavra, Luci. We’re working together, so let’s stay civil,” Dragos stated, turning so that they were no longer in a line, but in the points of an invisible triangle.

  He knew he’d be having this conversation often. Lumini, spirits were just as bad as people. Taking stock of the citation, he glanced around the cabin. When he left it, he’d taken every morsel of food left behind.

  There was precious little to be found so high up. His spirit flagged at the thought of hunting animals so close to his old home. He’d rather not kill acquaintances.

  “I need to forage and prepare what I can. We don’t know what we’ll face.” Dragos turned toward the zmeu. “Will you stay and keep the fire burning?”

  Zgavra glanced at Luci, then humphed. But its arms uncrossed, and it sat down, gaze on the flames.

  “Luci, if you want to come with me,” Dragos offered the vial he’d carried her in. Luci flicked glances between the vial and the zmeu, then swirled into a continuous stream, until there was a girl of water no more, and the vial was full. Dragos tucked it away in his pocket and gave Zgavra a grim look.

  “We have a lot of exploring to do once we get into the mountain. If you think of anything useful, I’d appreciate it if you mentioned it.”

  Zgavra scratched its wedge of a chin and glanced around. “I’ll see if I can’t find something useful here.”

  “Good.” Just as Dragos was about to pull the door open, Zgavra’s tone gave him pause.

  “I’m somewhat excited about all this. Who knows what we’ll find?” The zmeu scrubbed its hands together, orange orbs glowing fiercely.

  Dragos couldn’t match its enthusiasm. He grunted a neutral acknowledgement and left the cabin’s warmth.

  (zmyeh-oo): Shapeshifter dragon

  Umbregrin (UM-bruh-grin) [rolled r]: The spirit river of darkness and entropy. Without balance, it can cause overwhelming despair, blindness, madness, and terrible decay. The dark spirit river. Like the concept of yin and yang., The Umbregrin is the yin spirit river, which balances the pulse of the world.

  Ziorluc (zee-OR-luc): The spirit river of light and growth. Without balance, it can cause overwhelming bliss, blindness, madness, and overgrowth in overabundance.

  Sangestriga (suhn-GUH STREE-guh): a vampire.

  Str?luciele (Struh-loo-che-eleh): iele of spring waters

  ?oloman?? (Shoh-loh-MAHN-tsuh): The Dark School, where Solomonari take moroi viu to learn their ways. It rests in the bowels of the Spineback Mountain, not far from the Embrace.

  Striga/Strigoi (STREE-guh)/(stree-GOY): All manner of creatures with wounded souls. It could refer to the undead, to witches, or ghosts, depending on the context.

  Lumini (loo-MEE-nee): Light