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“That one, too?” Odson asked, nodding to the other book she still clutched to her chest.
“This one’s just ancient dragon mythology.”
Turning, he set the old tome on a tabletop. His large, scarred hands were gentle as he handled the vellum pages.
To Marli, that right there was Odson. Large and scarred, but ever so gentle when it mattered most.
He was Jori’s biological uncle, but Marli viewed him as her own surrogate uncle as well.
Many of the younger Aeleftherians did, even though he rarely set foot on the island.
He was a living legend, and nearly everyone sought him out when they went adventuring off-island to the continent.
She smiled to herself. He acted more like a doting aunty to everyone, than the hardened old warrior that he was.
“Here it is.” He tapped the page with a trim, clean fingertip.
“What is?” Jori leaned over the table to see the map Odson pointed at.
“The old territories?” Stenlen leaned in too.
“Have you been in Kargassa’s vaults yet?”
“Vaults? No. There hasn’t been time to inventory his treasure hoard with everything else we’ve had to do; keeping the peace, ensuring oaths, following up on who’s still here and who’s left…who’s determined to take my head, versus who might protect it. You know.” Jori shrugged.
“Long winded, but okay. Clearly you need some time away, Jori.”
Jori’s lips compressed. “Yeah, that would be nice. Anyway. The vaults?”
“I think this is important—not urgent, mind you, but I’ll have to talk to some folks.” Odson drew a breath, lining up his thoughts. He turned to Elora. “Did mom tell you the old stories? The really old ones, from before the divide?”
“The myths?” She nodded at Marli’s book. “Of course. I was very young, but every Aeleftherian heard those stories.”
The hair rose all over Marli’s body. Odson was excited about something to do with the myths and the old days. She never saw him excited. About anything, ever. Her heart pounded, waiting for him to get to his point.
“I finally finished reading Kargassa’s autobiography.”
“Odson, you’re all over the place.”
“Bear with me here.” He pointed at the map, with a mountain at its center. “Aeleftheria has always existed in some form or place. But before the divide, many of her inhabitants lived here, at the mountain.”
“Okay.” Marli nodded.
“In Kargassa’s book, he mentioned a young dragon that joined the tribe some decades ago. This young dragon introduced Kargassa to a group he called the Consortium. Kargassa boasted about how this group of self-proclaimed liberators sought an alliance with him. He wined and dined them, learned what they were all about, drew them in, bringing them to the edge of agreement. Played them. Then he turned them away.”
“You said that book was mostly fiction.”
“It is. Mostly. The Consortium is real. It’s complicated. The point is, that he said they’d discovered that the mountain dragon lord held what they thought was some kind of key.”
“So, what does this key open?”
“I don’t know, but I know someone who might.”
“What does it look like?”
“Don’t know that either.”
“So, there may or may not be some kind of key which we don’t know what it looks like, stored in the vaults, based on a potentially fictitious recounting of an obscure group of liberators.”
