Windburn(4)

She moved at the last second, so I ended up thumping my shoulder into hers.

“Half-breed freak,” Petal said before she spat at my feet a second time. The two pieces of my spear hanging at my side beckoned me with a deadly whisper. One quick twist and the weapon would be whole. I could hold the blade to her throat and force her to apologize.

Before Peta could say anything, I’d already tamped the anger down. We were clear of the planting fields now. “Peta, how can they be so blind? Cassava was the one who brought the lung burrowers, then held our family hostage with the cure.”

Peta was quiet for a moment. “The humans have a funny saying I heard once, and I didn’t understand it at the time as I was very young. But more and more I see it to be true. ‘The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.’ They knew Cassava, knew she was horrible and out of her mind.”

Slowly I nodded, understanding what she was getting at. “And so they would rather deal with Cassava than an unknown factor. Even if it’s Bella.”

“Or your father.” She shook her head. “From what I’ve gleaned in the last few days, he didn’t rule much. Cassava ruled through him. In his own way, he is an unknown factor to his own people.”

“Damn.” I breathed the word out. She was right.

“So bringing him back doesn’t really give them a measure of peace, because in their minds, you are bringing back a puppet.”

Her words didn’t have long to echo in my ears before a new problem arose, one I’d been dreading. The blasted field section of the Rim was where the earth had died. A plague long before I’d been born had eaten away at the dirt and now nothing was left. No power to draw, no nutrients for plants and animals. And it was where I had hidden the two gemstones.

The gray earth had footprints all around, crisscrossing back and forth.

“Oh, this is bad, Peta,” I whispered. “How in the seven hells did anyone figure out where I’d hidden them?”

“Hidden what?” She leapt from my shoulder and sniffed the ground. “I smell nothing. I see footprints but there is no scent. There is only one Elemental I know who can do that.”

“Blackbird.”

Him wanting the two gemstones didn’t make sense. Blackbird was the only elemental who carried all five elements. He was the child Requiem had been trying to breed in the Deep. A monstrosity of power and destruction.

“Explain what is hidden and why Blackbird wants it.” Peta trotted in front of me, her gray fur blending with the ashen earth, creating a strange camouflage where moment to moment she almost disappeared.

“I have two of the stones from the legend of the five.”

She stopped with her paw mid-air, and her head swivelled to look at me. “Come again.”

“I have the pink diamond and the smoky diamond. Spirit and Air.”

Carefully she lowered her paw and sat. “And someone knows where they are hidden besides you?”

“I told no one.” I headed for the boulder I’d buried them under, far deeper than I needed to, probably. At least that was what I thought when I’d done it. Now I wasn’t so sure.

I dropped to my knees and buried my hands into the loose, dead soil. I dug down through the layers of the blasted earth with my power. Peta stood beside me with her front paws on my thighs. “You know, you should not be able to do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The soil is dead, Lark. Nothing can grow here. There is nothing left to be manipulated. There is no power in it.”

It took a full minute for the bag I’d buried to be pulled up through the ground. “Must be another quirk of mine.” I gave her a grin and she shook her head.

“Quirk? You’re just plain weird, Dirt Girl. You do supposedly impossible things without any problem.”

I shrugged. “Spirit boosts my power with the earth. We know that.”

“But this much?”

I had no answer. I didn’t know why I could do what I could do. Maybe because I was the mother goddess’s chosen one.

Or maybe I was a freak, as Petal had said.

Under my fingers rolled the pliable leather bag I’d put the two gemstones in. With a quick look around, I pulled the bag out and peered inside.

“Drop them into your hand. Someone could have switched them,” Peta said. Goddess, I hoped she was wrong.

I spilled the stones onto my palm. They glittered. Swirls of power glimmered and flickered from their depths, sending a scattering of rainbow flecks over my arms. I had no doubt these were the originals.

I sighed, relief washing over me. I stuffed them back into the leather bag and then inside my vest. “I have to hide them again, but where?”