What I know of zemu is that they are no more evil than humanity. Their fire purifies just as well as the torches of the Lumnatori.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

  “Why are we burning it?” Alina said, her eyes reflecting the licks of orange that danced before them.

  Zgavra hadn’t waited for them but flew off to do the deed as soon as Dragos nodded. They’d followed to where the fields were aflame. Smoke rolled off the village, and even at a furlong, Dragos could feel the heat.

  Night pressed down, a veil of purple overtaking the fading warm peach streaks in the sky. The last of the sun’s yellow rays flashed and was gone. Shadows danced instead by fire like playful imps. The peculiar stench of the fire bore nothing Unspoken with it. Even that, which lay beyond man’s concepts of life and death, came to its own kind of end.

  “Fire didn’t help my uncle,” Alina continued. She didn’t look at Dragos, his cloak clutched around her, enshrouding her in black. Only her face was revealed and detailed with the orange brush of the fire.

  “Ashlings hate temperature changes. Slipcloth merely wants to flow like water. The fire will separate them,” Dragos said, likewise a haunt standing beside the growing blaze. “This kind of blaze would have been too much for your uncle to bear.”

  “What shall I do now?” Alina asked, her gaze held a depth of loss that Dragos understood. Intimately.

  “Live,” he said.

  “I…” Her head dropped, and she hugged his cloak about her tighter. “I can’t believe this. I miss them so much…”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged with the forlorn echo loss in his voice. The hollow pain, which came and went, swelled in his chest.

  Together, they watched it burn. Buildings collapsed. The hiss and pop of wet wood, the crack of dry. Firefly embers floated above, drifting on the waves of heat. The scent took on a more common smell. Grass and wood, and somewhere within that, the sizzle of flesh. Livestock and villagers alike.

  Zgavra crept along the shadowed edge beyond the doomed village, its eyes as bright as the fire it lit. Alina shot it a doubtful look. The zmeu slunk closer, floating through the dark, barely more than a pair of eyes as it approached them. She leaned away.

  “Can you make it stop doing that?” she asked, scowling openly as the zmeu openly stalked around her, watching her with its blazing orange eyes.

  Dragos shot Zgavra a glance and sighed. “You cannot have her as a wife, Zgavra.”

  Alina’s lip curled up, and she glanced from the draconic figure to Dragos. “What—what does it do with its wives?”

  Dragos shrugged. “Don’t know. Legends say they have castles across the veil of Umbre, but its never said if that was true.”

  Her gaze flicked over Zgavra, who took the moment to shapeshift into a stunningly handsome man in a wealthy merchant’s clothing. It strolled towards Alina and offered her its hand in greeting.

  Dragos stared daggers at the zmeu and slapped its hand down before Alina could take it. “No.”

  “Why not?” Zgavra said, offering Alina a beguiling smile.

  Dead ice crackled Dragos's words as he spoke. “Because I do not know what happens to your wives. I won’t be responsible for that.”

  “You are a stick in the mud, Dragos,” Zgavra stated with the volume of one much offended.

  Dragos noted Alina’s eyes roaming Zgavra’s new figure and pointed at her, “Stop that.”

  “I can’t just look?” She shot back, rolling her eyes at Dragos. “He picked a good face. I know what he is. I’m not stupid or in the mood for romance. My whole family is dead, Dragos.”

  “I know,” Dragos murmured and turned away. “It doesn’t need its ego fed.”

  With that smile? If she wanted a distraction from her loss, Zgavra could be charming when it desired, and distract her right across the veil. Dragos shot a look at the zmeu, snorted in disgust, and strode through waist-high wheat, away from the brushfire, across a wide irrigation ditch and another field.

  The zemu caught up quickly, shedding its human skin for streaks of fur and scale, a cloud as much as a dragon. “I merely jest, Owl.”

  “You press, dragon,” Dragos replied curtly, and climbed a short slope to a spot flattened by deer the night before. It would do for a bivouac, at the risk of fleas and ticks.

  Alina joined them as Dragos set his wards against Nerostit?; five slender iron spikes, shorter than his hand, were thrust into the ground around the circle. He walked the circle clockwise, murmuring the protection spell, pausing to touch each spike.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Zgavra floated back, away from the warding circle, orange eyes glittering.

  Alina stepped through it before she saw what he was doing. She watched him, head tilting as she listened. “What is that?”

  “Cin’ intr?, s? r?t?ceasc?,

  Cin’ vede, s? nu cunoasc?,

  Cin’ cheam?, s? nu fie auzit,

  Cin’ caut?, s? nu g?seasc?.

  Sub fier ?i sub pa?i, pleac?.”

  Dragos returned to the center and sat, shrugging his peddler’s box from his shoulders. He glanced at her as she knelt near and explained, “Warding spell. I’ll teach you. That’s the one bit of magic the Light-fearing don’t care about.”

  As she curled up in the voluminous folds of his cloak, he added, “You’ll need it more than most. Now that the Unspoken has touched you, you can see the shadows of that which walks the world beside us. They might be drawn to you.”

  It was dim, so far beyond the fire. Her face was a mere shadow, but he believed she understood. He lay back and looked up at the night sky. Starlight pricked the canopy, filtering down their tenuous light. The scent of grass was thick and wild all around him. Insects took up their night songs amidst the cooling air, sweet and thick with moisture. The faint reek of the fire clung to their clothes; soot afloat had left charcoal stains on both of them. Dragos could still hear the crackle of it in the distance.

  “I’m so angry at myself,” Alina said after a long stretch of silence.

  Dragos turned his head toward her dim silhouette. “You’re no more to blame than the rain that falls and floods a river, Alina. Nature has its ways. We can only bend to it and do what we can to survive.”

  She fell quiet again. Not completely. She sniffled and sighed, tossed this way and that. Eventually, she settled onto her back to watch the same stars that Dragos gazed upon.

  “What is the name of the next town over?” he asked, intending to sketch out his growing map of the countryside in the morning.

  He heard Alina’s voice hitch with controlled grief as she coughed, “Morileni.”

  “We’ll go there,” he whispered, rolling towards her.

  Her fresh pain woke old aches inside him. Memories pushed at his skull, demanding he turn them over, again and again. He stretched a hand out to her. She clasped it, her own grip trembling in his.

  They lay there, quiet but for tears and ragged breath. Sleep appeared like a host making rounds at a party, in brief welcomes, lost just as quickly to other concerns, until dawn came to warm their dewy skin. Dragos let go of Alina’s hand to pull his stakes up.

  As they walked along fields toward the next cart track of a road, Dragos said, “Look at me.”

  Alina glanced at him, and when he said nothing else, asked, “And?”

  Dragos stopped. “Unfocus your vision, and then look deep. Recognize what is around me.”

  “Like wheat?” Alina said, but as she said it, her expression changed. She stilled. “What is that?”

  “Nerostit?,” he murmured. He could see the ones around him out of the corners of his eyes. Darkest shadow, brightest pinpricks of light, like a swarm of midges all around him.

  Alina had the same, but hers were mostly dark, a black throng of tiny spirits swirling around her. Her experience had been with the Umbre spirits. Dragos knew he had a legion of spirits around him. Alina only had a few.

  “Prin harul lumini,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes. “I don’t want to see that.”

  “Ignore it the best you can, but pay attention when you need to. You’ll never stumble into slipcloth again.” Dragos's grim smile wasn’t exactly reassuring, but the truth was there.

  She’d never make the same naive mistakes.

  They traveled along the dusty track in that way until the fields of Morileni came into sight from the forest road. Lush and welcoming, the village sprawled out before them. Dragos glanced at Alina, who offered him a wan smile, her eyes red-rimmed but her head higher than as she’d plodded the road.

  “Now what?” she asked, her gaze turning to the town.

  It was just another place to him, but it neighbored Lunc?re?ti. Perhaps she knew people. If she was lucky, she might gain a place in someone’s heart, for her tragedy if nothing else.

  “Now, you must go on without me,” Dragos said. He pointed at his face. “I’ll ruin your chances of finding a farm that needs a worker or a shop that needs a hand. They might give you a job if they know of you. Your loss will soften at least one heart down there.”

  “My family is—was known,” she whispered, her lower lip quivering with doubt as much as anything.

  She looked down at the silver clasp of his cloak and undid it. “This is yours.”

  He accepted his cloak back, slinging it over his head right away to hide his damning hair. She frowned. “Why don’t you just shave it off?”

  “It grows back too fast,” he sighed ruefully. “Hardly matters. People fear my gaze and pallor as well.”

  “Oh, your eyes are strange, but…” Alina smiled. Perhaps the most real smile he’d seen yet on her face. “You’re not something wicked.”

  A half-hearted, rueful smile grew. He nodded and raised his hand in farewell.

  “Be safe, Alina. Never tell anyone the truth, and take the herbal tea I gave you twice a week for the next month,” Dragos said.

  Alina waved back. Her soot-stained white nightgown fluttered in the breeze.

  Dragos turned on his heel, fighting off his doubts.

  The mountain ranges dominated the horizon in the furthest distance. The Embrace. He had wandered far from what had once been home, those soaring mountains above the spirit-rivers. Dragos tugged his hood aside as he glanced over his shoulder. Alina had already become a small white figure against the earthen road and plush meadow.

  One day, he’d come back to Morileni to see how she’d fared, he promised himself. Until then, he hoped the next stranger he stumbled upon would lead him to his own lost beginnings.

  What was left of it.

  He couldn’t be the last of them.

  Click this link.

  (zmyeh-oo): Romanian dragon shapeshifter

  Cin’ intr?, s? r?t?ceasc?,

  Cin’ vede, s? nu cunoasc?,

  Cin’ cheam?, s? nu fie auzit,

  Cin’ caut?, s? nu g?seasc?.

  Sub fier ?i sub pa?i, pleac?.

  Who enters, let them lose their way,

  Who sees, let them not understand,

  Who calls, let them not be heard,

  Who seeks, let them not find,

  Beneath iron, beneath steps, depart.

  (UM-bruh): shadow.

  Nerostit? (neh-ross-TEE-teh): Calruthian word for all things unnatural or strange, synonymous with Unspoken. Places, events, and situations can be referred to as this, as well as beings.

  (PREEN HAH-rool loo-MEE-nee) [rolled r]: By the Light