Marked by Magic (The Baine Chronicles #4)(57)

My nose and ears led me to a spring a good two miles into the dense vegetation, and I drank greedily, then rolled around in the cool water for a bit. Ahhh, bliss. In animal form, my human worries felt much less urgent – as a beast, all I cared about was slaking my immediate needs.

Once I was satisfied, however, I remembered that I needed to figure out where the hell I was. A quick climb up a tall, long-limbed tree with thick, dark green leaves told me what I needed to know. Clinging to the trunk, I swiveled my head, taking in the miles and miles of sparkling blue sea that stretched in all directions, broken only by a tiny land mass off in the distance.

I was on a f*cking island. And unless I was very much mistaken, there was no sign of civilization here.

Climbing down the tree, I began to explore the forest, wondering if there might not be indigenous people living among them. I needed to get the lay of the land, find out exactly what I was up against. If there were people around, maybe they had some kind of boat or canoe that I could commandeer.

And then what? I scoffed at myself. You don’t know the first thing about sailing, and even if you did, you have no idea where to go.

Yeah, okay. Maybe that was true, but I’d cross that bridge if and when I came to it.

I padded back out to the beach again, still in panther form, and did a walk around the island. My little stroll turned up no boats, canoes, or fishing contraptions of any kind, and the only footprints I came across were my own, when after some two hours, I finally came back to where I started.

Upon re-entering the forest, I immediately forgot all about searching for human life when the appetizing scent of blood hit my nostrils. Wild boar. I stalked the scent to a small clearing about a mile away, where I found the wounded boar drinking from a stream. Quills sticking out from its right rear leg told me it had recently lost a tangle with a porcupine, but that wasn’t a deterrent – I simply attacked from the left instead. The boar squealed when I pounced from the trees, gathering its legs beneath it and trying to make a run for the safety of the undergrowth, but it was in pain, and I was much faster. It didn’t take long to bring it down.

Two hours later, after my impromptu meal and a long nap, I resumed my search, heading deeper and deeper into the forest. Aside from a confrontation with a large snake, I ran across absolutely nothing of interest until the terrain suddenly grew steeper, and the scent of bat droppings thickened the air.

Following the pungent scent, I climbed what I rapidly realized was a hill, probably near the center of the island, and came to a cave hidden in the hillside by dense foliage. I was deliberating whether or not the cave was worth exploring when the wind shifted, strengthening the scent of the bat poop.

But it also brought just the faintest whiff of magic.

Okay, now I have to go inside, I thought. Magic was the absolute last thing I expected to encounter on a deserted island. I crept into the darkness of the cave with caution, going slow so I could give my eyes time to adjust to the darkness. About thirty yards in, the cave floor dropped off steeply, and my nose and ears told me the bats’ lair was down this way. But to my left, there was a small tunnel, and as I drew closer to it, the scent of magic grew stronger.

I crept along the narrow shaft for a good hundred yards before it opened up again into a wider space. There was absolutely no light there, so I shifted back into human form, then conjured a ball of fire.

My jaw dropped as I held my impromptu flashlight aloft. I’d just found somebody’s hidey-hole. There was an ancient-looking wooden desk and a chair in one corner, a small cot with bedding, a carved chest, and a shelf filled with old, leather-bound books. The air was cool and dry, quite unlike the humid air outside, and surprisingly, there was no dust or bat guano at all. Excitement filled me, temporarily banishing my worries as I wondered who had lived here on this island, and whether the contents of this strange chamber could help me find a way off it.

Carefully, I started pulling books off the shelf, taking care not to crack their leather bindings further or damage their fragile pages. Janta would have been proud of me. Unfortunately, most of the books seemed to be advanced magical tomes written in Loranian, but a smaller book filled with cramped writing turned out to be a diary of the mage who’d called this place home. The yellowed pages told me his name had been Messindor, and that he was a pirate hailing from the far southeast. This cave was one of several hiding places he kept across the world, mostly on islands close to or south of the equator. Judging by the gaps in entry dates, he only updated the diary when he was in residence here every other year or so.

“Three hundred years,” I muttered, staring at the date of the final entry. This pirate mage had last entered this cave close to three-hundred years ago. That, or he’d gotten tired of journaling. It was unlikely that he was still alive, but perhaps he had grown weary of piracy and retired to a more hospitable isle than this one before meeting his end.

With nothing more of relevance to learn from the diary, I searched the desk drawers. I found some old coins, a congealed inkwell and a few quills, and a couple of pieces of parchment in one. Another held several rolled-up maps, which I laid across the table, using the coins as paperweights. One of the maps was of the Coracciao, a group of tropical islands south of the Northia Continent. There was a group of dots on the map that were a little way off from the main cluster of islands, closer to the Southia Continent, and a red arrow was pointing to one of the islands, possibly indicating my location.

Okay, so I wasn’t so far from civilization that my location wasn’t on a map. But I was far enough away that most people looking at said map would have a hard time even finding the island I was standing on.