Shadebound, page 8
part #1 of The Last King Series
“More pressing concerns?” His eyes tried to track the swishing tip of her sword, but she had always been better, always been faster. Her sword slipped right in past his guard, and the flat tapped the underside of his chin. Perfect and precise. “You prick.”
“Mother is dead.”
The tip of her sword wobbled, scratching a line across his throat. “What?”
Artemio let his own sword drop to his side. “She died. Quite some time ago. Father didn’t bother to inform us.”
The sword fell away from his neck. Harmony’s hair fell forward over her face. “She’s dead?”
“I’m sorry, Harm.”
“Sorry? You’re an idiot. She can’t be dead. Who told you she was dead? The Cerva? You know they’re all liars.” Her sword flicked back up again, pointed at his chest again. Wavered. “What did they say, she caught crotch rot off our whoremonger father? You know they’re liars, and you swallowed every word they told you.”
Artemio took a step back. “She was killed. A hired knife, sent for Father.”
She stepped to him again, but her cuts were clumsy, angry. Easy to predict and deflect. “If it was sent for him, he should have been the one to receive it.”
That stopped Artemio dead in his tracks. “Harmony.”
“Oh don’t pretend you’ve got a sense of propriety,” she scoffed. “Nobody hates Father more than you. You practically salivate at the thought of your inheritance.”
Artemio wet his lips. “I want nothing from that man.”
“See! That isn’t what loving sons say about their fathers.”
He managed to bat her sword wide and step inside her reach, only to be rewarded with a backhand across the jaw that sent him stumbling.
“Harmony.” He wiped the blood from his lip. “You need to stop.”
She brought her sword down on him. He only saw the shimmer of it. Death shining blinding bright in the sun.
He could never have brought his sword around to parry. He could never have done anything to save himself if he were alone. But he was never alone.
As the blade came down, Artemio opened and the wind whipped. Artemio could never have turned the blade, but Bisnonno Fiore could.
The old king rode up through Artemio, and the whipping winds he carried with him snatched the rapier from Harmony’s hands.
She whispered, “Mother.”
He dropped his sword and surged forward to catch her. Artemio wrapped his arms around her as the tears began to flow. He let his own come too.
They stood all alone at the back end of the gardens, crying out their eyes for the one parent who had ever shown them the slightest amount of affection.
7 - The Waters of the Woods
Arancia, Regola Dei Cerva 111
When Orsina followed him into the woods, Kagan made no complaint. The old woman wouldn’t let her young apprentice wander the woods if it weren’t safe. Neither one of them had too much to say in their first few trips out together—Kagan was used to being alone, Orsina was used to nothing but sniping and rebuttal each time she opened her mouth—but they found their rhythm soon enough. “Why did you get exiled?”
Kagan bit back his anger. She was a child no matter how much she’d grown since last he saw her. She had the tact of a child. “Crimes.”
“What sort of crimes did you do? Did you try to steal a dragon’s treasure pile? Did you seduce the dragon-king’s mistress?”
He paused mid-step. “Do you even know what seduce means?”
“Kissing, right?”
He shrugged. “Close enough.”
She caught up to him, close enough to faux-whisper, “So you got exiled for kissing crimes?”
For a long moment, he was silent, then eventually he let out a gruff sigh. “No.”
“Did your dragon get exiled too?”
He could feel a headache on the far horizon, creeping closer with every question. “No.”
“So you had a dragon?”
“Yes.”
She was bouncing as she walked at his elbow. Her braid springing up and down behind her. “What was it like? What are dragons like?”
“Large,” he rumbled. Then, realizing it wasn’t quite enough, “Reptilian.”
“Did you ride your dragon?”
The memory of it ached. The furnace beneath him. The scales shimmering in the sunlight, above the clouds. “Sometimes.”
“Did you have a special saddle for it?”
He blinked. “Yes.”
“That must have been expensive, all that leatherwork. Back in Sheepshank, they used to say making tackle was the most expensive work they ever got done.”
“I don’t recall the price.”
“Was it a long, long time ago?”
He tried to count back through the years of his exile and realized he had lost count somewhere. “Before you were born.”
“So are you really, really old?”
For the first time, he looked put out by a question. “No.”
“So you were really young for a dragon-lord?”
“No.”
“Were you young when you did your kissing crimes?”
He had slowed to a crawl, head cocked to one side, listening. When he could not sense any sign of his quarry, he answered her. “I was younger, but not young.”
“So you were exiled for kissing old people?”
He let out an exasperated groan. “No kissing.”
“You were exiled for not kissing?” The snap of her fingers silenced the birds in the trees around them. “You broke off an arranged marriage meant to tie two feuding families together and left the dragon empire on fire in a civil war?”
“I thought the hag didn’t tell you stories.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I can’t tell myself them.”
They crossed a stream, she bounding along without a care in the world, he lifting her cautiously to avoid anything that might have been lurking down in the gully. For a few blessed moments, there was silence, then she started up again. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
“You do.”
“Mother Vinegar says I never stop talking. She says I drive her up the wall.”
He raised a scaled brow. “Indeed.”
“That’s why she said I should go out hunting with you today, so she could get some peace. Which I think is just silly because…”
“Shh.”
“…even though I talk a little bit she talks even more. She even talks when she is on her own or she thinks I’m sleeping. I think it is because she’s been stuck out here in the…”
Kagan reached back and covered her mouth. She nipped his palm with her teeth, but he did not flinch. This was not their first time playing this game. When she tried to pull back and return to her ceaseless chatter, he pointed the tip of his spear across the clearing.
It was like a waterfowl gone terribly awry. Tall as Kagan at the shoulders, but taller still when it raised up its head at the end of a serpentine neck. There was a shimmer of scales beneath the feathers, an amalgam beast of serpent and bird. Orsina couldn’t tear her gaze away from the eyes, turning from the talons and stumpy wings to seek the reflection of the dying day in the golden saucers turned her way.
By all rights it should have run. Yet it stood there, stiff as a petrified log. Orsina had never felt Kagan’s power, never even felt the slightest press from him. From what few snippets of the Arazi arts Mother Vinegar had been willing to whisper, she didn’t even know if she’d be able to feel him working at all. All she could do was guess that the calm was emanating from Kagan. Sympathetic emotion that flooded the crocorax’s head and made it stand perfectly still as he took his aim and threw.
The bird toppled and Kagan released whatever hold he had on it. For the briefest moment, Orsina could feel the shade of the terror-bird in her head. The tangle of instinct and emotion and pain, before it faded away to nothing.
Kagan didn’t see his little companion flinch. He was too focused on the hunt, on the prey. He’d crossed the distance to the dying bird and hauled out his spear before Orsina even saw him moving.
His shoulders strained as he tried to lift the bird whole. “Now I remember why I bring you along, so you can carry things.”
She was back at his side and grinning, pushing all thoughts of what she’d just felt aside. “Aw, is the big chicken too heavy for you?”
“Why don’t you try to lift her?”
Orsina was nothing if not willing to try new things. She got both shoulders under the bird’s long neck and managed to stand upright. Blood ran down into her hair. “I’ve got my end.”
“Ah yes. The head is the heavy part, isn’t it. Giant brain. Crocos are known to be so clever.”
Orsina blew her blood-slicked curls away from her face. “Smart enough to hunt in packs.”
Kagan drew a great knife, the blade as wide as Orsina’s palm, and set to work splitting the head from the body. “Not this one. She’s a straggler from off the steppes.”
“What could scare a terror-bird all the way down here?” The head came away, and the rest of the body toppled to the side with a crunch of foliage.
“Nothing. Even a wyvern would leave them in peace. Too much trouble. That’s how you know this one wasn’t the sharpest arrow in the quiver. Probably spooked by the sound of its own farts.”
With no chance of hauling the beast along whole, Kagan was butchering it in the field. He cocked his head once or twice to sniff, and Orsina, recognizing the motion, had frozen in place expectantly. Each time he shrugged and went back to his work she let out the held breath. The third time, she finally asked him. “Scavengers?”
He scoffed. “The bird’s stink should hold them off long enough. Plenty will come pick over the body, but none would risk the claws. If we’re quick, we’re fine.”
With a little spin on the spot, Orsina shucked the crocorax’s severed head from off her shoulders to splatter in the bushes. The sudden thump set the birds in the canopy above to flight, but nothing went scurrying away. There were no rats, rabbits, or any of the other little things that filled Mother Vinegar’s stewpot to be seen. Maybe the terror-bird really had scared them off.
A giblet hit her in the side of the head. “Are you helping?”
“Keeping watch is helping.”
He growled. “We don’t need to keep watch. Come help peel the skin away.”
She turned to look upon his work and felt her stomach turn. “I do not want to do that.”
“Nobody wants to do it.” He hauled hard and the whole side of meat was exposed. “But they all want to eat. Do you want to eat?”
She’d turned pale enough that her freckles made an appearance. “Not anymore.”
It wasn’t often she got to hear anyone laugh these days. So when Kagan’s belly laugh rumbled out, she didn’t even care that it was at her expense. Her own face cracked into a grin at the sight of him rocking back on his heels.
Later, when she pieced her memory of that day back together, she would wonder if it was all the noise they were making that drew the dragon to them. If it had been the scent of all that blood. If the dragon had been the thing hunting the crocorax all the way from the steppes. If it was just bad luck that their paths had crossed. The last seemed the least likely to her—after so long in Mother Vinegar’s tutelage she struggled to believe in coincidence.
The dragon burst out between the trees, knocking oaks aside like they were tinder-wood. It was everything the stories of the great beasts of the Arazi aeries spoke of and so much more. No story spoke of the waves of heat that washed out ahead of their coming. The furnace dryness that pulsed from their bronzed scales. The sheer insurmountable bulk of a creature so large it almost defied explanation. Orsina’s eyes rejected it.
It could not be alive and so massive. It could not move with such sinuous grace and such power as to topple the very woods as it passed through. Not a creature, but a force of nature. A natural disaster on four legs, wings tucked tight to its sides but flexing with each bellow pulse of breath.
She was so busy being in awe of the beast that she could not even see the danger. She did not see the claws, the teeth, the flames coiling between them.
Kagan hit her full-on as the fire leapt out at them, bearing her down to the dirt and rolling off to extinguish what little of the sizzling venom had clung to his cloak. With hands held wide, he called out in the Arazi tongue.
The dragon showed no sign of understanding any more than Orsina did. The great burning eyes narrowed at the sound of a voice and it surged towards them. Even now, in what could have been her final moments, Orsina could not shut up. “Are you planning on lording over this dragon any time soon, dragon-lord!?”
He scooped her up and ran, but it was pointless. There was no tree in the forest that could hold back a dragon. “It does not work that way.”
Fire spread in their wake, but still Kagan ran. There was no question that the dragon could overtake them, only a matter of time. When life narrowed to moments, every extra moment that could be squeezed out was a victory. The forest that had become home passed Orsina in a blur. She wrestled to be free of Kagan, to run for herself, but it was no use. She bounced against his shoulder, rattling alongside the spears on his back.
She could see the great beast keeping pace with them, tearing up trees and casting them aside as it went, unflinching, relentless. “We can’t outrun it.”
“I know.” Kagan leapt over a gully that Orsina would not have even seen. Even now he moved through the forest like it was his home.
The dragon didn’t need to leap. Its great clawed feet were longer than the gap. It crossed without even noticing.
Orsina was sixteen years old. She had spent most of the time she could remember alone in the most frightening place in the world. She did not need courage. This was where she lived. “Then stop running. Stand and fight.”
“I cannot.”
She thumped her fists on his back. “You’re going to die anyway. Fight it!”
“You are not Arazi. You don’t understand.” His voice dropped to a rumble, almost impossible to hear. “I will not harm an aslinda-dragon. I will not. There is no greater evil.”
Orsina rolled her eyes. “Did nobody teach her that eating people is bad?”
“She is feral. Unbound.”
She thumped against his back. “So bind her!”
“I cannot! I am already… I cannot.”
The flames burst out from amidst the trees once more. Washing across Orsina’s back.
What had run smoothly off the dragon scales on Kagan’s flesh clung to her hair, to her clothes. It burned like nothing she’d ever felt. Hotter than the burning sun, hotter than the brightest fire. Kagan dropped her to the dirt once more. Tried to smother the fire in the loose soil and mulch, but each time one part was damped out, another blazed to life.
Orsina could not help but scream. A mindless, animal response to the pain. It wouldn’t matter in a moment. The dragon was upon them. Rearing up on its hind legs, balancing with its tail, it stood taller than the great old trees around it. Wings stretched out wide in triumph.
“Not like this.” Orsina hissed.
Ginny Greenteeth swept into her. Not just a welcomed guest, but demanded. Commanded.
Orsina’s eyes brimmed over with stagnant water. Her body, scorched and stung by the dragon’s fire, was swept clean of every ember as the flood came pouring forth. Pondweed coiled out of her hair. Silt and mud oozed from between her lips to dribble to the leaves below.
Kagan did not know the voice that came bubbling out.
“The water is lovely, deep, and cool.”
As the dragon gnashed down at her, Orsina did not flinch.
“Deep enough to drown a fool.”
Kagan cried out as she was swallowed down whole, but he was not surprised. No matter what witchery the girl had at her beck and call, she was only human. Nothing human could withstand a dragon. Nothing in the world could withstand a dragon.
It had been a long time coming, but Kagan had always known he would meet his end by dragon’s fire. He drew himself back up to his feet to face it with some dignity. All these long years in exile had been lived in the memory of this moment, standing proudly before a dragon awaiting the death he was due. It was almost a relief to have come full circle. As if fate had circled close once before, but now the orbit was ended. He held up his arms and accepted his death.
It did not come.
The dragon’s jaws snapped open, the magmatic glow of its innards washing out over the dim forest floor, but the fire did not come. A great ugly gout of steam rolled out, reeking of rot and ruin, but flaming death did not. Whether Kagan or the dragon was more surprised by this was impossible to say.
Something deeper than sense drew him forward. Some instinct that mattered more to the Arazi than self-preservation. The dragon’s serpentine neck bunched and coiled as it tried to regurgitate whatever morsel was blocking the flow of flame, and without thinking, Kagan reached out to stroke along its scales and offer comfort. He had not thought he would ever touch dragon scale again. When the sharp edges bit into his palm, he bore it with all due reverence. It felt like home.
The dragon began to back away, as though the knot in its throat was a fixed location that it could simply move around. Mud burst forth from its mouth with every heaving breath. There was no question of the fire within it being quenched, such a thing could not be done, but for all its power and majesty, it was still alive. It still needed to breathe.
Over and over it retched and retched, bringing up mud, tangled pondweed, and water, endless slopping waves of stagnant water. The clawed feet, so steady beneath it just a moment ago, splayed in the churned mud as it struggled for air. Kagan did not even know he was screaming.
“Stop it! Stop! Orsina! You must stop. You are killing her!”
If the girl could hear him from inside the great burning heart of the beast, he could not say. Even if she could, what did words matter to Ginny Greenteeth who rode her. The dragon stumbled, the low rumble of her furnace heart faltering and spluttering as she drowned.
