Draka

I had woken on a stone floor to someone throwing cold, salt water on me, and some woman gloating over me, telling me to be a ‘good little lizard’. To say that I was furious didn't even begin to describe what I felt.

I looked around. The room I was in looked carved out of stone, and was lit by a lantern hanging from the ceiling. There was a wooden door to my left, and the open doorway the woman had left through to my right. The man who’d been left to guard us, Vic, sat on a stool next to it, an axe leaned against the wall. Despite all their precautions he was watching me warily, so he wasn’t entirely stupid. By my side I felt a weak draft, and in the silence I could hear the distant sound of water.

I was chained, muzzled, and behind bars. I couldn't move or speak. I couldn't even open my mouth enough to breathe.

They thought that they could keep me here. They were wrong.

Across the floor was another cell. In that cell was the woman, the friend, who had betrayed me. If I had been more myself – in less pain, less blindingly furious, and probably slightly concussed – I might have considered her vacant stare and the way her hands were chained to the wall. As it was, all I saw was betrayal. The shattered faith I had placed in her. All the progress that I thought we’d made, the nights by the campfire, the times we’d fought beside each other, thrown away.

Right from the beginning, from the mines to the trolls, she had never trusted me. I’d thought that she’d warmed up to me. That we’d been getting close. Clearly, I had been mistaken.

A hundred different scenarios for what I’d do when I got to her fought for my attention, but one thing was clear. I wasn’t leaving her there. Not alive.

My opportunity to act came when Makanna, for lack of a better description, flipped her shit. It started small. She turned her head to our jailor and said, in a dead voice, "Where is she?" Vic didn't answer, but just looked at her with annoyance. "Where is she?" Makanna repeated. She began to sniffle, tears leaking from her eyes. "Where is she?" she sobbed, then got to her feet and started yanking on her chains, throwing herself towards the bars and repeating herself between heaving sobs, her voice rising in pitch and volume until she was screaming, "Where is she? I did it! I gave you the dragon! I did what you said! I gave you what you wanted, now let me see her! Where is she, you fucking animals? Where is she?"

She kept going, screaming, almost raving. I could see blood running down her arms from beneath the manacles around her wrists, and I didn't care. I wasn't really hearing her. I certainly didn't listen to what she was saying, or I might have understood the situation. All I cared about was that the man guarding us had finally had enough. He walked over to Makanna's cage, banging on the bars, screaming nearly as loudly as she did for her to shut up, how he was fed up with her screaming and crying and whining.

I made my move.

The room wasn't brightly lit. It was too bright, but shadows were everywhere. I pushed, and the shadows behind me enveloped me, flowing out past the bars as I shifted.

If Vic had a better hold on his temper he might have heard the chains and the muzzle clinking to the ground as they fell past and through me. As it was he only turned when Makanna backed up against the wall, her face turning from despairing rage to astonished horror, looking past him at me as I merged with the darkness and flowed out into the room.

Vic faced me just as I came back together, standing on my back legs before him. He opened his mouth to scream, and I simply reached up and shoved a clawed hand in his mouth. I took a firm grip and whatever he'd been about to yell turned into a muted scream of pain as I yanked his head down, my claws digging in around his jawbone, then used my grip for leverage as I tore the front of his throat out with my other hand. He punched me a few times. He was strong, and it hurt, but by the time he tried to defend himself it was already over.

As Vic slumped to the ground I turned my eyes on Makanna. She was sitting limp against the wall, staring at me with wild eyes, breathing quickly, her mouth open.

My head hurt. Manipulating the shadows around me made it worse, and I didn’t want to do it again. I looked at the lantern. I wanted to smash it down, but, no. Oil. Fire. Bad idea. It took three tries, but I managed to leap up and grab it off its hook instead. With a furious calm I used a claw to open the little hatch on its side, and sprayed some venom inside it, extinguishing the wick. Blessed darkness swallowed us.

Makanna still hadn't spoken to me.

I walked up to her cell, claws out, clicking and scratching on the stone floor as I went. I could hear her breathing, quick and shallow. Between the screaming and the shock, she was hyperventilating. She might pass out. I couldn't have that.

I flowed past her bars. I didn't think that she could see me – her eyes didn't track me – but she took a deep breath, feeling my presence in the small space when I shifted back in front of her.

"Dra–" she tried to say, finally, before my hand closed around her throat. My hands weren’t that large, but her neck was thin. I was careful not to break her skin too much, but I made sure that she felt my claws as I squeezed.

"Hello, Mak," I whispered, arcing my head down towards her, my teeth inches from her face. She choked and gripped my wrist with both hands, her chains rattling, but my grip was as sure as death. “This really hasn’t turned out well for you, has it? First the bastards you sell me to stab you in the back, and then it turns out that they can’t even keep me locked up. All those chains, two sets of bars, and here I am. With you.”

She started kicking weakly and trying to pry my fingers open, but that wasn’t happening. She had some muscle on her, I knew, but she couldn’t have broken my grip in my old, human body. Against the body of a creature built to kill, with magically enhanced strength, she may as well not even have tried. Still, her instinct to survive was strong.

"I've been feeling a little bad, did you know that, Mak?" I asked her. "Asking myself why I didn't tell you all that I can do. I know how important it is to you, keeping your advances secret. Surely that would make you trust me, right? If I revealed something like that? But I figured that after our talks and after finding the treasure and all, it wouldn’t be necessary. So I held back. Was that wrong of me, Mak?”

I waited for an answer until I remembered that I was choking her. Oh, well. “Did you ever think of me as a person, Mak?” I asked her. ”As someone who could doubt? Who might just want her friend’s sister to like her? Were you just stringing me along? Was I just a tool to you, that you could get rid of once you got a good enough offer?"

Her struggles began to weaken, and I relaxed my grip just enough to let her take one coughing breath, then tightened it again.

"I guess I'm just fucking prescient, or something. If I'd told you everything, they would never have left me here with so little light. They might have just killed me when they had the chance. So maybe I should thank you for being such a suspicious bitch, Mak."

I gave her another breath, and she managed a croaking, "Pleash!" as I did. It only infuriated me further. After all I’d given, she had the fucking gall to ask me for anything?

“Did you think you could betray a dragon and not face any consequences, Mak?” I growled, close enough that my nose nearly touched her face.

I tightened my grip further and felt my claws dig into her flesh. The feeling was intoxicating. I literally held her life in my hand. I could choke the life out of her, tear her throat out, gut her. Fast, slow, now later, I could kill her however I wanted, and there was nothing at all that she could do. Her useless struggles intensified, and inside her terrified eyes I could practically see the line I was about to cross. All I needed was the tiniest push. The wrong word, the wrong look…

Something changed in her. I saw, and felt, the fight go out of her. The acceptance that she couldn't resist me. She stopped struggling. Her hands still on mine but otherwise she went limp, staring towards me but not at me in the dark.

It brought me back from the brink. Her struggles had been feeding my rage, pushing me forwards, and her complete surrender gave me a moment to think. I’d been dead set on killing her, but maybe I shouldn’t be so hasty. If she wasn't fighting me she might be useful, at least in the short term. Waste not, want not and all that.

"I'm going to relax my grip now," I told her, "but I want you to understand that I don't want to hear a word out of your treacherous mouth unless I ask for it. If I do, I will kill you. If I think that you're lying to me, or holding anything back, I will kill you. If you don't do as I say, I will kill you. I have made it a point of honour to never eat human flesh, but today has made me want to make two exceptions. Do you understand?"

She tried to nod. I relaxed my grip enough to free up her throat.

"I understand," she croaked.

"Good," I said. "Can you see me?"

"No."

"Fix that."

It took her some time to collect herself and focus, but I saw her cast the spell. She gave off a very satisfying little whine as her eyes focused on me. I could only imagine what she saw in my eyes.

"Now," I told her, "do something about the pain that is pounding in my skull."

She hesitated, then released her grip on me and placed her hands on the sides of my head. Soon I felt the same soothing warmth as the last time she healed me, and the pain receded.

I sighed with relief. "Good," I said. "Well done. Now convince me not to kill you."

"Herald!" she said immediately. This again? That was the lie she had used to bring me into that cell. My grip tightened a fraction and she must have seen the renewed fury in my eyes, because her words became desperate.

"Please!" she said, her voice quavering. "Kill me if you want, but I'm not lying! They have Herald! They've been torturing us. They wouldn't let me help her if I didn't do what they wanted!" Tears were flowing freely down her face again, but she kept her breathing under control. "I don't care what you do to me," she said. "But, please, save my sister."

I considered her. Ever since the first time I’d met her, there had always been a strength in her eyes, a fierceness. It was gone now. I saw fear, regret, and a grim acceptance. She looked ready, almost willing to die.

I released her. She slumped back against the wall, alternately gasping and coughing. There was a nasty bruise already forming around her neck.

"We are going to find the Herald," I told her. "If you’re lying, and she is safe somewhere, I will rip your tongue out and eat it in front of you. As long as you do as I say, and as long as your usefulness as a healer, or as a go-between, or just as a comfort to her is greater than your usefulness as meat, you get to live. Otherwise, you are expendable. Is that clear?"

"Yes," she said, her voice rough.

"Does the jailor have the keys?"

"Usually."

I looked at Vic's cooling corpse. Flowing back outside I found a keyring on his belt, along with a small pouch of coin and a dagger. I removed all of them and tossed them to Makanna, who did nothing.

"Free yourself," I ordered, and she did.

"And heal that," I said when I saw the raw flesh under her manacles, and she did.

"Get out here," I told her, and though she hesitated to come closer to me, she did, unlocking the cage and stepping out.

"What are you good for, besides your magic?" I asked her. "What advancements do you have?"

She only hesitated for a moment, before replying, "I have excellent control of my movements, and I can both move and react faster than most. And I can feel strong emotion from others, and their intent, to some degree."

"Does that last one work on me?" I asked.

"Yes," she said and swallowed, "though it's much less clear. Usually. Your emotions can be confusing. Messy."

I snorted. "Fair enough," I muttered, then switched languages. “How well do you speak Tekereteki?”

Mak looked at me, afraid and confused, so I repeated myself.

“I… not good, now,” she said, slowly and carefully.

“Get better,” I told her, switching back. “Practise with your sister. It would be good if Tamor got better at it, too. Do you know how to get around here? Where the Herald is?"

She didn’t stumble at the change of topics. "No. They always blindfolded me before taking me in. There is a short tunnel, and a long staircase. Farther to walk between the street and the stairs than you’d think. The entrance is in a house in the north-west of the city."

"We'll just have to improvise. Anything else I should know?"

Mak hesitated. "I don't know who the woman is, but this is the same gang as the slavers we stopped. I'm sure of it. The man we captured, who's supposed to be dead, he was there when they took me."

I sighed. “At least there’s only one bunch of bastards to deal with. How are your hands?"

"Better than they look, but not fully healed yet. I haven’t eaten for a few days."

"Alright. Stay behind me. Leave the axe, but use that dagger if necessary. If anyone kills you tonight it's going to be me."

Love or fear. I needed at least one from anyone close to me. If Mak couldn't be a trusted friend, then she would be a tool. A servant. I tried not to think too much about the fact that this was Herald’s sister, and Tam’s. Val and Garal’s friend. Hell, even Lalia’s opinion of her mattered a little. They all loved and respected her. But she had betrayed me. It didn’t matter if her reasons were good or not. For her sins, she would serve me loyally, or she would die. I couldn’t afford to treat her differently. I’d deal with the consequences of that as they caught up to me.

Leaving through the open doorway, we went to rescue the one person who would never betray me.