Draka

The prisoners were smart. They had stayed together, and they had followed some of the horses. They tried to hide when I flew over them, of course, but the scrubby bush they found wouldn’t have done much to hide me, let alone six human adults.

They broke and scattered when I approached on foot, but when I barked “Stop!” in perfect if slightly hissy Karakanian, four of them came to a stuttering stop and turned to look at me. The remaining two kept running for a while but stopped when they looked back and saw that I wasn’t chasing anyone.

“I am here to help you,” I said as loud as I could. “You are free to go, but I want to speak with you first.”

“You speak,” the man with one hand said, barely loud enough for me to hear. I rolled my eyes. This again.

“Yes. I speak. You know what I am, or you should. And I need to speak with you. I swear that I mean you no harm, so if you come back with me to the place you stopped you can take the raiders’ stuff, answer a few questions, and be on your way. If you will not come with me willingly, I will pick one of you, and we will talk whether you want to or not.” I was quite satisfied with my tone. It was very ‘this will happen.’ Probably my Command advancement helping me along, I thought.

“What do you say, Dorten?” the man in his fifties said to the younger man who’d been crying in the night. Dorten closed his eyes, and even at a distance of a few dozen yards I saw a flash of magic in my direction, first weak, then stronger. It barely touched me, and then it was gone, as though I’d absorbed it.

I considered my options. I did not like having magic thrown in my direction, but I hadn’t felt anything. I settled on patience, for the moment. They were prisoners on the run, and frightened. I’d give them a chance.

Dorten spoke. “She… She? Yes. She means us no harm. Or, uh…” he swallowed nervously and looked in my direction, “she didn’t. Until I cast on her. I’m sorry.” The last was directed at me.

“You can read minds?” I asked, not happy with the idea.

“Uh, no, not really. I can feel what others feel. And, uh… change it, a little. I didn’t try that on you, I swear it!” he added hastily. “I only needed to know if you spoke the truth!”

“So will you return with me?”

“I, uh… I will. I think we all should,” he said, more loudly to the others, and approached me. “Except maybe Valana and Parkon should keep following the horses?”

“Happily,” the one-handed man, Parkon, presumably, muttered. Then he looked at me nervously and added, “Your pardon, uh, Lady Dragon.”

“No, no,” I said graciously. “I know what your stories say, and I did just kill a bunch of armed men and women pretty effortlessly. It’s fine to be nervous. Go ahead, gather up the horses. The rest of you, follow me. At a distance, if you must.”

I walked past them in the direction of the stream, not even looking back. I wanted to make it clear that it didn’t even occur to me that they wouldn’t do as I said, although inside I wondered how many, if any, would be behind me when I got there. One thing I was sure of was that my captive would still be there. I knew the signs, now. She’d had the beginnings of the same feeling as Ardek, like she wouldn’t dare to disobey me. It was a… not quite a smell, but that was the best comparison I could make. Beneath the fear and the desperation there had been something that smelled like obedience. I couldn’t describe it any other way.

And it was the most wonderful scent I’d ever experienced.

My captive, the self-described non-combatant healer, was indeed where I’d left her, though she’d taken the time to gather the three nearby corpses and lay them beside each other. She was kneeling by their feet and, by the look of it, praying. Again I hesitated, but this time I knew why. I owed her and her companions nothing, but it would still feel wrong not to give her a moment to perform last rites and say farewell. It wasn't like we would even be burying them.

Waiting meant that there was a moment for my aches and pains to make themselves known. I had hit an armoured woman at something like forty or fifty miles per hour pretty much chest on and, while she had come out of it as a bag of broken bones, even Fortitude could only do so much. I was going to have another bruise under my scales until I could rest it off on my hoard, that was for sure. And the little dings I'd taken from the lances weren't helping.

To take my mind off it I turned my head to speak to the man called Dorten who had approached to within a few yards of me. "This one claims to be a healer," I said, "a non-combatant who never harmed anyone. Is she lying?"

"What will you do if she is?" he said apprehensively.

I let my silence speak for me.

"It's true, so far as I know. She tended us and offered what comfort the others would allow, though none of us could understand her. Her name is Bekiratak or something like that. It's a little hard to say." He paused, then said, "Her treatments were too effective. I think that she's a magic user."

Well, that was interesting!

"Like you," I said.

"Like me," he confirmed.

"And me, and the others," said the oldest woman in the group, who must have been pushing seventy but walked straight and proud now. "We are all different, but we are all magic users. They came for us, saying our villages would be spared if everyone with a magic advancement surrendered themselves."

She gave the raider woman a pitiless look. "They lied. They killed everyone. My neighbours. My husband. My children, those who'd stayed. My grandchi–" Her voice broke and she looked away, her hand over her mouth as she gathered herself.

"Thank you, dragon, for killing them. This group is a good start. May the Traveller leave their souls for the Sorrows."

They killed whole villages? Rallon hadn’t mentioned anything like that. At first I couldn’t quite believe it. I didn’t see the point of butchering a whole village after you had what you came for. But then my more pragmatic side came out, and yeah, I got it. If you were going around capturing magic users for whatever reason, maybe you wouldn’t want that getting out. Word would spread to other villages, and the magic users there would flee, maybe all the way to Karakan, where you couldn’t touch them. Much easier to just butcher dozens, even hundreds of innocents to cover your tracks. Throw in some less lethal raids and some attacks on travellers, and it would all look like bandit attacks.

“Do you know anything about the raiders,” I asked after a long, sad silence. “Who they are, who sent them, things like that?”

“They’re not Karakanians, and they’re not Happarans,” a younger woman said. “I speak some Happaran. It’s not so different from Karakanian, just sounds a little funny. The words they use and the way they say them and such.”

“Right.” I came to a snap decision. “I guess I’m keeping this one. Can you all make it safely to a village? I can keep an eye on you until you’re out of the hills, but I need to return to the city as fast as I can.”

“If Valana and Parkon can bring back enough horses, we should be able to,” Dorten said. “I have family near the coast. It’s a ride but you can all come with me,” he said to the three others with him. “Anyone who… has no one left.”

“And can I trust you all not to tell anyone about me?”

“For what you’ve done, I’m sure we can spin a tale that explains our escape,” the older woman said. “To think, that the council has a dragon helping them! I understand that neither they nor you want that spread.”

“Right,” I said, not bothering to correct her. If they thought I was a state secret, so much better. I turned to the raider, who had stood up and was looking towards us. “You. Bekiratak. Take off your armour.”

“Bekiratag,” she corrected me softly, but she did as I said, beginning to loosen the straps of her layered leather hauberk.

“Becky. Once you’re done, sit down and wait until the prisoners are ready to leave.”

“Can I bury my dead?”

“No time. We’ll be leaving as soon as possible. But there should be another one a couple of hundred yards that way,” I said and gestured, “if you want to pray over him or anything.”

“Beretog,” Becky said and closed her eyes, then nodded. “He and Maraga were to be married.”

I snorted. “Are you looking for sympathy? Regret? Pity? He put an arrow through my wing. Go get the murdering sack of crap, and lay him out to rest next to his murdering sack of crap betrothed if you want. Or don’t. But don’t waste time searching for something that none of you deserve.”

She did go to fetch him. She struggled, dragging a man much larger than her across the grass. It took her twenty minutes once she found him, but she did it. She even found his bow and laid it on his chest, then put his and the woman’s hands in the other’s. It might have been sad if I felt anything except contempt for the both of them.

The prisoners who’d gone to fetch horses did a good job, bringing in eight of the original eleven. Only those two were strong riders since, as I was told, they were both from villages that raised horses, but the others managed.

“Shall I run, then?” Becky asked me when she was not offered a mount.

“Run? No, you’ll be much too slow.”

I saw a fearful suspicion begin to grow in her eyes. “But I… I’ll fall behind,” she said. She licked her lips, her eyes darting to the open hills beyond me. She was thinking of making a break for it, and she wasn’t being very subtle.

“Don’t worry about that,” I told her. “And don’t try to run. You really won’t like what’ll happen if you run.”

I turned to the mounted Karakanians and called, “Get started! We’ll catch up!”

“Turn around,” I told Becky. “And lift your arms.”

“No,” she whispered. “Please. You let me live this long, you–”

“If I wanted to kill you,” I told her, getting close enough for her to feel my breath on her face, “I’d do it like this. With you facing me, so I could see the fear in your eyes when I did it. Now turn around, and lift your arms.”

I could see her trembling as she closed her eyes and turned. Her hands shook violently as she raised her arms.

“I’ve never tried this before. Don’t struggle,” I told her as I got right up behind her. “Or I might drop you.”

“What–” she began, but then I wrapped my arms firmly around her chest, kicked off hard with my legs, and clawed my way into the air.

Becky screamed.

I followed the rescuees, flying lazy circles above them until they left the hills, getting on a small road which led them east. I pitied and admired them. They had all lost so much. I wondered if they would ever get over the grief and survivor’s guilt. But they all soldiered on, at least for now, as I turned north and east to skim the mountains on my way back to the city.

Becky had stopped screaming after a few minutes. Then she cried off and on for a while, before going completely silent, hanging stiff beneath me and holding on tightly to my arms while I held her with all four limbs, my arms around her chest and my legs around hers. I definitely felt her weight, but it wasn’t bad. I would need a rest on the way back to Karakan, but we could have been back before nightfall if I wanted to.

It made me think. Becky was fairly small. But if I could fly for miles and miles with her, surely I could fly for just one or two miles with Herald? I could finally show her my hoard!

I laughed, and felt Becky tense to beyond rigid under me, her grip on my arms tightening even further. “Don’t worry,” I shouted over the wind, “I was just thinking how you’re actually being useful! This is good practice for me. And being useful means that you’re safe!”

“P-p-p-ple-ase d-d-on’t-t–,” she stuttered as loudly as she could, her teeth chattering, and I realised that she must be freezing. I’d been flying pretty high to avoid being seen, and hadn’t thought about how lightly dressed she’d been under her armour.

“Shit, you’re not dying on me, are you?” I shouted back.

“I… I…”

Well, damn. She might actually have been going hypothermic. It was about time for a rest anyway, so I started slowly descending, keeping close to the mountains and looking for a good place to land.

“I’m going to set us down,” I told her. “If I try to land normally with you like this you’ll be smashed, so I’m going to slow down, hover, and drop you. So… try not to break a leg. It’ll be a bad time for you to fly the rest of the way back to Karakan with a broken bone.”

Becky squeaked.

I found a fairly wide ledge on the side of a cliff face. It would do as well as anything, so I started shedding speed and dropping quickly.

“Get ready!” I told Becky. I stopped and hovered above the ledge, slowly letting myself drop between each beat of my wings. Fifty feet up I released my legs, causing Becky to lurch forward with a terrified howl. The screaming started again, only this time her teeth were chattering so bad that it sounded completely ridiculous.

I dropped to maybe six feet up, as low as I dared to go in a hover, and then I let go of Becky.

Becky did not let go of me. She got a death grip with both hands on my left wrist, and dangled, only feet above the ground but acting as though she was hanging over the gates of Hell.

I shook my arm, trying to dislodge her, shouting, “Goddamnit, Becky! Becky! Bekiratag! Let go!” But she refused. It struck me that I hadn’t really understood just how terrified she’d been during our flight until that moment, and I had to do something. I really had three options: claws, up, or down.

With a resigned growl I braced myself, flared my wings, and dropped.

The hardest part was not crushing Becky. She hit the ground, not hard but unprepared, and would have fallen backwards if she wasn’t still holding on to me like her final life line. Instead she folded and crumpled onto the ground under me, and I had to jerk my arm quickly to the side to avoid planting it in her face or chest and throwing her hard on her side. I came down, trying to distribute it so that I could absorb as much as possible with my joints, but I still felt a shock of pain lance up my right arm from my wrist. That arm folded, and I ended up on my side basically spooning Becky, who was alternately chattering, crying, and laughing hysterically. She still had not let go of my wrist.

I felt a furious rumble start deep in my chest, and Becky must have felt it too, because she went suddenly quiet and turned to look at me. “God. Fucking. Damn it, Becky!” I said, my teeth inches from her face. “I told you to let go!”

She went limp. “I-I’m s-sorry,” she said, her voice somehow trembling while she chattered. “S-sor-ry! So s-sorry!” She just kept repeating that, going on and on about how sorry she was, and I was, finally, completely convinced that she was not a soldier. I didn’t know if she was a coward, but she didn’t handle fear very well, that was for sure.

She was kind of pathetic, really.

“Fine,” I said, some of my anger evaporating in the face of her fear. “You’re a healer, right? You have magic? Heal me. My right wrist.”

“I… yes. I do! I c-can!” She finally released my left wrist, and I felt a rush of blood that I hadn’t realised that I’d been missing, bringing with it pins and needles that I tried to flex away while Becky scrambled to put her hands on my right wrist. “Uh, how d-did you know?”

“The prisoners figured it out. You’ll need to push harder than normal. I resist magic.”

“Y-yes, okay, yes.” I saw the magic gather inside her, then flow through her hands into me, just like when Mak did it. Becky did it silently, though, her eyes fixed on my wrist as she seemed to direct the flow to exactly where it needed to go. She strained, and I felt the pain recede, replaced by a soothing warmth.

“T-there,” she said, and looked at me, her eyes shining with hope. ‘Have I done good?’ they seemed to say. ‘Do I get to live?’

“Do my wing, too,” I told her, opening up my left wing so she could get at the damaged membrane. I didn’t like what I saw. The hole wasn’t long, but I was pretty sure that it had torn a little at the edges, fresh blood having dried in trickles.

“You’re freezing,” I said as she healed it. She was such a terrified mess that I couldn’t even be angry any more. At that point all I felt was pity. “Come here. I’ll warm you up a bit before we go on.”

I didn’t wait for her to move. I simply wrapped my wing around her and pulled her in, curling up around her and holding her close while she trembled like a kitten, and went to sleep.