Song of the Dragoons

I couldn't press my wings against the weight of the wind for long. Soon, they faltered, and I stumbled in the air, losing altitude until my claws scraped the tops of buildings. The ice reaching through me sliced my veins, dragging long needles of pain through every blood vessel.

"Belfry, you're falling," Emrys said helpfully.

«The poison…» I found the strength to murmur, before giving up on flight and descending into an empty square somewhere on the north side of town. I gasped for air, struggling to force my lungs to open up.

"Damn it," Emrys cursed. He fumbled his blood lamp, trying to light it in the heat of the moment. "What's happening?"

«The monsters had…some kind of poison,» I said. I took a wobbling step and looked up at the others. Arthur and Brand were going on. I didn't blame them, they needed to get to that physician if they could before they were knocked from the sky too, but Griffin had turned around and was coming down for a landing in the square.

«Go,» I admonished them as they approached. «Get to the doctor.»

«No,» they answered. «Let me carry her. I didn't get poisoned, I can make it faster.»

A growl rose unbidden in my throat. «Don't…» I hissed. «Just…get out of here.»

Griffin's plaintive eyes turned a little nervous. «I don't want her to be hurt, either. Please.»

«No!» I shouted. I wasn't quite sure why the thought of letting them carry Grace made me so angry. I just knew they didn't deserve it. I had to push through this, it was my responsibility.

Ingo drew in a sharp breath, and felt the edge of his breastplate where it was pockmarked with dents from the shot he took. "We don't have time for this," he muttered in Griffin's ear. "Get to the doctor. We'll come back once the others are safe."

Griffin looked at me, then the sky, then back at me, before finally letting out a disappointed sigh and taking off once again. They didn't fly far. I saw them and the others dip down half a mile away. We were so close. I felt heat radiating from my back as Emrys finally got his lamp lit and started muttering things in that strange echoing language again, his hand on Grace's forehead. But whatever he was doing, it wasn't enough to close that massive gash in her side, and blood continued to flow free from it.

The poison's in my blood, I thought to myself, trying to reason a way forward when my strength wouldn't cut it. Maybe if I…burn it…. But then I'd need to get it in my head again. So soon after it tried to get me to fly off into the wild.

But I didn't have much choice. I needed her to stay alive. That was my one responsibility here. So, I reached out to the deeper parts of my mind, feeling the tendrils of dark thoughts that reached back.

Heal her, I ordered. …Please.

I heard a sound like a rumble, and felt the darkness sliding into place. It came naturally to me then, as easy as spreading my wings. I willed my blood to burn. The heat of the flames beat back the icy daggers, and I felt the warmth flowing out of my scales towards Grace. As the energy surrounded her, her writhing and unconscious twitching ceased, and she grew still. Still in a good way. I could tell she was still injured, still needed medicine, but she wasn't on the verge of bleeding to death or succumbing to poison any longer.

The Fiend thought that was good. I wasn't sure why, but I was at least glad for the moment of concurrence in my head. And then, I felt it again. The click of a lock coming undone. Again, I felt the heat within, as azure light ran through my veins. It was softer this time, but unlike before, this time it came with the feeling of shifting. Though, not shifting into my human form. My muscles twisted into new shapes in my wings, and I felt the scales on my tail sliding around, moving over each other and feeling like they were pulled outward. It lasted less than a minute, and the shock made the Fiend in my head retreat of its own accord, making me stumble as my blood smouldered and the balance of my weight shifted.

When it was done, I steadied myself and glanced back. My wings had grown longer, the membrane now stretching down my back to the base of my tail. I felt a small but palpable surge of power in my chest muscles that moved them. They seemed more than strong enough to lift myself with two passengers comfortably now. My tail, though, had completely changed shape. The fins on its length were gone, replaced by a broadened, more club-like tip. The scales there were raised, turning their sharp edges outwards, and in the gap beneath each raised scale, I could see a small bristle of needle-like spines.

Emrys allowed the flame of his lamp to go out as he stared at my wings, his hand over his mouth. "Was…was that another Lo—"

I cut him off as I jumped back into the air. I felt the loss of blood, but the evocation combined with whatever the Unlocking did to me seemed to have purged all the poison from my system, and I was not going to waste time gawking at how I had changed. My newly-expanded wings powered us up into the air and then forward towards the larger square the others had made for. I wasn't that much faster, but it was enough for the sound of wind screaming in my ears to have pitched up a few tones, and for us to reach the square in under a minute.

Luckily, the clinic Yura had mentioned was easy enough to spot. This square was larger than the last, but most of the buildings that stood off it were still unadorned, sporting only painted signs and potentially awnings made of eye-catching colourful cloth, none of which did anything to distract from the ornate statue of a veiled Saint Cèlis that stood in the centre, quietly pouring pure water from its palms into a huge basin below. Except for one. The clinic was large, and may have once been a cathedral or some other grandiose building for all its stylings. It was two storeys of grey-brown brick, with a vaulted, grey, slate-shingled roof possibly hinting at the presence of an attic, and the lower floor vanishing as the frame conformed to the shape of a hill it was partially sat atop. Two towers rose from the wings of the front half, although they seemed disused, with their windows shuttered and their bricks in greater disrepair than the rest of the building. At the back was a wide, circular segment, topped by a low dome.

There weren't any lights visible in any of the windows, but the door was just swinging closed behind Griffin's tail, and I barged in after them. The main entrance opened up into a waiting room of sorts, with chairs and wide cushions that must have been meant for dragons stuck between bookshelves laden with dusty textbooks, indices, and tomes. A globe rested on a side table, with some odd kind of device beside it that looked like an upside-down glass bottle. Lightning constantly arced from the mouth to the base, imprinting a flickering violet hue on the yellower light emitted by the gas lamps that suddenly ignited at our entry. A portrait hung at the back over a set of double doors, depicting a young, gaunt-faced fellow with their dark brown hair tied back into a neat knot and a nervous smile on their face. They didn't fit the image of physicians I was familiar with, but the context suggested they were this place's head doctor, or at least had been at some point.

I brushed past the others as their riders hopped down, heading for the doors at the back. «Belfry?» Griffin said as I passed by. «What happened to your tail? Are you okay?»

«Lock,» I answered curtly. I rapped my knuckles harshly against the double doors. «Hello? Is there a physician here still?»

Through the translucent glass windows, I saw a warm orange light moving closer, and stepped back to allow the doors to open. When they did, a stout, stern-looking woman in a long white gown stepped through, holding a candle up as she surveyed the gathered visitors. "What's all this?" she said, her rough voice carrying a strong accent. "Are you in with the vicar's office, or do you need medicine?"

I decided my questions about that question could come later, and turned to the side to let the woman see Grace. «We need medicine,» I said. «Urgently.»

The woman's eyebrows raised as she took in the injury. She nodded, ushering us to follow as she hurried back up the steps that stood behind the door. "Kyrie!" she shouted. "There's patients in with a nasty cut! Look like guards, or something."

There was a cavalcade of shuffling noises, like cloths being thrown around up the stairs, before a soft, high-pitched voice answered at what sounded like its diminutive maximum volume, "Bring them here!"

We followed the woman up the stairs and into what I presumed was a room for emergency care. I had to presume, because the room was bisected by a long, brown cloth curtain that cut the entire right side of the room off from view. The left only had some chairs and a couple doors that went somewhere deeper into the clinic. I could hear those shuffling sounds coming from behind the curtain, and soon they were accompanied by metallic or glassy clinking noises.

"How many injured?" that soft voice said from behind the curtain.

«One,» I said. The woman held her hands out towards where Grace was strapped into the saddle. Hesitantly, I knelt down, allowing her to take Grace in her arms. Before she disappeared behind the curtain, she pulled a small strip of cloth from a pocket on her gown and wrapped it around Grace's eyes. I narrowed my eyes at her as she left our view. What was it about this place they didn't want us to see?

«Some of us are hurt,» Griffin said as they entered behind me. «No one as bad as her. Some of us also got poisoned. I think. We were fighting fiends in the Old Quarter.»

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

As if on cue, Arthur stumbled and slumped to the ground, breathing hard. In this form, he could neither go pale nor sweat, but I could still see in his eyes the pain he was in.

"Fiends…did they have lots of loose, scaly skin?" the doctor, Kyrie, asked.

«They did,» I confirmed

"Flayed fiends. Elizabeth, fetch the cruxnine from the back, please. And a handful of charcoal!" There was a grunt of acknowledgement, then a door opened somewhere behind the curtain. A few moments later, it closed, and was followed by a period of scraping stone sounds, like a mortar and pestle, and then Elizabeth came out of the curtain holding a small stone bowl with greenish-black paste at the bottom in one hand, and a basket of slightly moist, finely diced leaves all pressed together into a solid mass of green mush.

"Show me where they drew blood," she ordered. Arthur limply raised a wing, pointing to a bite mark just behind his shoulder. Elizabeth scraped some of the paste off the bowl and mixed it into a poultice with a handful of the mush, then pressed it against the wound. "Hold it there," she ordered, taking her hand off once Arthur propped his up to keep the poultice on. She mixed more for the rest of us, one for everyone but Rosalie, Yura, and Emrys. Though I no longer felt the same icy pain as before, I still took the one she offered me, just in case.

I didn't notice any immediate effects, but the others seemed to, relaxing a little as the nurse went back behind the curtains. Ingo stared into the middle distance, more irritation than usual on his face.

«What's wrong?» I asked, deciding to face whatever cutting remarks he had hidden head-on.

"That was stupid," he murmured. "We should have backed off when we knew there was more than just one person there."

«We outnumbered them,» I said hesitantly. I hadn't been the one to pull the trigger, but I still felt like I had to defend Grace's decision. «And we had surprise on our side. I thought…well, with how easily the bandits went down, I thought we could handle them all together.»

"With how many more targets there suddenly were, it was more that they surprised us," said Ingo. "None of us were prepared to fight three fiends on top of a crazed killer."

«It wasn't like they were hiding or sneaking up on us,» I argued. «How could they surprise you?»

"We couldn't see them, Belfry," Rosalie spoke up. Her voice was calm, with a thin edge of frustrated, directionless anger sliding its way in. "You and Grace had the best position to watch from. None of the rest of us had a view inside the church; you had said it was empty. We were relying on your signal."

Right. None of these people had the experiences that I had, I couldn't expect them to naturally know to pick out perfect ambush positions. I fidgeted with the skylines hanging loose from my harness. I used to know how to be properly cautious without being paranoid, but now everything felt all confused, like I couldn't trust the instincts I'd worked to build most of my life.

"I'm blind," said Ingo. "I can't improvise in combat the same way you can. Griffin knows to call out what weapons I'm fighting, but they can only do so much when circumstances change last second." He sighed. "I'm not stupid. You can't always control the situation you battle in. But we have wings. We had the opportunity to pull back and learn what those things were, and we didn't take it."

«I'm sorry,» I murmured. «It was a bad call. I thought…» I tried to reverse engineer Grace's reasoning, «…I thought that if we waited, more people would end up dead, and it seemed like it was worth the risk.»

"Someone almost did end up dead because we took that risk," said Rosalie. That edge was prying its way out of the shadows and into the open in her words. "I would hope that we'll have more ability to communicate in the future, but if we don't, you need to not have us rush in unprepared. Uncoordinated, we're nothing."

I stared at the ground. I agreed with her. But I didn't know how much I could do to keep Grace from acting impulsively again, and didn't want to make a promise I couldn't keep.

"Sorry…" a groggy, raspy voice said from inside the curtain. "That was me. I thought we could take them and jumped in." A pause. "Where are we? I can't see…."

"Aaaah, tch-tch-tch!" Kyrie suddenly yelped. "No! It's a blindfold, just a blindfold. For you're own good, please leave it on." They took a very slow breath. "I'm Kyrie, and you're in my clinic, recovering from a massive chest wound and flayed fiend poisoning. Your friends are here, too. Relax."

Rosalie stood and moved to push her way through the curtains, but was blocked by some thing behind them. Her hands moved to either side, pressing hard against the invisible force, but whatever it was didn't seem to have an end, nor was it at all unstable enough to be pushed aside.

"It's a ward," Emrys whispered. "You can't get in without the mage's say so."

"I told you to stay where you were," Kyrie said, frustrated. "The curtains and blindfold are there for a reason."

"What reason?" asked Rosalie. "What are you hiding?"

"Me," said Kyrie. "I have…a disfiguring condition. For my own dignity, and your own peace of mind, it's best you don't lay eyes on me."

«I think we'd have better peace of mind if we could see our friend,» Arthur muttered, annoyed, as Rosalie hesitantly went back to her seat.

"I'm sorry," said Kyrie. "So…are you mercenaries? Guards?" they asked, abruptly and conspicuously changing the topic.

I tilted my head. They were a terrible liar, that much was obvious, and although there was probably a kernel of truth in the explanation they gave us, they were definitely keeping something close to their chest. Rosalie clearly thought the same thing, but neither of us were willing to breach their lie of omission now, not with how they were healing Grace.

"Dragoons," said Yura. "We only just arrived in the city yesterday, to our post at the Old Elderstone Castle, west of here. We received a mission to investigate and dispatch the 'Pillory Butcher', as she was called, and…well, you can see and hear how that went." He straightened himself in his seat. "But, now we have the knowledge we need. Flayed fiends, weaponry, poison—I think that we can easily win our next encounter."

"The 'Butcher', hm." Kyrie mumbled. "She has a name."

Emrys and I leaned forward at once, evidently hitting on the same thought. "Oh?" he said.

"Mhm. Well, I don't know her first name. But everyone here called her Mother Latighern. She used to live just off the square."

«So you knew her?» I asked.

"I knew of her. Everyone in this little neighbourhood did. She was one of the more gregarious ministers who lived in the Bellflower Quarter. One of the few who didn't go on about the warlock sightings in the district or the poor conditions here being some kind of justified punishment. Then her family disappeared, and she went not long after."

«How did you know that she's the Butcher, then?» I pressed. «If she disappeared?»

There was an uncomfortably long silence, in which I could practically hear the doctor weighing the options of what to say. "She…still comes here sometimes," they eventually admitted.

I sat stunned. "What?" Rosalie spoke for me.

"Sometimes she gets hurt during her hunts and she comes here for treatment, and she talks to me about what she's doing and who she just murdered, so I know that it's her," Kyrie said, speaking very quickly.

«How come you—» I started before they interrupted me almost immediately.

"I haven't told the Templar Guard about it because I have an oath to uphold that keeps me from talking about patients' affairs, and I'm a little worried that if she finds out she'll come kill me." They took a second to breathe. "I know that's selfish. But I want to keep this place open and keep treating the district. They don't get much in the way of medicine other than this clinic."

"So you won't tell the Guard, but you will tell us?" asked Emrys.

Something metallic clattered on the other side of the curtains. "Hah…" the doctor breathed, sounding a little faint after all that breathless talking. They were remarkably unstable for a practising physician. They were clearly knowledgeable and skilled, but those emotions had burst through the second a tiny crack was opened up for them to push at. The knowledge of the Butcher must have really been weighing on them. "I guess…."

Ingo didn't wait for them to get themself together. "Do you know why she started killing?"

"No," said Kyrie. "I just know she vanished, and started killing people a few weeks after that. She rambles about hunters sometimes; I think that something happened with the chasseurs the archvicar invited here. But I don't know what. Honestly."

There was a grunt of effort from Grace behind the curtain, and a moment later Kyrie hastily pushed her through to our side. She took off her blindfold, blearily blinking in the bright lights. A large swath of bandages had been wrapped around her chest with a lump shoved underneath it that I took to be another poultice.

"Your friend heals disconcertingly fast," said Kyrie. "She should be fine by tomorrow evening. Please don't exert yourself too hard before then, or you'll just tear that gash back open."

"I won't," promised Grace, gently prodding at the bandage curiously, without seeming to provoke any pain from the wound. "What do we owe you?"

"Considering the circumstances…I wouldn't feel right charging you," said Kyrie. "Look, just…if you're set on dealing with Latighern, her house is still empty. It's just a few doors down that way—er, south of the clinic. I don't know if she's reachable anymore, but if she isn't, I'd rather some knights let her go with her dignity, rather than having her succumb to the Scourge."

«We'll do our best,» said Griffin. «Thank you so much for your help.»

"Mhm, it's my job," said Kyrie. There was a muffled clopping sound like hard shoes against wood, then the sound of a door opening and shutting. We awkwardly lingered for a few seconds before making our way back downstairs and out into the crisp night air. I thought momentarily about peeking into the back area and seeing if there were any ingredients or tonic vials available to snatch, but fought that impulse off. Even I couldn't stomach taking from someone like that immediately after they helped us, but I did note the place down for later. In case of an emergency.

"Should we go take a look in that house now?" asked Grace.

I hesitated, and Rosalie answered for me. "No, of course not. It's night. We all need rest to heal from our injuries and poisoning. We'll have time tomorrow to do more thorough investigating. For now, we should head back to the castle and sleep."

Grace sulked, her energy having apparently reasserted itself as whatever medicine Kyrie gave her worked its magic. "Fine. As long as we actually get time to deal with Latighern. I don't want her getting another opportunity to kill."

«We'll make a plan once we're not sleep-deprived,» I said, lowering myself for those two to climb on. «Which is in the morning, not past midnight. Come on.»

We lifted into the sky, giving the city one last glance as we soared over the western wall back towards the castle. I gave Grace several long, worried looks as we flew.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

«Ah, I…I'm glad you're alive,» I said, whispering only to her. «That hit was meant for me. Thank you.»

"Hm?" she hummed before getting the message and whispering back. «Oh. Yeah, of course. We're partners, that's what we do.»

A rumble escaped my throat. «It's what I should do,» I muttered. «Please don't do that again. You scared me.»

«What, do you think you getting your head cut off wouldn't affect me?» Grace retorted. «If you're in danger, I'll do what I can to help. I love you, Belfry, but I don't care if you tell me not to do that, I'm still going to do it anyway.»

«I wouldn't have lost my head,» I said, but didn't have the energy to argue much right then. «Just be realistic. That's all I'm asking. I'm big and I've got a tough hide. I can be your shield. You're just human.»

"Just human…" she echoed aloud. I realised my error when I felt the touch of her mind go cold. But no matter how many times I replayed that conversation in my head before we went to sleep that night, I couldn't find a way to fix it, and I wallowed regret until morning came.