by Jada Fisher
“You had me cornered and alone in your clutches and I still managed to finesse you. Who do you think you’re kidding?”
“I may be guilty of underestimating you from time to time, but please, don’t let that instill you with an overconfidence in yourself. You’re like a house of cards. If I were you, I’d recommend you stop while you can still keep a hold of your self-righteousness.”
“You’re still so full of hot air.”
“Am I?” He leaned forward as far as his chains would allow, his eyes glinting in the runes’ light. “So, you’ve got our little oracle here now. You ever give her a good look? Maybe at her back.” I was glaring at him and felt the situation quickly slipping out of my hands. Maybe it was my self-prophecy, maybe it was just regular intuition, but it very suddenly seemed that I might have stepped into a trap. “She’s got a bunch of these really strange circles in a row, almost like that one blind human language. What do you call it?”
“…braille,” I supplied without thinking.
“Right. Braille. See, when she was very young, she had the hardest time getting visions on a consistent basis. And that wouldn’t do at all, so the prince did his best to train her. It’s hard, you know, when someone can’t hear you or really read anything, so he had to find another way to communicate with her.
“It turns out that something as simple as a metal chopstick, heated up as much as it could take, was plenty of motivation. All it took was a hard poke, and then she’d be telling us whatever we wanted to know.”
I knew what he was doing. And I also knew that I needed to leave before I did something stupid, and yet I couldn’t. I was so angry about what happened to Sokhanya, about the horror that she had to experience for basically her entire life, and he was touching right down on it.
He was right. I was easy. And yet I was just standing there.
“She’s a buggy-looking girl, isn’t she? She didn’t used to be. But you see, she used to make these awful noises, really gross ones, ya know? So, we’d just wrap a scarf around her throat and rattle her until she learned to shut up.”
“Yeah, so that’s how you get your jollies? Strangling a little girl?”
“Well, I didn’t. I was a bit too young, but I mean, maybe I did recently. It’s hard to remember, you know. It’s like breaking a dish. Not exactly eventful.”
“You really think this is gonna work?” I snapped, rage surging through me.
“It clearly is. But I could always change it up. I could tell you how much that one woman cried when those dwarves made off with her baby. Sokhanya was nice enough to share that one with us and wow, made me laugh for ages. She stopped eating, lost her stupid human job, and just sat in the nursery, staring at the empty crib.”
“You sent minions to steal a baby. You’re so intimidating.”
“Oh, no, no, no, we sent minions to kill a baby. Get it right. Just a wee little baby oracle. How does that make you feel, Davie? Knowing that the most vulnerable and precious of your kind wasn’t even off limits.” He laughed and for a moment, I saw true madness staring at me right back. It was cold, malicious, and thoroughly enthused by his taunting. “Can you do that mind-sharing thing that the deafie does sometimes? I can show you how it sounded when they threw—”
“Stop it!” I snapped.
Several things happened at once. The cell door flew open, forced back by the sheer velocity of the shield that shot out of me. Baelfyre was blown back, practically on his behind, and pressed down into the floor.
“Sensitive, are we? I can tell you more. I used to make the deafie show me all sorts of things whenever I was bored. I saw how your parents died. I saw the car accident—now that was a show.”
He let out a grunt as he got to his knees again. He was clearly enjoying himself and I knew I was falling right into his grip, but I couldn’t stop myself.
So much pain, so much awful, and there he was, laughing about it. Real people died. Real people felt horrible things and left the earth in awful ways. Real people lost those that they loved and never got them back.
And he was laughing about it.
The thing was that it wasn’t a show. I could tell that he sincerely did enjoy everything he had forced Sokhanya to show him. I could tell that he enjoyed hurting her and talking about her hurt. I could tell that he relished all the pain, even if he didn’t cause it himself.
And it made me so sick.
My hands curled into fists at my side, but he kept right on talking. “You’re not gonna win, you know. The elders in the old country are going to find out that you lot killed their son and they’ll swing in full force. Treaties, the compromise, all of it will be gone.
“And when Bronn is dead, you’re all going to be their property. Then, you’re going to wish that you had taken me up on my offer, been less of a thorn in my side.” He smiled and his teeth were sharp. So sharp. I felt torn between being terrified and wanting to rip them all out one by one. He did that to me. He was a mix of dangerous, unstoppable predator and complete jerkwad, smarmy and overly confident.
“You oracles will be snatched up, of course. Maybe they’ll do the smart thing and blind the lot of you. Your friends, though? They won’t fare so well. Bronn will die first, of course. But I think you’ve got a set of twins now? I bet there could be a lot of fun with them. Maybe if I ask real nice, they’ll let me torture one and see if the other can feel it.”
“Twins?” I hissed, confused and voice full of venom. “I don’t know any twins.”
“Of course you do. The tiny, squat ones. There’s the one I met, then the slightly smaller one that you have running around now. I swear they’re like rats, they multiply.” He meant Mal and Mallory.
“They’re not twins.”
“Huh, ya sure? The resemblance is pretty striking. Oh well, if not, I’m sure someone will want a human pet. I’m sure there are plenty of dragons who want to rip them apart piece by piece. Or maybe they’ll toy with them first, you know. I could probably run a bet on who cries first. My money is on the nicer one, actually. Maybe just a spike under her nail or two—”
“Shut. UP!”
I didn’t know what happened. One moment I was standing there, the next I was standing right in front of him. I had one hand around his throat and the other over his mouth, and my magic was pouring into him.
What was I even trying to do? I didn’t know. All I knew was that there was so much pain, so much awful, and there was no making up for it. I couldn’t magic those people back to life, there wasn’t some loophole or Hail Mary that I could just deux ex machina into existence.
My parents were dead. Babies were dead. Children. Adults. Lives that were meant for so much more were reduced to nothing. Stolen violently. And how he was trying to use them as pawns to emotionally manipulate me. How he was succeeding.
Baelfyre made a muffled sound against my hand, and I finally realized what my body had been trying to do. I didn’t have much in the way of offensive magic, but apparently, I was trying to trigger a shield from inside of him.
I blinked a moment, shocked at the move. It didn’t take a handbook to figure out that it would be bloody. A bit like a balloon popping, except the balloon was a shapeshifting dragon and it wasn’t so much filled with air as it was blood and guts.
I needed to stop—I was aware of that—but I couldn’t.
We had been pretty successful at putting a stop to them at every turn. We had stopped them from killing Bronn, from taking over the castle, from taking over the city. We also had snatched Sokhanya right out of their grasp.
But it was hard to feel like a victory when there was so much death. How could we be considered winning when there were children dying? When whatever magic that had brought back the Oracles had led to the deaths of innocent people? Children? Babies?
I had thought I’d come to terms with my parents’ death a long time ago, but all of the recent events told me that I wasn’t nearly as adapted as I had thought. It was like raw, open wounds were opening all over me, and I just wanted s
ome of them to hurt like we had.
But then a hand gripped my shoulder and I was pulled back. The magic inside of me bubbled up, ready to strike out, ready to release the shield bubbling up right below my skin.
But all of that faded abruptly when I saw who was gripping me.
“Davie, that’s not how we do things,” Bronn said, his voice soft as his other hand came up to stroke my cheek. “Let’s get you to bed, alright? You need your rest.”
“You always have to ruin everything, don’t you, cousin?” Baelfyre rasped from the floor, looking far more amused than he had any right to be.
My eyes slid from him to Bronn and I realized, really realized, what I had been doing. I’d been about to murder the man in cold blood, which really was gray on the morality scale, but he could have had valuable information that would help us. And I was certain that Baelfyre knew that, knew that he was just a step away from betraying his people, and had been trying to goad me into ending his life before any of that could happen.
And I’d fallen right into it.
I was just so angry. So tired of everything that I had let myself dive headfirst into a trap that was so obvious, I’d already known that it was there.
“Yeah,” I muttered, feeling empty and more than a bit ashamed. I felt like I didn’t really know Davie Masters anymore, what she was about or where her boundaries laid. Maybe that was a side effect of dying, maybe it was a side effect of prolonged trauma in the strange war that we were in.
And I didn’t think even my oracle powers were going to give me the answer to that.
3
Action and Consequences
Bronn and I didn’t say anything else as he closed the door again, then looked for the guards who were supposed to be there. We also didn’t say anything as we went back upstairs. However, we didn’t go to my room, or even his. Instead, we went to the gardens, which were lit in the lantern light—a lovely gold splayed across the greenery.
“I thought you were putting me to bed,” I murmured finally, feeling a bit sheepish.
Bronn nodded absently, wrapping an arm around my waist and pulling me flush against his side. “I figured that maybe we could use a moment to talk. Just the two of us.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. I tried to pitch my tone towards playful but fell woefully flat.
“Yeah. Since you’ve come back, you’ve been pretty busy between healing, debriefing us, catching up on what you’ve missed. People all checking up on you physically, but not anything else.”
“What do you mean?”
“A lot of bad and upsetting things happened one right after the other for you, Davie. Our minds aren’t meant to handle that much stress.”
“I… I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“I know. But you very much almost did. You’re pushing yourself too hard, Davie. You need to give your mind a chance to recover.”
“Yeah, well, tell the anti-humanist dragons that.”
He huffed a little, amused. “Fair enough.”
We fell quiet again, leaning against each other, when I realized something. “You have bad news for me, don’t you? And you don’t want to tell me because you’re afraid I’m about one cracker short of a cheese platter.”
“No. It’s not bad news, though it’s not really good news either. It’s just…important, but I do wonder if it can’t wait until morning.”
I sighed and crossed to sit on one of the ornate benches that littered the foliage. It was so strange to think that there was a barely-contained war in the city, but I was sitting in a pretty little conservatory where the only sound was the gentle trickling of water in the artificial streams and the chirping of a couple birds. It was easy to believe I was almost disconnected from the turmoil outside.
Except I wasn’t. I was connected to it so deeply that I could still feel it in my chest, squeezing, tightening, crushing. Sometimes, it hurt just to breathe. And for a moment, just a moment, I had wanted Baelfyre to know what that was like too.
“You might as well tell me. It’s not like one good night’s sleep is going to fix me. I’ll probably have some terrible, apocalyptic dream anyways. Or maybe I’ll be lucky, and I’ll get to relive my death again… That’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one. Or maybe I’ll be at a nice diner, drinking coffee across the table from my own personal grim reaper.”
Sarcasm and acid laced my tone, but Bronn slid his hand into mine anyways, gently squeezing. The contact made me calm a little, if only because I was surprised. Had we ever…just held hands before? For the sake of it? It was hard to remember over all the violence and tumult.
“The trial finished, while we were, uh…busy. All of the coconspirators were found guilty.”
Oh.
I found myself swallowing hard. Somehow, the frantic events of the past few days had helped me forget about all of that for just a bit, pushed to the backburners of my mind. But now all of it was right up front again, and I felt that near-overwhelming rush of emotions.
“They’ve been exiled, officially. Once this fight is over, and the shield around the city can come down, they’ll have to return to the old lands for several years of hard work rebuilding the old kingdoms.”
“I… I suppose that’s the closest to justice I’m going to get.”
Because I didn’t want them dead. I knew that my situation wasn’t one where an eye for and eye fit. I didn’t want Mallory to be an orphan. I didn’t want her parents to be executed. But, man, a few years and hard work didn’t seem like enough considering the genocide they had helped carry out.
At least it was something. At least my parents, and the other oracles, were getting some sort of recompence, even if it did seem paltry.
“That’s… That’s not it.”
“Geez, what? Did one of them learn to fly or something?”
He managed a wan smile. “No, not particularly. But Mallory is sick. She seems to have come down with some sort of flu, or other virus that dwarves get.”
“Huh.” My tone was neutral as I answered. There were far too many emotions swirling in my chest. “That’s too bad,” I finished. “I think it’s time for me to head back to bed.”
To his credit, Bronn handled that surprise well. “Alright then. Let’s get you to sleep.”
We headed back up the stairs and through the dimmed halls. I noticed that there were far more staff milling about or lining the halls, from the cleaners, to the guards, to everyone really. I was sure that if I made my way to the kitchen, someone would be there too. I wasn’t sure if it was because even the covert dragons were flocking to the manor, or if they were just on high alert because Baelfyre was a prisoner.
Or maybe it was from the moles we had discovered with my fake kidnapping. Well, kinda-real kidnapping. I was taken in the middle of the night and delivered to the enemy. But that had been a part of our plan.
When we arrived at the door of my outer chamber, Bronn leaned in to kiss my cheek, his lips warm against my somewhat clammy face. But I wasn’t quite ready to let him go yet. “Are you sure you don’t want to lecture me further about what I almost did?”
Bronn gave a weak sort of a shrug. “You know it was wrong. I know why you were pushed to it. I believe that you won’t let it happen again.”
He was so sweet, so kind. But I also kinda knew better. “You’re going to move him somewhere else?”
“Yeah, I’m definitely going to move him somewhere else.”
“I thought so.” I laughed lightly and leaned in to kiss his cheek too. He turned his head, catching my lips in a sweet little peck. It wasn’t as heated as some of ours had been, but it still made my heart skip a beat and my cheeks flush.
“Sweet dreams,” he said, opening the door and giving me an only slightly cheesy bow.
“They rarely are,” I answered with a wry grin as I went inside.
I blinked, and I was in a cute little restaurant. A sort of ma-and-pa place, woodsy and warm. It was pleasantly full, with families together and a few couples, all seemingly inv
olved in fun conversations. I didn’t even have to look to know who was sitting across from me, feeling the familiar chill down my spine and churn in my stomach.
“So, does being a grim reaper come with some sort of all-encompassing knowledge of diners or is this my subconscious telling me that I’m just really hungry?”
The grim reaper across from me leaned her skull head into her hand, her astral face floating hazily over it. “These places are all constructed from your memories. If you’re wondering why we come here, maybe I just like how you think of coffee.” She waved her hands and a steaming mug appeared right in front of her.
“Is that how this works? My memories effect the flavor of whatever you’re putting in your mouth?”
“Well, when you say it like that, it just sounds dirty.”
I sputtered at that, surprised by her quip. “I, uh—”
“Relax. Yeah, your memories are what build these things. Because they’re dreams, not visions. I can’t technically visit your visions, which is why I had to disappear for most of your… Well, we all know what I’m referring to.”
“Yeah, we do.” I nodded. “Anyways, so what do I owe the honor of this visit? Is this another meeting for you to threaten me with my death? Guilt me that my parents are waiting for me or something?”
“No. Actually, I wanted to have a little chat about…morals.”
“Really? Morals? We’re going parables here?”
“Hey, I’ve been working hard to find you a loophole so you can continue to save people in that impossible way of yours. You can cut the attitude by about forty percent there.”
I settled into my seat, wishing for a glass bottle of cream soda. It appeared right in front of me, but when I sipped it, I didn’t taste much of anything at all. I must have given it such a look, because the grim reaper across from me laughed.
“I suppose things in this plane of existence probably don’t compare to the real world for you, but it’s been a long time since I’ve ever been a physical being.”
“Ah,” I said like that explained everything. “Of course. I should have known.”
