Dragon Unleashed

by Grace Draven

  The arrowheads had penetrated deep and were surrounded by swollen, bloodied flesh. Before trying to remove them, she’d have to chop the shafts short with a hatchet. The initial wounding hadn’t killed him outright, but if her nose was right, those arrowheads had been dipped in a lethal poison, which should have killed him even faster than the bloodletting.

  Coin-size bloodstains marred his tunic and breeches where the arrowheads were lodged. The hip wound was the least grievous of the three. The one below his collarbone and the one in his side, far worse. Even if they managed to miss a vital organ, he might well bleed to death before Asil arrived with the medicine chest. Her mother climbed into the wagon, a small, intricately engraved chest tucked under one arm, a satchel stuffed with towels draped over her other arm. She shrugged off the satchel, dropping it at Halani’s feet, and set the chest down nearby.

  “I brought towels, Hali. Do you want me to boil water?” Asil was a precocious child trapped in an aging woman’s body, but that arrested maturity didn’t mean she was stupid, and she often acted as Halani’s assistant when she cared for a sick or injured person.

  “Thank you, Mama. You always know what to get even before I ask.” The older woman preened under Halani’s praise. “I’ll need the towels and the hot water. And see if you can borrow Marata’s sharpest hatchet and one of his blocks. These arrow shafts are made of bone. They’re too tough to break by hand.” She couldn’t do anything about the poison but try to help his body overcome its effects. Had he imbibed a lethal elixir, she would have administered a purge, but this ran through the bloodstream instead of the belly. Asil wasn’t gone long before Talen tapped on the doorframe to announce her presence and lifted an armload of linen for Halani to see. “I thought you could use some extra bedding and blankets.”

  Halani descended the steps to relieve Talen of some of her burden. “Thank you. Did Mama ask for a hatchet?”

  The other woman nodded. “She’s arguing with Marata right now over which is the sharpest to use.” She peered into the wagon. “Do you have enough room in there for an extra person or do you want me to stay out here and pass the bedding to you?”

  Halani motioned for Talen to follow her as she climbed back into the wagon. She dropped the bedding next to Malachus. “He’s heavy, so I can use the help getting his clothes off. Seydom said to call him or one of the other men, but we’ll manage fine between the two of us.”

  They knelt on either side of the unconscious man. Talen whistled her admiration. “He’s handsome enough, even nearly dead. I wonder why someone tried to kill him.”

  Because they feared him. She kept the thought behind her teeth, but the idea refused to let Halani go.

  She agreed with Talen’s praise, but his looks were neither here nor there. Her task was to keep him alive. She slid her hands under his shoulders. “Here, help me lift him so I can get half his tunic off. I’ll have to cut it away from the arrow shaft.”

  The two women gently lifted him into a partially reclined position. His head dropped forward, chin resting next to where the arrow shaft protruded from his chest just below his collarbone. Talen braced him against her knees while Halani cut away the fabric surrounding the wound. They eased the tunic off him, leaving his torso bare.

  “Very handsome,” Talen repeated, gaze lingering on his lean body.

  Halani snorted. “Not too loud, Talen. I don’t need Marata turning my patient into stew meat with the hatchet just because his wife can’t peel her eyes off him.” Halani’s humor soon evaporated as she got a closer look at two of the three wounds. One might require her to pull the arrow from bone, a bloody task requiring brute force, but not nearly as risky as removing one embedded in an internal organ, which she feared might be the case with the second arrow, in his side.

  “If the poison those arrows were dipped in doesn’t kill him, me trying to fish them out will probably do the trick.” She changed positions, scooting down to his feet. “Boots off. Then his breeches.”

  They stripped him, tossing his garb into a corner before readjusting the bedding, which had twisted beneath him with their efforts.

  Talen swiped at her brow. “Good thing he’s unconscious. All that jostling would have left him screaming if he’d been awake.”

  “Thank the gods for small mercies, then.” Halani stood up and leaned out the door to cool off. Asil had returned from arguing with Marata and now tended the fire she’d started nearby, watched by a small crowd of onlookers who’d gathered to gossip.

  Halani scowled. “Mama, how much longer until the water boils?”

  “Soon. Do you want the hatchet now?” At Halani’s nod, she skipped to the wagon and handed her daughter the sharp-edged tool. “Marata says no nicks in the blade or you’ll answer to him.”

  “You’d think that stupid hatchet is his favorite child.” Talen squeezed past Halani to exit the wagon. “I’ll tell him if he’s that worried, he can come and chop those arrow shafts himself.”

  “Tell him I’ll be careful,” Halani replied. “And send Seydom to me. He’s helped before when I’ve had to dig broadhead pieces out of someone.” Asil had always been Halani’s primary helpmate when it came to healing the sick or patching up the wounded, but she needed Seydom’s strength for the worst parts of her surgeries.

  Asil gave the fire one last check before joining Halani at the steps. “What now, Hali?”

  The two women laid out supplies, including the medicine chest, towels, bandages, a support block, and the hatchet borrowed from Marata. Halani left the wagon long enough to bury three knives in the fire’s hot coals and to mix a poultice of herbs. It oozed through her fingers as she swirled it by hand in the bowl. She closed her eyes and listened for the fading voice of the freshly cut herbs and the hymn of earth swirling under her feet. They were like threads once woven on the same loom, then cut. Halani pictured them thus and then herself capturing the trailing ends and tying them together, so that earth’s deep magic infused the herbs within the poultice with power, with life. This was the foundation of her healing, what gave her salves and tinctures their potency, what made her an enemy of the Empire.

  When she returned, she carried an additional knife with her, handing it and the poultice to Asil while she retrieved a thin length of silk from the chest.

  “I hope I won’t need this,” she told Asil before laying the silk across the top of the chest. She reached for the hatchet and block just as Seydom entered the wagon.

  “Glad you’re here,” Halani said and pointed to a spot next to Malachus. “Help us move him so I can mound the blankets beneath the block and wedge it under the arrow shaft.” She pointed to the shaft protruding from his upper chest.

  They managed to roll him in place without waking him. Every second he remained unconscious made her work easier. Halani lifted the hatchet and with one swift stroke chopped the arrow shaft down short enough to get most of it out of her way.

  They repeated the process with the arrow in his hip and the more dangerous one in his side, and then Halani set the hatchet aside. “Well done,” she complimented her helpers. “Now for the messy work.”

  “What if he wakes up while you’re cutting him, Hali?” Asil’s eyes clouded with worry.

  The last time a patient had awakened while having a wound cleaned, he’d lashed out with a fist and blackened Halani’s eye. Bildu, the camp’s farrier, almost didn’t survive the incident. It had taken Marata and two others to pull an enraged Asil off him.

  Halani tipped her chin toward Seydom. “Seydom is strong enough to hold him down if that happens. I’ll be fine, Mama.” She noted Seydom’s wary glance toward Asil. He’d been one of those who had wrestled Asil into submission and saved Bildu from a disemboweling.

  Odd scars decorated Malachus’s nude body, beautiful in their way, with fernlike designs decorating his skin. Halani had seen her fair share of scars on her patients; she’d never seen any like these.
“Hold the lamp a little higher, Mama.”

  Asil did as she bade. “How do you think he got these?”

  Seydom snorted. “We all saw those two men he killed. I’d be more surprised if he wasn’t scarred up.”

  “You can ask him when he wakes.” Halani turned her attention to the arrow just below his collarbone first. She held the shortened shaft between thumb and forefinger and gave it a delicate twist, careful not to rotate it so hard that the sinew attaching the broadhead to the haft separated.

  The shaft didn’t budge. Malachus remained still, though blood trickled faster from the wound.

  “Bad luck but not the worst,” she informed her companions. “I think it’s in the cartilage.”

  Seydom tensed. His task in here was about to become much more challenging. “Can you get it out?”

  “I think so.” Halani took up her knife. “Lamp higher, Mama.”

  Blood ran faster as Halani cut two incisions into the flesh surrounding the arrow shaft. Using the shaft itself as a guide, she slid the fingers of her free hand down the length and into the bleeding muscle swollen around the broadhead.

  Her fingertips passed over the smooth horn face and the sharpened sides. “Ah, damn,” she muttered.

  Asil’s lamplight wavered as she leaned in to see what made Halani curse. “In the bone?”

  Halani gently withdrew her blood-coated fingers from the now gaping wound. “There’s no bone in that spot, but that matters little. The broadhead’s buried like I thought. I’ll have to use the loop.” She clutched the towel Asil passed her to wipe her hands and then the blade, setting both down to retrieve the length of silk from her supplies. Knotting it into a noose, she hooked the loop over a fingertip and wrapped the trailing length around her forearm to anchor it for leverage. Seydom had changed positions, settling himself behind their patient so that his knees rested just above Malachus’s shoulders, ready to press down in case of a struggle. “Do you want me to do it?”

  Halani shook her head. “You’re stronger, but I’ve done this before. Just be ready in case he comes to and tries to kill us all from the pain.”

  Once more she dug through slashed muscle with her fingers until she located the broadhead’s tang and slipped the silk loop over it, drawing the slipknot tight. Malachus jerked but didn’t wake, even when Seydom pressed his shoulders down to hold him still.

  This was the hard part. Halani pulled the winding length of silk more snugly around her arm and braced for a tug-of-war between her and the broadhead.

  “Ready?” she asked. At Asil’s and Seydom’s nods, she placed her free hand on Malachus’s chest and with the other wrenched back on the noosed tang. The broadhead came free with a sucking pop and a gout of bright blood. The oblivious wounded woke to the world with a bellow.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Malachus dreamed of his dead mother and sister. They had come to the monastery to visit him, waiting in one of the courtyards while a blizzard of pink blossoms from the sour cherry orchards surrounding the monastery swirled around them. His mother, a woman of stern visage and aloof demeanor, briefly returned his enthusiastic embrace before gently pushing him toward his older sibling.

  Yain, beautiful as the dawn, lifted Malachus into her arms and spun him around, her laughter bright. “I’ve missed you, little brother!”

  Confused by their visit but ecstatic they were here, Malachus hugged her close.

  “Do you want to fly with us, Malachus?” His mother’s voice deepened, turning throatier, bigger. Her body changed, dissipating first into a swirling mass of gray and crimson smoke. The smoke swelled, expanding out and up until it resembled a colossal storm cloud. Yain squeezed Malachus’s hand. “One day we’ll do the same, little brother.”

  The heavy smoke coalesced, solidifying into a familiar shape, one carved on the monastery walls and drawn on prayer flags, sketched in precious books and scrolls, even stamped on coins. Those were nothing compared to this, his mother’s transformation from imposing human woman to majestic draga clad in armored scales shimmering in all the colors of earth’s most precious gemstones. Leathery wings tucked tight to her sides had replaced her arms, two of the claws broken off at their tips.

  Her great head, three times the size of an ox cart and crowned with a pair of spiral horns, swung toward him on a serpentine neck. Her nostrils flared to catch his and Yain’s scents, the brief snort she gusted knocking them both back a few steps. Scaled lips pulled back to reveal teeth the length of spears and edged like sword blades. Her body filled the courtyard and beyond, past the confining walls that had somehow faded to reveal the muscular length of her tail and the backdrop of snowcapped mountains behind her.

  Unafraid, Malachus clambered up the length of the leg she held out to him. For a moment he paused to stare at his hands where they rested against one of her glittering scales. A child’s hands, smooth and small. Confused, he turned to Yain, who waited behind him, balanced precariously on one of the draga’s claws. “I’m a child again,” he said in a voice high and very young.

  She grinned. “Of course you are, silly. It’s the only way we’ve known you.” She nudged him. “Hurry up. We don’t have forever.”

  Though she’d spoken in a cheerful tone, her words raised a wrenching grief in Malachus. Another push from her sent him scampering across scales, using their almond-shaped ridges as handholds as he climbed up his mother’s body. Once on her back, he scooted up the length of her neck until he found a spot behind her head where a ruff of scales acted as a windbreak. He buried his hands in the undercoat of scales, soft as fur, hidden beneath smaller, flexible pin scales.

  Yain settled behind him, one arm wrapping around his middle to hold him close. She leaned forward, slapped a spot on their mother’s neck, and called out, “We’re ready!”

  Malachus whooped his excitement and left his stomach behind as the draga sprang off the ground in a powerful surge of muscle and the flap of enormous wings. The earth fell away beneath them, the newly budding treetops specks of green on the rugged slopes, the monastery indistinguishable from the hillside into which it was built. “Higher, Mother! Higher!” he shouted, only to have the wind snatch the words and fling them away. His mother heard and beat her wings harder and faster until she caught a swirl of warm air that slingshot her toward the clouds and the sun. Behind Malachus, Yain cheered and hugged him hard against her so he wouldn’t slip as the draga banked to the right, shredding a wall of clouds to reach the blue of endless sky. The earth below was a puzzle of grays and greens as spring clawed its way toward summer.

  Winter still held dominion in the higher elevations, and while Malachus shivered under the occasional blast of cold air swooping over him and Yain, the sun radiated a blistering heat upon them, as if his mother had flown so high, he could stretch out an arm and trace the streams of sunlight gilding her scales.

  “It’s so hot,” he said as sweat dripped off his brow into his eyes. He dared not let go his hold to wipe it away for fear of falling off his perch, despite his sister’s protective hold. His mother trumpeted a roar, its vibrations undulating down her entire length. She banked again in a broad swoop, her wings making a dull thump against the air with every flap as she leveled off to skim the roof of the clouds.

  Even then, the sun still poured its heat onto his head, washing his body in waves until it felt as if his blood might boil and his skin blister. Yain’s grip, at first reassuring, held him in a smothering vise, tightening so it soon became a struggle to breathe, and Malachus squirmed in her hold. Still she hung on, ignoring his struggles.

  Draga roars filled his ears, resonating in his skull over and over until his eyes bulged. His stomach slammed into his throat when she suddenly dove, wings tucked tight, long neck stretched, as she plummeted toward the earth.

  Terrified cries hung trapped in Malachus’s throat along with his stomach as the ground rushed up to meet them. A flash teased his vision
in one corner, and he glanced to the side in time to see another follow it, a bolt of lightning that arced off one of his mother’s wing tips. This time her roar was triumphant, and every hair on Malachus’s small body stood straight up.

  “The lightning, little brother. It rides with us!” Yain whooped her joy, and the lightning answered, splitting the ether with silvery forks that buzzed the air around them as the draga sped even faster toward the earth.

  Struck mute with terror, Malachus dug his hands into his mother’s fur, begging her silently to please, please slow down, fly up. I don’t want to die.

  The draga roared, Yain laughed, and the lightning arced all around them. Malachus closed his eyes, certain they were about to smash headfirst into the mountainside from the exhilarating ride turned death spiral. A bright flash whitened the darkness behind his closed eyelids, and pain unlike anything he’d ever felt before tore through him. His eyes snapped open, and this time he didn’t hold back his cry.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They’d prepared for a violent awakening, but not his strength. Malachus batted Seydom away as if he were a pesky gnat, smacking him so hard against the wagon’s back wall, the vehicle tipped on its struts. Asil threw herself to one side, narrowly avoiding a kick to the belly.

  Halani’s own proximity and positioning kept her trapped against Malachus’s flailing body. Before she could scramble away, he wrapped an arm around her middle in a vise grip and squeezed.

  Air hurtled out of her nose and mouth on a wheeze, and she stared into a pair of deep brown eyes half mad with pain. If he squeezed any harder, he’d break her back. Asil launched herself at her daughter’s captor, only to be sent tumbling down the wagon’s length as easily as Seydom, who still slumped in a daze.

  Halani cupped a bloody hand around her patient’s chin and held up the dripping broadhead swinging on the length of silk so he could see. More blood poured from the gaping wound just under his collarbone, painting his entire side crimson.