by Grace Draven
“Kraelag was much bigger and the Empire’s main seat of power, but Domora has always been the more refined,” Halani told him. “The most profitable trade for the finest goods is here in Domora.”
They made their way slowly along the main avenue, caught amid the traffic of carts and citizens going about their everyday tasks. Numerous troop units wearing the insignia and uniforms of the Kraelian army moved among them, some directing the flow of traffic, others monitoring its mood and breaking up impromptu brawls that spilled from some of the streetside public houses into the throng.
Malachus noted the number of soldiers. A large representation, even among a crowd this size. “Domora is a hive of activity,” he said. His nostrils flared at the faint whiff of brine. “And the harbor isn’t far away. I can smell salt water and fish.”
Halani half turned to look at him. “You have a discerning nose. All I smell are ripe people and hot grease.”
He steered Batraza away from one cluster of soldiers who watched him with too much interest. “Domora is a city whose current purpose is to prepare for war.”
“Not surprising. The empress is probably spoiling for revenge against the Savatar or set on taking back the territories she lost in both the west and the east.”
If the Spider of Empire was only a fraction like the rumors and gossip portrayed her, she’d punish the Savatar and her rebellious vassals with utmost brutality. There would be no quarter given, no mercy granted.
The closer they got to the armory, the more troops they saw, among them throngs of army followers, including cooks and tailors, armorers and farriers, and a large contingent of prostitutes. The din of voices—human and animal alike—rose to a roar. “I won’t lie, Halani. We may have a difficult time finding Asil or Hamod in such a crowded city.”
She twisted in the saddle to better see him. “But if he has the draga bone still, won’t you be able to at least find him that way?”
“It will make it easier. If it’s still in his possession.”
Worry clouded her gaze. “Can you sense the artifact easier now?”
If she only knew. “It’s here in Domora. I’ve no doubt of it, and somewhere in the direction of the palace. As soon as we find the caravan and get Batraza settled, I’ll leave you with your folk so they can help you look in one part of the city while I search in another. The mother-bond’s draw is powerful here. If your uncle has it, I should find him soon enough. You can start searching for your mother. Your people will know best where she might have been taken. Remember, the garden I saw her in is modest but manicured, a wealthy man’s house but maybe not a nobleman.”
Halani suddenly pointed to a spot beyond the edge of a cluster of buildings. “There. I can see the top of my uncle’s wagon.”
Malachus guided Batraza toward the place Halani indicated. A small group of free traders gathered at the edge of the encampment, curious as to who rode toward them. People emerged from the wagons or left small cook fires to join their growing number as Malachus and Halani entered the camp. They were greeted with great fanfare, and Batraza snorted a protest at the commotion. Malachus halted in front of the group, dismounted, and helped Halani out of the saddle.
She was quickly enfolded in a welcoming embrace. Malachus watched from his place beside Batraza, fascinated by the overt display of affection. Humans were so very odd in their ways. Reserved and exuberant by turn, kind and cruel, loving and hateful. As unpredictable as weather and often as harsh. Seeing Halani and her kin like this lightened his spirit. He admired some of their ways and heartily disapproved of others, but none could find fault with their devotion to each other. This was a tight-knit group.
Saradeen, a tall free trader with a sun-lined face and red hair, was the first to speak to Malachus. “You’re looking a lot better than when I last saw you, friend.” The two men shook hands.
“I’ve come to help Halani find Asil. And Hamod. Clamik told us they’d both disappeared from the camp within a day of each other. Have any of you heard or seen anything from either of them?”
Saradeen’s features turned gloomy. “Nothing. Not even a scrap of rumor. We’ve scoured the city as best we can. Bribed servants who work in the palace, to no avail. It’s as if Hamod has fallen off the edge of the world, and Asil with him.” His eyes were grave. “I’m sorry, Halani. I’d hoped to have better news.”
Halani twisted her fingers together, knuckles whitening. “Not even the middens or the gallows?”
The free trader shook his head. “In that, I’m pleased to tell you no.”
Malachus pressed his hand to her back when her shoulders slumped, and addressed Saradeen. “We’ve traveled hard to get here quickly. Had we arrived earlier, I’d suggest a city search, though I know you said you’ve already gone that route once. But it’s late, the shops are closing, people are less willing to talk when they’re eager to go home. Morning would be better.” Halani looked to argue, and Malachus continued before she could. “We’re both tired, need some food and a bed. We’ll serve Asil and Hamod better if we’re alert and well rested when we start our hunt.”
His words inspired a deluge of offers to make meals, bring blankets and pillows, and vacate wagons for Halani and Malachus to use. Halani accepted the offers of tea and food but declined the others. “We’ll use Uncle’s wagon. I assume it’s standing empty?” At several nods, she turned to Malachus. “He isn’t here to protest.”
With Batraza taken care of for the night and a quick meal at the main campfire, the two made their way to one of the more ornate wagons in the caravan circle. Malachus paused just inside the door, carrying his and Halani’s satchels slung over his shoulders, and stared in awe at what her lamplight revealed.
The wagon he’d used as his temporary shelter was a spartan affair, a provender wagon cleared of enough content to give him space for a bed and a little room to move around. Halani’s wagon was a home on wheels. Of similar size to the supply wagon, it was far more welcoming, with furnishings and decorations that invited one to stay and visit. Hamod’s wagon was a different affair altogether.
Overdone, overstuffed, and overwhelming, it reflected something of the man Halani called uncle. A man who fancied himself not just the wagon master of a free trader caravan but the monarch of a small rolling kingdom. A man who called himself Hamod the Imposing with all seriousness. A man who robbed graves not for survival but purely for profit.
“I think I’d prefer to sleep under the sky,” he said.
Halani’s surprise at his declaration faded, a knowing gleam entering her eyes. She nodded. “The weather is decent enough, and it’s cooler out there than in here. Opening the windows won’t do much to lessen the heat.”
He took the lamp she passed him. “Will you join me?”
She bent to gather up extra blankets and pillows from the sumptuously made bed and smiled at him. “Of course. Where else would I wish to be?”
Her words sent a rush of desire through him, almost as powerful as what had swamped him when he returned to their camp and discovered her combing out her hair.
They made up a bed close to the wagon, away from the path of foot traffic. The noise of the city swirled outside the camp, even as it gradually fell asleep. The joy of having Halani in his arms once more almost drowned out the tug of the mother-bond on Malachus’s soul. He refused to waste the ever-diminishing time he had with her dwelling on it. She welcomed him into her arms and into her body once more as the stars wheeled above them, and he worshipped her with his hands, his mouth, and his heart.
Afterward, they lay entwined, their voices low as they spoke of inconsequential things and Malachus played with Halani’s loosened hair. She stared into his eyes, puzzlement creasing her forehead. “What?” he asked.
“Lightning has always loved the draga,” she said, echoing his earlier statement. He paused in coiling one of her ringlets around his fingers. “The others saw you call down
lightning and thought you a weather mage, but you aren’t, are you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Her hand pressed to his jaw. “This is the face of a man who’s lived three decades, give or take a couple of years.” The same small hand passed down his neck to flatten against his chest. “Inside, though, beneath what’s human flesh and bone, lies something else. Something much older, more long-lived than a mere man.” Malachus caught his breath when a terrible sympathy settled over her features, and her eyes grew glossy as she stared at him. “‘The Sun Maiden’ is more than a story for you, isn’t it? Who were Golnar and Yain?”
He didn’t look away, didn’t deny the truth of her speculations. He no longer wished to hide it from her. “Golnar was my mother and Yain my sister.” No matter how many times he said their names aloud, the pain it brought never blunted, never weakened.
Halani wrapped her arms and legs more tightly around him, as if she tried to offer sanctuary by melding him to her. “We are awful, brutish creatures,” she whispered.
Malachus stroked her bare back, returning the comfort she offered him. “Not all of you,” he said, planting a kiss into her hair. “Not you. Never you.”
He held her as she wept the tears he no longer did and grieved for the mother and sibling whose images as both women and draga remained as sharp in his mind now as they had centuries earlier.
“You’re not cursed are you?” Halani asked, returning to their bed after retrieving a cloth to wipe her face and blow her nose.
Malachus gathered her close. “No. The curse is my birthright, the mother-bond the means by which I can claim it before it consumes me. The guise of humanity can hide and hold a draga for only so long before I have to change and embrace what I truly am.”
“No wonder the livestock always grew skittish when you came close. They sensed the draga.”
“Yes.”
“But they do it to Batraza, too, and she doesn’t fear you. Is she a draga in disguise as well?”
Malachus grinned. “No, but she’s painted by draga magic, under a spell that binds her life to mine for as long as I breathe. If I were to die today, so would she. She’s not much younger than I am.”
Halani’s mouth fell open. “You have what? A two-hundred-year-old mare?” The idea shocked her even more than having him verify for her his own origins.
He laughed. “Something like that.”
“It explains why she’s so tranquil. She’s had a long time to settle into her bones.”
They grew quiet once more, and Malachus thought Halani might have fallen asleep, until a small giggle drafted across his neck where she’d nuzzled her face. “What’s so funny?”
Another giggle. “Never, in all my life, did I ever imagine I’d meet a draga, much less swive one.”
He shifted so he could stare down at her smiling face. “And what have you discovered?”
That smile took on a come-hither quality. “That dragas make wonderful lovers.”
They made love again, and this time their intimacy contained the strengthening bond of a shared secret, of unconditional trust, and for Malachus, the inarguable fact that he’d fallen deeply in love with a woman he’d soon leave behind.
She fell asleep in his arms afterward, and he lay there, savoring the feel of her body, heavy with sleep, against him. He wished they could stay that way all night, but it wasn’t to be.
He’d suggested they begin their search for Asil in the morning, but that had been for Halani’s benefit. He was stronger than she was, not plagued by the same exhaustion she suffered from the worry over her mother’s fate. He’d use the small hours to reconnoiter the city as an extra measure.
Slowly, carefully, he gathered Halani into his arms and stood, blankets and her hair cascading over his arms. She didn’t wake when he climbed the steps to Hamod’s wagon and shouldered the door open. She only muttered in her sleep when he laid her across the luxurious bed and straightened the covers over her. He dared not kiss her. If he did, he wouldn’t leave.
Outside, he silently dressed, armed himself with his two favorite daggers, and left the free trader camp for a nighttime exploration of Domora, guided by the powerful pull of his mother-bond.
The city stretched out before him in an orderly grid of streets that radiated from a central point: the graceful summer palace perched on the highest point of the slope upon which the city’s many structures were built. His mother-bond lay in that direction. While he had no illusions regarding his chances of entering the palace through means not nefarious, it was as good a place as any to start.
The mother-bond’s draw had taken on a strangeness. Instead of a clear, singular beacon flashing an internal light from within the palace, it pulsed with a broader wave, as if it sat not in one particular spot but across an area. Still close to the palace, and even within it, but acting more like a halo of light than a splinter of it. Malachus growled, frustrated with this newest complication. He prayed he didn’t face the same difficulty with finding Asil in tomorrow’s search.
His nocturnal exploration took him straight through the heart of the city and onto the wide royal avenue where trees lined either side of the broad street. Deserted in the small hours, the street welcomed him as its lone visitor, an assumption Malachus abandoned when something or someone moved among the trees, following him.
Two shadows, from what he could tell. Quiet, practiced at lurking and likely at ambush. Unfortunately for them, they’d chosen a difficult target. He picked a spot in the street with room to move that didn’t trap him in a narrow place or a dead end and halted to confront the pair who’d scurried from the shadows of buildings and shrubbery as they tracked him. “You might as well stop hiding,” he called out. “Try to rob me, and I’ll leave you in pieces in the street.” He wasn’t in the mood for games, nor had he the time for them.
One of the shades emerged from behind a wall of hedges, solidifying into a man with squinty, rattish features.
He moved like a rat too, with the same scavenging scuttle.
“I got something you might want to know,” he said, lisping the words through the gap where his front teeth should have been. “It’s about the woman you brought with you to the city today.”
While his instinct for trouble had served him well, alarm exploded inside Malachus at the footpad’s statement. He extracted a coin from the bag tucked into his tunic and flipped it silently to the man.
The footpad caught it deftly, inspected it, and promptly disappeared it among the dirt and fleas of ragged clothing. “I need a little more,” he said. “This is good information.”
“That’s all you’ll get and be grateful for it.” Malachus tilted his head, listening to the furtive movements behind him. “For all I know, you’re about to feed me a dung cart full of lies, and I can always just beat the information out of you. And back your friend off before you both regret it.” He rested a hand on the hilt of the knife he carried.
The footpad’s eyes widened. He gave a quick nod, and the creeping steps behind Malachus halted. “Your woman. Half of Domora has been looking for her.”
Fury fueled by panic roared through Malachus. He clenched his jaw, fighting to keep down his rising fear as well as the draga’s innate aggression. “Why is that?” His voice revealed nothing of his inner turmoil or the urge to sprint back to the free trader camp and ensure Halani’s safety.
The footpad shrugged, the sly gleam in his eye signaling he wasn’t completely fooled by Malachus’s apathy. “Don’t know other than the empress’s cat’s-paw has his lackeys scouring the city with drawings of a man and two women. All three look alike, and the younger woman is the one you rode into Domora with today. Word’s gone out that anyone who spots one of these three and reports back to him, they’ll get a reward.”
Malachus recognized the term “cat’s-paw,” a disparaging description for a henchman. “Did he say why he’s looking for them?”
&nb
sp; “No, and ain’t no one who knows him that stupid to ask.”
“The name of this cat’s-paw?”
The footpad shrugged. “Gharek. A gutter rat who rose through the ranks and fancies himself gentry now.” His upper lip lifted in a curl of contempt. “Dangerous but known for paying well if you give him what he wants.”
Dangerous and hunting for Halani and her mother, using drawings of their likenesses. Where the hell had he gotten those? Malachus barely resisted the urge to have done with the niceties and simply beat the information out of the footpad. “If he’s so generous and the reward significant, why aren’t you on his doorstep telling him instead of talking to me?”
“Because there’s probably a crowd already lining up at the Dead Hound Pub waiting to tell him and get the reward.”
“And you’d make more money by selling me a warning.” From a strictly mercenary perspective, it was a smart move and did nothing to lessen Malachus’s revulsion for this scavenger. “Where does the cat’s-paw live?”
His new informant cocked his head to one side, studying Malachus, his rodent face becoming even more rattish. “You’re new to Domora, aren’t you?”
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that makes me an easy mark.”
The footpad shrugged. “Don’t know. And if I did, I wouldn’t go there. I heard the last time someone paid Gharek a visit at his house uninvited, he returned the man’s entrails to his wife in a bag.”
A very dangerous cat’s-paw indeed, and unhesitating when it came to killing. Malachus tossed the man another belsha. “And no one’s seen the other two he’s looking for?”
