by Watson Davis
She said, “You look horrible.”
“Ouch,” Nohel said, patting his misshapen hand against her back, leaving a red stain on her shirt. “Davina said I’d have some impressive facial scars.”
Tayna leaned back, her face moving left and right as she studied him, her hands touching his cheeks with a delicate gentleness.
Tethan pushed himself back on the cot. He turned to stare out the window, but Mitta sat there, staring at him, her face composed, yet one of her eyebrows arched.
Tayna whispered something to Nohel and Nohel mumbled something back.
Tethan didn’t listen. He pursed his lips and shrugged at Mitta, whose expression didn’t change.
Someone in the hall shouted, “King’s Bane!”
Tethan welcomed the opportunity to peer into the hall, to raise his hand and smile at someone, anyone. He swallowed and looked back at Mitta, who was now rubbing her chin and staring off into emptiness. Tethan cleared his throat. “I need to thank you.”
Mitta jerked, her eyes flitting back to his, a grin growing on her face. “Thank me? For what? For being a distraction? I’m a clan leader because I’m supposed to be a hero who looks out for my clan. I should be thanking you.”
Tethan smiled and stared at the floor. “Thanks for that.”
Someone in the hall called out, “Dragonslayer! King’s Bane!”
Tethan waved, not seeing the person. Nohel murmured in Tayna’s ear; she giggled. Tethan crossed his arms over his chest and breathed deep, his gaze rising to the ceiling, studying its intricate details.
“You know,” Mitta said, shifting in her chair, pulling her foot off the table and setting it down with both her hands on her thin calf, careful not to jostle it, “it’s hard for me not to think of you as that little brat I remember from the Gatherings.”
“Little brat?” Tethan said, his eyebrows rising. “What do you mean little brat?”
Mitta put weight on her injured foot and winced. “You were a little brat. My clan hasn’t been to a gathering in Windhaven for seven years. You were a lot smaller back then, and you were always causing trouble.”
“Well, yeah,” Tethan chuckled. “But seven years is a long time. I’ve changed.”
“Not that much.” Mitta winked at him.
Davina swept into the room, going directly to Tethan’s side. She bent down and kissed him on the forehead. When she straightened up, her cool gaze was on Mitta. “You’re still here, Clan Leader? I thought you’d been cleared to return to your clan.”
“I was just enjoying the company.” Mitta’s eyes darted to Tethan and back to Davina.
Tethan gulped, feeling his blood rise to his cheeks.
“Yes? Well, Lirden was searching for you,” Davina said, kneeling by Tethan’s cot. “I believe you have Brightfox business to attend to.”
Mitta pushed herself to her feet, nodded to Davina, and hobbled past, looking up and smiling at Tethan as she limped through the door.
Davina sighed and jabbed her fingers into one of Tethan’s cuts.
“Ouch,” Tethan said, angling himself to the side, trying to see his mother’s face. “That hurt.”
Davina mumbled so that just Tethan could hear her. “I do not trust that girl.”
“Well, yeah.” Tethan relaxed, staring out the door. “She is a Brightfox, after all.”
Davina began to chant, her hands glowing. Tethan’s wounds grew warmer until they burned, tingling until they felt as though they would burst. She stopped and wrapped bandages around his legs, his chest, his arms, while Tethan tried not to notice Nohel or Tayna or the empty spot where Mitta had been sitting.
Davina said, “Stand up.”
Tethan winced as he stood, sweat beading up on his skin, dripping down the back of his neck, his eyelids burning and heavy.
“You need to get something to eat and some rest,” she said, placing her hand on Tethan’s shoulder and shaking him. She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, whispering in his ear, “And try to stay away from dragons and Brightfoxes in the future.”
Tethan laughed. “You too.”
She snorted and turned to Nohel and Tayna, saying, “Well, let me in here so I can try to salvage his good looks.”
Tayna backed away.
Tethan squeezed out through the door, placing each step with care, and ambled into the room across the hall.
Gartan lay on his cot, left arm behind his head, right arm over his chest, staring out through a window over the tiled roof, at the night sky beyond. A comforting breeze blew in.
Brivat and Makal slept on cots across the room; Simthil lay on the floor, jugs of beer and ale beside him, his snoring loud enough to wake a dragon across the Far Wastes.
Tethan crept up beside his father’s bed and leaned up against the wall. Gartan’s eyes appeared open in the darkness.
Tethan whispered, “Father, are you awake?”
“You need to rest,” Gartan said, not moving. “Regain your strength.”
“You sound like Mom.” Tethan followed his father’s gaze. Across the courtyard, in another part of the palace the Onei had taken for a hospital, Dyuh Mon sat talking to a group of small Shrian children, allowing them to pull his lips back, letting them touch his demonic-looking teeth, snapping at their fingers, and laughing with them.
His voice weary, Gartan said, “He’s an odd one, isn’t he?”
“Who are those kids?”
“Some Shrian orphans.” Gartan eased himself around, turning his face toward Tethan. “They are not important. He is, though. This Eternal Council deemed him valuable enough to summon a dragon to drag him back, or kill him, or whatever they were going to do to him.”
Tethan shrugged, arching an eyebrow. “He is an odd one, but he’s not what I want to speak to you about.”
“Ah?” Gartan smiled. “He is exactly what I want to talk to you about.”
“We can’t waste our time here.” Tethan picked up a stool from beside another cot, moved it to Gartan’s side, and eased himself down onto it. “We need to leave before the Eternal Council send more beasts our way.”
Gartan yawned, shifting his position to prop himself up. “What are you thinking we should do?”
“We need to stop farting around and get our asses back home.” Tethan laid his forearms on the edge of his father’s cot.
“I agree that we need to move quickly,” Gartan said, “but we need to take this opportunity to strike back at the Eternal Council. This is the time for us to go to this Arenghel place and steal the source of their power. Teach them they can’t fuck with the Onei.”
“No, that’s crazy,” Tethan said, shaking his head. “The other clan leaders are already heading back home, and we can’t take on the power of this Eternal Council alone.”
“I didn’t raise you to be an old woman.” Gartan grinned.
“We need to take as many of these purelander ships as we can man that haven’t been too badly damaged and load them up with our spoils, before we’re forced to leave it all behind,” Tethan said.
“No.” Gartan shook his head, his eyes hard as flints.
Tethan’s eyebrows rose. “No? What plan do you have?”
“Don’t you see?” Gartan asked. “This is just what we needed. The Eternal Council have confirmed that our pointy-toothed friend speaks the truth about knowing something of them and their ways. The map is real. The treasures there are real. We can’t turn away now.”
“Sure we can,” Tethan said. “We’ll be overextended if we don’t.”
“You’re going to give a speech,” Gartan said, putting his palm on Tethan’s cheek, patting it. “You’re going to call the clans around you. You’re going to hobble up before them in your bandages. You’re going to raise that harpoon into the air, and you’re going to tell them that the Nayen Eternal Council sent that dragon to kill them. You’re going to tell them the Nayen Eternal Council think a simple dragon’s enough to scare us off, and we need to go down there and teach those fuckers how wrong
they were. We need to show them that we’re Onei and they can’t scare us.”
“Father?” Tethan leaned back, a horrified expression on his face. “I can’t do that. That dragon was after Dyuh Mon. It had nothing to do with us. If anything, that should be a warning for us to return home now.”
“Tethan,” Gartan said, a tone in his voice of an older, wiser man finding the objections of a younger one cute and trivial. “I am a clan leader and listen to me now. Sometimes you have to fib a bit to get things done.”
“No, you listen to me,” Tethan said, raising his hands to keep his father from speaking further. “Our men are not trained to fight against Nayen. They are not ready for this. We don’t know their tactics or their spells. We do not have the supply lines set up to support this many men in the field for an extended period of time, and what if they have more dragons at their disposal? This is folly.”
“Supply lines?” Gartan spread his hands, a smile creeping across his face. “We have an entire city at our disposal. We can take anything we need and head across the sea, isn’t that what you said back in Windhaven? And if we need more provisions, we’ll take them once we get there.”
Tethan glared at his father, pressing his lips together.
“What?” Gartan asked. “What is it you want to say?”
Tethan’s eyes narrowed. “This is a fool’s obsession.”
“We will be the greatest heroes in the history of the Onei whether we survive or not.” Gartan grinned, spread his hands, and winked.
Tethan shook his head and rose to his feet. He hobbled away without looking back, a sick feeling of gloom gnawing at his insides.
# # #
The doors to the inn shut behind Tethan, and the loud chatter trickled to a stop. He squinted against the thick smoke filling the room, peering through the murky haze as the fumes tickled his nose.
Every face turned to him, almost all of them Shrian, none of them Onei, most of them scarred, gruff, and angry. A dealer of cards stopped dealing. A laughing sailor with a curvy woman on his lap stopped groping the woman’s breast to stare at Tethan, his laughter fading, his smile disappearing, his mouth dropping open. A serving wench tripped over a sailor’s foot, spilling her tray to the floor, the mugs of beer splattering their contents, the glass shattering.
In a corner booth at the far end of the inn, Kalo lounged with Mian-on beside her. Kalo’s eyebrows rose, her mouth dropping open mid-word. Mian-on looked at her, straightened up in his seat, and turned to look at what she was staring at.
Tethan smiled and waved. He strode through the room, navigating his way around tables, through aisles, stepping over beer and broken glass, toward Kalo and Mian-on’s table. Kalo motioned with her hands, and Mian-on slid out of the booth, Kalo quickly joining him.
“My new friends,” Tethan said, smiling. He gestured to the booth, the half-eaten and still steaming bowls of stew on the table. “Please, sit back down. I would talk to you.”
Kalo glanced past Tethan and said, “This might not be the best place for a meeting. Perhaps we should go back to the palace and talk there.”
“It seems a merry place,” Tethan said, easing into the booth across the table from where Kalo and Mian-on had been sitting. “I like this place. Please, sit.”
Kalo sighed and crawled back into the booth, dragging herself back to where she’d been sitting. Mian-on perched on the edge of the booth’s seat, eyes darting, a nervous smile playing across his face. He nodded to some people, gesturing with his hands as though asking someone, everyone, to be calm.
“I have a concern,” Tethan said, placing his forearms on the table, leaning into them, toward Kalo.
“A concern?” Kalo said. “I have more than one.”
“I have a few myself,” Mian-on whispered. “There are many Shrians here.”
Tethan waved his hand, dismissing Mian-on’s words, focusing his attention on Kalo. “What is your worry?”
“My worries?” Kalo said.
Mian-on shook his head. “Uh-oh. Here she goes.”
“I have no ship,” Kalo said. “I have no way home. I had a commission to sell a boatload of silver mirrors and that fell through, and the mirrors ended up at the bottom of the harbor, so now I have no money.”
“Wait, what?” Mian-on said. “No money? I need to get paid.”
Kalo raised her left hand, placing it over Mian-on’s mouth. She said, “I hired a mage knowing that he was running from something, and now I’ve learned that the thing he was running from was the Eternal Council. I don’t need any more problems with the Eternal Council.” Her left hand drifted back to her face, her fingertips touching the bandages covering her head and part of the left side of her face, where the pale network of scars was still visible.
A Shrian man stumbled up to the table, mumbling something, pointing at Tethan with a cutlass in his hand. Tethan’s hand shot out, fingers clamping down on the blade, and he wrenched the cutlass from the man’s grasp, jabbing the hilt into the drunkard’s belly. The man’s breath whooshed out of his mouth as he doubled over and collapsed to the ground. Tethan set the cutlass on the table and looked back at Kalo, asking, “You offered to guide us across the sea. Will you still do that?”
Kalo spread her hands and raised her eyebrows. “Guide you? I have no ship.”
“I have a whole harbor full of ships.” Tethan grinned. “Take your pick.”
“Every one of those ships out there rightfully belongs to someone,” she said, her hand gesturing toward the harbor, her voice rising. “By just taking what you want, you’re robbing a captain and his crew of their livelihood.” She touched her chest, shaking her head. “How can I condone that? I can’t. It’s wrong. It’s theft.”
“Fine. How about this?” Tethan leaned over the table toward her. “I have the Shrian treasury at my disposal. I promise to pay the Shrians a fair amount for their ships. Will that soothe your conscience?”
She blinked. “Yeah, actually.”
Tethan grinned. “So it’s acceptable to steal from a government but not from the people that government serves?”
“It’s different.” She sighed and rolled her eye, not looking at Tethan but at the ceiling.
“How would you feel about guiding the Onei back to your homeland, to this Arenghel, to fight against the Eternal Council?”
She fell back into her seat and bowed her head, touching her scarred cheek. “You can’t fight against the Eternal Council. They’re too powerful.”
Tethan spread his hands, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “If it were up to me, I would take my people and go home.”
Mian-on leaned in, his forehead furrowing. “Are you afraid we won’t be your friends if you attack the Eternal Council?”
“It is a long way to go, across the sea, just for more gold and jewels,” Tethan said. He grinned. “I wouldn’t want you to betray me or anything.”
Mian-on held his hand up, stopping Tethan. “We hate the Eternal Council.” He turned to Kalo and asked, “Is ‘hate’ too strong a term? I think not.”
Kalo glared at Tethan with her one good eye, her upper lip quivering and pulling back from her teeth. “I despise the Eternal Council.”
Mian-on pursed his lips, nodding. “’Despise’ is a good word, too.”
“They killed my father.” She slammed her fist on the table, the cutlass rattling, her cup sloshing. “They had wyrms pull him apart while we watched, his hands and legs tied to the necks of those foul beasts, each one sent in a different direction. Until…” She swallowed and looked away, a sparkling tear sliding down her cheek.
Tethan opened his mouth to speak but Mian-on shook his head.
Kalo put her palm against her cheek, saying, “I tried to save him. I was a child. I ran out in front of one of the wyrms and it almost killed me, too. And Gal-nya laughed.”
Tethan reached out, grabbing her wrist, pulling her hand away, revealing the scar. “You should not hide this. Among the Onei, it is a badge of honor.”
“I am not Onei,” she said, jerking her wrist from his hand and glaring up at him, her eye full of tears. “I am Nayen, and I am hideously disfigured.”
“No,” Tethan said, sliding out of the booth, standing up, towering over the table. “You are a quite beautiful woman.”
A Shrian sailor yelled and launched himself at Tethan’s back. Tethan wheeled around, catching the man by his throat, throwing him through the air, over one table to land on the table next to that.
More Shrians rose to their feet, and Tethan laughed, glanced back at Kalo. “And I suppose we will be traveling to Arenghel together once I am done here.”
# # #
Gartan hobbled up an alleyway, one of the narrow streets and lanes in Shria, the wind whipping through the channel off of the docks stinking of burned timber and tar. He stopped in those shadows, peering out over the heads of the Onei crowded onto the docks.
Tethan walked out onto the prow of a Shrian ship, balancing on the slender bowsprit sticking out from the prow.
The Onei who’d survived the battle against the Shrians and the dragon, the injured and the healthy, jammed onto the dock before Tethan, chanting “King’s Bane!” and “Dragonslayer!” and bouncing on their toes with their fists in the air above them.
Tethan held up his arms for silence, but the crowd yelled louder, the cheering deafening until a sharp voice called out, “Let him speak!”
A woman leapt from the dock to grab hold of the railing on the prow, her feet on the hull, turning to face the crowd as she waved her hand and yelled at them, “Shut the fuck up already!”
Mitta? Gartan rubbed his chin, his eyes narrowing, wondering what game she was playing, but the crowd grew quiet beneath her baleful glare.
“Thank you,” Tethan said, speaking in his normal voice, almost too soft to carry.
Every one of the Onei quieted, and even Gartan found himself leaning forward, bending his ear toward Tethan.
Tethan reviewed the crowd assembled before him, his gaze traveling slowly from one end of the dock to the other, his eyes finding each one of the men and women before him, even seeming to see Gartan in the shadows, pausing for that slight moment of connection. In a voice suited to yelling commands on the battlefield, he bellowed, “Why are we here?”
