by Aaron Pogue
She met my eyes and smiled through tears. "Something real is always better than a fantasy. Always. Have faith in me. Please."
I nodded. Then I said, "Of course. I will." She gave me another smile, and we both took a hundred paces to catch our breath. Then I reached over to squeeze her hand again, and I asked gently, "Where would you have me start?"
"Start in the City," she said. "I have never properly met a beggar before."
I told her my story. I told her of my father who had run afoul of the king's justice and spent the last years of his life rotting in a public prison. I told her of the work I'd done to keep us fed. I told her of the grief that followed after his death, and then the liberty.
We stopped for lunch and I told her how I'd fled to the luxurious Terrailles province outside the City and found a job as a shepherd. I told her of the other boys there I'd trained to fight with the sword, and of the night a Green Eagle from the King's Guard came to interrupt our duels. I told her of the wizard Claighan who had taken me to meet the king, and of his strange and foolish plan to teach me the value of magic.
I told her of the soldier I killed by my own hand.
She kissed me then, while tears burned in my eyes, and sometime later we returned to our horses and continued on to the south. I did not resume my story after that, and she did not ask me to. I would in time, and she knew that. I would keep no secrets from her, but this secret had cost me much in the telling.
So instead she talked for a while. She told me stories about the lands we were passing. She seemed to know every family. She told me about the Carters who had lost seven baby daughters in seven years. She told me about the Dales whose grandfather had been the fifth son of a royal house but who moved to Teelevon for love of a farmer's daughter. She pointed out the broken road that used to lead to Cara, and the hills so rich with iron that the soil here burned red.
And so we passed an afternoon moving farther and farther from civilization. The farms grew further apart as we went, and smaller and smaller. The river Teel still trickled in and out along the rocky earth, but no crops would grow far from its shore. Farms dotted its shallow banks, but everywhere else was red cracked earth.
As we went the horizon grew closer. Ugly, jagged mountains tore at the sky, and even the foothills were hard and sheer. The whole of the continent funneled down to a single point this far south, and the mountains that blocked the coast wedged in on either side of us until our whole vista could not have been more than a dozen miles from left to right.
She finally drew rein at a bit of desert much like all the rest, and as I climbed down I couldn't see why we'd stopped this time. There were trees here—a full pace taller than most of the shrubs we'd passed by—and a bit of a stream, but not much to recommend the place. I took the opportunity to stretch my legs, then finally turned to Isabelle to ask, but she only met my eyes with the spark of excitement in hers.
She motioned me to silence and led her horse over to one of the thorny little trees. I followed her example, scanning the ground around me for some indication that we'd arrived, but there was no path and no structure in sight. Still, we tied the horses up, and then she turned without a word and started across the cracked earth.
As we walked, a jagged shape on the horizon slowly separated itself in my vision from the black mountain range beyond. It seemed to drift into the foreground, all harsh angles and shadows in the red light of afternoon. Even in the heart of winter, heat hung in the air without a breeze to stir it, and the only sound was the crunching of dirt beneath our boots.
And then we topped a small rise, gained a new perspective, and the pieces fell into place. In an instant I recognized the shape of ruins within the jumble—ancient walls of stone that must have stretched for a mile in each direction, and a great crumbled mountain back behind them must have been a tower once. I stared in awe, trying to reconstruct the tower in my imagination. Trying to see how tall it must have been, to leave so much rubble two thousand years later.
Beside me, Isabelle breathed, "It's beautiful."
I looked over at her. "Beautiful? You mean that?"
She met my eyes and frowned. "How could I not? They say this fortress protected fragile humanity from the mindless monsters that once swarmed through the pass beyond. They say one man stood against the darkness and fought it to a standstill until others could come take up the cause."
I stared at her until she began to blush. Then I shrugged. "They also say he learned the depths of suffering and pain here. That he came to this place to escape humanity. That he passed through hatred and found the love that eventually united all the lands of man."
She smiled at me. "Of course. But if he hadn't waged his war here, there would have been nothing left to love beyond." She took a slow step toward the ruins, then turned and held out a hand for me. "Come fight the monsters for me, Daven. I want to see it more closely."
As we went closer, we discovered it would be more difficult than either of us had expected. The walls were crumbled but still more than three paces high in most places, and their old shape made even the rubble a sheer climb.
We found at last where the northern gate had once been, its span long since fallen into a pile we could scale, and beyond that we found the courtyard.
Within, the shape of the ruins became clearer. The walls had made a triangle, its point stabbing toward the southern pass, and at its center had stood the tower. We pressed through thorny scrub and picked our way carefully across treacherous stone, climbing down the far side of the gateway's rubble and into a lower clearing.
In the clearing I saw some signs of humanity—a pit carved out for a campfire, a discarded bit of harness—but even those signs were scant and marked with age. Mostly the place was still, serene, and buried in the black shadow of the ruined tower.
Isabelle never took her eyes from it. She stared, and I could see a hunger in her expression. I wanted to stare, too, but I could not forget the warnings her father had given. So I stayed close at her side and picked a careful path for her. I scanned the ground for any sign of a biting snake, listened closely for the soft footfalls of wild dogs.
And still I did not see the dragon until it moved.
A boulder three paces ahead of us uncurled. It had looked like nothing more than a jagged bit of gray rock, dappled here and there with spots of rust red, but in the space of a breath it stretched out into a dangerous drake.
It had a body the size of a large hunting cat, with underdeveloped wings folded tight and tucked close around its ribs. Its short legs sported razor-sharp talons, but I spent far more concern on the spike-tipped tail three paces long and the sinuous neck supporting a head full of cruel teeth.
I had no idea if this beast could breathe fire like its larger cousins, but even without that threat it boasted a half dozen different ways of killing a man.
Or woman.
I reacted the moment it moved. Old habits threw me into motion while my mind still reeled in surprise. I fell into a fighting stance, turning my body to expose as little of it as possible to my enemy. I took a breath and let it go, and that quickly I was relaxed, poised on the balls of my feet, one arm extended toward the monster, the other stretched out behind me as I pushed Isabelle out of harm's way.
I faintly heard her cry of surprise and pain as she stumbled and fell back, but I could spare no attention for that. Even as I'd fallen into my old dueling stance, I'd played out a new trick as well. I looked on the world with a wizard's sight, sensing the flow of energies and powers that lay beneath the fragile appearance of reality.
There was little to see here. The sun glowed with a distant fire, far too distant to reach, and there was no wind to speak of. I sensed the dance of cold, dark waters in the far depths of an ancient well, but it offered me nothing of value in this fight.
I had all that I needed in the earth, though. The earth here—the old worked stones, the hard-packed ground beneath the shadow of the tower—it thrummed with untapped power. I wore no sword on my belt, but with a th
ought I reached out to the ground beneath my hand and summoned forth a weapon.
The raw energy of earth poured up in grains too small to see, a vaporous cloud of black particles that coalesced around my hand, forming into a hilt tailored to my grip. Above that I formed a cross piece—its design stolen from a masterwork weapon I'd once won off a king's tracker—and then a blade stabbed out from nothing, a pace long and with an edge sharper than any blacksmith could have made.
I built the blade in the time it took to think of it, and before it was fully formed I sprang forward to meet the deadly drake. But the beast moved fast as lightning, slithering aside and snapping its long neck away from my vicious strike.
Before I could adjust, a voice exploded in my mind. Aha! It is you, it said. I have found you at last! The voice rang with a vicious malevolence that nearly drove me to my knees.
Nearly. I stumbled, but a cold black strength deep in the back of my mind rose up against the intrusion. I drew on that strength and forced the echoes of the dragon's voice away. I hesitated only long enough to reach out with my mind, to gather great handfuls of the rocky earth in my mental grasp, and then I sprang at the drake with another lunge.
Once again it tried to dance aside, but this time I threw the earth up against it. A wall of stone sprang up from nothing, not a pace long but shoulder-high on the drake and close enough to trip it up. I sensed surprise and the beginnings of an exclamation in the back of my mind, but I dove forward in a perfect lunge and buried my blade in the drake's side.
I left it there. I darted back before the snapping neck could catch me with its vicious fangs. I dodged a wild lash of the deadly tail. Then I extended my hand and my will once more, and the ebon sword melted from the dragon's side and flowed into my hand. Blood and ichor gushed from the wound it left, and three heartbeats later the little drake fell still.
I turned to Isabelle. She sat on the rocky ground almost within arm's reach, staring at me with wide eyes. Her knees were pulled up close, and she cradled her right hand against her chest. I could see the shock and fear clear in her eyes but no serious harm. I took a moment to scan the terrain behind and above, but there was no other movement.
I fell back into my wizard's sight and used that, too, searching for the telltale empty stain of a dragon's Chaos shadow among the vibrant energies. I turned in both directions, but I saw no other blackness than the dead beast at my feet.
I let the vision fade and stood panting for a moment, staring at the thing. Then I stepped to its side, pressed its neck beneath the heel of my boot, and removed its head with one swing. Isabelle made a tiny sound like a whimper. My conjured blade buried itself three inches deep in the hard earth from which it had been made. I took one more long, slow breath, then let the blade dissolve again to dust.
Then I went to Isabelle. I fell to my knees at her side. Her eyes were locked on the gory remains of the slain monster, so I reached out gently to turn her face to me. When her gaze met mine she shuddered.
"Isabelle," I said, loudly and clearly, "are you injured."
She shook her head, eyes still unfocused. "I never knew it looked like that."
I frowned. She still cradled her right hand against her chest, and I saw the bright red smear of blood staining the fine cloth of her shirt. When I reached for her hand she shied away.
"You're hurt," I said. "What happened?"
She shook her head. It was a frantic little gesture. "I have never seen a monster before. I have never seen a hero slay a dragon." Her gaze drifted back up to my eyes, and at last she focused on them. There was fear and understanding in her expression.
She licked her lips. "It is uglier than I thought."
I nodded once, slowly, then reached carefully toward her hand again. "What happened?"
She looked down, then extended her arm. I took it with extreme care, but still she gasped as soon as I touched her skin.
The blood came from a dozen scratches where she had caught herself on the rough stone of the earth. The pain, I suspected, came from a sprained wrist. I shifted my grip, and she winced again.
I met her eyes once more, and they were crinkled in pain.
"It hurts," she said. She sucked in a deep breath, then pushed it out slowly. She held herself still for a moment, then her expression twisted in pain again. "I'm sorry, Daven. It just hurts so much."
"It's not broken," I said. "But it's a vicious sprain. Those always hurt, but you will be fine once you're home." She nodded, lips pressed tight while tears touched her cheeks. I fought down pain of my own to see her hurting like that and breathed in admiration, "You are always so strong when you need to be."
She laughed at me, if weakly, and I said, "You'll be fine, but we should get you home. Let's head back to the horses."
She didn't make it four steps before crumpling to her knees. I rushed to her side, falling into my wizard's sight, but there was a delicacy to healing magic that I could not begin to attempt. And all my power over Chaos offered me almost nothing to help her here.
She leaned against me and whimpered, and I could not do nothing. So I took her arm again, as gently as possible, and stretched it out before her. She groaned. No matter how careful I was, every tiny jostling motion was stabbing at her.
I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking. Then I reached out with my will just as I had done before and drew impossibly fine grains of power from the earth beneath us. I bound it with my will, shaped it with my hands, stretching it into a gauntlet around her hand and wrist. I made it paper-thin and iron strong and bound it in place.
It made a splint she couldn't have broken with anything short of a blacksmith's hammer. I took her bound-up hand in mine and tugged it lightly toward me. She winced, but I could tell it was more from expectation than from real pain. I knew it in the way her arm moved, the way her elbow jutted out to follow her hand without any movement in the wrist.
We sat for a moment in silence, and she caught her breath. Then I said, "That should help."
"My private wizard," she said. She didn't manage to put any levity behind the words. I didn't blame her.
"We should get you back to town," I said. "The Kind Father can do far more for you than I've done."
She nodded. I pushed up, then helped her to her feet. We made our way more slowly now, back up on the gateway's fallen stones, then out onto the cracked plains outside the ruins. We could see the horses, still tethered to scrub some short way off, but our steps dragged.
And I realized with some surprise that it was as much my fault as hers. My feet dragged across the ground. I felt a bone-deep weariness. I tried to force myself to move faster, to hurry Isabelle closer to safety, but I couldn't find the strength.
Isabelle startled me from that puzzle with another. "Why did the dragon not attack you?" she asked. She surprised me when she spoke. "Even after your first swing, it only seemed to watch. But they are said to be bloodthirsty things."
I missed a step and nearly fell. I started to stammer an answer, then caught myself. I shook my head. "I surprised it," I said at last, but it sounded like a thin excuse.
How could I tell her the truth? The monster hadn't only watched. It had spoken to me. How could I describe the depths of that one idea? I felt a cold chill at the thought.
I had heard a dragon's voice before, but this one had sounded nothing like the creature that helped me clear the siege around Teelevon. Vechernyvetr had been a mature black dragon, ten times the size of this little drake, and we shared some kind of spiritual bond. But even Vechernyvetr had not spoken into my head with the crushing force I'd felt from this creature. It seemed absurd, coming from the tiny beast.
And yet it had nearly overwhelmed me. Perhaps it should have. Perhaps the drake had expected it to do just that. I suspected that was precisely why it had made no other move to attack me. But I had gained more than a voice in my head when I bonded with Vechernyvetr. I had gained the timeless, bottomless strength of their kind. It was a foreign thing, an unreliable thing, but more t
han once my life had been saved by that dark fortitude deep in my mind.
But with the danger gone, the strength had left me, too. It left my body aching. My shoulders and arms felt weak, my lower back and the balls of my feet. It was a familiar pain—so familiar that it had taken me this long to register it and still a moment more to recognize it.
It was the honest pain of hard work. I stopped where I was, halfway to the horses, and threw a thoughtful look back toward the place where the drake had fallen. I remembered the little wall I'd made of earth, paces of hard-packed dirt heaved up and rearranged.
My arms hurt, too. My wrists and fingers throbbed, and I had a suspicion that had more to do with the delicate work of shaping my sword and Isabelle's splint. I had shaped Chaos magic before, and perhaps it had left me weary before, but it had never worn me out this thoroughly.
Isabelle squeezed my hand in her uninjured one. "Daven? Are you well?"
I shook my head, and then again more violently. I raised my eyes to hers and nodded once. "I will be well," I said. "I spent more of myself than I realized fighting that beast."
She hesitated for a heartbeat, biting her bottom lip, but then she nodded back at me. "You did heroic work."
"Come on," I said. "To the horses."
The pack horses whinnied as we approached, and all four animals stepped nervously away from me. Isabelle soothed them, and with a firm hand she finally brought mine to me and held its bridle until I was in the saddle. I reached across to offer her the same favor, but she swung herself easily up even in spite of her injured hand.
She spent a moment considering the pack horses' leads, and I smiled ruefully. "We did not accomplish much."
"I have seen the fortress," she said, thoughtful. I found her gaze fixed on me, and after a moment she smiled. "And I have seen you in battle. That was worth a day's ride."
I shook my head. "That was not worth your injury." I took a deep breath and let it out. "Bring the horses closer." She did, despite their protests, while I mustered my strength. Then I took on my wizard's sight and reached to the earth beneath the scrawny tree. I carved out a block of it with my mind, about the size of a grave, and turned it into a cloud of dust.
