by T. S. Ryder
It was Kenner’s turn to be confused. “Earth?” he asked, repeating the only word she had said that was not of the Common Tongue.
“My planet,” she explained. “I was... I’m sure you have them on Elamaren, but I don’t know the word for the profession. ‘An officer of the law’, we call it. We investigate crimes, locate and apprehend criminals and make sure the laws of the land are obeyed.” Kenner nodded in understanding, but said nothing, allowing her to tell him her tale. “I had just started my second year when my partner and I were called in to look into what we thought was someone’s bad idea of a joke. See, all this – life on other planets, spaceships, sentient races other than our own – it’s fiction on our planet, nothing more. But it turned out that the person who called us to investigate the strange lights and incredibly fast aerial vehicles on the edge of our city wasn't joking.”
She looked sad. “I don’t know who took me exactly. They hit my partner and me with a small cloud of gas that made us lose consciousness, and I didn’t wake until I was in a cage at the Crossroads. It was... a maddening experience. No one understood me... I understood no one... they hit me to force me to do as they wished... and my partner was already gone. I don’t know if he died or was sold before I made it to the slavers’ block, but... honestly? I don’t know which I should hope for. He was a good man. He didn’t deserve this.”
“Neither did you,” Kenner told her, hoping to give her some comfort. It was not something he was good at – fighting, leadership, strategy, those were his strong suits. When it came to emotions, he always felt like a bumbling oaf.
But what a tragedy, what stress Teresa and her partner had been forced to endure. He tried to imagine himself so utterly lost, his entire world turned upside-down, completely out of any sort of control over his own destiny, and found himself amazed by Teresa’s inner strength. To survive such profound duress and adapt as well as she had showed an indomitable spirit.
“You speak the Common Tongue very well,” he complimented her, feeling the need to lift the conversation and make her feel better about herself. Her eyes were still sad, but she offered him half a smile and nodded. “I’ve always learned languages with ease,” she told him. “But Lady Esplyn favored my physical talents.”
“Of which you have an abundance, it would seem,” Kenner said, cursing the Skatian bitch for forcing Teresa into the Pit when she could’ve used her sharp mind instead. It would’ve made her no less a slave – and perhaps prevented them from ever meeting – but her life would’ve been incomparably easier if she had been trained as a clerk or a tutor rather than as a fighter.
Teresa shrugged. “Military training,” she told him. “I had no family other than my parents, and when they died, I had just reached the age of maturity. I had nowhere to go and no way to fend for myself, and the military in my homeland was recruiting, so...” Hearing this only made Kenner’s opinion of her grow more. She was a survivor, this one, resilient and well-versed in making do with what she had.
She will fit perfectly among the Kinai, he thought, with no small amount of pride.
“That is good,” he told her, “We are very much a military-minded nation.” Teresa cocked an eyebrow quizzically, allowing him the first glimpse into her sense of humor.
“A private, yet military-minded nation...” she mused. “Many would call that a historical oddity.”
Kenner barked a hearty laugh, his head falling back, which seemed to help relax her a bit more. “I doubt many nations have our particular peculiarities,” he said. “But those are something you cannot know until you are one of us.” With that, he stood up, and Teresa followed suit, probably out of habit. “Something tells me it won’t be long before that happens, though,” he told her, with his best attempt at a reassuring smile. “You should rest now,” he said, gesturing to the bed. “We leave before dawn, and the voyage to Kinai is long.”
A flash of worry crossed Teresa’s face. “And you will sleep...?”
Kenner brushed his knuckles against her soft cheek. “Elsewhere,” he told her. “Don’t worry. The next time you bed someone, it will be because you want to.” The idea of her giving herself to another man woke something ferocious and possessive inside of him, something that made him want to snatch her and take her far away from the rest of the world, but he knew that was the beast in him talking, and he was too old and too well-disciplined to allow its wild passions to influence him. For Teresa to have the freedom to choose whom she shared her opulent body with was more important than whether or not she would choose him.
“Lady Esplyn kept everything you once used,” he told her as he walked to the door. “But I have provided fitting garments for travel, and we’ll see about finding you more once we land in Kinai. They’re in the bedside cabinet.” He opened the door and turned to her once again. “Sleep well, Teresa.” He smiled before forcing himself to finally leave and find a sofa to spend the night on.
Chapter Five
Teresa thought she would be much too nervous to sleep, but the push and pull off the emotional turmoil she had survived that day seemed to have been far more exhausting than she thought, and she clonked out pretty much as soon as her head touched the pillow. She did not even bother to check what kind of clothes Kenner had found for her or whether or not they fit her, leaving it all for the morning. This would be her first time sleeping in a proper bed since her abduction, and she wanted to make the most of it.
Once Kenner came to wake her, though, she wasted equally little time preparing for the trip. She threw away the garments she had worn the night before with disgust, and put on the thick woolen coat and trousers she found in the bedside cabinet along with fur-lined boots and hat, wondering what kind of travel demanded such clothes. When she dressed, she joined Kenner, who was waiting for her in the common room of the suit his Squadron had used during their stay at the Imperial Palace.
“Where’s everyone else?” she asked.
“Waiting for us outside,” he told her, and she followed him out. The sun was not up yet, but Wallaria was still a city built of stone located in a desert, and by the time they reached the Central Square, she was sweating.
The Darkwing Squadron was there, a collection of twelve men and women built and dressed much like Kenner was, as was the Emperor of Skatia and his entourage, who had come to see their guests off. Teresa was not happy to see Lady Esplyn among them and fought the urge to duck away behind Kenner and hide from the daggers her former mistress shot at her from her beautiful eyes. But when she looked the other way, she noticed one of the Kinai women was looking at her with the same unbridled rage, which threw Teresa off for a moment, until she remembered one very important fact.
She was a free woman now, or as free as she could be. She had to hide from no one. So she straightened her back, lifted her chin and concentrated on the positive potential of her new future.
“Arul,” Kenner called out to one of his men. He ordered him to take care of Teresa while he spoke to the Emperor and did away with the diplomatic part of their departure. Teresa recognized him as the man who had sat with Kenner at the Imperial Loge in the Pit, and though she was nervous, she warmed up to his friendliness and cheery personality. He showed her to a... well. It was a wooden crate, there was no way around that fact, but it was padded with woolen blankets and large enough for her to comfortably fit in.
“You can sit up, or lie down, whichever suits you better. You’ll also find a skin of water, and a pouch with some bread and cured meat,” he told her. “There is a panel in the back you can use to close the window if you’re too cold.” The ‘window’ was actually a rectangular opening in the front of the crate through which Teresa could see outside if she sat down. It all seemed beyond strange to her – there were no vehicles of any sort to be seen anywhere on the Square; how the hell would they travel to Kinai? – but she had already decided to put her trust in Kenner, so she stepped inside the crate and sat down while Arul closed her in, using a set of leather straps to secure all the pane
ls in their place.
Kenner soon joined his Squadron as well and gave orders for...
...wait, did she hear that correctly?
Did he say ‘flight’?
The Darkwing squadron lined up at the far edge of the Central Square and, one by one, ran as fast as their feet would carry them to the opposite side. Teresa watched them, at first bewildered – and then stunned, with eyes wide open, as they changed shape mid-run, sprouting tails and wings, their hands and feet transforming into powerful front and hind limbs armed with enormous, razor-sharp claws, their necks and heads elongating as their bodies seemed to absorb their strange armor, and then growing, growing, growing as they took off from the ground with a feral roars that shook the roofs of Wallaria.
Dragons…
The Kinai... they were DRAGONS!
As his Squadron glided in the air above them, pirouetting and looping circles on the currents, Kenner knelt to meet Teresa’s eyes. “Magnificent, aren’t they?” he said, pride clear in his voice. She was too busy staring slack-jawed to reply. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll carry your crate myself.” And then he too melted from one form into another, using the now free space of the Square to shapeshift in less of a rush.
And if Teresa had thought him fascinating in his humanoid form, he was nothing short of spectacular as a dragon.
He was covered in large, dark scales everywhere save for his leathery wings, which were so large they seemed to make up two-thirds of his size. From his brow, over his head, along his spine and all the way to the tip of his tail ran a set of crests he was apparently able to lift and retract at will. And his eyes... his eyes now made complete sense, she realized. They were exactly the same as they were on him as a man, but bigger, so much bigger, mesmerizing in their brilliance. His claws scraped along the stone cobbling of the Square as he slowly walked towards her crate, and his gigantic mouth was full of terrifying, serrated teeth. Teresa gulped, and her heart pounded wildly from sudden fear that this beast would decide to make a snack of her, but the dragon just blinked at her, as if to let her know everything would be alright and, with a powerful swoosh of its magnificent wings, rose up from the ground.
A moment later, the crate shook and creaked as the beast grabbed it with the claws of its hind legs, and then she was up, fast, so fast, the land below suddenly so far away, the buildings around them like toys and the people like ants.
Terror shook her more than the sudden gust of chilly air... but then it hit her.
She was the only human being in existence to ever get a lift from an actual, real-life dragon.
And then she began to laugh, first out of pure hysteria, but as the day slowly settled on Elamaren and more beautiful sights opened themselves up to her view, out of exhilaration.
She was free.
Free, finally free.
And she was floating on air with a freaking flock of dragons!
All in all, it was not a bad way to start the very first day of the rest of her life.
Kenner was right when he warned her about the amount of time the voyage would last. This was an endurance flight, where it was more important to reach their destination safely than quickly, and the land of Kinai seemed to be quite far away from Skatia. She did some rough calculations in her head and came to the conclusion that Elamaren might even be somewhat larger in surface than Earth, because even though they flew to the west, it still took nearly all of the daytime hours for the Squadron to reach their homeland.
Too excited to sleep, Teresa bundled herself in the blankets inside the crate and watched the entire flight out of her little ‘window’, failing to be bored even by the fact that the largest stretch of the voyage carried them across nothing but water. Focused on their surroundings, she immediately spotted the collection of volcanic islands of various shapes and sizes that the Kinai called home, with their black sands and bridges of dark stone connecting them all. Around the islands, a belt of dangerously sharp obsidian rocks protruded from the sea, reminding her of Kenner’s dragon teeth. The largest of the islands, the one furthest to the South, boasted a tall volcano, and another seemed to be built of nothing but a thick forest and a collection of azure pools in the midst of it, with water so warm she could see wisps of steam rising off its clear surface.
It was beautiful, and Teresa could not wait to make it her new home.
They landed on one of the larger islands near the center, which had a clearing large enough to fit the entire squadron and then some. In front of the Long House, which was decorated with intricate swirling patterns burned into the wood, a gathering of ten old men and women awaited them. If they were surprised to see her, they did not show it. In fact, one of the old women came to her as soon as she was out of the crate, and helped Teresa, strained and stiff from the travel, into the Long House, where she fed her warm stew and let her sit by the fire.
All the while, as if she weren’t there, Kenner and two members of his Squadron, Arul and the woman who still looked at Teresa as if she wanted to feast on her entrails, spoke with the gathering of elders. She had no idea what transpired in that conversation, though, for they spoke in Kinai, a surprisingly sweet, almost musical language that she was determined to learn as soon as possible.
Later, much later, when Kenner took her to his home and prepared some temporary lodgings for her in his spare room, he would tell her they were reporting on their visit to Skatia, and explaining why they had brought her with them.
“There are some who fear you are a Skatian spy,” he told her openly, as he made a makeshift dais out of blocks and planks. “And I cannot blame them for being suspicious, even though I know that’s not true. We’ve had some very bad experiences with the Empire in the past, and some of their recent actions make us fear we might be heading for a new altercation.” He paused to place a thick straw mattress atop the dais, and then moved so that Teresa could set up the bedclothes he had given her to her liking.
“In the end, they agreed to either limit your range of movement to non-critical zones only,” he explained, as he watched her work, “or you’ll be granted access to the entire territory under two non-negotiable conditions. The first is that you can only enter certain areas if I am with you. The second...”
Teresa looked up at the sheet she was tucking over the mattress. “The second?” she urged Kenner to come out with it, though the look on his face made her worry.
“The second is that the second any Kinai can prove beyond reasonable doubt that you’re working against us, your life is forfeit, and you will be executed on the spot.”
She let go of the sheet and sat down on her new bed.
“Wow... that’s...” she began, but nothing coherent could come out of her mouth.
“I know, and I’m sorry,” Kenner told her, walking over and squatting on his haunches before her. He took her hands and gently rubbed his thumbs over them to soothe some of her newborn anxiety. “I should’ve anticipated something along these lines would happen, but I have very little experience with these types of situations. I was still a youngling the last time I did something so impulsive... and not one of those events affected as many people as buying your freedom and bringing you here did.”
Feeling the need to reply to Kenner’s tenderness with her own, Teresa entwined her fingers with his. She had never felt such a profound connection with anyone before in her life, such a sense that another person could understand any emotion she expressed. Somehow, it did not seem strange that this man would be the one to elicit such a response from her.
He was her dragon, ready to tear into anyone who would harm her – and her knight in shining armor, too, rescuing her from the short, brutal life of a gladiator slave.
Was it so strange, then, that she already felt such strong feelings for him?
“So who decides which rule will I live under?” she asked, her voice not as strong or as stable as she would like.
“You do,” he replied, “I managed to win that much for you, at least.”
Teresa nodded, thinking her options through. “It would be wiser to choose the first, wouldn’t it?” she said, hoping for some advice.
“Indeed,” Kenner agreed. “Though I hate how much it would limit you,” he added. “Still, there are far more areas you would be allowed into than not, and you’ll show them how wrong they were soon enough.”
She couldn’t help but chuckle. “Such faith you have in me, Kenner Darkwing,” she teased him, but there was no malice to it.
“What can I say?” he replied sheepishly. “I’m a big softie at heart.” She outright laughed to that, and the almost boyish grin on his face told her just how much he enjoyed it.
He let go of her hands and stood up.
“I’m keeping you from sleep,” he said, and Teresa rose as well.
“No, no,” she assured him. “I’m glad you are here.” She looked at him, a little nervous. “The past two days have been full of such twists and turns that I fear sometimes this was all a dream and I’ll wake up in my cot in the Pit...” She waved her head, expelling those thoughts. “You... you make me remember it’s all real.”
Kenner lifted his hand to her cheek, softly running his calloused knuckles along her jaw, and Teresa couldn’t help but tremble at the touch. “It’s real,” he whispered, “I’m real. And I’m right here if you need me.” For a moment, he looked at her as if he had more to say – or as if he might kiss her, a prospect Teresa was surprised to realize she would not mind at all – but then he left the room and quietly closed the door behind him, leaving her somehow both at ease and even more mystified than she had been before.
Chapter Six
If he had any sense of decency, Kenner thought, as he walked into his bedroom, he would find someone to take Teresa first thing tomorrow... but the thought of her sleeping anywhere but under his roof made the beast inside him furious.
