As the Crow Flies: An Epic Fantasy Adventure

by Robin Lythgoe

  “Were you? Or did you think you could just do it alone?” For once I didn’t mind his skepticism. In fact, I found his familiar attitude wonderfully assuring.

  “You are my fr—We’ve been through a lot together. You wouldn’t have been in this mess if not for me. Well,” I paused, reconsidering. “You wouldn’t have been so badly off, anyway. Besides, I owed you.”

  He did not miss what I’d almost blurted. For a moment I thought he would drag it out of me, but he resisted the temptation. “For what?”

  “Saving my life several times.”

  “Then you probably still owe me. A lot.”

  You may ask how I could resist asking him about the bounty on my head, and I would have to tell you that I do not know. The words leaped to the tip of my tongue, but I did not speak them. “Good to see your sense of humor’s returned. Where have you been?” I asked.

  His mouth twitched in a grimace. “No place you’d care about.”

  “If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t ask.” I didn’t look at him, but at the beauty stretched out before us, a city gilded by sun and the first twinkling of lights.

  He shifted forward, elbows to knees, staring at the city for a space. “I’ve been… explaining things to my superiors.”

  “Any luck?”

  “More or less.” Another silence followed. Not-An-Egg shifted to rest his chin on the arm of the chair and watch him. He had become quite delicate about the process, having learned that I did not much like him piercing me with his wickedly sharp claws every time he moved. I rubbed his little head.

  “Some of those demons avoided capture,” Tanris finally said. I couldn’t claim surprise. There had been quite a few of them, and I had no idea how long the Gate had remained open. “We ought to do something about that,” he suggested, a note of caution in his voice.

  “Us?” He took me by surprise although, knowing Tanris, I should have expected nothing less. “How?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe you could use your magic to find them.”

  It wasn’t my magic, but—could I? What a horrible development. I hadn’t the slightest desire to hunt or battle the things, even if they weren’t technically demons. And who would believe me if I told them such a thing? Did it really matter to anyone besides them and me?

  Tanris tipped his head, looking at me at last. “Don’t you think?”

  Well, yes, I do think, thank you very much, just not about demon hunting. “Isn’t the army looking for them?” I hedged.

  “Yes.”

  Well, then! Need I say more? I thought not, but Tanris evidently did not agree. From the way he looked at me—and the prickly emotions he gave off—he seemed to be testing me. It made me want to fidget. I knew what he wanted from me because it was the same thing I’d been considering for hours. Days, even. And in spite of a growing conviction that I must, I did not want to get involved. At all.

  “But the army doesn’t have magic to help them,” Tanris said reasonably, “and they weren’t responsible for letting them loose.”

  “Neither were we.” For a truth, it had not been our choice and we had not known until very late in the game what Duzayan planned to do. Still, a little voice that did not belong to the Ancestors whispered that I should have known better, tried harder, been quicker. I wished it would shut up.

  “What happened?” I asked. “I don’t remember much.”

  “No? You shouldn’t sound so disappointed. It was not good.”

  Tanris, the captain of understatement.

  “What kind of not good?”

  “People dying. Blood all over the place. That Gate making the most awful noise I have ever heard in my life. Demons pouring out and no sign of stopping until you did whatever it was you did.” He licked his lips, then drew his teeth over the lower one. “I thought you were dead. We couldn’t just leave you there, so I picked you up. Tossed you over my shoulder. Girl grabbed your necklace—”

  “Pendant.” A necklace sounded far too feminine to suit me.

  “Tarsha was there.”

  “I know.” I stubbornly ignored the urge to look away. “You want to tell me how that happened?”

  He made a rueful face. “I can only tell you what I’ve been able to decipher from Girl’s acting. As I understand it, Tarsha cried so much Girl couldn’t stand it any more. She tried to help her. Tarsha attacked her and escaped.”

  “Escaped our Girl?” I marveled.

  Tanris shrugged. “These things happen. At any rate, we found Tarsha at the top of the crater. She was hurt, but still breathing, so we pulled her away and off to the side. I didn’t see her when we left. Maybe someone found her and took care of her.”

  “She came to visit me the other day.” I gritted my teeth, then forced myself to relax again. Not-An-Egg gave my cheek a tender little, fishy-smelling dragon kiss, then resumed watching me.

  “She did?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I don’t remember you carrying me off.”

  Tanris looked at me curiously for a moment, but chose not to ask any questions about my former love. He wasn’t all bad. “You wouldn’t. You were unconscious. We took you to one of the Ishram temples, but when they tried to heal you, you screamed and kept screaming. The priests were upset. Girl was upset. The other patients were upset. So we brought you here and did the best we could, which wasn’t much,” he said glumly.

  The gods are sometimes strange and inscrutable, even to their most devoted adherents. Sitting on the balcony in the falling evening, I understood that Tanris actually cared about me as I had come to care about him—not as the quarry he’d chased for years, not as an elusive criminal, but as a friend. He had saved my life on several occasions in spite of danger to himself. He guarded me. Nursed me back to health. Gave me advice. Comforted me as best he could.

  “How did Girl find me?” I whispered, confused and overwhelmed. Tanris, I knew, had gone to alert his superiors in the Emperor’s Eagles.

  “The dragon.” The announcement came as another surprise, but the details belonged to Girl. “We could have stopped Duzayan in the beginning,” he said morosely.

  “No, we could not,” I countered. “We had no way of knowing what he would do.”

  “But we knew what he did do, and it shouldn’t have gone any further than that.”

  “Tanris,” I sighed and gave the beautiful view a grimace it did not deserve. “What you did—It was noble and brave.”

  “And useless.”

  “Aehana didn’t think so, and neither do I.”

  Hurt scraped at him.

  “I’m sorry, Tanris,” I murmured, a strange and unfamiliar knot in my throat. “I’m sorry she’s gone, and I’m sorry I was so inconsiderate the other day. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

  He bent his head, breath quickening, body tensed, fist pressed tight to palm. “I appreciate that, Crow,” he said roughly, eyes focused on the floor beneath him. “What you did—I haven’t thanked you.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” Not unless one counted failing abysmally.

  “You’re the one that came up with the plan to get the antidote, and you were the one in the most danger. You’re the one that got hurt doing it.”

  It was my turn to fall silent, wreathed in surprise.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do anything so selfless before. It—” He had to stop and rub his face. “It means a lot to me.”

  “It means a lot to me that you weren’t planning to kill me in Hasiq jum’a Sahefal.”

  “I wouldn’t have. That wouldn’t have been fair. I’ve always enjoyed hating your guts. You and I—Well.”

  Now we were getting mawkish. “Well,” I echoed. It was high time for a change of subject before one of us started crying or something equally embarrassing. “So we should help the army, eh?”

  “I’d like that.” Tanris looked up, sincerity writ all over his ruined features. The bruises looked quite horrendous. “You’re sure?”

  I avoided his eyes, rubbing Egg’s head instead.
“I think we must. Tidying up, as it were.” I had truly lost my mind, but was that really any surprise?

  “I’m glad you think so. I convinced the powers that be to give you a full pardon if you volunteered to, ah, serve.”

  I blinked. “You did what?”

  “I told them the hunting would have to be on your terms, and that you are quite capable.” He lifted a hand to rub his bristly scalp. “They won’t let you do it completely on your own, of course, but since we did such a thorough job with Baron Duzayan they decided we should continue to work together.”

  If I had been in their illustrious positions I would likely have said the same thing, but that wasn’t what astounded me. “You stood up for me?”

  He gave a slow nod.

  “Really?” I had never been at such a loss for words.

  “I’m still not sure what possessed me.”

  “It must have been an illness of incredible strength. Would you like me to take you to see the healers?”

  “I already did. They said there’s no cure.”

  “Tanris…” I sniffled and dabbed at the corner of my eye. “I’m getting all teary-eyed.”

  “Oh, stop it,” he said gruffly, and gave me a half-hearted swat. “Are you going to make me regret this?”

  “Every day,” I promised with a wide grin. “I expect this arrangement comes with a prohibition against further relocation of resources.”

  “Of course.”

  “Mmm.” I nodded sagely, not making any silly promises we both knew I wouldn’t keep. If things had gone his way, and it sounded as if they had, he should have been more cheerful. “So what are you not telling me?”

  He held both hands out to his sides, disbelief all over him. “How do you do that? I hate when you do that.”

  “Then don’t make me. What’s wrong?”

  “They think you’re a wizard.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I nearly came up off my chair, but the weight of Not-An-Egg and the prick of his talons threatening my skin kept me down.

  “Not really,” he replied, folding his arms and leaning back again, calm and pragmatic. “When a magical door materializes, letting all kinds of nasty things through, it’s only logical to suppose a wizard opened it and logical to suppose it would take a wizard to close it.”

  “What is logical about that?” I asked, knowing full well that I would have supposed the very same thing if I had been one of the witnesses rather than one of the participants. “It takes years of training to be a wizard! Secret rituals! Arcane spells! Magic artifacts!”

  Tanris crinkled his brow. “As far as I can tell, you’ve covered three of the four.”

  “I have not!” I protested indignantly.

  “Mm. What do you want to call that bit in the tunnel with the lights and the voices and the writing on the walls? That might have been a ritual for all we know. You keep saying things in a strange language, and you can’t deny the odd and powerful results. Arcane spells, no? And how about that thing you wear around your neck?”

  My hand went automatically to the pendant beneath my shirt.

  “If you’re not a wizard, what are you?” he pressed.

  “A druid.” My eyes widened and I clapped that same hand over my mouth. Had I just said that? “I didn’t say that!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. What’s a druid if not a wizard?”

  “Nat-natural,” came out. I had no idea what I was talking about, but the concept hung just on the edge of my knowing. “Not like Duzayan.”

  “You are nothing like Duzayan, or you’d be dead now, too.”

  “That’s comforting. You’d kill me?”

  “For being like Duzayan? In a heartbeat,” he said with devastating conviction.

  My own heart stuttered in my chest. “I’ll endeavor to remain as un-Duzayan-like as possible.”

  “I hope so,” he said with vehemence. “You do have public opinion to contend with, and that includes whatever soldiers we might… borrow. Everyone knows trapping a wizard is no easy feat, so of course people wonder if an enemy wizard was involved in Duzayan’s destruction.” He hesitated.

  “And?” I glared.

  “And you have made quite a reputation for yourself over the years. I don’t want this to go to your head, but you’ve developed some pretty impressive skills. If people wondered before...” His voice trailed off and he shrugged one shoulder.

  Wasn’t that just dandy? My career teetered on the verge of death. Maybe, though, enterprising clients would appreciate having a… wizard working for them, never mind how the very label made me feel distinctly light-headed and queasy. “Then I suppose,” I managed in a remarkably calm tone, “I’ll have to figure out a way to change public opinion.”

  “Not an easy task, especially with a dragon for a companion.”

  Toddling forward on the stilts of reconstructing my reputation, I abruptly found my memories speeding back to the fateful night in the ruins of Duzayan’s mansion. “They saw him?”

  “He was hard to miss. Maybe people mistook him for another demon, though.”

  “They aren’t demons,” I muttered, glowering at the remains of the sunset on the city. The golden roof of the palace caught the last rays, and its brilliance contrasted magnificently with the reflected orange of the scattered clouds. Away to the east, the sky darkened. Rather like my mood.

  Tanris didn’t argue with me, and I suspected that he had elected not to debate what was obvious to him and nearly everyone else in Marketh. Never mind they were wrong. Never mind that trying to explain the truth would only further condemn me.

  “Well,” I said, and made myself focus on all those things I’d been considering before Tanris’s return. “That brings us rather directly to another subject. I need to go back to Hasiq.”

  “Where?” He was utterly, wonderfully blank.

  “Hasiq jum’a Sahefal. Where we got the dragon.”

  “Why?”

  “It is where Not-An-Egg belongs,” I explained, and wondered why the idea of taking him back and leaving him with whichever of his parents had survived made me feel so… alone. I ought to feel endangered. I couldn’t imagine the adult dragon would welcome me back with open arms, or wings, however you’d like to look at it. “And there is the library and the collection. Without Melly, what will become of all of it? It’s dangerous.”

  “I shudder to think what will become of it in your hands,” he said drily.

  “Mine? No, I don’t want it. Too much responsibility.” The books might perhaps prove interesting, providing they weren’t wizard’s lesson books or spell books or the like, but the thought of all those enchanted things in the underground chamber and the way their magic affected me—No, I could live quite happily without any of those.

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know yet, Tanris.”

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek and studied me until I felt like something in the emperor’s exotic animal park. “And you’re—I don’t want to say this wrong, but you’re what? Worried about the dragon?”

  I was quite aware how un-Crow-like such a thing was. “Yes. Do I look like a dragon to you?”

  “Not a lot, no. Well maybe a little around the nose.”

  I regarded him with narrowed eyes, which did not much impress him. “And do I know anything about raising a dragon?”

  “You’re doing pretty well so far,” Tanris pointed out, though he still managed a dubious expression.

  I just rolled my eyes. “I like him, don’t get me wrong.” That was an admission worthy of note. I am not, you might have guessed, particularly fond of animals, except as meals and even then I am somewhat selective.

  Not-An-Egg lifted his snout and smiled at me, I swear he did. Teeth and all. He is a cunning little creature and, being clever and canny myself, I could appreciate that sort of thing in another person. Or dragon. I cleared my throat. “But can you imagine me trying to feed him and—and teach him whatever dragons are supposed to know?”

  “
Yes.” Tanris was, on occasion, prone to being evil in spite of his outwardly noble demeanor. He did not fool me. “All right, no,” he surrendered. “But it would probably be funny to watch.”

  “Ha ha.” It was good to know Tanris still had a sense of humor, odd or not. “I suspect he will grow, and soon he will not fit in my apartment.”

  “That might be a problem.” He paused and pressed his lips together. Was he trying not to smile? “And the neighbors will probably notice.”

  “Yes, the neighbors…” I heaved a sigh. “So I need to take him back.”

  Tanris nodded. He did not, as I’d hoped he might, volunteer his services as my guide and traveling companion. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out, lacing his fingers together over his belly as he took in the view. “You have any of that Taharri Red left?”

  “Yes.” He made no move to get up and neither did I. I found myself in an internal debate. He’d just lost his wife—should I ask for his help? Maybe it would be good for him. Keep him busy, as it were. And he’d just asked for my help! “Will you go with me?”

  His head twisted and he met my eyes, surprise reflected bright in his own, and I waited to hear why. “You know the way,” he said slowly. “And the weather should be good now. Probably pretty, even.”

  “Yes, but no one loads things like you do. I’d have to take a whole pack train.”

  His snort startled Not-An-Egg. “What about Girl?” he asked.

  “Are you going to keep calling her that? Don’t you think she ought to have a real name?”

  My words earned another snort. “Teach her to write and maybe she'll tell us.”

  “Me? I’m supposed to teach her how to pick pockets.”

  “You will do no such thing.”

  Maybe not when he was looking. “I can’t picture her remaining behind, can you?”

  “No.” She’d already refused a perfectly comfortable and reasonable position to follow us into danger. Perhaps she secretly liked it. “There’s no accounting for other people’s peculiarities. Besides, she’s awfully handy with that crossbow and she makes a very good pot of stew. So you’ll do it?”

  “How long do we have before the dragon outgrows his box?”