They were moving way too slow. At this rate they wouldn’t make it back to the capital by the end of winter.
Their trip down the river had knocked them way off course. Fortunately, they’d landed on the opposite side, but they were at least a dozen miles south of where they’d started. The closest town was another five miles south. Most of the fresh supplies Asra purchased the day before were lost to the waters inside Ciaran’s bag, so they had no choice but to replenish at this town. It would take them two days to get back on track.
Asra counted the days in her head. It had been a full week since the parade, and she was still thousands of miles away from Nolan. She growled, causing Ciaran to shoot her a dirty look. She growled louder in response until he looked away.
They were at each other’s throats worse than ever before. The sweltering heat did nothing to ease either of their bad tempers. Asra’s fur was drenched in sweat, and her tongue was spread out as flat as possible as she panted, but neither did much to help. She felt like she was trapped in a sauna.
Asra spent all day breathing down Ciaran’s neck to ensure he wasn’t sneaking any more booze. She sniffed every time he took a drink. Fortunately, Asra’s rucksack had remained intact, all the goods safely secured inside, though still thoroughly damp even now, so they still had a couple bottles of water—actual water. Asra wondered if she should have dumped the two remaining bottles of moonshine, but the alcohol could prove useful for cleaning a wound in a pinch, and she couldn’t bring herself to waste it. So she instead kept her vigilance over Ciaran’s water consumption.
Ciaran, a man used to always getting his way and answering to no one but his brother, chafed under the strict surveillance. They could manage about thirty minutes of silence, the tension festering between them like a bad wound. Then the loud crunch of Ciaran stomping on a branch or the tapping sound of Asra licking her nose would inevitably annoy the other, until they were snapping at each other once again.
If her people worshiped gods, she would have thanked them that her ribs had healed properly last night. She wasn’t sure if she could stomach having to reset them. She was still sore and stiff, and by the looks of Ciaran’s subtle limp, so was he. Good—he deserved it.
As they neared the town, a scent caught Asra’s attention. Recognition flickered at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t quite place it. It was earthy and natural, yet perfumey and artificial at the same time. She mulled over the smell until Ciaran’s voice brought her back to reality.
“Are you even listening to me?” he said.
“What?” Asra snapped.
“We’re getting close to town. Someone’s going to see you like … that.”
“Okay, I got it.”
She changed out of her fur and rummaged through her bag for clothes. The scent was right on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t grasp it. As she dressed, she realized the perfume smell reminded her of Ciaran’s apartment. Perhaps the scented candles used there? And the earthy smell was very canine. A dog? A dog from the city, maybe?
Asra’s heel slipped into her shoe as the light bulb in her head finally went off.
“There’s no way,” she said, standing.
“What?” Ciaran said, but Asra was already running to the edge of the trees just ahead.
A sign by the road welcomed newcomers to the small city. And next to the sign sat a dog, waiting as though he’d been told to wait there. A rich brown coat, with dark ears and amber eyes.
It was Bane.
Ciaran knocked Asra to the side as he sprinted to the ridgeback. Asra followed on his heels. At the sight of his owner, Bane stood and wagged his tail low.
Bane took a step forward to greet Ciaran, but collapsed under his own weight. Ciaran caught him just before he hit the ground. He held the dog tight, frantically murmuring soothing words and rocking the dog as Bane managed a few weak licks on Ciaran’s arm. Asra looked away, shuffling her feet and focusing on a spot on the ground rather than the emotional reunion.
But her attention was brought back when Ciaran looked up at her, tear tracks cutting through the grime on his face.
“He’s hurt. Can you help him?” His voice quivered. “He’s hurt. He’s hurt and I … I can’t lose him again. Please, will you help him? I’ll do anything.”
Asra was even more startled by Ciaran’s whiplash change in mood than she was by Bane's sudden reappearance. She nodded and bent down to examine the dog.
From a distance he’d looked weak, but up close he looked like he was on death’s door. A long, angry gash stretched from his chest to the right side of his ribcage. The skin around it was slick with purulent drainage. His pelvis and spine jutted out from under his skin, and his coat lacked the luster it had a week ago.
She shifted his lips to reveal cherry-red gums that were sticky to the touch: signs of heat stroke. She pinched the skin on the back of his neck and pulled it straight up. It took a full four seconds to return to its normal position: severe dehydration.
Asra considered how fast he would have had to travel to get here in such a short time. There was no way a common dog could have made that trek alive in that amount of time, especially factoring in the dangers of the landscape and the dog’s significant injuries. She placed a hand on his shoulder and reached out with her magic, and felt the dog’s magic answer in return.
Bane was not a normal dog.
Asra glanced up and down the road. No horses or pedestrians right now. In this situation, a well-meaning passerby could be just as dangerous as an outright enemy. They couldn’t risk anyone recognizing them.
“Let’s get him back into the woods,” Asra said, putting her arms under Bane’s chest and nodding towards Ciaran to indicate to him to lift Bane’s rear.
When Asra was confident they were hidden from view of the road, she and Ciaran lowered Bane onto the soggy ground. She would need to get him cooled down and get some water into his body before she could address the wound. She dug through her bag and took out a few rags and all the food that was in there, as well as a bottle of water and a small metal cup.
She poured water into the cup and offered it to the dog. He drank readily. That was a good sign. As he lapped the water, she took out a piece of beef jerky. The salt was less than ideal for his dehydration, but she needed to know if he would eat.
“Is he going to be all right?” Ciaran asked.
Asra tossed him the rags. “Go wet these in the pond.”
Ciaran snatched the rags up and raced to the edge of the water. The dog sniffed at the small piece of jerky, then slowly chewed and swallowed. Another good sign. Asra grabbed the bag of dried fruit and dropped a few apple and banana slices into the bottom of the cup and filled it with water once more.
“Wait!” Ciaran said, the water from the rags in his arms soaking through his shirt and dripping onto the ground. “Make sure there’s no raisins!”
“Already have,” Asra said, offering Bane the water.
“And don’t feed him too much at once! It’s not good for—”
“Ciaran!” Asra said, her head snapping to lock eyes with him. “Believe it or not, I do know a thing or two about taking care of dogs. Quit running your mouth and get those rags on his belly.”
Ciaran clamped his mouth shut into a tight line and dropped to his knees, rubbing Bane’s stomach and sides with the sopping rags as Bane lapped up the water from the cup and ate the rehydrated fruit at the bottom. Slowly but surely, the dog’s panting subsided and his skin cooled. Asra put a hand on his head and reached out with her magic. No signs of swelling in the brain. She lifted his lips to reveal pink gums.
Confident that they had avoided the worst complications of heat stroke, Asra turned her attention to the gaping wound in Bane’s side. She used her magic to numb the area, then pinched the edge to ensure she’d done it correctly. She opened one of the bottles of moonshine and carefully washed the gash out as best she could. She hoped it would be enough. Proper bacteria-killers would be hard to come by so far away from a major hospital, and they would be unlikely to afford them even if they could find them.
She laid her hand on the start of the wound, just under his neck. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and focused her magic on sealing the gash. When the skin and muscle closed under her hand, she moved it to the next section of the wound and repeated. As it slowly healed, section by section, Bane became more and more alert. By the time Asra reached the end, Ciaran had to hold the dog down to keep him from leaping to his paws.
The instant Asra lifted her hand from his fur and said, “All finished,” Bane threw himself into Ciaran’s arms, coating his owner’s face in a fine sheen of dog spit. Ciaran gripped him in a bear hug so tight that Asra worried he’d snap the dog’s spine. He buried his face in Bane’s fur, and the ridgeback craned his neck to lick the back of Ciaran’s head, his whole body wiggling as his tail swung back and forth so fast it became a blur.
“Hey, hang on,” Asra began, concerned that Bane may reopen a spot in the wound with less-than-perfect healing, but the redness in Ciaran’s cheeks and the tears streaming from his eyes made her clamp her mouth shut. She stood and said, “I’m gonna lay down. You’ve got first watch tonight.”
----------------------------------------
Asra woke to a purple twilight sky. She sat up slowly, every muscle in her body protesting the movement. Healing Bane had drained her, and she felt like she could sleep for three days straight.
But there was no time for that. They needed to be moving before morning, and Ciaran still needed to sleep at some point. She spotted him leaning against a large fallen log not too far away, Bane sprawled across his lap. She sat next to him. Ciaran tipped back a bottle to his lips, and the scent of alcohol burned Asra’s nose.
“Hey, what the hell did I tell you about—”
“Aw, come on, Asra,” Ciaran said, giving her a plaintive smile. “This is worth celebrating. I’ll be sober by morning. I promise.”
There was a warmth that radiated from him, and Asra didn’t have the strength to tell him no. She sighed.
“How is he?” she asked.
“Acting like nothing even happened.” When Ciaran looked at her, the moonlight flashed off the tears that rimmed his eyes. “I can’t ever thank you enough for what you’ve done. I know I don’t deserve it, not after the way I’ve treated you, and especially after my behavior yesterday—”
“I didn’t do it for you. I did it for him.”
Ciaran nodded as he stroked Bane’s ear. The dog’s paws twitched in his sleep.
“Why didn’t you tell me he had the gift?” Asra said.
“The what?”
“The gift!”
Ciaran’s brow furrowed, then a disbelieving smile spread across his face. “Asra, don’t be ridiculous. My dog is not magic.”
“I felt the magic in him when I was healing him. And think about it. What common dog could have possibly made it all the way here in a week while injured like that? How did he know we would be here? We weren’t even supposed to come to this town.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“All of my dogs are extraordinary. I wouldn’t have bred them if they weren’t.”
“Yeah, because they probably all had the gift. It’s hereditary.”
Or at least that was what she’d heard. The truth was, her people didn’t know much about the gift these days.
Ciaran laughed and shook his head. “Asra, that’s absurd. He’s my protection dog. Most of my dogs were protection dogs, or royal guard dogs. Many of them have bitten people before and none of them have turned people into giant killer dogs. Hell, I’ve had dogs come up the leash on me.”
Asra growled. “Look, I don’t know exactly how it works. I don’t think a bite is a guarantee that it’ll happen, and I think most people don’t survive the process, anyway. But I know I felt his magic.”
Ciaran sighed and leaned his head back on the log. “Well, I suppose you’re the expert here. I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Ciaran started to take another swig from the bottle, then looked at it as if he’d never seen it before.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t even ask if you wanted some.”
He held the bottle out to her, an earnest smile on his face. His demeanor was so different from anything Asra had seen from him. It was no wonder he was able to charm all of those simpering nobles in the capital city. For a moment, she almost agreed.
“No,” she said. “One of us needs to be sober enough to keep us alive.”
She’d meant it to sound caustic, but judging by Ciaran’s grin, he’d interpreted it as a friendly jab.
“Fair enough. I’ll toast to you, then.” He raised the bottle above his head. “To Asra, the kingdom’s best damn veterinarian!” As he pressed the bottle to his lips again he added, just loud enough for Asra to hear, “Even if she is an utter bitch.”
Asra leaned back on her hands. “Why do you humans use that word like an insult? I’m literally a bitch.”
Ciaran coughed, gulped the liquor in his mouth, then sputtered a laugh. Asra raised an eyebrow at him.
“I’m sorry,” Ciaran said. “I just can never tell when you’re joking.”
“I’m never joking.”
He made a face that was halfway between a smile and a grimace. “Then you’ve really eaten rubbish?”
Asra’s jaw dropped in indignation before she said, “That was one time!”
Ciaran laughed again. “Please tell me you didn’t just eat it straight out of the bin?”
Asra puckered her lips to hold back her embarrassed smile, hoping to appear disgruntled, but Ciaran clearly wasn’t buying it. His laughter shook his whole body, open and genuine, enough to rouse Bane from his sleep. Asra turned her head to hide her grin.
“Oh, Asra, that’s vile!”
“I was running from your dogs, asshole!” Asra said, trying to regain her composure. “They’d been after me all day and all night, and I hadn’t eaten in forever. There was a chicken carcass on the top of a trash can in an alley and I just … grabbed it as I passed.”
Ciaran’s smile faltered. “I don’t like the idea of my dogs chasing you like a criminal, or an enemy.”
“I’m both of those things, according to your laws.”
“Yes,” Ciaran said, his smile fading completely. “Of course.”
Silence enveloped them as the reality of their situation fell onto them both. Crickets’ chirps and owls’ hoots filled Asra’s ears, barely audible over the ringing of her tinnitus. She opened her mouth to tell Ciaran to get to sleep, but he spoke before she could.
“Bane is all I have left.”
The heaviness of his tone weighed Asra down where she sat. She held back a sigh and cursed herself for not speaking a second sooner.
“My family’s been breeding these dogs for generations. Long before we were even royalty. My mother was so proud when I started helping her in the kennels.” He smiled. “Nolan never had the knack for it.”
Asra snorted. She couldn’t imagine Nolan having a knack for caring for anyone besides himself.
“Bane’s dam, Trigger, was one of the pups from the last litter I whelped with my mother. When my mother was … ” He paused. “When she passed, I had to learn how to do it all myself. I was only six at the time. We had kennel hands and trainers that would work the dogs and clean them out, and obviously the guards had their dogs to take care of. But I did all the feeding and grooming. I helped muck the kennels as much as I could. I mentored under other breeders who had known my mother well, and I learned everything I could.”
He smiled again, apparently lost in some memory.
“It took me forever to find a good dog to match with Trigger. Ordinarily I wouldn’t breed a bitch so old, but I wanted the sire to be just right. There were eleven pups in her litter, including Bane. They were perfect.
“When they were seven weeks, they all contracted distemper.”
Asra’s heart lurched. She remembered the boy in her class her first year of school who died of distemper. Shapechangers’ bodies were phenomenal at healing wounds, but diseases were trickier, and distemper was a ruthless disease.
Ciaran continued, “We had private veterinarians at the palace kennels. The puppies received the utmost care, around the clock. I lost four.” His face was grim as he stroked Bane’s head. “Three more survived, but had complications so severe that I chose to cull them. The others eventually recovered, but Bane was weak for a long time after they had returned to normal. I kept him in my room with me, so I could personally attend to him throughout the night.
“One night there was a fire. We’d had a terrible drought that summer. It caught so quickly that by the time the guards noticed, it was … ” He swallowed. “My bedroom window overlooked the kennels. The light woke me up. Then I heard the dogs screaming. I raced to the kennels as fast as I could. It was an inferno. There was smoke everywhere. I couldn’t get inside. One by one, the dogs stopped screaming.”
His voice was thick and raspy, as though the smoke still filled his throat and lungs.
“The firefighters did everything they could, but the fire was so strong. The only dog left alive when they finally put it out was Trigger, and she … ” His throat caught. “She’d inhaled too much smoke. I don’t know how she made it as long as she did. It was like she was waiting for me. Like she knew I would come, and she wanted to hold on until she could … say goodbye. I held her as she took her last breath.”
Asra thought of her siblings’ broken bodies on the floor of her childhood home, the wall they’d been standing next to obliterated from the explosion. She felt her father’s hand gripping her tiny wrist, felt the way her throat burned through the smoke and flame as she begged him to let her go, to run to her siblings.
We can’t save them now, he’d said to her. But there are others we can save. We have to protect the commune, no matter what we’re feeling. Do you understand? Tears had streamed down his face. She’d never seen him cry before.
Ciaran sniffed, paused, then said with force, “All of my dogs were gone. Everything my family worked to build. Everything I helped my mother with. All I had left was Bane, and a pile of ash.”
He swung his head to lock eyes with Asra, red eyes brimming with tears. “And then I thought I lost Bane, too. And it was too much. I’m sorry for how I’ve behaved the last few days, but … He’s not just my dog. He’s all I have left of the other dogs, and of … ” He swallowed.
“He’s all you have left of your mother,” Asra finished for him. His eyes widened, seemingly surprised that she understood, and he nodded.
Asra thought of her father’s massive fang resting in the quarantine cabin in the woods several miles outside of the capital city. It was the only piece of him that was still whole when she found his body beneath the rubble. It was all she had left of him.
She heard the guilt in Ciaran’s voice, even if he never mentioned it. She knew all the ways he must have blamed himself for what happened, all the ways he wished he could have stopped it from happening. She recognized it because she’d done the same for the last eighteen years.
His eyes hadn’t left hers. He looked so weak, so vulnerable. He was nothing like the man she’d met in the capital city. He was waiting for her to say something, do something. She reached her hand out to … what? Pat him on the back? Comfort him? At the end of the day, they were still enemies, regardless of their current situation. She diverted her hand to instead scratch the back of her head as she said, “You should probably get some sleep. We have a long day tomorrow.”
Ciaran at least had the social grace not to comment on her obvious cover-up.
----------------------------------------
By the next morning, Bane was almost completely back to normal. He had enough appetite to scarf down a squirrel Asra caught for him, and he was hydrated enough to urinate on every third tree they passed on their way back into town. The only signs that he had ever been on death’s door were his bony hips and ribs and a couple faint scars on his chest. Asra was confident these would be a distant memory within a few weeks.
Ciaran was in the best mood Asra had ever seen him in. His smile seemed to be a permanent feature of his face, and he was pleasant and conversational towards Asra, as if they were old colleagues or schoolmates. She could almost believe he was a normal person and not a spoiled prince.
“I’m sorry I got you hurt the other day,” he said for what must have been the fiftieth time that day.
“It’s all right. It’s over now.”
“Your healing abilities are incredible. I’ve never heard of anyone walking away from a water horse attack in one piece, and today you’re just … fine.”
“It’s not perfect,” Asra said. “It’s got its issues, too.”
“In what way?”
Asra deliberated how much she wanted to tell him before she spoke again. “Well … we get a lot of cancers. I think it has to do with the way our cells repair themselves so quickly.”
“Do you get other illnesses often?”
“Yes, but … I don’t think that has to do with our healing abilities.”
“What do you mean?”
Asra chewed her bottom lip as she considered her next words. “We isolate ourselves really strictly. From other kinds of shapechangers, I mean. I think our bodies are losing the ability to fight off diseases. I got sick all the time the first year I was in the city. I got an infection in my paw once and I thought it might fall off.”
Ciaran looked like he had more questions, but thankfully the first buildings of the next town appeared through the trees.
When they arrived in town, they sold off a few more pieces of Ciaran’s jewelry and replenished the supplies they’d lost in the river two days before. As they left the pawnbroker, Asra’s stomach rumbled, and they agreed to grab some hot sandwiches from the nearby pub first.
She was so reluctant to cause tension between them again that she didn’t say anything when Ciaran ordered a gin and tonic. Bane tucked himself neatly under Ciaran’s barstool and closed his eyes.
They ordered food, then Ciaran leaned over to Asra. “We should get a horse while we’re here. It will speed things up.”
“Can we afford to buy one?”
“No, but we could rent one. There’s rental stables at most of the major towns and cities. We can swap out horses when we stop to buy new supplies.”
Asra grunted. The idea of traveling with one of those brutes was not appealing, but they definitely needed to pick up their pace.
They were halfway through eating when Ciaran suddenly gripped her hand. Her head shot up to look at him, then she followed his wide-eyed gaze to a newspaper held by another patron at the bar. Front and center of the first page was a blurry photograph of Asra and Ciaran in the resort in New Port, the headline PRINCE CIARAN ABDUCTED in a rather dramatic bold print above it.
“That son of a bitch,” Ciaran hissed. “He’s trying to make it look like you kidnapped me. He’s trying to cover his arse after his mercenaries didn’t kill us.”
Asra grumbled to herself. It was already tricky enough to avoid detection when the entire kingdom wasn’t actively looking for them. They would need to be even more careful now.
Asra flexed her hand, still firmly in Ciaran’s grasp, and said, “You wanna let go?”
He snatched his hand away and mumbled, “Sorry. I didn’t realize.”
Asra looked him up and down. She felt less confident in her disguise for him now. His common clothes, rapidly-growing stubble, and unstyled hair may prevent commoners from recognizing him as the well-groomed prince at a glance, but anyone in the royal guard or nobility would recognize him with no trouble.
Asra could get away with her glasses and a hat. People weren’t used to seeing her face plastered on every newspaper and paper bill in the kingdom. But Ciaran was a different story.
“We should get going,” she said to him.
As Ciaran counted out money and dropped the bills on the bar, Asra again pondered how they could better disguise themselves. It was fortunate that humans didn’t have Asra’s strong nose; that would make it easier to avoid detection. The thought brought her mind to the parade a week ago.
“That thing you did, to disguise those people on the parade float as you and Nolan,” Asra whispered to Ciaran. “That was magic, wasn’t it? A spell?”
Ciaran nodded.
“I don’t suppose that’s one of the tricks you picked up from Vincent?”