The alley where we trapped Tark was about ninety feet long. By the time his party had made it twenty feet in, about halfway to Herald and her barrel, the lead guard stopped, holding up a hand. He looked around, seemed to listen, or to almost feel the air. Then he started herding the others back out, hissing, “Ambush!”
I had started Shifting back the moment they turned. I could recognize a plan going to shit, but I refused to let them get away. I was on a roof above Herald near the middle of the alley and was almost ready to leap into the air when Mak stepped out in front of the four men, her sword held almost casually at her side.
If the four had rushed at her in that moment, there was a very real risk that she would have died. She was saved by the pipsqueak’s arrogance.
“Tarkarran,” Mak said as I took off, her voice trembling noticeably. With fear or anger, I had no idea.
“Miss Makanna,” Tark sneered in his high tenor, holding up a hand to stop his guards as he drew his sword with the other.
That was as far as they got before I landed, instinct putting me between my valuable servant — my sister — and the man who had harmed her before, and who threatened to take her from me. Perhaps it would have been better to pounce on the whole group, but I couldn’t take the risk. For all that I’d once been willing to use Mak, to throw her away if the payoff was worth it, now I could not risk losing her.
Of course, introducing a dragon to the situation did not make things calmer, or less violent.
Mak’s expression when I landed in front of her, what I saw before I whirled around, was a mix of relief and reverence. The four men behind me had leapt back, wide-eyed, and as I faced Tark for the first time since we freed the slaves he bought from the valkin he growled, “The dragon! Kill it!”
Well, he tried to growl. It didn’t really work with his voice, but it was still a sound that would have sent chills down the spine of any human. There was a malice bordering on madness in his eyes, a promise of violence and suffering to anyone unfortunate enough to end up in his power, which Herald and Mak knew so well. But I was only barely human in that moment, hanging on by a thread and a hope as I faced the man who had tortured my friends. I wanted so very much to just rip him apart, but I had promised, so I would try to hold back.
That was assuming I had the choice. The moment he finished speaking he was coming at me. He hadn’t lost a shred of the speed I’d seen the first time I faced him, and he either didn’t feel fear, or he recognised that he didn’t stand a chance at a distance. He closed with me in the blink of an eye, scoring more glancing cuts than I’d care to admit as I dodged, slapped, and snapped at him. His cronies were no slouches, either, coming at me and Mak with swords and desperate courage.
I sprayed my venom wide at them, but they were prepared. When I let loose they all closed their eyes and held their breath, falling back and covering their faces. I only really got one of them who was too slow, and who started groaning and coughing as he tried to blink away whatever got in his eyes. Mak went for him, but the guy next to him jumped in to fend her off, and they ended up locked in a furious exchange. Tark’s man had the advantage when it came to skill, but they were matched for speed and Mak was, quite frankly, cheating. When the guy had to parry, it became clear that she was strong as hell, her attacks driving him back despite his skill. When she defended, she moved with a dancer’s grace, but despite her agile dodges a thrust slipped through, aimed at her neck.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the blade slid along her skin, blood welling as it went. But that was it: a shallow graze where her neck should have been cut open.
That was the turning point. When Mak realized that her borrowed draconic Fortitude really meant something in a fight, she went on the offensive. She attacked furiously, dodging almost everything the guy could throw at her, accepting shallow cuts on her arms and legs when it made sense, and only parrying the most clearly lethal stabs.
As Mak went on the offensive, so did I. Tark and the third guy, the one who wasn’t partially disabled, had recovered. I saw Tam and Val enter the alley from the far end, but it would take them seconds to reach us, and I needed the initiative. I let myself go wild, forcing them back into the alley, not expecting to do any damage but keeping them busy until we could overwhelm them. A quick glance at Mak showed that she was winning her duel, but that might change in a second. It was still a one on one, but the last guard, still coughing and blinking furiously, had recovered enough to join the fight and was moving to flank Mak. If Mak went down—
A shadow reached out and wrapped itself up along the man’s body and around his head. He cried out in surprise and wiped ineffectually at his face, never seeing the length of steel that appeared from nowhere. It cut halfway through his neck, lodging in his spine.
Herald’s sword jerked loose from the dying man, seemingly of its own accord, and followed that up with a slice to the back of the knees of the man Mak was fighting, who stumbled and fell as his legs stopped carrying him. Mak only hesitated for a heartbeat before closing in, catching the wrist of his sword arm in her free hand, and driving her sword clean through his throat.
That left two, still focused on me as I pushed them back. Things were going well. They were both quick and had reach on me with their swords, and I wasn’t getting at them, but that was fine. It was five on two now, or would be in about two seconds when Tam and Val joined the fight. But no matter how skewed the balance was, we were still facing two desperate men with fighting Advancements, and I didn’t want any last second reversals to lead to one of my humans getting hurt. When the rhythm of our exchange would have had me attack, I fell back, instead sending shadows to enveloped my two opponents to terrify and blind them.
Tark quickly showed me that I had underestimated him.
His remaining companion froze. Tark himself was made of sterner stuff. Perhaps he really was fearless, as I’d wondered at the beginning of the fight, a few seconds before. Perhaps his fight, flight, or freeze was permanently locked to fight. Whatever the cause, he launched himself out of the shadows, a cornered animal throwing everything into a last ditch effort to, if not survive, then at least cause as much damage as possible. Roaring with surprise and outrage I reared up and away from him, swiping at him with both hands and dodging back and to the side. He accepted a glancing blow from one set of claws and dodged under the other. As he did so he followed me unerringly, put his free hand on the pommel of his short sword, and thrust.
The thrust was perfect. The aim was off. He missed my heart by inches. It was still the most horrible experience of my life.
The sword took me straight on, low on the right side of my chest, through the flight muscle. Scales slid and cracked, and the pain and the horrid, cold sensation of steel sliding into me, cutting through flesh and organs, was like nothing I’d ever imagined. At first I wasn’t sure what had happened. Tark himself seemed stunned, shocked beyond comprehension that his attack had worked. It slowed him enough that he didn’t have time to pull away when my head snapped down, almost reflexively, and my jaws sheared through his wrist, bone and all. I barely heard his shrill, horrified scream as he fell away from me, clutching at the stump, or how the others cut down his last guard and subdued him. I just stared stupidly at the hilt of the sword hovering in front of my chest, connected to a gash in my scales by about five inches of steel. I tried to take a breath to speak, but that made everything shift around the thing — the sword — stuck through my lung, and I hated that, so I forced myself to hold my breath.
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I ended up lying on my side, not sure how it had happened. There was a lot of blood on the ground, but I was pretty sure that very little of it was mine. The sword that had been driven almost all the way through my chest was still in there, after all. If you got stabbed you were supposed to leave the blade in since it would block a lot of the bleeding. They’d included that in my first aid training for some reason, and I remembered wondering why.
I had a detached sort of realization that I was in shock. Dragons could go into shock. Or could they? I felt very human in that moment, very small and vulnerable and scared, and felt somewhat betrayed by the fact that Instinct, with all her rage and arrogance that could have made the fear go away, was nowhere to be found. But then my family was all around me. That made things a little better.
Someone was holding my head.
“Herald,” I gasped with some of my last, hoarded air. The word came out wet, and I tasted blood.
“Hush, big sister,” she said. She sounded terrified, like she was barely keeping it together. I hated that. Then her grip on my head tightened, keeping it from moving while her hands clamped my jaws shut. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I didn’t like it at all. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re going to fix you up, all right? But I need you to lie very still, and keep your claws in. Can you do that, Draka? Keep your claws in. That’s it. That’s good. Just like that.”
Her speech wasn’t the careful style she usually used, but the rush that came out when she was very emotional. I didn’t like that. I wanted to comfort her. But she’d asked me to lie still and be quiet. And to keep my claws in, for some reason. And she was Herald. If I couldn’t trust her, if I couldn’t do as she asked, then who?
I distantly heard Val ask, “Ready?”
“Ready,” Mak and Tam both answered.
“It’s going to hurt a little bit, okay?” Herald said, her voice trembling so hard that she could barely get the words out, in a tone I really didn’t like. “Only a little. Just be still.”
Then she clamped down on me as hard as she could. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Val grip the hilt of the sword that was sticking out of me. There was some pressure as he braced one foot on my chest, and then he pulled the sword out in one smooth motion.
The world was pain. I would have howled if I had any air to howl with. As it was I just contracted my chest as hard as I could, which was lucky, because if I’d tried to take a breath I would have filled my chest up with air through the two-inch gash that went right through my lung.
I tried to lie still. I really did. I still couldn’t stop myself from scrabbling at the ground and trying to cover up my wound. Luckily I only caught Mak a glancing blow as she immediately dove in past Val, and she recovered quickly and shoved her palms onto either side of the gash. “Heal!” she pleaded, and I felt a warmth, followed by a beautiful numbness spread through my chest. At the same time someone was pouring something on the wound. “Heal, you gods-damned lizard, heal!” she said as she continued pumping magic into me, a steady stream of light from her heart to mine.
As I got my limbs back under control Herald released her grip on my head, and I gasped with relief. Then I started hacking and coughing, globs of blood coming up with every wracking spasm, spattering onto the ground and Herald’s lap. She stroked my jaw as I gasped weakly, recovering from my coughing fit. “You need to drink this, all right?” she said, her voice a little steadier. I felt a bottle against the side of my mouth. It was weird. I hadn’t drunk from a bottle for… half a year, maybe? “Just open your mouth, and swallow,” she said, tilting my head back and pouring a slow trickle of burning liquid onto my tongue. Alcohol! The healing potions were mostly alcohol, I remembered that. I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since I came to Mallin, but last time I drank I’d been chugging pink Moscato straight from the bottle. Classy as hell. Nowhere near as strong as this stuff, but it was still funny how that worked out.
I carefully swallowed the trickle, and it burned all the way down. I really hoped that healing potions weren’t toxic to dragons. That would be embarrassing. Surviving a sword through the lung and then dying from potion poisoning.
“Getting her out of here will be difficult,” Val said. “I can’t imagine her flying in this state.”
“Yeah, how do we carry her?” That was Tam. “Especially if we don’t want her to be seen?”
I agreed. Moving me anywhere would be tricky. I was large, and was probably somewhere between three or four hundred pounds. I’d just have to move on my own.
“Tark?” I said weakly, remembering what we were doing here. I was supposed to fly him out.
“Alive, but out,” Mak said wearily. She was sitting back against the alley wall, breathing heavily.
“Oh. Good.”
“I’m sorry, Draka,” Tam said. “I don’t think we can keep you hidden.”
“All right. It’s all right. Needed a kick in the bum anyway. You wouldn’t betray my secrets, right, Tam?”
“No, of course not! You know I wouldn’t.”
“And you too, Val. You wouldn’t tell anyone if I showed you something crazy, yeah?”
“I swear that I would not.”
“All right. Good. Thank you. Mak? Do you think that I’m all right to move?”
I shared a look with her. She knew what I was planning. I could see it in her eyes. Finally she gave me a sharp nod.
I Shifted. It was hard. Harder than normal. Harder to focus. It felt like there was a lot of resistance, and I wasn’t sure that I could have done it without the fullness of the Nest Heart I’d eaten. But it was still far easier than it had been those first few times, and the way Tam and Val jumped back was amusing.
“I’ll go with her. Leave the bodies, and figure out what to do about Tark,” Herald said, almost commanded, then went from a mid gray in my vision to shining bright as she followed me into the shadows. She didn’t wait for them to argue or acknowledge, just Shifted and went with me.
“I guess you knew about this?” I heard Tam ask Mak as I made my way north.
Perhaps I should have stayed with them, but I was in no shape to fight. I was woozy, and getting hungry, and desperately tired. There was no way that the sounds of fighting wouldn’t attract someone, and the sooner I left the scene the sooner the others could do the same. Besides, I was not planning on being out in the street when something like four shots of pure grain alcohol kicked in. I didn’t know if dragons could get drunk, and I really didn’t want to know what might happen if one did, but I was about to find out.
My going was halting and occasionally confused as we made our way back towards the inn. Once I was stopped by something as simple as one of the weak street lights, when I forgot to use the shadows to make a passage through the light. After that Herald kept an eye on me, making sure to guide me around the light with careful nudges. She also blocked my way once or twice to keep me from passing unnecessarily close to some late-night pedestrian. Not that they’d be likely to see us, or believe their eyes if they did, but Herald took keeping me hidden pretty seriously.
About halfway I ran out of steam and had to stop behind a wall and Shift back. I just lay there, panting through my exhaustion, Herald watching over me until I could Shift and make it another few thousand feet, then another few hundred. The last time I had to stop we were almost in sight of the inn. We didn’t bother with the yard and the cellar door. Herald just went in the front, and I followed.
One of Barro’s friends was keeping an eye on the place while we were all out. He hadn’t asked for much either, just a free night’s stay with meals, so he didn’t deserve the way Herald just shooed him out of the way, storming through and doing her best to play a pissed-off princess to keep his attention on herself as I slipped past into the kitchen. Once she’d opened the door to the cellar, though, and I had slipped down the stairs, I heard her sigh theatrically and begin to apologize as she closed the door.
I had no idea what she was going to tell him. She was a bad liar, and couldn’t act for love nor money. But I was too wrung out to worry about that. In the dark of the cellar I Shifted back and collapsed. The world spun. I felt like I could barely breathe, and I was getting frighteningly hungry. I’d been healed, by magic and by alchemy, but I still felt like I was horribly injured. The memory of steel sliding into my chest was still fresh, and it was hard to accept that I wasn’t pumping blood onto the floor.
Now that the pain was gone I could feel Instinct creeping back in, the coward. I wanted to hide, to crawl into a crack somewhere no one could find me, or where they could at least only come at me from one direction.
I desperately wanted my hoard.
I settled for the best I had available. The strongroom was locked, but I still dragged myself into the short corridor, settling down best I could with my back to the massive door. My face felt numb, and I was so tired, but something told me not to sleep. I was hurt, and I hadn’t killed the one that hurt me. They were still out there. The archer. No, that wasn’t right. It hadn’t been an arrow this time, but a sword. And my humans had the little bastard, didn’t they? So I knew that I was safe, but I wasn’t with my hoard. I couldn’t sleep yet. I needed to get to my hoard. I’d be safe there, safe to sleep and heal. Not here. My humans were out, they weren’t here to guard me. I mustn’t sleep. I mustn’t—