Zabra stood on the last step of the stairs, straight-backed and defiant. The effect was spoiled a little, for me by the fear that she hid so well but which still wafted off her, and for the others when Herald materialized out of the shadows behind her and kicked her in the back, spilling her onto the stone floor.

The tension snapped. She didn’t even have time to get to her hands and knees. Her earlier threat of her men retaliating meant nothing; Mak and Herald kicked the shit out of her, to the point where I wondered if they intended to just kill her there and then.

After two minutes there was only me left watching them, and I didn’t trust myself to join in. Ardek and Pot had been dragged away when they tried to intervene, the others going with them. They couldn’t stomach it anymore.

When my sisters were done, when they’d left the author of their suffering within an inch of her life, they poured a healing potion between her split lips. They bound and gagged her, and left her on the floor of the same unused room where we’d kept Simdal, and later Tark in his barrel.

----------------------------------------

“Five days.” Mak broke the silence as the three of us sat in the cellar. Blood spattered the floor. Her voice was thick, the words choked. She was staring at her hands still smeared with red. They were trembling. “We shouldn’t kill her. I want to. I want to, so much. I want to keep beating her until she’s meat. But we shouldn’t. I believe her when she says that her people will want to avenge her, and as much as I sometimes feel like just letting everything burn… But we can keep her for five days. Five days of hell, one for every day that she held me.”

“And then?” Herald asked. Once the rage had left her she’d become emotionally flat. Empty. She sat looking at her hands as she slowly clenched and unclenched them. She’d split two of her knuckles and had refused to let Mak heal them, pulling back when she’d tried.

“Then we let her go. With… I don’t know. Whatever threats seem reasonable. Enforceable. Maybe Draka can break her? I’m honestly too focused on keeping myself from going back in there to think of anything.”

“Really?”

“I never thought I could exhaust myself beating someone and regret that I can’t continue, but… yeah.”

“And if we cannot control her?”

“Then…” Mak rubbed her face and sighed. “Then we’ll have to find a way to strike first, before word gets out that she’s dead. And we pray to the mercies that we don’t lose too much.”

“Oh.” Herald kept looking at her hands, and whispered, “I don’t think I can do this.”

Mak and I both looked at her with concern. When Herald broke out the contractions, we listened.

“Not like this,” she continued. “I thought— I imagined that hurting her the way I was hurt would be… cathartic, I suppose. That it would make me feel better. But I just feel dirty. Hollow. Give me a dagger and I’ll drive it into her heart for what she’s done, but…”

She waved helplessly towards the door to the corridor, and the room where we’d left Zabra on the cold stone floor.

“I can’t.”

We both closed in on her, Mak wrapping her arms around her and me covering them both with my wings.

“You don’t have to,” I said into the little cocoon I’d made. “You don’t have to touch her, or even see her again, if you don’t want to. But Mak needs this. Right, Mak?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that all right, Herald?”

She closed her eyes and gave a small, sharp nod, then abruptly Shifted, fading into the darkness. When she answered, her voice was distant and hollow. “Do whatever you need to. She deserves so much worse. I just can’t be there.”

“That’s okay, sweet sister,” Mak murmured, her arms wrapped around nothing. “You don’t have to do anything.”

After a little while Herald faded back in. “That is really hard to keep up with someone holding me,” she said, with a little sniffle of laughter. “And I am being so dramatic. Sorry. Maybe I should have just shot her when I had the chance.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“It didn’t feel right. The bitch and her guards were all as shocked as you were. And they did not attack you after, so I wanted to keep an arrow ready and an eye on that window, in case the archer popped back up.”

“I think you got the bastard, though.”

“Yeah!” she agreed with a feral grin. “I definitely did. But you never know how quickly someone can recover. I could not risk it.”

“Can I fix these now?” Mak asked gently, pulling back and taking Herald’s hands in her own.

“Leave them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. But you have to promise me to keep them clean. If I see them getting swollen or anything I’ll deal with it, whether you want me to or not.”

“I will.”

Herald was still being dramatic, but I understood where she was coming from. Killing someone and hurting them for its own sake are very different things. She clearly felt guilty about it, and not letting Mak heal her hands was some kind of self-flagellation. But like Mak, I wasn’t going to interfere as long as it was only painful. She was a big girl. If this was how she wanted to deal with her feelings, fine. I still gave her fifty-fifty odds of going to Mak or Kira for help within a day or two, once she’d processed the night’s events.

Ardek came down soon thereafter and told us what I’d already suspected. There were people, a lot more people and rougher looking than normal skulking outside the inn. He’d pulled his younger minions back inside. Two guests had come and gone unmolested, but none of our people were going farther than a few steps out the door. We were, effectively, under siege.

We hadn’t been actively trying to hide anything from Kira, but I’d asked everyone who’d seen Zabra come in not to mention her to anyone else. Kira still figured out pretty quickly that something was going on. She came to me in my little nest in the strongroom the next morning.

“Who are you keeping locked up in the other room?” she asked me bluntly as she stood in the doorway.

“What makes you think there’s anyone there?”

“The meeting last night. Someone banging on the door in the small hours. Herald’s hands. Mak bringing some drink down here.” She rolled her eyes. “Blood on the floor. A door that’s always open is locked. I’m not a fool, Draka.”

“No, you’re not,” I sighed. “It’s Zabra.”

“Who?”

“The Night Blossom.”

”Oh.” She blanched. “Her? What are you…?”

“She tortured my sisters, and now we have her. Mak has some very justified anger to take out on the woman. I’m going to let her.”

“Oh.” She looked away from me. I told myself that she wasn’t judging us. She was just being the soft, kind woman she was. But I wasn’t confident. Conscience told me that perhaps she should be judging us. Perhaps we should just slit Zabra’s throat and deal with the fallout. Perhaps that was the smart move, too. I didn’t think that she’d hated us before last night. Now, or in a few days… who could know?

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“Is that why there’s half a dozen dirty children hanging around the back of the common room?” Kira asked, facing me again.

“Yeah. Some of Zabra's people are out there.”

“Can I see her?”

“Why?”

“Do you intend to let her die?”

“No.”

“Then I would like to see her. Please.”

I looked into her earnest eyes, and saw only worry there.

“Fine. Mak is in the… feels like the kitchen. Get the key from her.”

Kira left. A little later I felt Mak moving to some other part of the building. I wasn’t sure what was there. An office perhaps, since Mak and occasionally Herald spent a lot of time there.

When Kira came back with the key and a lantern, I was waiting outside the door to the improvised cell. We’d decided that no one should be allowed to be in the room with Zabra alone. We weren’t sure how it worked, but she definitely had something about her that made people want to agree with and help her. Ardek and Pot were banned from interacting with her entirely after how they’d acted while Herald and Mak were beating her, trying to step in and stop the sisters. And while Herald and Mak seemed immune, I knew for a fact that I was not, though I hadn’t had any trouble resisting whatever it was.

Kira looked to me for permission and I nodded. The lock opened with a rasping tchunk. Inside, Zabra was slumped in a back corner, looking like she’d just woken up. Magical healing took a lot out of you, after all. She blinked in the light, but gave us a defiant look that I didn’t like at all. I quickly wrapped her up in shadow and considered just setting them there, keeping her in the dark until it was time to let her go, but that might make the others lose track of her for all I knew. I hadn’t really experimented with setting shadows on people since I’d first messed with Herald.

“This is Kira,” I told her, hearing her whine as I squeezed the shadows a little to make sure that I had her full attention. “She’s a kind soul who wants to take a look at you, to make sure that you’re not dying on us. You will cooperate with her, and not try anything stupid, or I’ll do something terrible to you. Understand?”

I released the shadows, and Zabra slumped forward from where she’d been sitting rigid against the stone wall. She looked up at me, the defiance replaced by just a little bit of undisguised fear, and nodded.

“Good.”

“Was that really necessary?” Kira asked in her provincial Tekereteki, almost reproachfully. “Look at her!”

I did. What I could see was a mess of bruises. Blood from where split skin had barely healed crusted her face and stained her torn clothes. She looked tired. Not broken; there was still strength in her. But she was clearly in pain, the potion being either too slow-acting or not enough to heal her fully in the hours since she’d been given it.

Was it really necessary to add magical fear on top of that?

“Yes,” I decided. “With her it’s necessary. I don’t know what tricks she has, but she makes people loyal to her. I don’t want her trying anything.”

“I want to untie her and remove her gag while I treat her. Can I do that?”

I considered it. With me there it was unlikely that Zabra could hurt my little healer, especially in the state she was in. “Go ahead,” I told Kira, and settled back.

Kira put the lantern down close to me, and approached. “Name Bekiratag,” she said to Zabra in her beginner’s Karakani, putting a hand on her own chest. “Healer. Help pain, injuries. Yes?”

Zabra looked at her, then nodded.

“Turn,” Kira said, making a circling gesture. “I take out… in mouth.”

Zabra complied. Kira carefully untied the ribbon keeping the gag in, then had the other woman turn back around. She put a gentle finger on each lip near where they’d split, pushing healing, painkilling magic into them before reaching in and removing the sodden wad of cloth blocking Zabra’s mouth and keeping her jaw open.

“Ah!” Zabra croaked, slowly working her jaw up and down. “Thank you.”

Kira spent some time going over the bruises around Zabra's eyes and on her cheeks and neck. Then she put both hands on either side of her nose, whispered “Sorry,” and with a surprisingly savage jerk straightened what the potion had started to heal crooked. Zabra yelped and tried to pull away, but Kira simply followed her back to the wall, pushing healing in all the time. “Sorry,” she repeated, though her tone was business-like. “Needed. Sorry.”

“Mercies, girl,” Zabra hissed, though I was sure the pain must already be gone. “Thank you, but some warning would be nice.”

Kira didn’t show if she’d understood or not. “Need that off,” she said, gesturing to Zabra’s ruined silk bodywrap.

Zabra looked at me. “Your choice,” I told her. “I’d probably let her heal me, in your position. Might be your last chance to be free of pain.”

Whatever she saw in my eyes, she turned back to Kira. “Help, please?”

Kira untied her arms, then helped her off with the wrap. The skin around her undergarments was a mess of purples, greens and yellows, bruises of various sizes and stages of healing. The area around her lower ribcage was almost black in places, and I wondered how many of her ribs had been broken. Maybe that was why she was still such a mess; maybe the potions prioritized the worst injuries. Mak was small, but with my strength backing her she kicked like a mule and punched like a prize fighter. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t left Zabra with all kinds of internal bleeding.

Kira gave me a… not a dirty look, but a decidedly unhappy one, and got to work. “Can you translate for me?” she asked me after a while.

“Sure.” I was curious what she might have to say.

“Are you Blossom?” she asked Zabra, and I translated.

“That’s what they call me, yeah. The Night Blossom.”

“Why were you selling slaves to the Silver Spurs? Or to Tekeretek?”

“I won’t admit to having anything to do with that,” she scoffed, then cringed slightly under my unimpressed gaze. “That was all Tarkarran’s business. The whole damn operation. I could have stopped him, I suppose, but he insisted, and he had too much leverage.”

“You expect me to believe that?” I snorted, but Kira looked at me.

“Translate, please,” she said, and I did, with a tone appropriate to just what I thought of Zabra’s claim of relative innocence.

“If it wasn’t your business,” Kira asked while working on her ribs, “why did you do what you did to Draka, to Makanna and Herald?”

“I was angry. Fucking furious, really. Perhaps I overreacted. They’d killed some of my best men. Some of those guys had been with me for years. And, yes, losing a whole shipment was a lot of money I’ll never see.” She looked at me. “And then, there was you. I didn’t believe Tark at first. I thought he’d finally lost it. But then Hardal came back, and he told me the same thing as Tark. A dragon. Small, but an actual, live dragon on Mallin, one that spoke and worked together with people.” She looked at me desperately. “I swear that I never intended to harm you. I let greed and childish fantasies run away with me, but I truly wanted to learn about you. Get to know you, even.”

“Congratulations,” I told her drily. “You have a perfect opportunity to get to know me right now. Let me tell you about myself. I love silver and gold and other pretty things, and my friends. And I destroy anything that threatens the things I love.”

“Draka,” Kira reminded me, and I translated what Zabra had said. “Did you sell the slaves to the Silver Spurs or to someone else in Tekeretek?” Kira asked once I was done.

“I don’t know who those are,” Zabra said, and I told her the Tekereteki name. “Oh. Yeah. Tark mentioned them. Someone called Lakatekete, or something like that.”

“One of the commanders of the Spurs,” Kira commented in an aside to me.

“Not the one you were with?”

“No, that’s Sarahem. Lakatekete commands the ships.” She turned back to Zabra. “Did they want anyone in particular?”

“Tark mentioned that they’d pay extra for anyone with magic advancements, but otherwise he took care of everything.”

I was actually starting to feel a little bad for Zabra. Just a little. Part of me was wondering if she’d really just been unfortunate, saddled with some bastard she couldn’t get rid off who got her into all this. If this was all just a terrible series of unavoidable events that escalated to this point, with me and her and Kira in a small stone room. Perhaps, after Kira finished healing her up, I should talk to Mak.

Just as I finished translating, the door swung open. I’d felt Mak come down shortly after Kira. She’d been waiting outside the room, listening. She chose that moment to step into the room, as though she’d heard me thinking of her. “You are both aware that she has been lying through her teeth, are you not?” she asked. “Every sentence she speaks, she has been trying to hide something.”

I blinked. Kira sighed, and nodded. “I thought so,” she said, “but I hoped not.”

Zabra scowled up at Mak. “Anything you wish to share with the room?”

“Not at all.” She waved a large stoppered bottle. “I thought you might need something more to drink before tonight. And since Kira has apparently been kind enough to remove the gag, you might not spill half of it this time.”

“That was hard to avoid, with you pouring it through the damn thing,” Zabra replied bitterly.

“Be glad you get anything. I’ve heard that a person can live for three days with no water. We could try it and see, if you prefer.” Mak then turned to me. “Draka, do you feel affected by her at all?”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“I thought so. You felt… confused. Even sympathetic, perhaps, before I came in. Should I take over?”

“You probably should.” I looked at Zabra, and said in Karakani, “Try not to undo all of our healer’s hard work.”

“That’s up to Zabra,” Mak said. “And how much she wants to lie to us.”

Zabra gave me a brittle look as I went to leave. “Sure that you can’t stay?” she asked, her eyes flitting between myself and Mak. I didn’t answer. And I wasn’t the one she should want to stick around, anyway. As long as Mak didn’t send Kira away, Zabra was relatively safe. Mak didn’t want to upset Kira any more than I did. Less, probably. But Zabra didn’t need to know that.

“Now,” Mak said as I closed the door behind me. “Let’s figure out how much you really knew about ‘Tark’s’ slaving.”