Staying so close to the city might have been a mistake. I learned very early that people hunted here, since the fields attracted boar, deer, and hares, who all used the forest as a base for their raids on the crops. The very first morning I had a grey, balding man with a bow sneak past almost right below me. The dragon woke me as soon as we could hear the soft crunch of his steps on the dry leaves, but there was no danger. He passed, as did everyone else who came near that day, or the next. In the dense, shady crown of the tree I may as well have been invisible.
There was a wide stream nearby which I visited to drink, but other than that I spent two days and three nights in that tree. While I slept, the dragon watched, and, I assume, vice versa. It should have been boring. But the dragon was patient and, somehow, so was I. I’d sleep, then wake and watch the road a little. I’d sniff the air, look at the birds and other animals that passed by, and then I’d sleep again. The traffic on the road was the same as ever; few lone travellers, a few groups of adventurers, merchants, or villagers, and patrols of guards or mercenaries. Mostly it was sunny. On the second day it rained for an hour. It was all very peaceful.
On the morning of the third day since I led Herald to the bandit camp I woke to a voice in my ear. “The humans march,” the dragon said, and I was instantly awake. It was nearly dark, shortly after dawn with a heavy rain falling straight down. On the road a long column of mounted people in heavy cloaks trotted along. The mercenaries were on the move, and they were out for blood.
They were moving fast enough that it would be hard for me to keep up on foot, so I just took a look at the column. The mercs were out in force, and I counted about thirty of them. Between the rain and the cloaks it was hard to be sure, but I thought I saw Herald, tall and lithe, towards the middle of the pack. That made sense. She had been pretty sure that she wouldn’t get paid if she didn’t actually show the way herself, and I think that she wouldn’t have been left behind if she could help it anyway. The fact that the figure scanned not just the forest but the sky and the tree tops every now and then only made me more certain. We hadn't discussed me coming along, but she was smart. She knew I'd want to see what happened.
Once the column had passed I gave it a minute, then found a clearing and took to the sky. Since I knew where they were going and by which route they were likely to go, I went ahead, posted up in a tree, and waited. Sure enough, after a good while they passed, first two of them in the trees that I barely noticed, then the main column, and then, while I waited for them to gain some distance, two more, again in the trees. There was probably a great reason for that. I had never been interested in military strategy or tactics, but my guess was that there were scouts or something.
Once everyone was well past I repeated the process, moving ahead, waiting, and so on.
Soon after the mercs left the main road the rain petered out. It was close to noon judging by the sun, and the mercenaries took their cloaks off with obvious relief. I recognized two people. The first, obviously, was Herald. She had her hair tied back and was wiping down her bow. The other was Guy’s girlfriend.
I don’t know why that surprised me, but it did. She and Herald seemed friendly, smiling and laughing as they talked together in low voices. I immediately felt a spike of jealousy, almost anger. This woman had been one of the people who ran me off when I met Guy, and here she was again to wreck the day!
I fought the feeling, and was at least partially successful. I knew that I couldn’t blame her for how she’d reacted. She had probably just been relieved to find her man alive, and there I was, all teeth and claws. If my boyfriend had gone missing in the mountains and I found him sitting next to a cougar I would’ve freaked out, too.
I still didn’t like her. It’s hard to get over someone waving a sword at you.
As they got within a kilometre or two of the hidden path a change came over the mercs. They slowed down, started adjusting their armour and readying their weapons. Those who had bows stopped a moment to string them, if they hadn’t already. At that point they were going slow enough for me to keep up, and I shadowed them from deep inside the trees. The two who had been riding ahead rejoined the column and talked to the older, bearded man at the front, who nodded and gave some signals with his hand. In a quick and orderly fashion the whole column turned and rode in among the trees. Things were about to get interesting.
A small group of mercenaries had gotten off their horses and went ahead on foot, running almost silently through the leaves and the undergrowth. I was curious about their purpose, but I needed to stay close to Herald. Trying to get past the line of mercs would have been risky, anyway. But I didn’t need to wonder for long.
I had seen Valmik fighting in the mines. He was a fighter, and a good one as far as I could tell. These five, four men and one woman, were killers. When they left they disappeared into the bushes and shadows, and that was the last I saw of them. Every so often I would hear an animal call, a bird or frog or something else that wouldn’t be out of place, and the line moved forward. On the ground were bodies. Bandit sentries, I guessed. I hadn’t heard a single scream, cry, or even a rustle. The five moved forward, and bandits died. It was hard to look at the bodies. A couple of the dead sentries were no older than Herald. I could only assume that those five mercs were paid well and on time, because I would not want to be the person trying to screw them out of a paycheck.
Before the main force got in sight of the camp the leader gave a signal, and most of the mercs dismounted. They tied their horses to branches or to tent pegs, like Herald had done at the lake. Only a few, including Herald and Guy’s girlfriend, stayed in the saddle. Some of them strapped shields to their arms. All of them readied weapons. Then, at a signal, they advanced.
I felt responsible for what was about to go down. People were going to die, on both sides. Lots of people. The bandits had brought this on themselves, and the mercs accepted the risk together with their pay, but if not for me this battle would not happen.
Now, all I needed to do was to make sure that Herald was safe. When I felt reasonably sure that no one would be able to see me, I quickly and silently scaled the back of a tall pine a few dozen metres behind her. Between the trees I had a decent view of the clearing and the wall, but most importantly I could keep an eye on the young woman.
The soldiers on foot reached the line where the trees ended. Everyone without a bow broke into a voiceless jog. The archers stayed in the treeline and readied their arrows.
The line had crossed half of the fifty or so metres to the makeshift fort when a head popped up at the sound. They had crossed half of the remaining distance when the alarm had been raised and the observant bandit died with an arrow in his neck. Seconds later the mercs had reached the gate. One of them had carried an oversized sledgehammer, like a keg on a wooden post. He’d been half dragging it, and I had no idea how he expected to fight with the thing. Then I understood that he didn’t.
The man was a living siege weapon. As the soldiers reached the gate the man stopped, concentrated, and a bright glow came alive in him. It travelled from his heart down his arms and to the sledge, and with a yell and one swing he made the gates buckle. With another the gates shattered and swung inward, and he slumped to the ground, exhausted.
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About twenty seconds after the soldiers had left the trees they began to pour through the gates. I could see now that they moved in pairs, one soldier with a shield and some weapon together with one wielding a large, two handed sword, axe, or other heavy weapon. Now the archers started moving up, keeping their eyes on the palisade, as Herald had taught me that the wooden wall was called.
Twenty five seconds after it all began the screaming was becoming unbearable.
Forty seconds, and a section of the palisade by the rock wall fell outwards, and ten or a dozen bandits on horses came charging out. I noted the armour and weapons. The dragon, however, noted the lumpy bags strapped to their saddles.
They headed for the trees at a full gallop, straight towards Herald and the others still on horseback. Herald had already loosed her first arrow when I understood what was happening. Archers in the clearing were turning in surprise, but the riders weren’t paying any attention to them. They were fleeing, and Herald and the others were simply in their way, or a last attempt at a “Fuck you” to the mercenaries.
“Brace! Brace!” Guy’s girlfriend’s voice came clear over the distant sounds of fighting and the roar of hooves, but I still barely heard it. I was flying, hurtling through the air towards a point somewhere between Herald and the charging horses. Two riders on the edge of the pack jerked as arrows from the clearing hit them, but their horses came on. I didn’t remember leaping. I may have been cut out of the decision entirely, and above all the noise of the battle and the screamed commands of the woman next to Herald, the one thing I heard loud and clear was the voice of the dragon, roaring in my ears.
“Mine!”
That was probably a bad sign, but I had no time to analyse it. The bandit riders were about to hit the few mounted mercenaries, swords and spears poised to kill, when I passed over Herald’s head. I caught a glimpse of the leader’s eyes going wide, just as I sprayed the whole group with a furious hiss of venom and slammed into him like a cannonball. The man basically stopped in mid air as his horse continued without him, and then the horse behind him slammed into us and everything went to hell.
There was a moment of silence and white blindness as my brain tried to catch up with what was happening. Then light and sound and everything else came back all at once, and I was fighting. Humans and horses were screaming around me, and I was slashing, kicking and biting wildly with only one thought guiding me. Protect Herald. They don’t get to hurt her. They don’t get to damage what is mine.
Yeah. Probably a bad sign.
I had a flash of wide-eyed recognition from Guy’s girlfriend, but she was fighting a bandit with a long, curved sword and her distraction almost cost her a hand. A man stumbled to his feet and tried to simultaneously grab the reins from Herald’s hand and stab her in the gut, and I struck like a snake, my sharp teeth closing over his forearm. He looked at me with more surprise than pain and bashed me in the face with his free hand once, then twice. It hurt like hell but it didn’t feel like anything broke. Then his eyes went wide as a bar of shining steel appeared in front of my eyes, going into the bandit’s chest through the hollow of his throat.
The bandit fell with a bubbling whisper as Herald drew her sword back out, and I slowly realised that the fighting around us was over. The bandits were dying on the ground or fleeing with the surviving mounted mercenaries in pursuit. Herald looked down at me from her horse, her bloody sword in her hand and a wild elation in her eyes.
“Draka! I knew it! I fucking knew it!”
I was about to reply when there was suddenly a mass of sweaty horse between us, carrying a bloodspattered woman wildly swinging a sword at me. The damn thing caught me on the neck as I jumped back. It didn’t go through my scales, but it still hurt!
“Back!” the wild-eyed woman screamed at me. Again with this fucking bitch! “Herald, stay behind me and get your bow!”
“Try me, skank!” I screamed back at her and prepared to fucking end her, at the same time as Herald dropped her own sword and took a two-handed grip on the woman’s sword arm.
“Lalia, stop!” Herald shouted in the woman’s ear. “Stop! Stop! This is my informant! My friend! Stop!”
Then, when the woman almost pulled Herald out of the saddle trying to swing at me again, Herald hauled back and punched her.
I don’t know which of us was more surprised. The bitch, Lalia, turned her head and just stared at Herald. Herald sat back, her mouth locked in a silent “Oh,” hand still clutching the other woman’s wrist.
Lalia. The name sounded familiar, somehow. Where had I heard that name before?
“Now! While her back is turned!” the dragon screamed at me, and it was hard to resist. My claws dug into the dirt as I prepared to pounce, but then I looked at Herald and I came to my senses. Whoever Lalia was, and whatever I felt about her, she was Herald’s friend. Friends don’t kill each other’s friends in front of one another. A lesson Lalia needed to learn, but that was beside the point.
In the distance I saw riders returning. Mercs, not bandits. “Herald,” I said, then again, louder, when she didn’t react the first time. The women broke their shocked stare-off and looked at me.
“Herald, are you safe with this woman?” I asked.
“It talks!” Lalia said, almost dreamily. I ignored it.
“Herald! Will you be safe?” I asked, louder this time.
“Is it wearing a damned necklace?” Lalia said. I was still wearing the money pouch Herald and I had taken from the would-be rapist a few days earlier.
“Yes!” Herald said, breaking out of her stupor. “Yes, I am. I will! I am fine!”
I believed her. Punch or no, they had looked friendly enough on the way here. And so I took that as my cue to leave. I did not want to be there when the others returned and Lalia got over her shock. The dragon was annoyed that we wouldn’t be killing and preferably eating the woman, but it could be pragmatic when it needed to. And it always kept track of the important things.
“The bags,” it hissed in my ear. “Take the bags!”
The bandits’ fallen horses were right there. Some of them had gotten back up and scattered, but some were clearly injured beyond help. The leading man’s horse had broken its neck charging into a tree, and that’s the one I went for.
The lumpy bag had been held to the saddle with simple rope and had rolled off when the horse fell. I simply ran past and grabbed it in my teeth, nearly breaking my neck as the weight caught up to me.
“Wait!” I heard Lalia shouting behind me as I angled for the clearing, but I was not slowing down for her. The heavy bag in my teeth and the many, many deep aches and pains from the short but furious fight tried to keep me down, but I was not sticking around to see what happened when the mercs got back together and found me there. Some fast and powerful flaps of my wings, powered by dragon adrenaline, got me into the air and then…
Then everyone knew that I was there. I passed right above the bandit base. The fighting was over, and everyone, surviving mercenary or captured bandit, looked up to see me pass. Even if the mercs hadn’t said anything before, when they saw me at the lakeside camp with Guy, well, now I was pretty sure that the cat was well and truly out of the bag.