When I returned to the gate, there was no one there.
Or, rather, I couldn’t immediately find anyone, but not being seen was part of Rebatia’s job, as I understood it. The other part was killing people without flinching. There may be something else to it, but those were the parts I knew of.
I, of course, didn’t want to make myself obvious either. Taking Lalia to and from the gate in the mountains had taken all night and most of the morning, and now it was midday. That wasn’t ideal for me, but I was still pretty damned sneaky, and I decided to make a game of it. It would have been better if Rebatia had known the rules, but what can you do?
The game was simple. Whoever got found, lost. Now, I could have almost guaranteed victory by shifting. Almost. But Rebatia might already be watching me, and I was in no way ready to let anyone except Herald know what I could do.
Staying low to the ground and very still, I disappeared into the ferns and low bushes that even here covered the ground between the trees. I looked and listened, but obviously I didn’t pick anything up except the normal sights and sounds of the forest. I could smell a human, but the smell was spread out, and I couldn’t get a direction for it.
I stayed there for a long while just in case something changed, but except for a cat-sized squirrel passing through in the treetops nothing much happened. Clearly I wasn’t going to find Rebatia this way anytime soon. While I could have probably waited her out over the next several hours, I was achy, tired, and sleepy. A change of vantage point was in order.
Guessing the general area where she was likely to be, I found a good tree. It was a tall pine of sorts, with the kind of dense crown that I liked, and it overlooked my chosen area nicely. I crept along the ground to the back of the trunk, then climbed it slowly, trying to keep myself as much on the far side as possible. I settled in the way I usually did, finding a good angle for my head where I could watch the gate and look for the scout, and then I waited.
I dozed off, but was rudely woken by the loud “Koh-ahp! Koh-ahp!” of some bird. It stopped after a few moments, and after a minute’s silence I relaxed again. The instant my eyes closed, the “Koh-ahp! Koh-ahp!” came again, louder and longer this time. That’s how it went for the next hour. Every single time I was about to fall asleep the damned bird would start screaming. I’d look around, fail to see it, and I’d hope that it had finally fucked off. It never had, and after maybe the twentieth time I had finally had enough. This time I didn’t relax and try to sleep. This time I woke myself up and stayed alert, waiting for the next time the damned thing started. There was only one way this could go, now. I was going to find that bird, and I was going to eat it!
After a minute the infernal “Koh-ahp! Koh-ahp!” started up again, and this time it didn’t stop. It went on, and on, and on, and I hunted around the trees, the bushes, even the rocks around the gate, and nothing! It kept screaming, and I couldn’t find it!
Then, suddenly, there she was. Rebatia stood up from behind a rock, perhaps thirty yards to the right and above the gate, and waved at me. Our eyes met across the distance, and despite how tired and frustrated I was I couldn’t help but return the shit-eating grin she flashed at me. It looked like she had not only figured out the game. She’d won, no contest.
Since the jig was up I figured I might as well do the polite thing. Looking and listening carefully for a while to make sure that no one was coming – and that Rebatia wasn’t looking – I climbed down and crept towards her. I could have flown, but the trees continued up the hillside and flying among them was pretty annoying if I didn’t have to. Instead I tried to find an approach that would keep me hidden.
To my great satisfaction I got within fifteen yards before she noticed me.
Up close she wasn’t grinning quite as wide anymore. Her slightly wide face was still split by a smile, but there was a touch of nervousness around the eyes, and she kept running her fingers through her short cropped hair as I approached.
“Ah… Hello,” she said quietly, shifting back a touch as I joined her behind the large rock she’d chosen for her hiding spot. “No hard feelings, I hope? Tam said you can take a joke. Craziest thing. Dragon with a sense of humour! Right?” She had a very rapid way of talking that made me wonder if it was because of nerves or if that was just how she was.
“Hello, Rebatia,” I said flatly, speaking with deliberate slowness. Then I just stared at her, putting on my best angry murder-lizard face. Her smile started to fade and I saw some real concern creeping in, but I couldn’t keep a straight face for long. “When did you spot me?” I asked, relaxing my voice and giving her one of my practised smiles, with minimal teeth.
Some of the tension left her and the smile came back, a little easier this time. “Call me Rib, please! And…” she considered the sky, “an hour and a half ago, maybe. I got lucky and saw you pass through a sunny patch. Since you didn’t call out or anything to find me I figured I’d make you work for it.” She showed no hint of remorse. She did, however, look a little embarrassed when she added, “Sorry about keeping you awake. It’s a merc thing. If we see someone nodding off on guard.”
“Yeah, nah, no dramas. I really need some sleep, though. Don’t you?”
“Drama…?” She blinked rapidly, then shook her head and fished out a vial half-full of clear liquid, from a belt pouch. “Won’t need rest for a while, yet. I’m running on these for now. Good stuff! I’ll be fine until Pot comes back with the others.”
Some kind of stimulant. That might explain the quick, jerky way that she talked. I hoped it wouldn’t be a problem.
“Pot,” I said, “That’s Poterio, I guess. He’s your brother?”
“That’s him. And we’re cousins, like… second, once removed? Big House, the Terriallons.” She paused and put the vial back in her belt. “Might as well be siblings though. Same age, grew up together and all that. Like him better than my real brothers, pack of pricks that they are.”
I was too tired to try to follow that in a good way. “Well, Rib, I really need that nap,” I said instead. “Are you good to watch the gate?”
“Good as gold,” she said, patting her belt pouch. “Have a good one.”
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I didn’t just curl up and sleep. Rib felt trustworthy, but she was new. Instead I headed back to the tree I’d come from and settled in. There I drifted into a nap, mercifully free from bird calls.
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When I woke, the nap had turned into a full day’s sleep. It had been some time after noon when I curled up, and now a sea of stars sparkled through the breaks in the tree’s crown.
As I stretched a bit and began to look around there came a “Koh-ahp!” and I nearly fell out of the tree. It hadn’t come from the hillside, though, and when I looked around I spotted an unfamiliar man with long hair and a goatee in a neighbouring tree. He waved at me silently, then pointed to the left of the gate. I gave him an uncertain thumbs-up, which I remembered too late didn’t mean anything at all here, and he looked at me in confusion before gesturing again and going back to watching the approach from the road.
Between man’s gesture and his lack of urgency his meaning seemed clear enough. I climbed out of my tree, padded over to the gate and then up the hillside on the left. A few dozen yards up, in the dip behind a sharp rise, I found a small camp. There was no fire, of course, only a couple of low tents and two figures sitting guard. I recognised Herald immediately and Poterio – Pot – shortly after.
They both looked up as I crested the rise, hands on their weapons, and relaxed when they recognised the only dragon on the island.
“Evenin’,” I said softly as I got close. “Did Lalia make it back alright?”
Herald gave a short, barking laugh before smothering it with her hand. “I am sorry,” she said, also keeping her voice down. “I can hardly believe that the first thing out of your mouth was to ask about Lalia’s well-being!”
“Yeah, well…” I looked at Poterio instead. “So, did she?”
“She did, though she was half blind when she came in. Wouldn’t tell us why, either. Embarrassed about taking too much potion, I’d guess.”
If he didn’t know, I wasn’t going to tell him. “And you all? You make it here alright?”
“There was no trouble,” Herald said. “Pot has a perfect memory for landscapes and locations, and we took a covert route here just in case. Rib is sleeping, as are Mak, Tam and Val. The rest of the scouts are,” she gestured vaguely to the forest, “out there.”
“I saw. Well, one of them showed himself and pointed me here. I’m guessing Rib told him what bird call to use?”
Pot grinned. “She thought you’d recognise it.”
He got a little huff for that. “Yeah. What kind of horrible bird makes a noise like that, anyway? I hate it!”
“Are you sure that you want to know?”
“Why?”
“You won’t like it.”
I sighed. “Just tell me.”
Pot gave me a big smile, the same smug fucking grin as Rib had, and said, “The koh-ahp.”
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It was four days before anything happened. The scouts, besides being silent death on two legs, turned out to be good people. Bit odd, maybe. I wasn’t sure if the weirdos were encouraged to become scouts or if being a scout turned you into a weirdo over time, but they were good and friendly weird, not creepy weird. Rib and Pot, despite being full-blooded, how-much-could-a-banana-cost aristocrats, had a shared love of absolutely filthy ballads and shanties. They promised to show off their repertoire once we were done and could finally speak above a whisper, and I accepted happily. Not that I’d ever been into that kind of music, but I’d take what I could get. They even tried to rope Makanna into it, and she actually smiled and said that she’d think about it.
Boot, real name unknown, was the guy in the tree with the hair and the goatee. In his thirties, he was the oldest and most experienced of the scouts. He was also the one of the scouts who was most wary around me. But Rib covertly told me that Boot had a weakness.
Boot loved boots, and he warmed up considerably when I, being a dragon and thus naturally ignorant on the subject, asked him to tell me all about them. He could, and did, spend a whole watch talking about the merits of different styles and materials for different parts, depending on the purpose, surface, and season the boot was intended for. He was also completely unashamed of his particular love of boots on women, though he mercifully didn’t dwell on that for long.
If you needed advice on properly maintaining your boots, Boot was your guy. He was also the scouts’ unofficial cook, and owned the first piece of enchanted equipment I’d seen, which he happily showed me on the second night.
“See,” he said, holding it so I could get a better look at it. It was a flat, round, metal disc, with a middle part and an outside ring that could rotate, with a complex design covering the whole surface.
“You turn it like so,” he said, holding it by the centre and turning the outer ring so that the design lined up, “and then you just drop in your water!”
He dropped it in the pot he’d filled with water. There was a quick hiss, and then the thing sank. After a few seconds the first small bubbles rose to the surface, and after a minute the whole thing, over a gallon of water, was boiling gently.
It was fascinating. One moment it had just been a fancy piece of metal, but when he’d turned the ring so the pattern lined up the whole thing had glowed with magic. Even after he’d dropped it in the pot I could still see it shining through the liquid, growing dimmer little by little.
“And there you are! It’ll keep going for a good while before it runs out. I usually have to fish it out. Don’t stay hot if it’s not in water. Wish I had one for oil, but not like I can fry stuff out here anyway, is it?”
“And then what?” I asked, peering into the bubbling cauldron. “Once it runs out, I mean? How do you make it work again?”
“Easy! I just wash it off, turn it back, and then it’ll be good again in a few hours. About five if it ran out, less if I fished it out. Draws ambi-tent–”
“Ambient,” Herald corrected from where she was sitting.
“Thanks, that, yeah. Draws magic from the air. Little Herald here can tell you more than I can, she always loved this enchantment stuff.”
Herald rolled her eyes at the ‘Little,’ but I could see her smiling behind her book.
I never saw much of the remaining two scouts, Arlal and Med. For one, they had the same sleep schedule as me, sleeping the days away. For the other, they didn’t seem to like being around us very much. Not like they actually disliked people, or me for that matter, but more like they each just wanted to be alone as much as possible. They’d come in, report, eat, exchange some jokes and a few smiles, and then sleep. Then they’d wake, eat, talk a little, and head out. I’d have liked to get to know them a little, but they seemed happy enough, so who was I to interfere?
I took a couple of shifts watching the gate like anyone else, but other than that I was free to do as I pleased. I talked to Tamor, Valmik and even Makanna when they were awake, but they slept during the night and watched during the day, so we didn’t have a whole lot of overlap. I spent most of my time with whichever of the scouts was in the camp, and, of course, with Herald.
When I realised that Herald had switched her sleep schedule to match mine, one of the first things I did was to head back to the cave to fetch my books. The sight of me returning with my ‘chestpack’ amused Rib to no end, and I think that anyone who saw us was amused by the sight of Herald helping me with my letters. I couldn’t blame them. Seeing a proud and mighty dragon struggling with a childrens’ book, under the patient guidance of a 17-year old girl, must have been something. The few sessions we managed to cram in when the moon was bright enough really did help, though.
In the early hours of the fifth night we were alerted by the hooting of an owl. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but Boot stopped greasing the seams of one of his boots and listened intently.
“That’s Pot,” he said, and waited. The hooting came again, and again, a little different each time. “Enemies approaching. Nine of them. Wake the others. This is it.”