“What the hell happened here?!” I roared at the scene before me.
I’d been tipped off by the sound and the smell of blood as Herald and I approached the gate. We’d picked up the pace, and when we arrived we were met by two bodies, a few spent arrows, and a solid stone face, with no sign of the opening that led into the mountain but half of a bloody handprint where a shimmering line marked the middle of the two doors.
The bodies were of a man and a woman neither of us recognised. They were rough and dirty, if not absolutely filthy, and had wounds from a sword and a spear, respectively. They also had nothing of real value on them. They were wearing simple, damaged armour, but it looked like any weapons they might have been carrying, their belts, and even their boots had been taken.
I’d opened the gate, the smell of blood and worse becoming even stronger as the doors swung open, and been faced by Rib and Pot, holding Mak’s sword and spear respectively. Behind them stood Ardek with a dagger, and behind him Mak sat pale and groaning against the wall of the tunnel as both Kira and herself pumped magic into her. Her clothes were a mess of blood from her waist down.
That was right about where I had a small conniption.
“Mak!” Herald screamed and rushed in, fast enough that if Rib and Pot hadn’t put up their weapons when they saw me, Herald might have skewered herself.
“Hey, baby,” Mak said with a weak smile as Herald took her hand.
“Mak, anyone, what happened here?” I asked, feeling a very real fear rise. “Is Mak going to be alright? Kira, is Mak going to be alright?”
“Draka!” Mak said, her eyes barely focusing on me. “I caught a sword in the gut, really bad. How about that?”
“Hush, woman!” Kira said, but there was only fatigued concern in her voice. “I told you to sit still and rest! Dragon, she will live. She has a potion in her and I am healing her. And she is doing some herself, I think, despite what I keep telling her. She will need much food, but she will recover.”
“We’re pretty sure that they were bandits,” Ardek said, speaking at almost the same time. “Too filthy to be the Blossom’s people.”
“We drove the fuckers off,” Pot said. “Mak got one, but then another one got in and got her real bad before Rib got him. The rest cooled off after that. Let us retreat into the tunnel, and I guess they must have fucked off if you didn’t see them.”
“Draka. Draka!” Mak said insistently, dragging my attention back to her. “I need to tell you.”
“You are not dying, Mak. You can rest and tell me whatever it is when you have recovered.”
“No, no, Draka. You need to know. Kira is a good woman. You need to know that.” I could see Kira blush slightly as Mak continued. “She really just wants to help. She loves the city that made her a slave too much, but she is good. Do not let them hang her, Draka. Please. Or make her a slave again. Can we just keep her? Not give her to the council or the Wolves or anyone? She is too good.”
“I will see what I can do,” I said, with a sideways glance at Kira. “But we need to find out what she knows.”
“Just need the right questions,” Mak said. “No need to hurt her for that. Right, Kira?”
“I will not go against Tekeretek,” Kira said carefully, “but the Silver Spurs are mercenaries. I have no love for them… those that remain. I will answer questions with truth, and tell what I know.”
“See, Draka?” Mak said, “We just need someone to ask the right questions. No need to hurt her.”
“Yes, Mak, I will see what I can do,” I said, trying to be patient. I wondered if it was just blood loss and the alcohol in the potion that made her want to tell me this so urgently, but there had been something she wanted to tell me about Kira before. “Now rest! I am not asking, I am telling. You have done well, and I need you to recover. Herald needs you to recover,” I said, looking at the younger sister.
“Please, Mak, do as she says,” Herald said, backing me up. “You are out of danger. There is no need to strain yourself.”
“Alright,” Mak said, capitulating and relaxing back against the tunnel wall, then lapsing back into Karakani. “But don’t hurt her, okay? She’s so damned afraid and lonely, and she doesn’t deserve that. Just talk to her, you’ll see.” Her eyes fluttered shut as she whispered, “You’ll see.”
“Can she lie down?” I asked Kira.
“Perhaps, but I would not do so. The skin and muscle have closed, but some damage was in the guts. I would prefer not to move her at all for some time.”
I could tell that she was flagging. Her eyes looked hollow, and there was a sheen of sweat on her face. Whatever Mak had said, the fact that Kira was putting so much into helping Mak was earning her major points in my book, and in Herald’s as well judging by how the latter was looking at her.
That made me suspicious, though. Perhaps it was unfair, but the fact that I suddenly felt so positively towards her, together with the fairly excessive way Mak had praised her, made me wonder what kind of advancements Kira had, besides the obvious. Ardek had something to make people like him so I knew that was a possibility, but in his case it wasn’t strong enough to keep Mak from beating the crap out of him, and I would still only feel kind of bad if I had to get rid of him.
But that was not important right at that very moment. What was important was that my people had been attacked, and I was very unhappy with the situation. I’d returned triumphant from running off the bear, only to step into another problem. I was hurting and I was tired, and Mak was injured, even if she should recover, and I was angrier than I would’ve thought about that. Besides, I had come to rely on her to keep things under control and running smoothly.
It was a problem that I had to solve as soon as possible. I didn't need a band of bandits to worry about.
“So, you killed two,” I said to the group at large, “and the rest ran off, meaning they know where to find you if they want to come back for revenge. How many of them were there?”
“Six,” Rib said. “Two dead and four survivors.”
“And which way did they go?”
“North, along the hills,” Pot said.
“And do they know that the gate closes?”
“Yeah,” Rib said. “Mak had to close it before she collapsed, and the survivors were stripping the bodies when she did.”
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“Alright. At least four bandits or other violently desperate people who know too much,” I said with a sigh. “Rib, Pot, can you see in this darkness, or do you have more of that potion?”
“We’ll be fine,” Pot said, giving me an interested look.
“Good. I want you two to go out and look for them. I’ll do the same from the sky. Once we know where they are we need to get rid of them.”
“Yeah, not much choice, is there?” Pot agreed. “What’s the plan?”
“Pretty simple. If there’s not too many more of them, I take them out. You two make sure that no one gets away.”
“On your own? Isn’t that–”
“No, it’s not,” I said firmly. “Unless they’re an organised force of strong fighters, four or a few more of them won’t have a chance against me. I just don’t want them scattering into the forest where I can’t get them. Can I count on you? You’re not mine, but I still hope that I can ask for your help.”
Rib and Pot looked at each other silently, then Rib said, “Yeah, you can count on us.”
“Herald, will you be alright?” I asked, making sure that she followed my eyes when I looked at Kira and Ardek.
“Shut the gate, and we will be fine,” she said, her voice slightly chiding. I had a moment of annoyance, but it passed. I needed to rely on her and Mak when it came to judging others, especially when I was annoyed or angry. She had clearly deemed Ardek and Kira safe.
“Right,” I said. “We’ll be back as soon as we can. Hopefully we can deal with this tonight, and then we can relax again. And perhaps tomorrow we can do that thing we talked about.”
“I hope so,” she said.
Rob and Pot didn’t need much in the way of preparations. “How do we get in touch if we find them?” Pot asked.
“If you find them, go out in the open with a torch or something and I’ll find you. I’m not sure how to handle it if I find them, though. Any suggestions?”
“Why don’t you just fly low over the trees and, I dunno… roar or scream or something? Anyone else out here would be freaked out and confused, but we’ll know who it is. Then we can do the torch thing.”
“What about if I do that birdcall Rib likes?”
Rib and Pot, like so often, shared a look.
“We’ll know that it’s you,” Rib said carefully, “so that’s good.”
Meaning that I was pretty shit at it, but it didn't really matter. Like she said, they’d know that it was me, and anyone else who might hear could wonder what it was, look up and not see anything.
We split up, Rib and Pot setting off at an impressive pace through the dark forest and me taking to the air. Finding the ‘bandits’ was not actually hard. Just a few miles north they had a rough camp. The hills there were lower and densely wooded, but from the air their camp was easy to make out, set up as it was in a natural clearing. It looked so clearly divided that I was immediately curious. The camp had two distinct parts separated by thirty feet of emptiness, each with a fire and four or five tents. There were clearly more than four people there, but the look of the camp made me confident that there was nothing to worry about. In fact, the whole situation looked so non-threatening that I decided to take a closer look before going to find the cousins.
At each fire sat a single sentry, staring at each other across the dark no-man’s land as though they expected the other half to attack at any time. It just didn’t look like an organised camp. Blinded to anything outside of the camp, they wouldn’t have stood a chance if anyone or anything attacked. They had no idea how lucky they were that a certain bear had gone south instead of north, because she would have ripped half of the camp to shreds before anyone even had a chance to react.
Besides that, the sentries also didn’t have any armour on, and their weapons were rough. One had an old, worn sword and the other what looked like a regular axe, for felling trees or splitting wood. If these were bandits, they were not only divided, but very new and woefully unprepared.
I’d seen all I needed to. Killing them would have been entirely effortless. I still left to find Rib and Pot, flying low and slow over the forest making my ‘Koh-ahp’ sounds which didn’t sound the least bit like a bird, even to myself. But they heard me, and like Rib had predicted they did know that it was me. I found them waving a torch in a dip between two soft hills after about half an hour.
“We’re not killing anyone tonight,” I told them. “There’s a bunch of them, but they’re pretty pathetic. They’ve barely even got a camp. I’ll show you where they are, but then I want to keep an eye on them for a while and see what’s going on.”
“What did you find?” Rib asked. “They looked pretty rough from what I saw, but the two we killed knew what they were doing.”
“Nine tents, so there might be a bunch of them, but they have a bad camp, bad equipment, and there seems to be two factions who are suspicious of each other. I could have walked right into either side of the camp and they would never have noticed. Whoever they are, as long as I keep an eye on them they’re no threat to anybody. I could take them out whenever I want, and that’s if they don’t do it themselves first.”
“So you want to just stay and watch them?” Pot asked. “You don’t want us backing you up?”
“I wouldn’t mind it. But until Mak’s recovered I want you there to back up Herald, just in case.”
“In case of what? Another attack?”
“In case Ardek or Kira–”
Rib cut me off. “In case they do what, exactly? Ardek wants you all to like him more than anything, and Kira is a pacifist who can’t stand to see anyone hurting. Don’t you know those two?”
“I… haven’t really had any deep conversations with them. They both say that they’ll behave, but they’re both here against their will.”
“Kira, maybe. Ardek could have slipped away in the chaos when the fire broke out, but he was right there helping to pull out gear. He’s not going anywhere, and I doubt that he wants to or could fight either Mak or Herald. He’s scrappy, but he’s not a trained and experienced fighter the way they are. And Kira isn’t going to hurt anyone. Mak talked to her and I talked to Mak, and the way Mak tells it, working with those mercenaries was slowly killing her. And she’s too smart to try to run. Where is she going to go?”
“And,” Pot said, “after the fight you couldn’t have held her back from Mak. She was holding Mak’s damn guts in while she started healing and Rib poured a potion down her throat. She’s a helper. It’s who she is.”
I frowned at them. I didn’t like the fact that everyone seemed to have the same opinion about Kira. I’d killed… maybe not her friends, but her companions, and I had dragged her here against her will and put her at risk of death. Hell, I’d pretty casually threatened to kill her myself a few times. I just couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t try something, given the chance. At least Ardek seemed angrier at the Blossom than he was at me, and I’d promised him money. Kira had nothing to look forward to except possibly survival as a slave for much of her life.
Although, thinking back on what I’d seen of her interactions with the others, she seemed to be on good terms with everyone. Once she’d stopped interrogating Herald and Mak about their parents, the three women had gotten along just fine, and while Mak had tried to stay cool towards Kira she had obviously more than warmed up. And even though she could only speak to the sisters, the others seemed to like her well enough anyway.
Everyone treated her well, and she was respectful and helpful in return. The only person she had any reason to have a problem with was me.
That displeased me in a way that made no sense. What did it matter if she got along well with everyone but me? If it kept everything running smoothly I shouldn’t give a single discount damn about what she thought about me. I was her jailor, not her rescuer or her friend. I wasn’t really responsible for anything, but if I were it would be for her life and her availability for interrogation, not her happiness.
I still had a petty, nagging feeling that it was somehow very unfair. Perhaps if I were to have an actual somewhat friendly conversation with her I could make her see me with something other than fear.
“Maybe you’re right,” I conceded. “I guess I could just go back and tell them that it’s going to be a while. I still think you’re going to be bored, though.”
“Let us worry about that,” Pot said. “Show us where this camp is and we’ll keep an eye on them until you get back.”
I could have argued with them, but I didn’t. I felt that I could trust those two, and if I wanted anything more than a professional relationship with them I should show that. Fear and respect were all well and good, but if I wanted to make friends they weren’t enough. So I brought them to the camp. It didn’t take long, and the same two men were still sitting guard, still looking suspiciously at each other. I left the cousins to find their own hiding spots, and returned to my mountain and the gate. A wide, freshly disturbed patch of soil at the edge of the treeline showed that Herald and Ardek had not been idle while we were away.
Herald was understanding when I told her the new plan. Of course she was. She could be hard and vengeful when she needed to be, but the one who’d hurt her sister was dead and she trusted my judgement.
And I needed to trust her. “I’ll shut you back in,” I told her. “But if you need to get out while Mak is still resting, I’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to tell Kira how to do it. You all seem to trust her to behave, so…”
“Yet you still avoid speaking Tekereteki in front of her,” Herald chided me with a little smile.
Kira had been dozing nearby, not used to the inverted hours I’d forced on them, but she’d looked up sleepily when I said her name. Come to think of it, she hadn’t gotten much sleep when I flew her in, and then we’d marched out to the mountain through the night. I had no idea how much she’d slept in the tunnel while I waited with the cousins, but then they’d been attacked and she’d taken care of Mak…
I turned to her. “Bekiratag,” I said in her own dialect of Tekereteki. “Kira. How are you doing? Did you eat? Sleep?”
“Makanna and Herald have been very kind,” she said with a dainty yawn. “We all ate before the attack. But sleep… not so much, no.”
“I’ll leave you to your rest, then,” I said, then hesitated for a moment. “Thank you, Kira. For helping Mak. Riberia and Poterio told me what you did. I wouldn’t have expected you to volunteer like that.”
“Oh,” she said, clearly surprised and with not a shred of deception that I could pick up on. “Of course. She was hurt, so…”
“Still. She’s important to Herald, and to me. Thank you,” I said, and left.