I’d thought about Mak a lot over the previous month, about what she’d done and how I’d reacted. I knew the why of it. I understood. I hadn’t forgiven her. I still couldn’t think about it without needing to tamp down on a flare of anger and spiteful satisfaction at the misery she’d gone through since, but I understood it.
That morning I was pretty damned happy with her. She’d done a lot since her betrayal to try to earn back my trust, but if there was one single act that showed that she was truly willing to do anything, this was it. There was no going back from this. No possibility that she was just waiting for an opportunity to turn on me again. She had made me a part of herself, as essential as her own magic. She had, willing and unprompted, made herself mine.
She was being a little intense about it, but skin-in-the-game Mak was a lot easier to feel good about than sad-and-repentant Mak. With any hope she was just overcorrecting for a while and would come back to some kind of balance, but if not I’d still be far happier than I was before. She had a sense of strength and purpose about her that hadn’t been there for a while, and it was great to see.
“Are you not worried?” I asked Herald after we’d stepped away to talk privately a little. “I do not think that I could free her now, even if I knew how. She would not accept it.”
Herald looked at me and smiled, shaking her head. “She is so much happier now than she has been since we were taken. Almost herself again. I know that it is not the same, and that she has given up much of her freedom. But really, has she not just confirmed what we already knew? She already could not deny you anything. How is this any different, other than her being stronger and happier? She was already yours.” She stopped, and so did I, as she looked at me seriously. “Just as I am.”
It was something I already knew, but to hear her say it made my heart flutter. “Herald,” I told her, “let us get your sister.”
That close to Mak I could tell exactly where she was, which was a feeling I wasn’t used to. When I told the sisters about it, Herald thought that it was “Very useful, but quite creepy,” and Mak simply accepted it as though it was natural and only to be expected. They knew that I could feel the direction of my hoard, and Mak, as far as I could tell, simply lumped herself in with my other possessions. Which was disturbing in a way, considering how readily she did so, but also just felt right. And as long as she was content with it I wasn’t going to argue.
We found her back inside the gate, sitting against the tunnel wall across from Ardek, who looked somewhere between concerned for her and afraid for himself. She was, amazingly, apologising.
“I was just always angry at you,” she was saying, “and I never trusted you. I saw you as sharing the blame for what happened to Herald and me, even though I knew better. I could tell that you meant us no harm, that you felt guilty and wanted to make things right as far as you could, but I didn’t listen to what my own instincts told me.”
“It’s really no problem,” he said, “I get it, right? It’s fine.”
“No. I was dishonest, and I was cruel. I let you think that I’d forgiven you when I hadn’t. I treated you with kindness and led you to trust me, and then turned around and violated that trust. And for that you have my apologies, and my promise that I’ll be more honest with you from now on.”
“Uh, right. Accepted. Thank you?”
“Listen, Ardek. If it helps, I’m telling you this as much for my own sake as for yours. I can’t say that I will always be completely open with everything, but I need to know that you believe me when I say that I won’t lie to you, and that I won’t mistreat you for something you had no control over.”
Ardek’s eyes flicked towards Herald and me as we approached, a silent plea for help.
“Mak,” I said. “I need to talk to you and Herald, together.”
She turned and looked at us, then rose smoothly from where she sat. “Of course,” she said, then spoke over her shoulder as she went with us. “I mean it. You didn’t deserve the way I treated you, and I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Ardek said, relaxing more the farther Mak got from him. “You’re forgiven and all that. Really!”
“Alright. We’ll talk later,” she said, then spoke to us in Tekereteki. “He does not quite believe me, but I cannot blame him. I would not believe me so quickly, either. What did you want to talk about?”
“Let’s walk,” I said, starting out and letting the sisters follow. I didn’t feel like dragging them through the undergrowth, so I led the way along the rock face, contemplating the scrubby bushes as I put my thoughts together. I needed to do this right.
“Are the bushes telling you anything interesting?” Herald asked after several minutes had passed, breaking me out of my thoughts, “Come on. You are the one who asked us out here. As much as I enjoy spending some uninterrupted time with you, I believe that you had something you wanted us all to do today.”
“She is nervous,” Mak said, sounding uncomfortable. “What is wrong, Draka?”
“Nothing is wrong,” I said. “I just do not want to express myself clumsily. This is important, and I do not want to give you the wrong idea or offend you. Herald, you are my dearest, truest friend in this world. Mak, we have had a difficult month. I will not pretend that there was not a short time when I hated you, and would have killed you or thrown your life away if it became more convenient or useful to me than keeping you alive. But before then I believe that we were slowly growing close, and I hope that we can get back to something like that.
“You have each said that you are… mine. I love that. I cannot describe my feelings any other way. Hearing you say that gave me so much comfort and satisfaction that, in a very selfish way, it almost makes what I went through worth it, even if I cannot ever forgive the Night Blossom for what she did to you.
“But Herald, Mak. I feel that you have offered yourselves to me as some sort of servants. Mak more than Herald, perhaps. And I do not want that. I think. In general, perhaps I do, at some point. Having servants sounds nice.”
Herald laughed very politely.
“But you two… what I really need you to be to me are friends. Advisors and allies. As satisfying as it is to have people simply obey me, I need people who question me, who are honest with me about any concerns they have about my decisions and my behaviour.
“I am not always constant in how I look at or think about things. Mak, Herald already knows why, and I will trust you with this as well. Will you swear not to speak to anyone about what I am about to tell you, except your sister?”
“On my life,” she said. “I swear that anything you tell me in confidence, I will take to my grave.”
“Good.”
And so I told her. I told her about falling as a human only months ago, and about being trapped and put into stasis as a dragon centuries ago, and waking as a single individual. I told her about the dragon speaking to me for a long time, and the human sometimes speaking to me now, and how different circumstances brought out each side of me; fear, stress and anger, the dragon; and comfort and pity, the human.
“My greatest concern,” I told them, “is that when I or what is mine is threatened, when I even think of it, it becomes very difficult to think of anything but destroying whatever offends me. Then, more than ever, I will need you to remind me of the human perspective, and of long term consequences of short term satisfaction.”
Mak had stood, then sat in stunned silence as I told her my tale, but she took my silence as an invitation to speak. “Draka,” she said, “I knew that something was different about you. What you tell me is incredible. Amazing. But so is everything about you and this… this explains so much. Why you speak the way you do. Your intelligence and your maturity despite your size. But I must ask: In the Blossom’s prison, which part of you was that? I expected to die. Which part of you spared me?”
“I had not fully understood or accepted my nature, but I am pretty sure that was all dragon. It is strange to look back on my own behaviour, to think about why I did things, but… I honestly think that you were lucky that it was that side of me. It was not mercy that made me spare you, but cruelty. If my human side had been at the front I might have just killed you.” I glanced at Herald before looking back at Mak, and I was human enough in that moment to feel a small measure of shame. “I am not proud of it, but I was hurting, and I wanted you to hurt, too. I could not see past my own pain to how much you were already suffering. When you… broke, when you stopped resisting me before I could decide how to kill you, when it seemed that death would be a release for you, that was when I decided to spare you.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Mak visibly shuddered at the memory, and Herald put one arm around her, holding her until she was ready to speak. Her pained expression mirrored my own feelings. “As unpleasant as that is to remember, it is still good to know that even the dragon in you saw fit to let me live, no matter the reason. She is clearly not a mindlessly destructive beast, which is what dragons are all too often depicted as. Thank you for telling me.”
Herald, for her part, looked equal parts relieved and horrified. “Every time I hear about what happened between you two, my heart breaks,” she said when I looked at her curiously. “I am so… I do not know what to think. Draka, I cannot imagine your pain, and I cannot blame you for anything that you did.” She snorted softly. “I am literally unable to. But if Mak had not done what they asked of her, if you had not been captured and brought to the place where we were being held, I do not know if either Mak or I would be alive now. If we were, I doubt that we would be sane. Every moment that I can remember was full of fear and pain and… “ She looked away and pulled Mak closer to herself. “I am sorry but, in a very selfish way, as you said, I am glad that Mak handed you over to them. As much as I love you, I cannot blame her either.”
“Yeah,” I said. “In the end I do not think that any of us can truly blame anyone but the Blossom. But, I had something important I wanted to say. Herald, Makanna, if you want to give yourselves to me, I will promise to do all that I can to keep you safe and to help you prosper. And I will try to treat you as trusted friends and allies, not as servants. Subordinates, at worst. And I want you to know that this is all of me speaking. The dragon recognises your value to us… to me, just as well as the human does.”
And she really did. She had long recognised the value of Herald as a go between and representative, beyond the purely emotional benefits of having a close friend. But Mak had proved her competence and usefulness over and over since we’d met her, and while the dragon didn’t need friends as such, she definitely recognised the benefits of having competent people bound to us. Hell, she’d been going on about the four adventurers serving us for months.
Herald side-eyed me and scoffed playfully. “Servants, indeed! You are certainly arrogant enough, whether there is a human side to you or not. But you know that I am your friend, forever, and if you want me to promise to always be honest, even if the truth might hurt, then I will do so without hesitation. So long as you will make the same promise.”
Mak looked… not quite crestfallen, but her face passed through a series of emotions from disappointment to something more like uncertainty. I’d seen her face fall as I said that I didn’t want servants – which probably wasn’t a great sign of her mental state – but she rallied. Being able to feel the intent behind my words must have helped. “I was prepared to serve you for as long as it took to work off my guilt, a year or a lifetime” she said. “Since you have asked for our honesty, I do not know if I am ready to be your friend, because I do not know if I deserve it. I do not think that I have forgiven myself yet. But if you think that you could go back, that you would have me as a friend again, then I will try.”
“I am sure that you will have plenty of opportunity to convince yourself in the near future,” I told her. “Now, as good as this whole conversation has been for me, we have an immediate problem to deal with. Have Rib and Pot filled you in on the refugees?”
“Our supposed bandits. Yes, they have,” Mak said.
“They have told us all that they saw and that you talked about,” Herald said. “For me, I am inclined to simply let them go their own way, but it was Mak who was injured. And who was forced to kill.” She wrapped her arm around her sister as Mak shrunk in on herself. “Well, Rib killed one, but she seems to take such things lightly.”
“Was this the first time you killed a human?” I asked Mak.
She fidgeted a little, started picking at the skin around her nails. “It was. It was my first real combat against people at all. I have been in fights, but nothing life-or-death.” She closed her eyes and took a breath, then straightened herself. “But I agree with Herald. If what we have heard is true, they do not deserve any more hardship. The two main offenders are dead; the others in the group were reluctant to fight us in the first place, and withdrew as soon as they could recover the equipment of their fallen. Let us talk to them, find out what they are running from, and send them on their way somewhere they will be able to start over.”
“Then that is what we will do,” I told them. “Where are Rib and Pot? I would like them to show you the way. I have only flown, so I am not sure of the best way across the ground.”
“Oh, they are… around. Somewhere in a tree, probably.” Herald said, waving her arm in the general direction of the trees. “Listening to us, for all I know, though I have no reason to believe that they understand Tekereteki.”
“Yeah, they are good at skulking, are they not?” I said. “I can barely even smell them.”
Herald started surreptitiously scanning the treetops. “I can usually find them, given a little time. Just pretend that we are actually talking about something important.”
After a few minutes of idle chit-chat she said, “I found them. Behind you and a little to your left there are two short kala-trees, with a tall, dense dura in between them. They are halfway up the dura, Pot watching us and Rib keeping an eye on the forest.”
“The what?” I did not actually know the names of any of the unfamiliar trees, so that meant nothing to me.
“A leafy tree between two trees with needles,” Mak explained.
“Right,” I said. “Well spotted. Let us go get them, then. Mak, do you want to do the honours?”
“Sure.” Mak grinned, and we started walking. I didn’t take us straight towards the tree but at an angle, all of us chatting pointlessly and none of us looking at the tree or the two cousins. I had no idea what Mak had planned, and was both surprised and impressed when she broke off at a sprint, covering the short distance to the tree before I really knew what she was doing and then leaping up to grab one of the lowest branches and hauling herself up. The branch was nine or ten feet off the ground, and for such a little woman it was really quite impressive. And she was climbing quickly, too, her grip sure, hauling herself up nearly one-armed in some cases.
I don’t know how surprised the cousins were, but they loved it, laughing and cheering as Mak climbed. She stopped a little below them, having covered fifty feet in just a few seconds. “Come on, get down!” Mak said loudly, looking up as she stood on a stout branch, holding on to another.
“Alright, alright!” Pot laughed, loud enough for us to hear on the ground. “You could have just asked!”
“And yet I didn’t!” I could hear the grin in Mak’s voice. Whatever that advancement was doing to her – and I had a very good guess – she was clearly enjoying it.
“Showoff,” I muttered as they joined me and Herald.
Mak just grinned. “You’re impressed, aren’t you?”
I snorted, but it wasn’t like she was wrong. “Let’s get Ardek and Kira, get you all ready, and go deal with these transients,” I told the others.
“Why them?” Rib asked. “Can’t we just leave them here?”
“We could… but then we’d have to either shut them in or leave the gate open for them, and one would be pretty unpleasant for them and the other unsafe. They’re coming.”
“Yes, ma’am. Understood.”
For all that we hoped that this would be a somewhat friendly meeting, the humans did not take it lightly. Herald and Mak both had their armour on, Herald including her helmet this time which made the whole effect seriously imposing. Over six feet of angry woman in night-black scale armour wasn’t something anyone could ignore. Rib and Pot, however, didn’t really do armour, or anything else that reduced their mobility. Ardek got Herald’s bow and her few remaining arrows, and Kira… she just looked kind of anxious about the whole situation, even after we explained that we didn’t want or expect any violence. With everyone mostly awake, geared up, and ready, we set off through the hills.
The cousins had mapped a good, easy trail to get to the refugees’ camp, and while we couldn’t move at their easy speed it still took less than an hour.
“How do you want to do this?” Mak said softly to me as we got close. “You feel tense.”
“I just want this to go well,” I told her. “Which means that I’m pretty sure that I shouldn’t follow my instincts here.”
“Which are?”
“To march into their camp, terrify them to death, and tell them that I’ll wipe them all out if they don’t fuck off immediately,” I sighed. “So instead I want you and Herald to go in and handle this. I’ll stay in the trees, out of sight, with the others. I’m sure that they’ll be smart enough to assume that there will be others with you, so even if they get any stupid ideas they shouldn’t act on them. Especially with your sister looking the way she does.”
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what she spent on it if you really want to know, but I think you’re better off not asking. I can tell you that we all thought it was worth it, though. First impressions with clients and other adventurers are important, and she’s going to make a Sorrows’ first impression.”
“Give her your spear and I’d think twice about taking her on,” I agreed. “And you didn’t even see how she handled the bear. Girl can move.”
“She did grow into quite the little warrior, didn’t she?” Mak grinned. “I used to worry so much. I still do, but… she can handle herself, can’t she? At least in a fight.” She laughed. "It still took her hours to work up the courage to read her letter, though.”
“She got a letter?”
“A reply from Maglan, yeah. Do you know what she wrote to him? She won’t tell me, and all she’ll tell me is that everything is fine.”
“No,” I said, glancing back at Herald, who was talking to Kira. “But she was anxious about getting something back. Strange that she’d put it off.”
“Well, you know how it is. You must have sent letters and messages when you were… before. Sorry. It’s still strange to think of, you being, you know. But you must have waited for an answer before and then been worried about what it might have said.”
I thought back on messages left on ‘Delivered’. Or worse, messages left on ‘Read’. Bloody torture.
“I guess, yeah,” I said.
“At least whatever he wrote seems to make her happy.”
Ahead of us Rib raised her hand, signalling ‘Halt!’
We had arrived.