By the time Kaz finished speaking, the light around the door had dimmed. The females of the tribe had doused most of the lights, leaving only a few to allow the guards to see and members of the tribe to reach the waste crevice. Li was dozing in Kaz’s lap, only occasionally opening her eyes to make sure Katri was still keeping her distance.
Katri was. In fact, she’d taken a place at the far side of the hut, leaning against one of the long bones that supported the wall. She watched Kaz silently, her pale eyes almost glowing in the soft light. When Kaz was done, she shook her head slowly.
“If there wasn’t a dragon in your lap, I’d say you were crazy,” she said bluntly. “You were never a liar, though. Not smart enough.” She lifted a lip toward him, eyes watching to see if he would react. When he didn’t, she chuffed softly and raised her muzzle toward the ceiling, closing her eyes.
“I spent so long protecting you. That was my job, even though usually it’s the brother’s duty to protect his sister. And now it turns out that not only did you have enough power to protect yourself all along, but you managed to do everything Mother and Father hoped you might, entirely without my help.”
“What did you expect, when you sent me with the humans? Did you think we’d make it to the Deep?” he asked.
Katri’s ears flattened, but she didn’t look at him. “I was angry,” she admitted softly. “We made it through all those years, and now, when we could finally be free, you came back and told me Mother was dead.” Her voice was rough. “It felt like it was all your fault. I just wanted you gone.”
“You told Raff that if Rega refused to follow your instructions, he should kill her.” Kaz tried not to sound accusatory, but this was a memory that had clawed at him ever since it happened.
Now his sister looked at him again. “I knew she wouldn’t argue. Rega never wanted to be a chief. Not of the Magmablades, not of the Farpaws, and certainly not of the Broken Knives. I was just full of myself,” she said bitterly. “I wanted her to be proud of me, finally.”
“She was,” Kaz said, blinking in surprise. “You always learned the howls the fastest, and all the pups listened to you, even the older ones. When you were learning to use your power, you were stronger than anyone else, and even though it took you a little while to learn control, you practiced until you nearly made yourself sick, and once you had it, no one was better.”
Katri glared at him. “Do you know how many times she told me to hold back? I shouldn’t make the others feel bad. I shouldn’t leave you too far behind. I’d be an adult for many long years, so I should enjoy being a puppy.”
Kaz thought about Ija and Kyla. “I don’t think it was easy, growing up as the daughter of the Magmablade chief,” he said. “All of them were pressured to be the best, and specifically to compete with each other. They didn’t have friends, or-”
“You think I don’t know that?” Katri barked. “Oda was always encouraging me to be the best, make sure everyone else knew I was the best. All while Mother was quietly worrying that I didn’t have friends.” She bared her teeth. “I wanted to be the best. So what if no one likes me?”
Likes, not liked. Katri lifted a hand to her chest, absently fingering a patch of thin fur that Kaz didn’t remember being there before. As she brushed at it, he caught the reddish-pink gleam of a fresh scar beneath the fur, and his eyes widened. “Someone challenged you!”
Katri bared her teeth again, but this time it was in defiance of the world, not Kaz in particular. “Several of them did. And I showed them exactly what Oda taught me.”
“Did you kill them?” Kaz asked.
Her eyes flicked away. “The first one, yes. I had to prove that I was willing to do what had to be done. But as strong as the Longtooths were, we can’t afford to lose strong females. Not if we want to be able to hold territory lower in the mountain.”
Kaz hesitated. He was glad that his sister was alive, and honestly, he’d never expected that holding the tribe would be easy. Katri had taken it through underhanded means, and unless every female remaining was certain Katri was the strongest, there was no doubt they would challenge her. He’d hoped they would take longer to risk it, but obviously the challenges had begun almost immediately.
“If I can find you a place in the Deep,” he asked carefully, “would you want it?” Want another place she hadn’t earned? A place she would have to prove her right to, over and over? But the rest of the tribe would be safe. She wouldn’t die in a vara or luegat, wouldn’t lose her mate or her pups, wouldn’t spend years in the descent.
Katri stared at him. “Nothing is free,” she said, waving a hand to indicate the cavern beyond the hut, and the tribe sleeping there. “What would the price be for safety?”
Kaz barked a laugh. “Danger, probably,” he told her. “The Woodblades are reforming, and the Magmablades are now their chief subsidiary tribe. We’re cousins to Ija, the new Magmablade chief, and you would be seen as her ally, even if you’re not. No one likes the Magmablades. In fact, I suspect many tribes would be happy to force them from the Deep entirely. They certainly wouldn’t be happy to see more Magmablades, especially the remnants of the ones they did manage to get rid of.”
One of Katri’s ears twitched in a way he knew meant she was laughing at him. “You make it sound so inviting.”
He shook his head. “I can almost guarantee it wouldn’t be. You’d be the lowest of the low, there because of family and luck, not power. But you’d be in the Deep.”
“And I’d take it,” she said immediately. “There aren’t many Broken Knives left, but I know they’d like to go home. And the Longtooths were always ambitious. When can we go?”
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Kaz thought about it. He couldn’t drag an entire tribe down through the mountain with him. Even if he could defend them, it would take too long, and they had nothing to trade for safe passage. He could certainly force the kobolds between here and the Deep to allow them all through, but he would have to hurt people, which he didn’t want to do. Better to gather trade goods and send someone back up for them.
“I’ll be in the Deep within a week,” he told her. “Ten days at most. I have…some things to do there, but I’ll make sure that no matter what happens to me, someone will come for you.”
Katri’s eyes sharpened, and for an instant he thought she might actually be worried for him. “What might happen to you?”
Kaz lifted his own lip. “I’m going to make sure that that thing in the Tree never bothers any of us again.” He didn’t know how or why, but he had no doubt that Nucai was behind many of the things that had gone wrong in the mountain. He knew the ancient being had been manipulating the kobolds for hundreds of years, if not longer, and Kaz was going to put a stop to it. Somehow.
His sister’s ears flattened, and now he was sure. Katri didn’t like the idea that he might be killed. She shook her head. “Forget it. Stay here. Take a mate. We’ll make it down to the Deep eventually. Faster if you help us.” She looked at Li consideringly. “Will that thing grow larger?”
Li raised her head and puffed a cloud of over-heated vapor toward his sister. Kaz grabbed her mouth gently and cooled the hot steam before it could reach its target. “Li will be enormous,” Kaz said with absolute confidence. Even if it turned out that Li’s full size was closer to her smaller parent than her larger, Kaz was certain she would still find a way to grow bigger. Li was determined to grow large enough to eat his mountain someday, though he very much hoped she wouldn’t actually do it.
Katri chuffed a laugh, waving the mist away from her face. “Then she can help. With a dragon on our side, no one will even dare challenge us. We may need to wait until she gets a bit larger, though. She’s only a little bigger than a large fuergar right now.”
For a moment, Li had almost started to like Kaz’s sister, but at that last sentence, she stood, carefully stepping away from Kaz, then glancing around the inside of the hut. It really was a good-sized hut, but still, Kaz reached for her. She deftly dodged, and then she began to grow.
It wasn’t as fast or as smooth as it had been when she shrank. Her wings grew first, and then her paws and tail, and Kaz could feel her self-image falter. She hadn’t been big for that long, after all, and she could only see certain parts of herself easily. But Kaz stepped in, showing her all of herself, from crimson horns to the patch of deep sapphire scales on her chest, right over her heart. And if those scales were exactly the same color as Kaz’s fur, who was to say they hadn’t started out that way?
Li grew until she had to curl up on herself in order to avoid poking a hole in the ceiling with her horns. She was definitely larger than she had been, but she was too busy watching Katri to even notice. Kaz’s sister, for her part, had shrunk back for only a moment, and now glared at the dragon with the fur on her neck standing straight up and all of her teeth on display.
Katri’s core was spinning, and he could see the ki gathering in her hands, so Kaz knew it was time to intervene. Not that Katri could hurt Li, but she could bring the entire tribe running to find out why her hut had just exploded, and if Li bit her now, Katri wouldn’t just get a little smarter. His dragon was far too used to biting people with at least some body cultivation, and Katri certainly wasn’t Iron body or above.
“I’ll be all right,” Kaz tried to reassure his sister while silently encouraging Li to return to her smaller size. “As you can see, I have powerful friends.” This mollified Li, and since she wasn’t enjoying the feeling of holding herself in so she didn’t destroy Katri’s hut, she started to shrink again.
Only when Li was once again lap-sized did Katri move away from the wall of the hut. Before, she’d seemed to find Li as much a curiosity as anything - possibly because Kaz’s howl had emphasized how different she was from the dragon who had once ruled the kobolds. He wasn’t sure how much Katri knew of the story of the first Magmablade, especially since Oda had torn those pages from her book.
“Obviously you don’t need me,” Katri said, and for once there was only a little bitterness in her tone. “Go ahead, but I won’t count on you. I was planning to declare luegat on the Darkpelts soon. Our scouts found a good territory not far from theirs, but their chief wants to keep it for her daughter. She’s strong, but not as strong as I am, and while our tribes are about the same size, she won’t want to risk losing any females if she really means to split the tribe. I don’t intend to stay there for long, anyway, so I think it’ll be relatively bloodless if I just convince her that we’re far too powerful to stay in the heights for long.”
Kaz searched his mind, but he didn’t remember a tribe called Darkpelt. That wasn’t too surprising, however. While Oda had been good at making everyone nearby hate her, she hadn’t been good at learning more than she had to about the territories not immediately next to theirs. After all, she was going to lead the Broken Knives deeper again, so it was a waste of time to learn about the ‘weak’ tribes who lived and would remain in the upper levels.
“Wait two weeks,” Kaz told his sister, holding Li as he stood. “If no one has come for you by then, do as you must. You’re a good leader, Katri. I could tell that just by walking through the den. Your people sound content, and there’s no tension here, like there always was with Oda as chief.”
Katri stood as well. She looked pleased, her tail even giving one abortive wag before she got it under control, but she just said, “Which reminds me. How did you reach my hut without anyone noticing you? Were the guards sleeping or talking?”There was a hard edge to these last words, and rightfully so. The guards at the entrance to the den were the last line of defense before an enemy could reach the pups and the tribe’s store of food. If they weren’t paying attention, Katri needed to know.
Kaz shook his head. “No,” he told her. “Though you might want to send someone to relieve them for dinner a little earlier. I think I heard one of their stomachs growl as I went by.” That and they were distracted by the smells of the food. Their focus had slipped, and while that might not be a terrible risk on this level, once the tribe started their descent, it would become progressively more dangerous.
His sister’s eyes narrowed. “Then how did you get in?”
Li made them disappear, and Katri forgot herself so far as to gasp softly. She stared around the apparently empty hut, then gave a deep sniff, searching for their scent. She would find it, of course, since they’d been there for several hours, but now that Li’s power was hiding them, it would soon start to fade.
“No one will know we were here,” Kaz promised, his voice apparently coming from thin air. “You can tell them whatever you want, or wait until someone comes with trade goods to pay the tribes from here to the Deep. Someone will come, Katri.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Katri said, though she was obviously shaken.
“Bright howls,” Kaz said softly, then opened the door to the hut, peering out into the darkness.
“Bright howls, brother,” came the quiet words behind him, and Kaz hesitated for just a moment, looking back before making his way out of the sleeping den.