Within the Dragon's Jaw (The Dragon Thief Book 2)

by D. K. Holmberg

“Often enough.”

  Ty and Eastley shared a look at Bingham’s evasiveness, but he wasn’t going to be able to force him to tell him anything that he didn’t want to. At this point, it probably didn’t matter, either.

  Once they reached the outskirts of the city, Bingham motioned for them to climb down from their saddles, and they guided the horses along the road.

  The streets were wide on the outskirts of the city, and unlike in Zarinth the buildings out here were massive; this was not at all the poorer section of the city. He found himself gawking at everything around him, looking up, sweeping his gaze around, trying to take it all in.

  Rows of shops lined the street, all of them with massive glass windows showing the wares inside. He noticed a tailor with much finer clothes than he had ever seen anyone in Zarinth wear. There was a chandler with exquisitely designed candles, along with strange lanterns in another storefront. A general store, with stacks of parchment and inks in the window of another. One after another were like that. The crowd moved slowly, forcing them to squeeze their way through.

  “We should probably find a place to stay for the night. We can stable the horses there, then we can begin to look into where to find your brother.”

  “It sounds like you have someplace in mind.”

  “Probably where he spent his time when he was in the city before,” Eastley said.

  Ty nodded. “Probably.”

  “Would the two of you stop? I’m starting to wish that I hadn’t come.”

  “We could have brought Olivia,” Eastley said.

  The suggestion made Ty’s brow furrow, and he shook his head. She had her uses, but he wouldn’t trust her out of the city. Besides, if Bingham had contacts here the way it sounded like he did, he wasn’t about to abandon that advantage.

  Bingham guided them off the main street, and they began to weave through increasingly narrow streets until they got to one that looked no wider than an alley. Ty was thankful they weren’t riding, as they might’ve smacked their heads into the overhanging rooftops.

  When they finally stopped, Bingham handed him the reins of his horse and hurried inside. A young boy followed him out and took the reins from him.

  “Where is he taking them?” Eastley asked.

  “There’s a stable not too far from here. He’s going to keep them there for us.”

  “What if we need to leave quickly?”

  “If we need to leave quickly, we won’t be going on horseback.”

  Ty and Eastley followed Bingham into the tavern and paused for a moment. It was a simple building with stone walls and a wooden plank floor. A counter ran along the far left wall, and there were perhaps a dozen people scattered throughout the tavern, all of them dressed more formally than he was. Ty realized just how unusual his clothing looked compared to the others.

  He looked at Bingham, but he had already headed straight toward the counter, as if more interested in something—or someone, he realized—than he was in him. He took a seat and Ty joined him, watching him.

  He looked at a woman on the other side of the counter with wide eyes. She had dark hair that had started to go gray, green eyes, and full lips. She frowned deeply when she took a look at Bingham, though when she turned to Ty and Eastley, the frown deepened even more.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I came in for a drink and a place to stay.”

  “You and your boys?”

  Boys?

  Bingham started to laugh, and the woman’s face soured even more. His laugh cut off. “Not my boy. A friend of mine. This is Tydornen and Eastley.”

  Ty nodded to him. “It’s nice to meet—”

  “I don’t care much about who you brought in here, Jarson. All I care is that you finally show your filthy face back in here after all this time, and you come with someone else?”

  Ty glanced at Eastley for a moment, grinning.

  Eastley leaned in. “Who is Jarson?”

  Ty nodded to Bingham. “It seems like it’s him.”

  Maybe there was much more about Bingham that he didn’t know.

  As far as Ty knew, Bingham had lived in Zarinth, though he hadn’t done so as long as Ty had known him. Maybe before then he had spent time in the capital, or perhaps elsewhere. The only thing Ty had really known about Bingham before going to work for him was that Bingham knew Ty’s mother. And that Bingham loved dragon relics.

  “I’m sorry, Esme. I haven’t been able to make it to the city as often as I once had.”

  “As often?” Esme leaned forward, resting her hands on the table, and she turned an angry expression on Bingham. “You haven’t been to the city in years, Jarson. If you want me to think that you were held up, perhaps you should offer a different excuse. Now. Do you have a different excuse?”

  Eastley grinned as he looked from Bingham to Esme.

  Ty elbowed him, forcing Eastley to take a step back, but he shrugged. He didn’t seem to mind, though perhaps Ty didn’t either. If he could learn more about Bingham, he wanted that opportunity as well.

  “I don’t have anything that would appease you. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? That’s all you have to say to me?”

  “Like I said, I don’t have much else that I can say to you. I should have visited.”

  Esme swept her gaze along the rest of the tavern before turning back to Bingham and shaking her head. “What do you want?”

  “I would like food and drink and a place to stay.”

  “What say we start with the first two, and then we can decide about the third later.”

  She turned and headed through a door into another room, leaving Bingham staring agape at her.

  Ty started laughing. “I think you have to explain yourself,” he said.

  “What’s there to explain?” Bingham asked.

  “What did you do to her?” Eastley asked.

  Bingham frowned. “It’s complicated.”

  Ty snorted. “It doesn’t seem that complicated.”

  Bingham glanced back toward the kitchen. “She wanted me to stay.”

  “Oh, I see that. I just want to know a little bit more about why she’s angry and what expectations she had for you. It seems like she feels the two of you had more of a connection than you obviously did.”

  Bingham stared at the door but then shook his head. “It wasn’t more of a connection than I thought we had. I knew what we had.”

  “Then why did you leave?”

  “It wasn’t safe for Jarson to stay.”

  “So who was Jarson?” Eastley asked. “Was he the same as Bingham, or was he someone else?”

  Eastley seemed to be having far more fun with this situation than Bingham was.

  “Everybody has secrets,” Bingham said softly.

  “This is more than just a secret,” Ty said.

  “Don’t keep pushing the issue, Tydornen.”

  “I think I’m going to keep pushing until you tell me more about what’s been going on,” he said. “This is fascinating. It seems to me that you have a whole other life here in the city.”

  “Did you think I should not?”

  Ty didn’t know what he thought. Since coming to work with Bingham, Ty hadn’t given that much thought to him. He had known him peripherally, and when he had gone to Bingham, but that was out of a familiarity and hope that maybe Bingham would know something about Ty’s mother.

  “Will she help us?” Eastley asked.

  “She’s the tavern owner. She wants business; she’s going to help,” Bingham said.

  Ty glanced toward the kitchen where Esme had disappeared. In his mind, it was a little more complicated than that, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. There was the possibility that Esme remained too angry with Bingham over some perceived slight. If so, it was possible that she wouldn’t want to help him. It wasn’t all that different than how Ty had felt with what Olivia had done to him, and there had been no relationship there.

  The door opened and Esme came back out, carr
ying a tray that she slid across the counter and over to Bingham. She glared at him for a moment before turning her attention to Ty. “Are you even old enough to have a mug of ale?”

  “I prefer wine,” Ty said.

  The woman frowned for a moment. “We don’t have much wine here.”

  “None? Maybe I could go someplace else. It seems that you and Jarson need to talk, anyway.”

  “Tydornen,” he started.

  Ty got up and dinged Bingham on the shoulder, motioning for Eastley to join him. “Why don’t the two of you visit. We’re going to wander the city a little bit and perhaps find a place that actually will serve a glass of wine. We can find you later.”

  They headed out into the street, and Ty looked over to Eastley.

  “I would’ve preferred staying and watching him squirm a little bit,” Eastley said, looking back at the door.

  “If we do that, he’s going to be of no use to us. Besides, we came to the city for a reason.”

  “But he’s the one who has the contacts,” Eastley reminded.

  “He might have the contacts, but that doesn’t mean that the two of us can’t see what we can find out. Besides, I know where we need to start. Figure out what prisons are in the city, and try to come up with an answer as to which one Albion might be held in. Once we have that, then we can come up with our plan for breaking him out.”

  Eastley snorted. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “I don’t know. We did break into the palace in Zarinth.”

  “And got caught.”

  “But we got in. Now we just have to perfect the second part.”

  Ty had committed himself to being the Dragon Thief, at least now that his brother was in prison. The Dragon Thief could break into a prison and back out, couldn’t he? Which meant that Ty would have to do that as well.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ty was frustrated. They had been in the city for the better part of two days. Two days spent searching for some answer, two days spent looking for prisons that might hold his brother, and two days where Bingham had stayed in the tavern, drinking.

  He looked over to where Bingham was seated at a booth at the back of the tavern. He had a mug of ale resting in front of him, much like he had every time that they had come here before. Eastley stayed close to Ty, a hint of a smile on his face, but even Eastley had started to grow increasingly frustrated with Bingham.

  “He has to be coming around,” Eastley said.

  “You would think so,” Ty said, shaking his head. “But he obviously doesn’t really care.”

  “Oh, I think he cares, but it’s who he cares about that matters. Look at him.” Eastley shook his head. “The poor bastard can’t get over her.”

  “Then he shouldn’t have left her.”

  Esme stepped out of the kitchen carrying a tray laden with food and drinks, glancing briefly in Bingham’s direction. She seemed more than willing to ply him with ale but had not visited with him as far as Ty managed to tell. It was almost as if she were taunting him. Perhaps that was what it was.

  Ty was frustrated. He could have used Bingham and his contacts to try to find more information within the city.

  “We should go check out the fortress,” Eastley suggested.

  Ty stared at Bingham for another moment before tearing his gaze away. “You’re right.”

  They had discovered two places that prisoners might be held within the city. One was the palace, at least according to rumor, but everyone he’d talked to about prisoners had suggested that it was more theory than reality. As far as Ty had managed to learn, no one went in or out of the palace. He truly was a ghost king. No one had seen him. No one saw who served him. No one knew whether the king was even in residence or elsewhere.

  Other than the Dragon Touched, he suspected. Well, that and the Tecal.

  They had seen plenty of Dragon Touched within the city. He couldn’t pass a street corner without seeing their dark blue jackets, the heat wafting off of them, and sensing the possibility that they might be discovered at any time. Ty kept thinking that they might run across Roson James, but he didn’t seem to have returned to the city. There had to be other Dragon Touched here who worked with him, though. They just hadn’t found them.

  Ty suppressed another frustrated sigh. They stepped out of the tavern, into the street, and Eastley motioned for Ty to follow. Eastley had proven himself invaluable on this journey, far more so than Bingham. He had a way of getting information that Ty found surprising. Mostly because he intimidated some of the people that he questioned, but partly because he simply had a way of charming people. In that, it reminded Ty of Olivia, but the way that Eastley did it was more pleasant.

  Well, maybe not more pleasant.

  “So who would’ve heard about the fortress?” Eastley said as they reached one of the main street running through the city. There was a baker on one side of the street, a silversmith on another, and a general store down the road. “The fortress is supposedly impossible to get into unless you are traveling with one of the Dragon Touched.” He looked over to Ty. “But seeing as how we have the advantage of the Dragon Thief,” he went on, “I was thinking that we might be able to get in, find your brother, and if we have to use the Dragon Thief, then we should be able to sneak back out.”

  “You’re saying that as if we can actually get into the fortress in the first place.”

  Eastley shrugged. “Well, that is the real challenge.” He led them through the streets, and Ty glanced at a pair of Dragon Touched, half expecting that they would pay special attention to him, but none of them turned in his direction. He should’ve been thankful, but it left him unsettled. In Zarinth, the Dragon Touched would have been watching for any sort of dragon remnants. It didn’t seem as if the Dragon Touched even cared about them here.

  Of course, Ty had been surprised by the sheer number of relics that he had seen. There were massive obsidian sculptures situated all throughout the city. None of them were in the shape of dragons, at least not like the ones that his mother and Bingham often prized, but there were some that he imagined being significant hauls. He was reminded of the job that he had taken with Olivia, the dragon magic that had locked it in place, keeping them from stealing it easily, and wondered if they had something similar. When they passed another relic, this one a twisting band of obsidian that was more decorative than anything else, he found himself pausing, looking at it.

  Eastley tapped him on the arm. “You can’t keep stopping at them,” he said.

  “I’m just surprised that there are so many within the city,” he said.

  “What do you expect? This is the capital. He brings everything here.”

  “But none of them are like the relics that we’ve encountered in Zarinth.”

  Eastley shrugged. “I don’t care. It doesn’t really matter to me. I just want to make sure that we get this done.”

  Ty sighed. Maybe Eastley was right. They had no real leads on his brother. Just the rumors of prisons. In one of them that would be impossible to break into. The palace, a place that no one entered, would be impenetrable.

  But the fortress?

  It was a place of the Dragon Touched.

  Ty had been trying to work through the scenario that would be involved in breaking into it and hadn’t come up with any answers.

  It was impossible.

  At least for him.

  Maybe Bingham, if he were sober, would have some thought on it, but he was useless to them. The only person who might provide the means of getting into the Dragon Touched fortress was the very person who was probably captive inside it.

  They slowed as they reached another intersection.

  There were more people on the street but also more Dragon Touched. Ty counted at least a dozen, some of them on patrol, marching in what looked to be a steady pattern, and others that were either leaving from or going to the fortress in the distance.

  It wasn’t what Ty would necessarily consider a fortress. It was a massive stone structu
re, all of a dark gray, that stood only two stories tall. There was a wall around it that was probably only a few feet shorter than the fortress itself. On each corner of the wall, Dragon Touched were stationed, looking down upon the city, as if trying to make sure that no one passed through that wasn’t supposed to. It was all too much.

  “So there isn’t an entrance on the side,” Eastley said, keeping his voice low and leaning close to Ty. “If you get close enough here, you can see that they are heading down.”

  “Down what?”

  “That’s a great question. Stairs? I don’t have the answer. Since I haven’t seen anything outside of the fortress, I can only assume they are heading down inside somehow.”

  There were others who weren’t Dragon Touched that headed toward the fortress, but not many.

  Eastley guided him to another intersecting street, and from there Ty noticed more Dragon Touched, the wall, and patrols atop it. They made their way steadily around, picking their way through the city, watching.

  As they did, Ty continued to struggle with identifying any way of getting in.

  “Do you have a thought on this?”

  “I have lots of thoughts,” Eastley said. “Unfortunately, none of them are going to be of much use to us in this place. Here’s what I suggest. We jump one of the Dragon Touched,” he said, dropping his voice and whispering, looking at a Dragon Touched who was making his way along the street toward them. He didn’t seem to be mindful of their presence, though they stood on the side of the road, just looking toward the fortress. “We grab the jacket, and we—”

  “Are you really proposing that we pretend that we are Dragon Touched and break in that way?”

  “At least to get closer,” Eastley said. “Once we get closer, we can get a better sense of the challenge that’s before us. Then we can try to figure out what we need to do.”

  Ty found himself laughing, shaking his head. “We aren’t going to be able to get through them. They have to have some way of detecting whether somebody is Dragon Touched or not.”

  “Do they?”

  “I don’t know,” Ty said, looking over to him. “How much do you know about the Dragon Touched?”