Royal Rescue

by A. Alex Logan

  “It’s their fault,” Omar protested. “Their system, their corruption, their enslavement of the guardians.”

  “And I’ll be sure to tell them that,” Gerald said. “But I have to be there to do it.”

  He turned away and started writing a reply before Omar could say anything else. After a long moment, Omar muttered something under his breath, turned on his heel, and started rousing the others from their tents.

  We can get there in two days, but late. The dragon’s confident it can get us across the border, Council or no Council, although it hasn’t said how. That should be soon enough. It’ll take the Council time to discuss if they should agree to the parlay in the first place and then more time to negotiate terms. Especially if all of them are there, they’re not going to agree with each other on anything. Nedi should be able to stall them for two days.

  He hesitated and then wrote.

  And three would be better. I’m not in very good shape. Calin’s going to kill me when she sees my leg. You might, too.

  AFTER A FULL day on dragonback, from dawn to long past dusk, Gerald started thinking he might just go ahead and kill himself and save Calin and Erick the trouble. For hours all he had been aware of was pain, which was so all-encompassing he had even stopped wondering when they would land and when it would end. It no longer seemed possible the pain would ever end.

  “Gerald? Are you awake? We’ve landed. Let’s get you down, okay?”

  He was out of it enough that he wasn’t sure he had responded, he wasn’t even sure he was expected to, but he didn’t resist when Omar started unharnessing him.

  “There’s a river here. Do you want to get in the water? Will that help? Gerald, are you listening? Gerald?”

  Omar was starting to sound a little panicked and Gerald forced himself to respond. “It can’t…hurt,” he managed.

  There was no suggestion of Gerald using his canes or getting himself to the river under his own power. He could barely manage to help keep his descent from the dragon a controlled fall, rather than a headlong tumble. His bad leg buckled underneath him when he touched the ground and he sat down heavily, leaning against the dragon’s warm side.

  “Can I do anything?” someone else asked. “Can I help?”

  There was conversation in the background, but it floated over Gerald’s head. He opened his eyes and saw Robin leaning over him, and then they helped Omar lift Gerald back to his feet. The two of them helped him to the river, half carrying him, one on either side holding him up so he could hop along without putting any weight on his mangled leg.

  They stopped on the bank just long enough for Omar to take off his boots and wrestle Gerald out of his, and then he hauled Gerald into the water while Robin made their way back toward the camp.

  The water was cool enough to startle a gasp out of Gerald and he thrashed a little, instinctively wanting to get out before the cold sent his muscles into further cramps, but then a comforting numbness began to spread and the support of the water, the weightlessness it provided, allowed his tense muscles to relax.

  Gerald closed his eyes again and let himself float, trusting Omar to keep his head above water and keep the gentle current from tugging him away.

  “I think you have a fever, too,” Omar said. His tone was conversational, but Gerald realized he had been talking for some time and had stopped expecting a response. Omar rested a cool hand on his forehead. “Maybe the river’s cooled you off. Or maybe it’s just my hands that are cold. I wish Calin were here.”

  “You’re…doing a…good job,” Gerald murmured. “Feel better.”

  “Yeah? Better enough to eat some dinner? You didn’t eat at lunch.”

  “If…you’re…not cooking.”

  Omar let out a startled laugh. “You must be feeling better if you’re joking. All right. Robin said they’d put our tent up, let’s get into dry clothes. Can you walk at all now?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Omar towed him over to the bank and pulled him out. Gerald stood awkwardly balanced on his left leg, feeling the mud squelch up between his toes as he shivered in the cool of the night air. Omar pulled Gerald’s arm over his shoulder and helped him take a halting step. “Are you okay? Or should I get your other human crutch?”

  “No, ’s okay.”

  They took another step and another and Gerald was concentrating so hard on remaining upright and in motion he didn’t even realize they had reached the tent until Omar stopped walking.

  The dragon, who usually remained slightly distant from the tents out of deference to its size and the fragility of the canvas, was right there, curled around the tent the way it had tended to curl around the tower back in the desert. It was watching Gerald with evident distress, and he reached out a hand to pat its scales.

  “I’m okay,” he told it. Its side was hot and he pulled his hand away quickly before it could start to burn.

  “No, you’re not,” the dragon said frankly. “But this is not the time to argue about it. You’re going to catch a chill on top of everything else if you keep standing here in wet clothes.”

  Omar helped Gerald into the tent and they both heard the dragon’s muttered commentary about human fragility and design flaws as Gerald sat down heavily and straightened his leg with a grimace.

  Omar closed the tent flap behind them and then looked everywhere but at Gerald. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  Gerald squinted up at him. He still felt disoriented and muddled and like he had missed something. “What?”

  “I mean… Well, can you get changed or do you need help?”

  “Oh.” He thought about it or tried to think about it. His thoughts were slippery and as he tried to chase them down and reach a conclusion, he lost track of what he was trying to decide.

  “Gerald?”

  “What? Oh.” The idea of getting undressed and dressed again was overwhelming. It seemed like far too much effort. He was already tired. He closed his eyes.

  “Gerald.”

  “I think…I…need help.” Once the words were out, he noticed a vague sense of unease, a little knot of nerves in his stomach. There was a reason for it, he was sure, but he didn’t know what it was, and he was too tired to try to pin it down.

  “Okay. And you want me to help you, right?”

  Gerald opened his eyes and blinked in confusion. “You’re here.”

  “Right. I know. Okay. Ras, you really are fevered, aren’t you?”

  Gerald wasn’t sure if that really needed a response. Omar didn’t seem to be expecting one. He’d turned away and was rummaging through their packs and Gerald closed his eyes again. He opened them when Omar started to tug at his wet shirt. Gerald sat there passively and let Omar maneuver the clinging fabric over his head. Once it was off, Gerald started to shiver harder and he reached for a blanket to drape across his shoulders, but Omar handed him a dry shirt instead. Gerald held it and watched as Omar used the wet one to wipe the mud off his bare feet. Omar was still looking everywhere except at Gerald and once he noticed Gerald wasn’t going to put the new shirt on himself, his lack of eye contact resulted in awkward fumbling with the shirt since Gerald couldn’t seem to get his arms into the sleeves by himself.

  His vague feeling of unease was increasing, fueled by Omar’s own apparent discomfort. In his feverish state, Gerald still couldn’t put his finger on the why behind it, but it seemed important. “What’s…the matter?” he asked after a moment.

  Omar sat back on his heels and finally looked at Gerald. “This feels wrong,” he said bluntly. “You’re sick, you’re not thinking straight, and it feels like I’m taking advantage of you. You never wanted to undress in front of me. When I had to help you a few days ago, you hated it, you were so upset, and if you weren’t feverish, you’d be even more upset by this than before, because of…because of me liking you.”

  Gerald blinked at him. “Oh. ’S true. But…too tired…to care…now.”

  Omar let out a breath that was half sigh, half laug
h. “All right. I guess you’d hate it even more if it was one of the others. But here—” he grabbed a blanket and draped it over Gerald’s waist before going back to helping him undress. “You’ll appreciate this when your fever breaks.”

  He appreciated it now, albeit fuzzily. His unease faded with the blanket draped over him and Omar seemed more relaxed as well. At least until he got Gerald’s pants off.

  He hissed in dismay when Gerald’s right leg came to light. “Oh… This looks a lot worse. No wonder it hurts.” He dug through their packs again until he came up with the ointments Calin had sent and he started applying them to the swollen scars and scrapes. He did it gently, careful not to cause Gerald any more pain. Gerald held his breath and held still. The scars were so swollen that they were tender—he could actually feel Omar touching them. As disconcerting as the prior numbness had been, Gerald decided he would rather have numbness than this returned sensitivity. What was the good of having feeling in the scar tissue if the only thing it felt was pain?

  “There. Is that any better?”

  Gerald made a noncommittal noise, more an acknowledgment of the question than an actual response.

  “Calin will fix you up tomorrow,” Omar said. “Just one more day, one more flight.”

  Gerald didn’t want to think about that. Dried off and dressed, his leg treated, he wanted to lie down and sleep and not think about anything: the pain, the flight, the awkwardness with Omar, the Council awaiting them…

  He closed his eyes while Omar put his own dry clothes on, but Omar didn’t let him slip into sleep. “You said you’d eat,” he said sternly. “You need to eat something.”

  “Don’t want…to move. And…no boots.”

  “Damn, I left them by the river. Mine too. All right, you can stay put. But if I bring you something, you have to eat it. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  GERALD’S HEAD WASN’T much clearer when he woke up. His skull felt like it had been hollowed out and then filled with wool; his leg still ached, and his scars and his knee throbbed in time with his heartbeats. He was tempted to close his eyes again and not face the world until he had to, but his bladder told him that time had come.

  It was getting on toward dawn; the tent was still shadowy, but there was enough illumination he could find his boots and his canes. Moving enough to get his boots on was a chore—his bad knee was so stiff and swollen he could neither straighten nor bend his leg, it was stuck in one position—and he wasn’t entirely sure how he managed to get himself out of the tent and then to a convenient bush.

  The dragon had been snoring when he crept out of the tent, but it had roused in his absence.

  “How are you feeling?” it asked when Gerald limped back over.

  “Not great.”

  “Are you hungry? I can start a fire.”

  “No. Just tired.”

  He sat next to the dragon and rubbed at his swollen knee. “I want to be there already,” he said quietly. “I want Erick to cast another spell and Calin to use her bandages and potions and I want my leg to be fixed.”

  “Some injuries can only be fixed so much,” the dragon said, touching a foreclaw gently to the scars that ringed its own neck. “No matter how much we want it to be otherwise.”

  Gerald wanted to snap at it, tell it that its scars were only cosmetic, they didn’t pain the dragon or keep it from doing anything. But he bit the words back unsaid and felt ashamed of himself for even thinking them. The dragon’s scars were the result of years, decades, of slavery and ensorcellment. Even if the scars themselves didn’t hurt—and he didn’t even know if that was the case—he had seen the wounds that caused them, and he knew how painful those had been. The dragon had suffered that pain for years. It had been less than two months since Gerald was burned. How could he compare their pain? Why did he need to? It wasn’t a contest.

  “I know,” Gerald said, his voice low. “How many of the guardians are like this, do you think? Like us. Is it enough to take the collar away and say, all right, go back to your life? Can any of us go back to how we were?”

  “We can try. And we can make new lives, better ones, with those who understand what we’ve gone through.”

  Gerald leaned back against the dragon and closed his eyes. There was an idea there, somewhere, buried under the wool in his head. Something the dragon had said had caused a spark, but he was too tired to find it and fan it into life. “Remind me of that when I feel better,” Gerald murmured. “I think it’s important.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  GERALD SQUIRMED AND twisted in the grips of a feverish nightmare, a childhood memory gone twisted, of when he and Lila were first taught to spar. In the nightmare, Lila’s practice blade had morphed into sharpened steel, while Gerald’s remained blunted wood. He stumbled and dropped his shield and it vanished as if he had never had one; Lila lunged and when he tried to block her strike his wooden blade was shorn right off at the hilt. Her sword continued on and drove deep into his knee.

  He sat up with a gasp and then yelled in horror at the knife sticking out of his leg.

  “Gerald! It’s okay, it’s okay, lie down.” Omar’s hands were on his shoulders, pressing him back down to the bed.

  Gerald let himself be pushed back, his horror muted by confusion and shock and the realization that he didn’t feel any pain, not from the knife and not from his aching hip or throbbing scars.

  “There you go,” Omar said soothingly.

  “What’s happening? Who stabbed me?” Gerald asked.

  “No one stabbed you,” Omar said. “Not technically… You have a bad infection. Calin is, um, draining the pus. No, sit down! You don’t really want to see it. There’s, uh, there’s a lot of it.”

  “Oh.” Gerald took stock. His memory was very fuzzy, and his head ached. “Calin… We’re in the dragonlands?”

  “Yes. We got here an hour or so ago. You’ve been very feverish, you slept almost the whole way here. Calin and Erick have been taking care of you. Just relax. Erick said you shouldn’t be in any pain now, is that right? He’s lying down, he was tired from the spellcasting, but he said to wake him up if you needed…”

  “No,” Gerald said slowly. “No, my leg doesn’t hurt. I’m thirsty, though. And tired…” He started to close his eyes and then jerked them open again and sat up abruptly. “The parlay! When’s the parlay?”

  “Relax, relax,” Omar said again. “They’re still negotiating. The Council agreed to one, but they and Nedi haven’t agreed on terms. Don’t worry.”

  “Hold still,” Calin said severely.

  “Here, here’s some water,” Omar said. He held the cup for Gerald, who discovered he was weak and shaky, drained from the fever, when he tried to grasp it himself. After he gulped half of it, he felt better and didn’t resist when Omar steered him back against the pillow. “Relax. Go back to sleep. You need the rest. I’ll be right here.”

  Gerald closed his eyes and slipped back into uneasy dreams.

  HE DRIFTED IN and out of sleep and fever dreams, never staying awake long enough to even know how much time had passed. Whenever he opened his eyes someone was there looking back at him—Omar, Erick, Calin or her sisters—and he would close his eyes and drift away again.

  Slowly, the fever broke. Calin’s herbs and ointments drew the infection out of his leg and Erick’s spells took away the pain and worked to heal the damage. The next time he opened his eyes, he felt clearheaded for the first time since falling ill, and he was able to sit up and look around.

  “What time is it?” he asked, after looking around for the windows that still weren’t there.

  “Around ten, I think,” Omar replied. “In the morning. We got here the day before yesterday. You’ve slept almost the entire time.”

  “Oh. The parlay?”

  “Tomorrow. Nedi was starting to fret about you not waking up on schedule. But how are you feeling?”

  Gerald took stock. He wasn’t muzzy or dizzy; his back and hip weren’t sore; his leg ached a
little when he moved it, but it was a far cry from the stabbing pain he had gotten accustomed to. “Not bad,” he said. “A little sore. A little stiff. But overall…not bad at all.”

  Calin bustled in just in time to hear that and she put her hands on her hips to glare at him. “And that’s no small miracle, after the way you mistreated yourself! I should never have agreed to let you leave. And now they want to drag you out to a parlay. Humans!”

  “Oh,” Gerald said slowly. “How am I going to get to the parlay?” He didn’t want to limp out with his canes, even assuming Calin would let him. Putting his injury on display would hardly be a rousing endorsement of their decision to hold the showcase in the dragonlands.

  “You’ll be sitting on the dragon’s back,” Omar said reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Nedi’s got it all worked out. As soon as she hears you’re awake, she’s going to be in here filling you in on everything.”

  “So before she hears,” Calin said, “you are going to take a bath, let me change your bandages, and have something to eat. She is not to overtire you. Nor is anyone else,” she added with a significant look at Omar, who held his hands up placatingly.

  Gerald looked around the bedchamber and was unsurprised to see his canes were nowhere to be found, but a familiar-looking wheeled chair was waiting in the corner. He didn’t protest it.

  AN HOUR LATER, he was clean and bandaged and sitting at the dining table in the bigger reception chamber, where the dragon could join them and reassure itself Gerald was all right.

  “Calin might never let me out of her sight again,” Gerald said ruefully while the dragon examined him carefully from every angle, “but I’m really okay.”

  “You probably shouldn’t be allowed out unsupervised,” Erick said. Gerald turned to see his cousin and Nedi coming in, trailed by piedlings bringing breakfast. “You had us worried for a while, Meathead.”

  “Yes, well, let’s worry about the Council instead. I’m fine. As you know—it’s your healing spell.”