“Wait. Can you see the images I’m giving her?”
A slight pause. “Yes. I can see when she’s seeing it. But not when you’re thinking it.”
SHIT! Flames burst over Elena’s face, rife with embarrassment. That meant… that meant he saw her projecting the image of her and Garek cradling the dragon. Had she imagined anything else incriminating? But wait, Garek was thinking to the dragon as well. Had she caught any thoughts from him, originally believing them to be from the dragon?
Oh, Christ, the possibilities for humiliation were endless. “I-I don’t think I’ve seen anything from you yet.” Yes, nice save, Elena.
“The implications behind this…” Yvonne’s voice went contemplative. “I’d like to know more. Also, take a right turn. There’ll be steps. They’re shallow, but you better move slow.”
Garek let out a little groan. “Why didn’t anyone think to bring even one light?”
“Because none of us were expecting we’d have to escape. Or an attack. Though we did have warning there might be an attempt, thanks to you, Garek. Tara and Janus informed me of that letter.”
“Letter?” The word escaped Elena’s lips before she had time to think it through. When was this?
“I had a letter smuggled into me, asking if I’d kill the dragon. I refused. I think they’ve found out I’ve refused. They have eyes and ears everywhere.”
Another cold chill swept through Elena. She hadn’t mentioned about her mother’s visit.
She also didn’t intend to. However… she had also told Yvonne the stall her parents worked at. That was appropriate, hopefully. She’d given the information. They didn’t need to know anything more. Still, she couldn’t help but feel guilty, like she was holding back a loaded secret that others would curse her down for.
Again, the image of them holding hands was pushed into her mind by the dragon, but she knew the baby didn’t have a concept of romance like humans did. The baby was fixated on the scarring on their palms. Posing a wordless question.
“I don’t know what to say to her,” Elena admitted in the dark, wincing when her left hand hit empty air, and she turned right as instructed, following the other sounds, gingerly stepping until she reached the ledge of the first stair. “She’s asking about our Bond, I think.”
“She is,” Garek agreed. After a moment, a new, foreign image tickled her mind. Garek showing the baby dragon something new. A male unicirim, and a female rider, in a similar pose to the tapestry hanging on the wall. The dragon feasted upon this image, excitement bleeding into the images she attempted to form, but they were blurry, inconsistent, struggling with concepts she didn’t understand.
Certainly not war or fight or why the pose seemed heroic. Why would the dragon understand concepts like that?
They lapsed into silence, concentrating on not tripping over, breaking their necks and dying. The stairwell, because Elena sensed they were going around in a circle, seemed to get thinner and thinner. The air worsened, becoming so foul that she kept needing to pinch her nose, absorbing it only through a bitter taste in her mouth instead. She heard Garek curse again, and unease radiate from the dragon.
Footsteps pattered into more even spacing, and Elena breathed a sigh of relief, having not fallen unceremoniously to her doom, or in an embarrassing heap on top of anyone else, because she didn’t think she’d be able to live it down.
“Two lefts,” Yvonne’s voice scratched the darkness, and Elena did bump into Garek twice, obtaining a grunt from him, likely knocking the breath out of him one time.
Sorry, she’d muttered each time, and he’d merely grunted in response, too busy focusing, or maybe a little irritated. More unease radiated from the dragon, but there was also a crack of light waiting for them after the second turn, which a silhouette marched up to. Elena’s eyes feasted on that tiny sliver of light like a dog after scraps, her pupils contracting as she took it in. More light bled in once Yvonne slid it aside, and they were outside the castle, in some small, sheltered patch which looked like an abandoned, crumbling tower in an obscure part of the castle’s vast grounds. Blinking against the influx of light, Elena registered no less than two unicirim, and one exile dragon patiently waiting, partially draped out of sight on one side of the tower.
“Here’s our rides,” Yvonne said, and Elena bumped into Garek, who had stopped dead, just to glare at the water witch.
“Where in damnation are you taking us?” Garek said, tone hostile.
“Somewhere safe. So very safe that hopefully no one will be interrupting and assassinating any of you for a while,” Yvonne said, beckoning them forward. All of them could probably fit on the exile alone, but Yvonne seemed to be choosing one of the unicirim to ride instead, while the other trotted behind the exile. Garek and Elena reluctantly crawled up onto the exile via his or her wing joint, colored a bright, almost luminescent green.
Leaving Bastion scared her. The only weak spot between realms that she knew of was twenty miles outside the city. If these people took her someplace else, she had no idea how to get back home at all. And for all she knew, her mother might be searching for her right now, trying to rescue her daughter and bring her back to the market. If Yvonne hadn’t already figured out how to reach the Realm Market without an encoded signet ring, since not everyone would be able to find it.
The exile dragon beneath her lifted their great wings, and with a leap and rough swing of those bat-like sails, they wobbled into the air, before soaring up and away, two unicirim flying with them. The cold chill bit into Elena, and all of them had to lie down on the dragon’s back, stabilizing themselves by hanging onto the spikes that ridged out from their scaly backs. The scales and spikes helped provide excellent grip, but the dragon’s lurching, clawing movement through the sky flipped Elena’s stomach in an entirely unpleasant way.
No, she wasn’t much of a fan of flying at all. She tolerated human airplanes, just about, but always had a habit of clinging onto the armrests. She wasn’t scared… just cautious. But this, this was something else entirely. Clinging onto the back of a gigantic scaly beast as it flapped through the air, knowing that if she let go of what she held onto, she’d likely plummet and die an unpleasant death – not exactly reassuring. She let out a squeak when Garek reached for her hand. Not expecting the contact, she glanced at him, and saw that he was every bit as pale as she felt. All of a sudden she felt much more reassured of her position, of being nervous, because it wasn’t just her. Someone else looked as though they were about three seconds from vomiting as well.
The baby dragon, of course, loved the wind pushing into her face, and her claws dug perfectly into the scales.
Flying through the frosty, evening tinged air felt a lot better when holding someone’s hand. Garek’s grip was warm and soothing, even past that strange unease close body contact gave them. She tried talking to Garek, but it was hard to hear one another over the winds, so they eventually gave up, just focusing on comforting each other for the journey. Wherever it took them.
6
Garek
Garek hated forced isolation, and the cold chill of snow. He preferred the hustle and bustle of cities or thieving towns, because the inns were always full of travelers or people looking to swap information. Out here in the ass end of nowhere, there was nothing but a tiny village for miles around, and that tiny village had one inn, which only held hard liquor and cheap, piss-poor beer, which was about the extent of their crafting abilities in this weather. With his wings clipped by the antimagic cuffs, Garek spent an increasing amount of time in isolation being bored, irritated, and picking at the bindings, seeing if he could engineer an escape, somehow, or just have some damn access to his magic. Being without it made him naked, and being without magic in the middle of nowhere generated fury in his soul for his captors.
Why did they have to put him somewhere with snow?
Their new prison used to be some ancient royal holiday house, somewhere in the center of Albalon, and not too far from where the royals we
re gathering their army for an assault on River’s End. The house itself had a disused, overgrown garden, and little terraced seats on the sides of the grass, as if people used to watch performances long ago. A couple of servants had been shipped in to deal with the mess inside the house, and Garek slept in one of the servant rooms, like Elena. The exile dragon was their live-in guard, and a few more dedicated sentries also patrolled outside, and slept in the small side houses by the main building. The location itself was in steep, mountainous area, with only one viable path downwards to the tiny mountain village that attracted only miners, trappers, and those accustomed to isolation and seeking treasures by themselves.
Sometimes, the royals and the witches dropped in to check on them. But mostly, for the next few weeks, Garek dealt with the isolation, a rapidly growing dragon able to beam pictures in his mind, and Elena, who locked herself away in her room for long periods of time, sometimes emerging with ink stains on her hands and cheeks. They held nice, light conversation, digging more into the things each other liked and disliked.
Such as, for example, Elena loved the snow, and the peace and quiet it offered. She preferred heating up from being cold, as opposed to cooling down when hot. She knew a fair about of Albanese news regarding the conflict between the dragons and unicirim, and talked about showing Garek earth at some point, because for a non-magical realm, it did boast some magical views. He wasn’t entirely opposed to how her face animated when she talked about earth, about her first ever mission as a thief, a teenager tagging along with her mother, and the friends she knew who had parents working on other stalls. The market’s inhabitants had plenty of bars to visit, and sometimes they organized day trips to one of the many realms accessible via the gates.
Garek shared what he could about himself, glossing over his childhood years, because they were blurred, anyway, and he’d spent a lot of it frightened he wouldn’t hit his quotas, and some of it yearning for something different. Life with Sylas, however… Garek had been put through his paces. Taught how to hunt for information in bars without seeming too obvious, how to cheat at cards, how to spit out his alcohol in a spare bottle if playing drinking challenges and needing to stay sober. He avoided the first prostitute, paid by his fellow thieves to “make a man of him”, and described the sheer freedom of flying through the air in his unicirim form, how exhilarating it felt to spread his wings.
How he loved slipping into the darkness of his magic as he flew over cities and watched their lights dancing in the night, how evening was his favorite time of the day, because that was when the bars were most crowded.
Something was changing underneath all their conversational brevity. Something intangible, unspoken, tense enough to be cut. A sense of loss in the space they shared with one another, as if something permanent had been sliced out of him. Like they should be touching, but not without that missing part, hidden behind the nausea and headaches.
He hated that, too.
Right now, Garek sipped the last of his piss-poor beer, leaning back against the rickety wooden chair doing his spine in. The front door of the bar rattled ominously from a draught of wind, and the two fireplaces in the room flickered from the extra air.
Two guards watched him from their corner of the mining inn, while he sat with two long bearded folks, absently playing cards for a few extra coins. A bottle of whiskey sat by his elbow, and he poured shots into a small glass whenever he felt like a strong bite of alcohol on his tongue, as opposed to the terrible beer. The two men were also liberally pouring from the same bottle.
“Mining accident last week,” Henry said, wiping a few drops of drink off his yellow-gray beard. “That Travis fellow who wanted to strike gold. He went too high, in the snows, and heard it was a cave in. Or was it an avalanche?”
“Both,” Emmett supplied, who concentrated hard on his cards. He’d been losing all evening, and had switched to water in order to keep himself sober enough to fare better. Aside from these two men, the barkeep and the helmeted guards, there was only one other traveler in the inn, wrapped up in a woolen gray cloak, face obscured as they nursed their drink. Snow fell outside, dusting the window ledges, covering the icy glaze of ground with even more powder.
“Has anyone successfully managed to find gold here?” Garek asked, purely out of professional interest. Might be a career choice for him in the future since he couldn’t exactly go back to Smuggler’s Den without being killed. Being a liability was quite the inconvenience.
“If they do, they don’t say,” Emmett answered. “Wise, in my opinion. Wouldn’t put it past some o’these folks to do something untoward to get their pickings. Partnerships are risky business out here. One little shove at the right time, and you’re halfway down a gully with a broken arm, freezing to death in the cold.”
Well, Garek thought sourly, he certainly understood why they’d chosen this place as a hideaway. You’d have to be insane or desperate to choose to stay here, and since the only real social interactions you got was from the inn, you’d probably soon turn into a budding alcoholic. He could already feel the gut-rot drinks settling inside, probably forming a permanent coat there that’d never be washed off. “Seems to me people should stick together in these areas, have each other’s backs. Accidents can happen, and it’d be better to have a partner who could haul you out than to have one slip be the end of you.”
“That’d be the logic,” Emmett agreed amiably. “But folks up here are a stubborn lot. Want to do everything by themselves. Won’t accept maybe they’d be safer off with someone, because they’re quite content to mistrust and be misers over their own paltry earnings.” He blinked at his shot of whiskey, likely calculating if it’d inhibit his judgment, before shrugging and downing it. “Henry and me hope to make it big. We’ve saved a little something up, but we don’t want to return to civilization until we’ve reached our goals.”
“Sensible. Minimal living has to be easy on the pursestrings, right?” Garek smiled at the old timers. Briefly, he entertained the idea of stealing from them, and just as quickly, let it slither past. It was a bad impulse of his. Even with people he liked and trusted, his mind conjured up probable scenarios where he’d rob them, how he’d do it, if he’d get away with it without them knowing. He hadn’t actually robbed anyone he liked, but his mind enjoyed the theory behind it.
Henry, now staring morosely at his cards, let out a world-weary sigh. “Got nothing to spend it on right now, really. No brothel within miles. Wish I still had my woman. Don’t get any in these places, and we were sweet on one another for a while. Not so anymore.”
“Oh?” Garek privately thought about Elena. She’d insisted on wanting to come to the inn for some company, but Garek had warned her off, sometimes too harshly. There were absolutely no women in the village, which was more a collection of ramshackle huts and people retreating to hermit lives, and he was certain that Elena’s presence would invite potential danger. Desperate people did desperate things.
Plus, though this was the tiniest thought that didn’t dominate the others – he wanted to keep her for himself.
Garek listened absently to Henry’s tale of woe, though it sounded like the reason for the break up was all Henry’s fault, though he kept teasing in excuses, justifications, that it was his “nature as a man” to want to spread his seed in other, particularly buxom women.
Damnation nonsense, he wanted to say. But he smiled, laughed, and acted as if he agreed, because it was always worth having people receptive to his company in the arsenal. Never knew when you might need to call upon them. The dragon in his mind was projecting images to Elena, but he grasped at them as well. Elena playing with a dragon now significantly bigger than her. The beast was now over two meters tall, and about triple that length wise, due to her whiplike tail. She was now able to understand snippets of the human language, and both Garek and Elena struggled to teach her about humans in a way that didn’t make humans seem like callous monsters.
Cleaning out one last hand, leaving with a few
extra coins than before, Garek also paid for two bottles of whiskey to carry back up the mountain path. His guards trudged behind him, surly and bickering about the cold weather, even though they had far more layers on than Garek did. The guards, in Garek’s opinion, would be far too easy to kill. Trained fighters couldn’t resist a knife slipped under the ribs at night, but so far, Garek hadn’t thought of a proper justification to kill them.
He hadn’t yet figured out if any of them had magic, though he suspected Yvonne wouldn’t dare leave two shadow witches in this cursed place without some magical power in the mix. A pleasant buzz hummed in his body from the drink, and when he made it back up the steep, singular path to the private grounds some thirty minutes later, using a key to get through the only entrance there, he saw Elena riding the dragon, giggling in an entirely non-mature way as the dragon lifted her wings and attempted to flap them hard, but not making any progress off the ground.
He watched them both silently for a moment, simply smiling, not wanting to intrude on the rare bubble of enjoyment. It was… nice to see people raptured in joy, rather than grousing about their miserable and entirely self-imposed existences. Had she smiled like that as a child? When they had first met? He wished he could remember. Not that it mattered now, because all they simply had to do was relearn each other once again, but it would be pleasant to fill that black spot in his memory with her.
Sometimes, he wondered if that absence in his memory was what led him down this path. Maybe they’d been great friends together, made future plans as great friends sometimes did. Or maybe they suffered from a fallout of a sort.
Maybe he had caused some sort of rift between Elena and her parents, and they took matters into their own hands to ensure she had flushed him out of mind, and he for her.
It maddened him in a way to have this gap in his mind, this part that should have been his, but got ripped away. For storm’s sake, they were Bonded. They were meant to have shared a future together. Maybe not as lovers (still, that thought whispered across his mind anyway), but just as people bound together by fate. Anchored by destiny. You didn’t mess with fate.
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