Hunter chose that moment to amble over, and Nessa had to abandon her contemplations, saving them for another time.
“Let me in,” Hunter said, nudging Aoife’s tail with the toe of a boot. “Otherwise I’ll be forced to clamber over you.”
I think the word you’re looking for is “please”, Aoife murmured dryly. Did you think of that?
“I try to think as little as possible. I get myself in less trouble that way.”
Do you, now?
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “Sometimes it works.”
Nessa found herself smirking.
“Come on, you giant lizard,” Hunter huffed. “I would just like to nestle against you for some body warmth.”
Is that all I am to you? A breathing hot-water bottle?
Hunter scowled. “Please, oh, wonderful, magnificent dragon, let me sit with you for a short reprieve from this bitter cold?”
There, now, Aoife moved her tail for him to pass, was that so hard?
Hunter grumbled something under his breath as he settled beside Nessa, his shoulder bumping into hers as he shimmied to get comfortable, stretching out his long legs and crossing his ankles.
“That’s better,” Hunter sighed. “Now I can start to relax. I practically had a heart attack when we were separated. And when Aoife told me that you wanted me to go ahead without you, I nearly passed out.”
And called me a few choice names that I have yet to forgive you for, Aoife added, curling her tail closer around herself, surrounding Nessa and Hunter in a ring of comforting warmth. You were mean.
“Mean!” Hunter exclaimed with mock outrage. “I was not mean.”
I’m still of a mind to eat you, Aoife said, such was the level of your meanness.
“No eating Hunter,” Nessa admonished her companions, “and no being mean to dragons.”
“I wasn’t mean,” Hunter corrected, “I was panicked. I barely remember what I said.”
Oh, Aoife said brightly. There were insults to my intelligence, my species and my appearance. Not to mention a selection of words I’d rather not say in front of my Rider, lest she picks up some of your bad habits.
Hunter squirmed. “Ah, yes. It’s coming back to me now.”
Is it, now? Aoife mused. I’m waiting.
“Waiting for what?”
An apology.
Hunter blinked owlishly. “And why, pray tell, are you waiting for an apology?”
Aoife grunted, and with a level of dignity only a dragon could achieve, decided to ignore them both and rested her angular head on a front paw, closing her large eyes. Nessa and Hunter didn’t let that fool them, though. While Aoife may appear to be resting, she was by no means unaware of what was going on around her, too riled up for sleep.
Hunter slouched a little more, his eyes half-lidded, and rested his shoulder against Nessa’s. He sniffed and said, “You smell like a bonfire.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t smell any better.”
Hunter looked her over, and Nessa knew what question was about to follow. He’d already asked it a dozen times in the last hour or so.
“So, you’re sure you’re not hurt?”
Nessa stifled a sigh, just. She knew he was concerned and frightened, they all were, but having to answer the same question over and over again was getting on her nerves. Nessa drew upon her last reserve of patience, not wanting to snap and say something regrettable, and very tolerantly said, “Yes, Hunter. I am sure I’m unhurt.”
He still had the impudence to look unconvinced.
Nessa tried a different tactic and plucked at her top, forcing a smile. “Although I can’t say that your tunic has escaped the ordeal unscathed.” Just visible in the pale moonlight were little blackened spots, small holes where embers had burned through the linen.
“I noticed that,” Hunter said with a hesitant grin. “You owe me a new one now.”
“I suppose that would be the only polite course of action, wouldn’t it?”
“Afraid so.”
“Guess I’ll have to get a job and get some money together.”
“Or you could learn how to cheat at cards and join Orm on an excursion or two.”
Nessa laughed, then clamped a hand over her mouth. It felt too soon for laughter, for joy. A town had been reduced to nothing more than piles of rubble and ash, and its inhabitants…not to mention Chaos…
A sob caught in Nessa’s throat, and she turned, burying her head against Hunter’s chest. His arms went around her, and he held her gently, a hand rubbing her back, trying to console her.
“There, there,” he murmured. “It’s alright.”
“No,” Nessa moaned, “it’s not alright. None of what’s happened is alright. All those people… It’s my fault.”
Hunter jolted. “Whatever makes you say that?”
Nessa shrugged.
“Come on. Tell me. Why do you think it’s your fault? Have you hit your head? Gone mad?”
“I’m not mad.”
“You sound a bit mad.”
“Well…” Nessa searched for a witty response. “…I’m not,” she finished lamely.
“Then tell me why you feel this way.”
Nessa didn’t want to explain herself, yet the words came spilling out of their own accord, a confession of sorts.
“It’s my fault that we were there in the first place,” she whispered. “If I hadn’t wanted new clothes and a comfy bed in an inn, then we wouldn’t have been there and Chaos wouldn’t be…”
Hunter sucked in a breath. “We all decided to go to Arncraft. We all wanted to spend a night in comfort, under a solid roof with drinks and food and amusements aplenty.” Nessa squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out Hunter’s words, but he continued without pause, his tone quickly going from mild to heated. “And I’ll tell you that it wasn’t a frivolous thing, getting new clothing. It was a necessity. You had to have new clothes, and that’s that. Orm wanted to play a few games of cards and fleece some rich fops out of their not-so-hard-earned money. I wanted a soft mattress and a night where I’m not kicked by a bald giant. I also wanted to get some fresh supplies in the morning. Besides, it wasn’t like Chaos protested an awful lot, now, did he?” Hunter tugged on a lock of Nessa’s hair, making sure that she was listening. “We’re all adults. It was a group decision to go to Arncraft rather than another town or village. None of us are to blame.”
“Indeed,” Orm said, his voice deep with grief. “It seems as if it were nothing more than a weird sequence of events, a series of tragic happenings. An unavoidable mistake. One that we were, perhaps, destined to make.”
Nessa frowned, peering at him in the night-time gloom. “Are you implying that we were supposed to witness all of that?”
Orm shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. But it seems a little strange that we were there at the same time that King Kaenar decided to pay Arncraft a visit. Perhaps divine powers were in play, leading us unknowingly into the belly of the beast.”
“Divine powers?” Hunter scoffed.
“The king!” Nessa’s spine snapped straight, and she sat upright, leaving Hunter blinking in surprise as his arms fell from her. “The king?” she croaked. “Are you telling me that the Rider was the bloody king?”
Orm’s brows rose. “Oh, you didn’t know?”
“Of course I didn’t know,” Nessa hissed. “I have no bloody memories, remember?”
“Ah, yes. Now you mention it, I do remember.”
Nessa looked at Hunter for validation, hoping that Orm was playing a peculiar game with her. “The king?”
“The king,” Hunter confirmed with a nod of his head.
“But that would mean that I…”
“Ran straight into King Kaenar and his monster of a dragon?” Hunter finished for her. “Yep.”
Horror ripped through Nessa’s chest like a lightning strike, making the nape of her neck prickle and her heart skip a beat. “He looked right at me. He saw me. He smirked at me.”
“And we
should thank the Creator that he was too busy doing whatever the hell he was doing to chase after you.”
“Do you think there’s a chance he knows about me. As in he could tell that I was a Dragon Rider, or…or an Old Blood?”
Orm scratched his chin, his fingernails rasping against the bristles of stubble. “From what you told us, I would say not. I don’t think you would be alive if he did.”
Nessa fidgeted. What she had told them… She wondered if she should fill in the parts of her story that she had so far left out.
After escaping from the burning ruins of Arncraft and running into Hunter, it had been a whirlwind of nonstop questions as they retreated further from the town, and meeting up with Aoife and Orm was followed by even more questions. The four of them had stood on a rise for a time, not far from the foothills of the Clēa Mountains, watching as the town continued to burn, a ruddy ember on the horizon with black smoke belching into the sky, creating a dark stain that blotted out stars and smothered much of the moon’s luminosity.
It had been a long while before the Rider and dragon had departed, flying leisurely away without any effort to extinguish the fires. Power had seeped from them, spilling over the land in a sickening wave, heavy and filled with sinister threat. It had been strong enough to even make Orm flinch and Hunter shift with unease as it rolled over them.
Only once the Rider and dragon disappeared from sight, their magic fading to nothing more than a bad taste in her mouth, did Nessa regale the others with her tale of escape. She told them how, after being separated from Hunter, she had seen a path through the fires and she’d taken it. She explained that, like so many of the town’s inhabitants, she had unknowingly been channelled towards the square where the Rider and dragon awaited her. The flyovers may have seemed random at first, but they weren’t. They were strategic, intentionally leaving small paths through the town. They had wanted as many people in that square as possible.
With her hands trembling, Nessa had told her companions how the Rider had stared at her, and how she had become frozen, unable to run. She’d been helpless and could do nothing but watch as the Rider had cut his palms and spilled his blood, summoning the wave of pure power from the mound of bodies, drawing it into himself.
It had been Orm’s speculation that she had been released from her bonds by a lapse of concentration on the Rider’s part, not that she had broken free by herself. Nessa hadn’t corrected him. She had intentionally left out how she’d sensed the dark entity, how it had briefly awoken something in her, something that had shocked the Rider.
Nessa didn’t want them to know that the power coming from the bodies had been drawn to her too, without her ever calling to it. Was she wrong in keeping that from them? Maybe. But Nessa found that the words needed to explain what happened, what it had felt like, evaded her. Not even Aoife knew, thanks to Nessa having kept her mind shielded during the encounter.
Hunter plucked at one of her arm warmers. “He couldn’t know you’re a Dragon Rider. Could he?” He looked to Orm.
Orm was unsure. “Since she’s alive and the mark was covered, I think it’s safe to say that her being a Rider is unknown to him. However, I worry that he might have been able to sense the otherness about her.”
An image flashed in Nessa’s mind’s eye, his surprise when the thing inside of her had awoken. He’d sensed something alright, and it had shocked him.
Nessa opened her mouth, about to make her confession.
Orm began thinking aloud, cutting her off.
“Although saying that,” he mused, “if he had even the slightest inkling that she was an Old Blood, then he would have ended her without hesitation. Perhaps her shielding her mind was a saving grace?”
And something that I’m still not particularly happy about, Aoife grumbled.
I’ve said sorry, Nessa whined. Multiple times. I only did it to keep you safe from them.
Be that as it may, I don’t appreciate being locked out of my Rider’s mind during something like that. You scared me half to death.
But it may have kept us both alive and out of the king’s clutches, so how about cutting me a little slack? I’m still getting used to this whole “bonded to a dragon” thing.
Aoife sighed softly, a puff of smoke rising from her nostrils, thin and curling. Shall we call a truce, then?
Nessa settled back against Aoife’s side, the dragon’s warmth bleeding through her ruined top. Indeed, we should. Truce.
Truce, Aoife murmured. For now.
Nessa rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to Hunter and Orm, who seemed oblivious to her silent conversation.
“Well, since it’s unlikely that the king knows Nessa is an Old Blood or a Dragon Rider,” Hunter was saying, “we have to wonder why he was there in the first place.”
“The rebels?” Not even Orm sounded convinced of that, and he was the one suggesting it.
“They’re little more than a rumour. A network of lazy criminals” Hunter said. “Anyway, if they are real, then they hardly deserve to be called ‘rebels’. From what I’ve heard, they do very little in the way of rebelling.”
Nessa’s curiosity got the better of her. “Then what do they do, if they don’t rebel?”
Hunter shrugged. “Smuggling, mostly. Sometimes, if they’re feeling gutsy, they might assassinate some lord or another, or rob them blind. They’re hardly worth the king coming all this way to deal with them himself.”
“If he wanted the Arncraft branch of rebels dealt with,” Orm added, “then he would have simply sent out one of the other Riders instead.”
“Anyway,” Hunter said, “if he wanted to deal with so-called ‘rebels’, then he would have destroyed The Hidden City long ago. And let’s not forget about the pirates that operate out of Emerence. If I were King Kaenar, they would be at the top of my little list of people to massacre.”
“Ah, yes,” Orm whispered wistfully. “The pirates. Oh, how I miss Rozalin.”
“Rozalin?” Nessa whispered, intrigued by the faraway look in Orm’s eyes.
“A flame-haired bitch of a woman,” Hunter murmured. “Has a couple of ships under her command.”
“She’s a pirate?”
“Indeed she is, and a pretty fearsome one at that. Her disposition matches her hair, fiery and wild.”
“And she’s a hellcat in the bedroom too,” Orm sighed happily. “I had claw marks on my back for a week after our, ah, rendezvous.”
Hunter groaned, “You’re an animal.”
“So was she.” Orm grinned smugly.
Nessa grimaced. “That’s more information on Orm’s antics than I ever wanted to know.”
I concur, Aoife grumbled.
“So, getting back to the matter at hand,” Nessa said, trying to steer the discussion away from Orm’s past shenanigans. “If the king didn’t go there because of me, or the rebels, then why was he there? There must be a reason.”
“I’m sure there is,” Orm agreed. “However, whatever it may be, it’s escaping me at the moment.”
“Perhaps it has something to do with whatever magic he used,” Hunter suggested. “The power he summoned?”
“Maybe,” Orm murmured, gazing up at the moon as if it might hold the answer. “Maybe.”
Nessa wrapped her arms around herself as a chill crept over her. “And what, exactly, was the magic he used?”
Orm bit the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know.” He turned and looked at the ruddy ember on the horizon. “A part of me feels like we’re better off not knowing.”
Chapter 18
None of them had much sleep that night, which was both a blessing and a curse. At most, they garnered a few hours of restless dozing; their eyes sliding closed just long enough for the nightmares to come calling. Sleep hadn’t been their intention, but as it was, exhaustion wore them down in the end, putting an end to their dissections and speculations. They dozed where they had been conversing, sat in a small circle, Aoife curled loosely around them, her gemstone-esque
body acting as a partial windbreak, protecting them from the worst of the autumn cold.
Time became a strange thing, a fickle thing. Seconds felt like hours and minutes were all too brief, gone in a blink of an eye. It was in this strange state of stretched timelessness that Nessa entered into an odd, dream-like haze.
The images were broken and jumbled, pale and faded as if she was looking through misted glass. Nessa saw herself walking in a forest at springtime, the trees’ leaves fresh and green, casting dappled shade on the ruins she explored whilst being urged forwards by a cunning raven. Walls of pale stone were broken and crumbling, concealed beneath trailing fingers of ivy and honeysuckle. She saw herself in a dark, underground room, the floor covered in a whispering carpet of decay, walking over to a mirror of liquid mercury, the surface covered with eerie, flickering lights.
The dream-like visions showed her things too strange and outlandish to surely be real. Nessa saw roaring dragons, flames of blues, greens and purples spewing from their mouths as they flew over a battlefield on which armies of silver and gold were fighting each other. There were men with antlers…women with large cat eyes… The sky filled with clouds of arrows… A river of blood flowed down a hillside, a waterfall of gore… Screams filled her ears, a cacophony of noise that was muddled by the whispers of a creature unseen, offering tantalising titbits of secrets and truths, of promises and prophecies.
With those whispers echoing in her ears, all light seemed to fade. Shadows crowded around a mighty throne on which a man sat, a crown perched on his head and a golden torc resting around his neck. He toyed with it, his fingers rubbing over the fine woven threads, over the black diamonds and the dark, gleaming opals…
Nessa shot upright, pain lancing down her thigh from a rather sharp kick.
She scowled and turned, finding Hunter twitching in his troubled sleep, his eyelids fluttering wildly and his limbs spasming erratically, his muscles straining and flexing as he fought against devils only visible to him.
The tension slowly eased from her, and Nessa abandoned her intention of slapping Hunter for her rude awakening. She swiped away the sweat peppering her forehead and leaned back against Aoife, seeking warmth and companionship, and a bit more time before she’d have to deal with the troubles that daybreak would surely bring.
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