Dragon Unleashed

by Grace Draven

  He stared up at the sky with the same expression she likely wore when Gilene told her the story. “Is that so?” His snort of disbelief made her chuckle. “I think we’ll wait a little longer. Is the stall emptied?”

  “Nathin and the others are breaking it down now. They should be back before nightfall.” She preened a little. “We even managed to sell a few things as we were trying to pack them away.” Every sale was a welcomed godsend, one more belsha to add to the communal treasure they depended on to see them through the hard winter months, when trade was practically nonexistent.

  Kursak clapped his hands. “May the gods bless last-chance buyers.” He noted the way Halani scanned the encampment. “If you’re looking for Malachus, he’s with his mare.” He laughed at her blush and whistled a tune as he walked away.

  She didn’t immediately seek Malachus, continuing to her wagon, where she washed her face, straightened her clothes, and brushed and rebraided her hair. The small mirror hanging from a hook on one of the wagon’s frame supports reflected a face with high, round cheekbones, a smooth brow, and a pale mouth. The sparkle in her eyes was new. As Malachus, and others, had pointed out on different occasions, hers was a somber gaze. Gray as a burial shroud, though Asil had once said her eyes were the color of dove’s wings. Halani liked that comparison a lot more.

  Why do you care how you look? a sly voice inside her asked.

  “Oh, shut it,” Halani muttered, giving her skirt one last shake to loosen any wrinkles, and left the wagon.

  As Kursak said, she found Malachus with Batraza. If she faced her mirror now, she had no doubt her smooth brow was gone. “What are you doing?”

  He paused, one hand on the pommel, the other on the cantle of the saddle someone had placed on Batraza’s back and cinched. He turned his head slowly, a sheepish expression settling over his features. “You’re back. Sooner than I expected.”

  “Obviously,” she replied, infusing all of her disapproval in that one word. “Who saddled Batraza?”

  He flinched. “I did.” His frustrated exhalation ruffled Batraza’s mane. “Halani, I hurt in places I didn’t think were supposed to feel pain, but I’m no longer an invalid. I need to move, need to make my muscles remember what they’re supposed to do. I came to these shores for a purpose, and I’ve put it off far too long. Besides, Batraza needs exercise.”

  She crossed her arms. “And you’re the only who can exercise her?”

  This time he turned fully to face her. “I want to exercise her.” He offered her a small bow. “Shall we negotiate? If I can get in this saddle without help, you can ride pillion to make sure I don’t fall off, and we’ll have an extra-long lesson tonight.”

  He’d obviously been among free traders long enough to adopt one of their less desirable traits—negotiating everything. Halani nibbled at her lower lip for a moment, considering. “That seems fair, but only a short, slow ride, and you must tell me the version of ‘The Sun Maiden’ you learned.” He might adopt the ways of bargaining, but he was a beginner. She was a master.

  “Done.” Having gained her agreement, he returned his attention to the saddle, testing its hold on Batraza’s back. The mare whuffled at him when he attempted to mount and failed.

  “Do you need help?” Halani called to him.

  “No.” Malachus didn’t look at her, and his short reply carried a breathless quality. He tried again and failed again.

  “Are you sure?

  “Yes.”

  He achieved success on the third try, with a vault into the saddle that belied the labor of the previous two attempts and the pallor of his features. He settled into place and offered Halani a victorious smile. He held out a hand to her. “Ready?”

  She refused to use his arm as leverage to mount behind him. It didn’t matter that it was his uninjured side. As he said, he hurt in places he didn’t think felt pain. She refused to make it worse. Instead, she had him ride Batraza to the nearest wagon, where she used the steps to put her level with Batraza’s back before climbing up behind Malachus. She rested her hands on his waist, worried she’d somehow press on the healing wound in his side or even the one on his hip. “Slow,” she reminded him.

  “Yes, mistress,” he said in a wry voice.

  The good-natured mare readily responded to her rider’s silent commands, ambling away from the camp to cut a path through the rye grass toward nowhere in particular. Halani swayed with the horse’s rolling gait, resisting the temptation to constantly ask Malachus how he felt, and simply enjoyed the view, the quiet, and the companionship.

  Malachus sat easy in the saddle. He’d told her that both he and the mare had journeyed far and long together, and Halani wondered where they had gone and what they had seen in their travels.

  Her thoughts drifted until one stilled and refused to flutter away with the rest. “Animals avoid you and Batraza, though neither of you have shown them any hostility. Is that part of your curse? Was Batraza cursed with you?”

  The flutter of tensing muscle teased her palm where it lay against his skin. Malachus turned his head a little so she could hear his reply. “I never thought of it, but it makes sense.”

  His answer only inflamed her curiosity. Free traders were a taciturn folk, a characteristic required in their vocation. Halani clamped her jaw shut to keep from spilling all the questions she wanted to ask Malachus about his curse.

  “Go ahead and ask,” he said. “If you don’t, you’ll burst apart.” His amusement made her blush but didn’t deter her.

  “Why are you cursed? Did you anger a god? Defile a temple? Take a sorcerer’s wife to your bed?”

  He laughed outright. “While those are all epic reasons for cursing someone, the answers are no, no, and no. I can see why you’re the caravan’s principal storyteller. My curse isn’t one wrought from malice but from desperation. Its details aren’t ones I can share, but the one who cast it didn’t mean for it to become a curse.”

  “Do you know how to break it?”

  “Yes, but it takes a special item to do it, and that’s something I don’t yet have.”

  The dread blossoming inside her threatened to choke Halani, not to mention the guilt fighting for space in her chest. Was this special item the draga bone Hamod had taken with him to Domora to sell? Her stomach twisted itself into knots. Her actions in warning her uncle to leave and get rid of the draga bone had been spurred by the certainty that the bone was valuable, coveted, and bad luck—three things that never boded well for whoever possessed it. Malachus had killed the two men who’d sold the bone to Hamod. If this was the item he hunted, she had no doubt he’d kill Hamod as well if he had to, to take it back. And who could blame him? A curse that threatened to immolate you without warning wasn’t the same as one that made your feet smell or your hair fall out. Had she condemned a man to an undeserved death in a misguided bid to protect her greedy uncle? Halani closed her eyes and stiffened her spine against a shudder.

  “You’ve gone quiet back there.” Malachus clicked to Batraza, turning her so the setting sun was behind them. “No more questions?”

  Thoughts reeling in a whirlwind of guilt, Halani struggled to gather them together so she could give him an answer that didn’t alert him to her distress. She had one question in her arsenal sure to distract him. “Why aren’t you married?”

  His amused snort eased her panic. “Who says I’m not?” His question ignited it again.

  Her hands fell away from his sides. “Well, you haven’t said, so I’m asking.” She thanked the gods for the calm tone of her voice. Why had she assumed he was unmarried? Just because he was a wanderer didn’t mean there wasn’t a wife waiting for him somewhere in far-off Winosia. The idea made her queasy.

  He allayed her fears when he said, “I’m not married. What woman would want a cursed husband?”

  Halani wondered if this was what it might be like if you climbed to the top
of a mountain and celebrated your victory, only to be pushed off the precipice. And then do it all over again. “One willing to help you break the curse.”

  “True,” he said. “Though I think I desire one who can cook like Marata or better.”

  She chuckled, forgetting her worries for a moment. “I want a wife like that myself.”

  They shared laughter, then more silence as they rode across a pasture of shorter grasses toward the haunted Pumon Ridges in the distance. After their last conversation and the racing thoughts it inspired, Halani was reluctant to remind him of her bargain but too curious to shunt it aside. “Will you tell me your Sun Maiden story now?”

  He sighed, any hint of amusement gone from his voice. “It isn’t the gladdening one you tell, Halani.”

  “I’d still like to hear it, if you feel up to telling me.”

  “I said I would, and I’ll keep my end of the bargain.”

  They rode farther away from the caravan, once more in silence, as Malachus gathered his thoughts. Halani found herself stroking his sides with her fingers and stopped, mortified.

  “Kansi Yuv,” he finally said, adopting the storyteller’s cadence, “was more ambitious than heroic. A common soldier who rose through the ranks until he gained the emperor’s attention and admiration for his feats in battle as well as his strategies for conquering his enemies. He won a lot of wars for his sovereign, but he wanted more. Wanted to rise to greater heights and bring his family the status and elevation reserved for the aristocracy.

  “He met a woman named Yain who fell in love with him and made her his concubine. She lived with him for a decade, content, until he discovered something about her that changed everything.”

  Instantly ensnared by the telling, Halani leaned into him so she could hear better. “What did he discover?”

  Malachus had grown stiffer in the saddle. “Yain wasn’t human but a draga female who’d taken on the guise of a woman. And she was Golnar’s daughter.”

  Halani’s eyes rounded. “Golnar had children?”

  “She did. I used to wonder why other stories always depicted her as a male draga. The texts about dragas stored in the monastery’s library described female dragas as bigger than the males, more aggressive, more formidable, and Golnar the fiercest of all. Maybe making her male in the tales made Kansi Yuv more heroic.”

  All the stories Halani told to entertain paying crowds and her fellow free traders featured a hero facing off against a male villain. There was never a heroine or a female villain. She remembered Gilene’s backstory of the charm she now wore. A Savatar goddess had created the first three beings to populate the earth: draga, horse, and woman. Had the first two been female as well? The progenitors of their kind, deserving of stories never shared?

  She sensed this version of “The Sun Maiden” bore no similarity to the one she told, a tragedy instead of a triumph. “What did Kansi Yuv do when he found out?”

  “Wielded his knowledge as a weapon.” Contempt dripped off Malachus’s words. “The gift of a draga would immortalize Kansi Yuv and make it so he’d have everything he desired, just short of the emperor’s throne itself. He just had to find a way to trap Golnar.”

  By now, he was rigid as a stone pillar. Even his body felt cold to her touch, despite the sun’s heat bearing down on them. Sensing her rider’s souring mood, Batraza tossed her head, snorting a protest.

  Halani reached to squeeze his muscular arm. “You don’t have to tell me the rest, Malachus.”

  It was just a story, an old history recited around campfires and passed down from one generation to the next. Its principal participants were long dead. Even Golnar’s skeleton no longer existed, destroyed in the conflagration of god-fire that swept the old capital. Yet Halani knew she hadn’t misheard the fury in Malachus’s voice, or the grief, as if the events that played out in the Sun Maiden story held a very personal sorrow for him.

  A rough palm covered her hand. “It needs to be shared, especially since it’s the true one and not that glorified pile of horseshit everyone on this side of the Raglun Sea believes.” He spat the words from between his teeth. She had only a glimpse of his profile, but it was enough to reveal the flare of his nostril and tight downturn of his mouth. Was this the expression the sell-swords saw just before they died? For the first time since she’d met him, Halani suffered a frisson of fear, not for him, but of him.

  If he sensed her faint withdrawal, he didn’t comment, only returned to his telling of the story of the Sun Maiden. “Kansi Yuv didn’t commission a gold statue of a woman to be made. He turned a living woman into one.” Halani gasped, horrified. “He betrayed Yain, had her bound, bespelled into docility, and painted from head to foot in gold paint like a treasure, believing the draga couldn’t resist entering the ravine, despite knowing it was a trap. He was right; she couldn’t. Golnar died trying to rescue her daughter. Yain watched, helpless, as her lover and his men shot arrows into her mother, then butchered her in front of her.”

  “Dear gods.” Halani barely managed to force the words past her tight throat. “Not a hero at all; a monster.” Sickened, she dreaded Malachus’s answer to her next questions. “What happened to Yain? Did she turn into a draga herself? Escape Kansi Yuv?”

  Where before his words nearly vibrated with rage, they now sounded dull, flat. “He gave Yain to the emperor as an additional gift, a coveted pet. But she escaped Kansi Yuv and the fate he planned for her. She died in a fire of her own making before he could deliver her to the palace.” A gravid silence swelled between them before Malachus said, “And that is the true story of the Sun Maiden. Of beautiful, unfortunate Yain, who loved a man who betrayed her and murdered her mother in front of her.”

  Malachus’s back was a blurry wall. Halani wiped away her tears with the heel of one hand to clear her vision. She sniffled several times and cleared her throat twice before she attempted to speak. “I know now why I’ve never liked the Sun Maiden story. I always thought it was because the draga were forever gone from these lands, hunted out of existence, with Golnar one of the last to die. The truth is worse. So much worse. Thank you for telling me, Malachus. I’m sorry it pained you to do so.”

  He brought Batraza to a gradual halt, looping the reins so they rested on her neck. With his hands free, he captured Halani’s where they lay against his sides and raised them until they rested across his breastbone. His heart beat steady under her palms. “I’m glad I told you,” he said in a low voice, its vibration adding to the percussion of his heartbeat. “Telling it to another is like lancing a boil and draining the poison. Even if no else hears this version of ‘The Sun Maiden,’ another person in these lands now knows it.”

  Halani leaned her head against his back, enjoying the feel of his hair against her forehead. “It’s no wonder the woman sitting on the Kraelian throne is so corrupt. So bloodthirsty.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Empress Dalvila is a descendant of Kansi Yuv’s line. Rumor has it that when the Savatar goddess destroyed Kraelag, Dalvila raged in her sickbed for days, not because the fire killed the entire population behind Kraelag’s walls but because it destroyed Golnar’s bones as well.”

  He slumped in her embrace, as if the invisible strings holding him tall and straight in the saddle broke. Alarmed he might pitch from the saddle, Halani wrapped her arms hard around him, no longer so cautious about his wounds. A fall from Batraza would hurt a lot worse.

  He didn’t fall, and his voice held both disgust and satisfaction. “It seems blood will out, even across centuries. Good for the Savatar goddess. After so long, she set Golnar completely free of her murderers.”

  The drone of insects and the swooping flight of bats on the hunt reminded Halani that twilight bore down on them, and they’d wandered a fair distance from the caravan. “We’ve ridden longer than I thought. How are you feeling?” She pressed a hand to his forehead. “No fever. That’s good.
”

  Malachus chuckled. “Ever the nurse. I’ll be stiff later. I can feel all the warning twinges now. I won’t be galloping toward the horizon anytime soon, but Batraza and I can manage a fast walk.”

  They made it back to the encampment in time for supper. Halani declined the request for a story, telling the others she had a reading lesson.

  “How dull,” one boy, just shy of his first beard and with a voice that resembled a goose’s honk, muttered to his mother. “I’d much rather tell a story.”

  His mother, seeing an opportunity, gave his shoulder a nudge and pointed to the spot where Halani usually stood to tell her tales. “Would you, now? Well, here’s your chance. Get up there and tell us a story!”

  A hue and cry of encouragement along with whistles and the shouted chant of “Tell us a story! Tell us a story!” burst from the crowd. Halani took that moment to abandon her audience for her wagon. Malachus followed after her, and the two set up their usual reading spot on the ground in front of the door, with the light of multiple lamps around them.

  While Malachus cleared a patch of ground down to the dirt and retrieved a slender stick to use as a makeshift quill, Halani brought her small brazier outside and started a fire to brew a pot of tea. When it was done, she poured a cup for him, sprinkling a pinch of kartom powder in it. He took it, giving the contents a cautious sniff.

  “It’s just a wild rose and strawberry tea,” she said. “There’s a little kartom in it. You won’t be sleepy like before and not so sore in the morning. Are you sure you feel up to a lesson?”

  He set the tea aside to cool. “Of course. I’d insist upon it if you tried to back out of our bargain.”

  Thrilled that he wanted to teach despite the earlier physical and emotional exertion, she threw herself into the lesson, reciting back to him the letters she painstakingly drew in the dirt with her stick.

  He smoothed the dirt flat at one point. “Now draw the letters you’ve learned tonight from memory and speak the sounds they make.”