Dragon Unleashed

by Grace Draven

  The writing part of it she embraced, marking quick flourishes in the dry dirt, celebrating inwardly at each approving nod he gave. The verbal part was harder, more embarrassing. Halani sounded out the letters, peering at Malachus’s face and mouth as he enunciated slowly, exaggerating the movement of his lips, tongue, and teeth. She copied his actions, feeling as if something pulled and twisted her cheeks into weird shapes.

  “I’m sure I look foolish,” she said after one practice with a letter combination that sounded fine when spoken at natural speed and bizarre when enunciated slowly.

  “You don’t look foolish at all,” he assured her, lamp flame reflected in his dark eyes.

  A fall of heat cascaded down her back that had nothing to do with the lamps, the brazier, or even the summer evening, and everything to do with his gaze.

  He showed mercy after that, allowing her to practice more of her writing. Halani bent to draw one of the letters, only to have her braid suddenly escape its pins. It uncoiled in a long rope, falling on her sketched letter to smear its shape. She set the stick down. “Hold on,” she told Malachus, reaching up to find the pins still in her hair. “Let me pin this back up, and I’ll redraw it.” She halted when he caught her wrist, an arrested look in his eyes.

  “Wait. Would you unbraid it? I’ve wondered what it looks like loose.”

  A simple request, without the flowery adornment of compliments to the color of her hair or its length, and yet Halani found herself eager to grant it. “As you wish.”

  She sat down cross-legged on one of the blankets, skirts flowing over her knees, the thick plait coiled in her lap, and parted the tight weave. She started at the tip, working upward until she reached her nape, where she separated the curls with her fingers until they cascaded over her shoulders to cover her lap and spill onto the blanket. One springy curl fell in front of her eyes, and she blew it out of the way before capturing it to tuck behind her ear. “Now you can see why I keep it braided,” she said, suddenly self-conscious under his heavy-lidded stare. “Sometimes I think it’s a creature all its own, getting into everything, tangling around everything, including itself.”

  Malachus remained silent for what seemed like centuries. Unsure what to do or say, Halani waited, wondering what thoughts swirled behind that impenetrable gaze. “My gods,” he said in reverential tones. “It is your glory, isn’t it.”

  Thank the gods she was sitting or his comment would have made her fall. “It’s just hair.”

  As if ensorcelled, he slid closer, arms outstretched until he buried both hands in her hair, lifting the curling locks to let them spiral around his arms and fingers before falling away. “Just hair,” he breathed.

  He was close enough to her now that she could return the gesture. His hair, as thick as hers but straight as an evergreen bough and as dark as his eyes, fanned across the back of her hand. “Yours is nicer, easier to tame. My uncle says if I left mine unbound, I could trap a wild horse with it.”

  “Or a draga.”

  She smiled at the odd notion. “That would be impressive. I’d be famous.”

  He continued admiring her hair with both his eyes and his hands, separating one curl from the rest to straighten, then let it go so that it bounced back into its natural coil. “Asil’s hair only has waves.”

  “We think the curls come from my father, though we’ll never know.”

  He turned his full attention to what she was saying. “You never knew him?”

  Asil’s history, shrouded in shame and secrecy, was something Hamod forbade anyone in the caravan to discuss. It was the one thing Halani had never argued with him about for fear of upsetting her mother. Yet here she sat, tempted to tell Malachus at least some part of her story. Not all. Not the details, just the surface facts that gave Halani a past, no matter how dark or brutal. Hamod wasn’t here, and there was no one around her and Malachus at the moment to eavesdrop on their conversation. Besides, what shame there was, it didn’t belong to Asil or to her.

  She tamed her hair into one long skein, then split it into three smaller ones before plaiting it again. She spoke as she braided. “No. My mother was abducted by slavers before my uncle formed his own caravan. The wagon master he and my mother traveled with didn’t care that she’d been taken. You’ve seen her behavior. Strange, childlike. Uncle says a head wound when she was still on lead strings made her that way. He took care of her after their parents died from disease. Since no one in that caravan was interested in rescuing her, he set off by himself, found her in the Ryndamiss slave markets a few months later, and escaped with her. Neither of them knew she was pregnant with me by then.”

  Silence had weight. Sometimes it was a light thing, gossamer as a spider’s web and just as enduring. Other times, it raised the hair on one’s nape and made the heart beat a trebled rhythm. And sometimes it became a thing alive. For Halani, it was this living silence that hovered between them after her revelation. Her breath hung in her nose and mouth as all expression bled away from his face, only to rush back with a shock wave that seemed to age him ten years.

  Halani looked away, unable to face what she knew she’d see in his eyes. Revulsion maybe, but worst of all, pity. A fingertip nudged her chin up, and she stared into dark eyes lacking any pity or disgust. Instead, they shone with an admiration that made her gasp softly at the sight.

  “I think your mother is probably one of the most remarkable women I’ve ever known.”

  It was Halani’s turn to crumple like a puppet with the strings cut. She smiled, caught between the urge to cry and the urge to laugh. She settled for widening her smile to a grin. “Thank you, Malachus. I think she is too.”

  Caught in a mutual spell of desire and shared sorrows, they leaned toward one another. His lips brushed hers, soft as a down feather. Another brush, a little harder, a little more open so that his breath teased the sensitive skin on the underside of her upper lip. A third pass, and this kiss bore no resemblance to the first two. Scorching hot and openmouthed, pulling a soft groan from the bottom of Halani’s chest as Malachus’s tongue filled her mouth to sweep its contours before retreating to do the same to her lips. She mimicked his actions, making him moan as well.

  She was on her back and he lying half on top of her when the sound of voices drawing closer brought her back to her senses. Malachus retreated to his place on the blanket before standing with a lithe grace she envied. While his knees looked none the worse for it, her own had all the rigidity of water after that soul-searing kiss. Malachus reached down and helped her up. His eyes blazed in the semidarkness, and his chest rose and fell with staccato breaths. They stared at each other for long moments. She was tempted, oh so tempted, to invite him inside her wagon and finish what they’d started the day she brought him wounded and unconscious into the free trader camp.

  It would be so easy. And later, when he left, it would be so crushing.

  She stepped back from the temptation he represented and all the heartache that came with giving in to it. “We’re done with the market and will start packing in earnest tomorrow, so the day will start even earlier than usual.” She didn’t dare offer to check his wounds. “I’ll leave you to find your bed.”

  Taking one of the lamps, she left the rest to him to snuff and put away, along with the blankets they shared. He said nothing as she passed close by him to climb the wagon steps, though he brushed her skirts with his hand. Halani paused, one foot on the last stair tread, one on the wagon’s threshold. Her lamp highlighted the hunger in his expression. She suspected she wore the same look. “You know, you’re welcome to stay longer and travel south with us until you’re fully healed.”

  “Ah, fair woman,” he said on a sigh. “Were my journey and task of a different sort, I might ask you to go with me.”

  Her sigh matched his. “Were my obligations of no importance, I might say yes.”

  “I won’t forget you once we part, Halani of
the Lightning.” He caught her free hand and pressed a kiss to her palm before letting go.

  Halani crossed her threshold and closed the door behind her, staring at the comforting home she’d always known and seeing the cage it had just become.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Were he not in danger of literally going up in flames, Malachus would have tried to coax Halani to his bed in the provender wagon or wooed her for an invitation into hers. He kept an eye on her until she disappeared inside the wagon, then turned his attention to his hands. Smoke streamed in tendrils from his fingertips and wafted from the confines of his sleeves.

  Relieved that the voices that interrupted their captivating kiss hadn’t drawn closer, he strode away from the camp, avoiding the corrals and livestock pens. Every prey animal in range would sense a predator approaching and raise an alarm. The draga within him was awake, restless, wrenched out of its enforced torpor by Malachus’s desire for a woman he had no right to pursue and every reason to crave.

  He halted his solitary trek in the middle of the open field he and Halani had ridden across earlier, and stared up at the few bright stars winking back at him through a vaporous veil of clouds. Here, with the darkness thick around him and the silence of night closing in, he could sink into his own thoughts, douse the internal fire roused by a free trader healer, and remember the main reason he was in this unfamiliar land in the first place.

  The mother-bond’s pull on him never ceased; it only waxed or waned with either distance or the manipulation of sorcery. Ship captains might envy such a consistent instrument of navigation.

  Now his senses veered not west, but southeast, into the lands of the Kraelian Empire instead of the steppes that belonged to the Savatars and other horse nomads like them. He was tempted to call down the lightning once more, let it blast through his body in a javelin of white fire, leaving images and convulsing muscles in its wake. The last time he’d done so, the lightning had shown him Halani. Lightning divination was often mysterious and abstruse, open to numerous interpretations, but it was never wrong. Halani didn’t posses the mother-bond, but she was tied to it in some way.

  His birthright still eluded him, as it had since looters stole it from the Sovatin necropolis long ago. Then the search had been a matter of pride. Now it had become one of survival. He had matured to an age that demanded a first transformation from the guise of a man to the full form of a draga. He hadn’t lied when he told Halani he was cursed. His mother’s magic, meant to protect him, placed a heavy burden on him as well.

  A small flame burst across the fingertips of his right hand and marched merrily toward his wrist. Startled by the swift change from smoke to fire, Malachus smothered the flames with his other hand. The draga inside snarled its frustration, and he worked feverishly to calm it, turning his thoughts to mundane things.

  He recalled an earlier conversation with Seydom, who had done him a favor and promised to keep it secret from Halani.

  The free trader had taken the belshas Malachus had given him and returned to the caravan from the Goban market bearing a thick square of cloth. He joined Malachus in the provender wagon and placed the package, along with change, into Malachus’s hands. “I bought the largest one I could with the belshas you gave me. The bookseller was happier than a wolf with a fat sheep, and tossed in an extra quill.” His own jovial expression sobered. “Is this a courtship gift for Halani?”

  Malachus unwrapped the cloth, pleased beyond words with Seydom’s choice. “No. Repayment for her care. She saved my life, and that’s a debt I’ll never be able to repay, but with this I can thank her.” This was the book he’d seen her admiring, her hands caressing the leather binding with a lover’s worship.

  “Maybe you should have given her something else.”

  Yanked from his own admiration of the journal and visions of Halani’s expression when he gave it to her, Malachus glanced at Seydom, frowning. “Why do you say that?”

  The other man’s shrug belied the disquiet in his eyes. “Because a man who’ll give Halani a book understands what moves Halani. She’s fond of you; it’s obvious to all of us. Too fond, I’m thinking, and that gift will only make her more so.”

  Seydom’s words sent a rush of euphoria surging through Malachus, guilt hard on its heels. The blood shouldn’t rush hot through his veins at learning of Halani’s affection for him, one overt enough that others had noticed. And worried. “It’s for her to share with others in the camp,” he told Seydom.

  Partially pacified, the free trader handed him the quills and a bottle of ink. “As long as she knows that, it won’t be so bad when you part company with us.”

  His words plagued Malachus’s thoughts, even as he sought to force the draga into its torpor once more. He had grown as attached to Halani as Seydom claimed she was to him. His desire for her beat through every part of him. He wanted only to please her, but the one thing he couldn’t do—and she’d even asked in her own oblique way—was to stay with the free traders. He didn’t wish to hurt her when he bid her farewell. What was better? Push her away now and pretend he had no feelings for her beyond that of a grateful convalescent? The notion made him recoil. He hadn’t always been truthful with her, but in this she deserved his honesty and not some false manipulation of her emotions.

  A damp wind smelling of rain turned his thoughts yet again, this time to the environment around him. The moon sank low toward the west, waxing gibbous as it phased toward full in the coming days. More clouds shrouded the sky, and even the brightest stars were no longer visible. They’d get rain tomorrow.

  He returned to the caravan camp with its undercurrent of constant noise from livestock and sleeping humans. He gave Halani’s dark wagon a quick glance but didn’t stop. If he did, he’d find himself perched at her doorstep begging to come inside. He continued to his own temporary abode. Compared to some of the places he’d slept for a night, these were luxurious accommodations. He left his shoes by the doorway, disrobed, gave his wounds a cursory inspection, and stretched out on his bed. He fell asleep with the sweet memory of Halani’s taste on his lips and in his mouth.

  He awakened to rain pounding on the roof and opened the door to a camp turned into a mud puddle. People raced back and forth working to get items under dry canopies and checking on the livestock that stood in the downpour in either silent misery or bleating protest. Flocks of chickens sheltered under some of the wagons, the sheepdogs not put to work keeping them company.

  Malachus dressed and pulled on his boots. Instantly soaked in the deluge, he slogged toward Batraza, who gave him a gimlet stare as if blaming him for the bad weather. Other than being as wet as he, she was fine and gave him a petulant snort when he left to help others in the camp. He spotted Halani in the distance, whistling to the dogs as they herded the sheep into one of the grassier pastures fenced off for feeding purposes.

  They worked through the day in the rain. Some of the women split the task of feeding everyone lunch between them, brewing tea and boiling broth on individual braziers inside the wagons. By midafternoon, there was nothing left to do but wait out the downpour and try to dry out.

  Malachus, sodden and muddy, stood under a leaky tarp, sharing a pipe with an equally sodden and muddied Kursak.

  “Never again will I doubt some rickety old Savatar’s predictions about the weather,” the wagon master groused as he glared at the rain.

  Malachus wondered what rickety old Savatar Kursak had spoken with recently but didn’t ask. He’d intended to speak with the wagon master that morning, but with the sky trying to drown everyone in a single rainstorm, they’d all been too busy until now. “If you’ll have me, I’d like to stay a few more days and travel south with you. I can pay you for my continued use of the provender wagon as well as the food I eat, and hunt to contribute to the camp larder.”

  Kursak blew a stream of smoke past the pipestem clamped between his teeth before passing the pipe to Malachus.
“I thought you planned to travel west.”

  “I do, but I’m not looking forward to a solitary ride through days of a downpour without any shelter. And I can use more time with teaching Halani to read.” And bask in her company. And wrap my hands in her hair. And kiss her until neither of us can remember what it is to breathe separate from each other.

  “Have you said anything to her about staying longer?”

  Malachus shook his head. “No. I wanted to speak with you first. You’re the wagon master.” He tucked the pipestem in the corner of his mouth, letting the pipe smoke swirl across his tongue as he breathed.

  An amused chuff greeted his statement. Kursak accepted the pipe back. “Don’t let that title fool you. Halani has almost as much say over what happens in this caravan as Hamod. I know you’re teaching her to read so she can teach the rest of us who want to learn. Bring in supper from a few hunts, pay a little rent, and I’ll consider it a fair exchange.”

  Kursak’s easy agreement surprised him. Malachus had expected more reluctance and been prepared to present an even better offer.

  When he told Halani his change of plans, her wide smile rounded her cheeks so hard, she squinted.

  “I’m glad you decided to stay longer. I’d have worried for you traveling alone in this weather.”

  Later that evening, with the rain still falling and people huddled in their wagons to have their suppers, she invited him to hers. “Have supper with me.”

  “Do you have enough to share?” He’d happily watch her eat as his stomach growled in protest just for the chance to spend time alone with her.

  She waved away his concerns. “There’s plenty. Maybe we can read afterward?”

  He dashed from his wagon to hers, wedging himself into the shallow overhang of the arched weatherboard above her door. Halani handed him a large towel to dry off and tucked his muddy boots and one of his satchels into a corner close to the door where she stored her own mud-caked footwear. Barefoot and mostly dry, he joined her in the main part of the wagon, where the carpets underfoot were warm and the spicy scent of hot tea and hot food cooking on her brazier filled his nostrils. There were palaces in wealthy kingdoms that would never feel so grand or welcoming as this small free trader wagon.