Shards of a Broken Sword

by W. R. Gingell

  That’s just ridiculous, she thought. I didn’t make a dragon. But it was there all the same, plucking Fae soldiers from her vines in order to tear their heads from their bodies, and swooping in on the ones who had been quick enough to discover the safety of remaining near the prisoners. Dion distantly felt the impact of a body nearby and heard a female voice yell: “Hey! Watch where you’re throwing those things!”

  Then the same female voice said in her ear: “You might as well stop now. Rafiq will take care of the rest of them. They tried to kill me two days ago and he’s been a bit annoyed about it ever since.”

  Dion released her grip on the land and let herself become smaller, weaker; exhausted. There was a Shinpoan girl crouching beside her, neck-scarf pinned tightly against the wind and her almond eyes bright with friendly interest. Her mouth was pulled up on one side by a small scar as much as by her smile, and nearly every bit of bare skin that showed was similarly marred. Even Barric wasn’t so scarred.

  Dion, trying to gather her thoughts into reasonable order, said: “Is that your dragon?”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” said the girl.

  “Oh, good,” said Dion. “I didn’t think I’d conjured one. I should go and get my friends: they weren’t expecting a dragon.”

  “No one ever really expects a dragon,” said the girl, offering a hand to help Dion up. “That’s kind of the point.”

  “Thanks for helping,” said Dion, with a shy smile. She could feel her shard resting against her leg, searingly hot: the other girl was also carrying a shard. She didn’t mention it, but Dion knew that she must know Dion had one, too. The dragon explained why it had been moving so swiftly toward them.

  “Oh, well; it’s good for Rafiq to get it all out of his system,” said the other girl. She added: “Your friends must have been waiting for a distraction.”

  She was gazing ahead, and Dion, following her eyes, saw Barric and Fancy busily untying the others. When Barric saw them approaching he dropped Aerwn back on the grass, much to her shrill indignation, and strode across the rocky mountainside to scoop up Dion.

  “Huh. I should get myself one of those,” said the other girl, trotting a bit to keep up with Barric’s long stride. “Very handy over rough terrain.”

  Dion giggled; and, finding herself inclined to rebel, said to Barric: “I can walk.”

  “I know,” he said, without even the smallest suggestion of slowing down or stopping. “But it was a beautiful piece of working and you should be resting.”

  By the time they were a stone’s throw away, Fancy had untied the others, and Padraig was hurrying to meet them. Kako looked up at Dion with one brow lifted, and Dion found herself blushing.

  “A day’s walk!” Aerwn was saying, when they approached. “Another whole day’s walk! It’s all right for you lot: you’re exactly where you want to be. I’m the only one who has to backtrack.”

  “Best get started, then, hadn’t you?” said Padraig unsympathetically. Aerwn glared at him, and Dion thought that things were about to disintegrate into a childish quarrel when the dragon swooped in close and landed rather too near for comfort.

  Fancy’s knives were back out in an instant, as was Padraig’s hammer. The girl stepped away from Barric and Dion, putting herself between their weapons and her dragon, her hands spread wide. “We can stand here pointing weapons at each other,” she said. “Or we can get on with discussing exactly what we plan to do with the shards.”

  There was an immediate babble of noise: most of it from Padraig and Carmine, with an occasional, slightly sarcastic comment from the girl. She didn’t seem to be particularly intimidated, even by Barric. That could have been because of her dragon, but Dion didn’t think so. At last, she said amiably: “Oh, shut up, you two,” at Padraig and Carmine, and said to Dion: “You’re the shard-holder, aren’t you?”

  Dion threw a quick look up at Barric, but his face was impassive, so she said: “Yes. Barric, put me down, please.”

  Barric’s scar pulled, but he put her down. She found herself less steady than she would have liked, and kept a tight grip on his arm as she said to Kako: “You’ve been looking for us. Why?”

  “I have my own shard, of course. We’ve been trying to piece the Broken Sword back together. Rafiq and I had to leave home in rather a hurry: the Fae got impatient and took over the castle in Shinpo. We weren’t expecting it. We thought we had a bit more time before things got so dangerous.”

  Padraig, his hammer dropping to his side, said in dismay: “We’d heard that the castle had been taken. I was hoping it was an exaggeration.”

  “It wasn’t,” said the girl. There was sorrow in her eyes, deep and unresolved. “We were cut off when it fell.”

  “Cut off,” said Barric slowly. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Kako,” the girl said. She looked up over her shoulder as if sharing a joke with the dragon behind her. “This is Rafiq.”

  Much to Dion’s surprise, Barric bowed deeply. Kako looked at first surprised, and then very much amused. Barric said: “I’m sorry to hear of your parents. Are your brother and sisters–”

  “Don’t know,” said Kako lightly. There was the barest tremble in her voice, and Dion knew with a searing sense of fellowship that the other girl was only just holding back tears. “We weren’t able establish any kind of communication.”

  The dragon shifted forward, startling Carmine and Fancy into a hasty retreat, and dipped his huge head to breathe a small huff of smoke into Kako’s hair. She patted his head absently and looked relieved when Dion said: “How did you get your shard?”

  “A fortunate coincidence,” said Kako, wrapping her arm around Rafiq’s nose. “It seems to work like that with the shards. It’s almost like they find you instead of the other way around.”

  “I’m more interested in knowing how you know about the Broken Sword,” said Padraig, his blue eyes watchful. “There were two copies of The Song of the Broken Sword: one is destroyed and the other is still in Avernse.”

  “Yes, but I have a dragon,” said Kako. “I might as well wonder why you know about it, if we’re going to be suspicious of each other.”

  “I’m Fae,” said Padraig, his nose flaring.

  “Exactly,” Kako said. “Very suspicious. There’s no use looking for reasons to mistrust each other; we might as well just get on with it. There’s at least one more shard in Shinpo and another in Montalier. That makes four, and Rafiq says there’s only seven of them.”

  “Five,” said Dion absently. It had occurred to her that there was still a discrepancy in the position of Kako’s shard: she knew it to be just a few feet away with Kako, but she could still feel the tug of her own that said another shard was nearby. So close nearby, in fact, that she added: “There’s another shard here.”

  “That?” said Kako, looking surprised. “I thought that was just an echo sort of effect that your shard was giving off.”

  “So did I,” Dion said. “I’m not so sure, now.” She made her way rather waveringly toward what had been the outer edge of the Fae camp with Kako beside her, their eyes scanning the grass.

  “Oh, here we go!” said Kako, poking at a headless corpse with one foot. “This one’s got it.”

  “They can’t have been tracking us with it,” Dion said, frowning. She knelt by the body, wincing as she went through its pockets. “So why have it?”

  “I’ve got a theory about that,” said Kako, briskly going through the pockets on the other side of the body with considerably more relish and considerably less wincing. “It’s like I said before: the shards seem to find us instead of the other way around. He might not even have known what he had.”

  “Maybe,” said Dion uneasily. “Oh! I’ve got it!”

  “Oh,” said Kako, sounding disappointed. “I suppose that means it’s yours, then.”

  Dion snuffled a laugh. “We should probably keep them separate, anyway. If we’re attacked again at least one of us should be able to get away. Barric can look afte
r this one.”

  Barric, already silently waiting beside her, took it without complaint. He said: “Have you got a bearing on the next shard?”

  “Much better!” said Kako. She glanced at Dion. “North-westerly Shinpo? Maybe one in Illisr as well.”

  Dion said in relief: “Yes. And something further on in Montalier.”

  “We’d best be moving, then,” said Barric. “Aerwn, do you know your way?”

  “Yes,” said Aerwn. “But I’m going to miss my set time with Owain. Hopefully he’ll wait for me.”

  “You can fly,” said Kako to her, unexpectedly. “No need for walking two days when you can fly a few hours instead.”

  “I’ll take too long, sure,” said Padraig. “You’re a bonny fighter, Aerwn, but yourself and ap Rees can only stand against the Fae for so long. By the time we’ve foot-marched all the way to Montalier and back again you’ll be dead or worse. Much better that the dragon comes with us.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Aerwn, grinning.

  “We don’t need to get back,” said Dion. “Once we have the shards and the sword is remade, we only have to travel on to Avernse to find the place where the Sword originally bound Faery. You can hold out until then, can’t they?”

  “Aerwn and ap Rees are capable,” said Barric with finality.

  “We don’t need to walk,” Kako said. She said it as if it should be obvious. “We’ll fly, too, of course.”

  There was a rather uncomfortable silence. Dion wasn’t sure if it was because Rafiq looked both distinctly dangerous and distinctly hungry, or if it was because of the fact that there simply weren’t enough dragons to send in both directions.

  “Unless you’ve got another dragon up those sleeves of yours,” remarked Carmine, speaking the thoughts of everyone else, “it seems unlikely that we’ll all fit.”

  “Not exactly up my sleeve,” said Kako, with a secret smile. “Please don’t panic, everyone. I’m about to show you a new trick I’ve learned.”

  Dion somehow wasn’t very surprised when Kako began to grow, scales rippling across her skin and colour blooming. A heart-beat later, a second dragon was coiled on the grass cover beside Rafiq, her head butting against his shoulder in friendly greeting. By dragonish standards she was small, compact, and well-shaped: Dion wasn’t surprised to see the delicate flourish of colour to Rafiq’s scales that, if she had correctly learned her dragon emotions, meant he was fully aware of Kako’s charms. By human standards Kako was dauntingly large: she dwarfed even Barric completely.

  Aerwn, her eyes shining, said: “I take it back. I’m glad we were captured.”

  “Me too,” said Fancy, her eyes just as wide as Aerwn’s. “How beautiful! I’d heard that some dragons could take human form, but I’ve never seen it!”

  I’m not exactly a dragon, said a familiar voice. It buzzed in Dion’s ears in an illusion of sound. I’m more of a human who can take dragon form. I’ve had to practise a lot: I’ve only just learned how to do it properly. Rafiq is the real dragon.

  You take the curly-haired one, said another large, thrumming voice. I’ll take the others.

  “I want to go with Aerwn,” said Dion. There was an immediate outcry.

  “You can’t, Di! What if we’re captured?”

  Padraig said: “Aye, let’s not make a division of ourselves. Cherry, you’re the most important one of us. We can’t risk losing you.”

  “Too risky,” agreed Fancy. “And we are in a hurry, after all. If you go one way and we go another–”

  Barric, his dark eyes thoughtful, said nothing at all.

  “I’m just as likely to be captured with one dragon as with another,” said Dion resolutely.

  “Which is to say, not likely at all,” remarked Aerwn, only half-convinced. “It’s not that I don’t want you, Di; but Fancy’s right. The quicker you find the shards, the better it’ll go for Owain and me.”

  “I can catch everyone up when they stop for the night,” Dion objected. “The next shard is at least a day away yet, even if we are flying. I’m not going to see you again and I want to make sure you get safely back to Llassar.”

  I’m the faster flier, said Kako. If that helps.

  “I’ll go with them,” said Barric briefly. “Padraig, Fancy, Carmine– go with Rafiq. Do you have a familiar meeting place?”

  Outside Lo’him, said Rafiq. There’s a cattle-shed we’ve used before.

  “That must be an impressive cattle-shed,” said Carmine, observing the two dragons with one eyebrow up.

  Padraig looked as though he would have liked to protest, but Barric was already boosting Dion and Aerwn up on Kako’s silvery-blue back. Dion, laughing at a rueful grimace from Padraig, saw the habitual glitter of amusement wake in his eyes, and the elaborate bow he gave as Barric swung himself into place behind her. Kako leapt into flight almost immediately after that, and Dion was too busy gasping for breath to do more than grip tightly to Barric’s arms and hope rather wildly that she wasn’t going to disgrace herself by throwing up on Kako’s beautiful scales.

  Once the uneven takeoff was out of the way, flying was surprisingly enjoyable. Dion and Aerwn shouted to each other over the wail of the wind and the flap of Kako’s wings as if they were out on horseback, enjoying the summer afternoon. They didn’t talk about war, or binding, or even the Fae: Dion, leaning forward with her arms around Aerwn’s waist, eagerly pointed out familiar landmarks and sights, both of them kept from slipping to certain death by Barric’s watchfulness. Kako shamelessly eavesdropped, interposing a comment every now and then and frankly interested when she discovered that Dion and Aerwn were the princesses of Llassar.

  Even Dai didn’t rebel to this extent, she said, her voice touched with amusement. Mind you, Shinpo already has enough rebels as it is. I suppose that makes us sisters, according to my elder sister’s theory on the Sisterhood of Princesses. I’m the third princess of Shinpo– or what’s left of it, anyway.

  That explained the sorrow in her eyes when she spoke of the fall of the castle, thought Dion, with a stab of sadness. The conversation faltered after that, and it wasn’t long before they landed in a convenient pasture close to Tywyn, scattering cattle every which way. Barric and Kako stayed where they were by unspoken agreement, while Dion walked Aerwn to the edge of the field.

  “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” She hadn’t seen any sign of an army—be it rag-tag citizenry or well-drilled troops—and she had the worried feeling that she should have.

  Aerwn nodded. “I saw Owain’s signal as we cleared the last field. He’ll already be looking for me. The others are meant to be laying low in Tywyn and camping out in a few friendly barns. By the end of the week we’ll have too many to hide in barns, though.”

  “Aerwn–” Dion stopped, and then said: “I’m sorry we weren’t so close for the last few years.”

  “My fault,” said Aerwn, her voice short and clipped. Dion wasn’t fooled: Aerwn didn’t like to be seen as anything other than strong, and the closer she was to tears, the terser she became. “We’ll fight as long as we can. Try not to let them kill us.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Dion said, smiling just as brightly as Aerwn. She hugged her sister to escape the necessity of keeping up the facade, and felt Aerwn’s arms fairly crush her ribcage.

  “I love you,” said Aerwn. “I didn’t want to be queen, Di.”

  “I know,” Dion said. “I love you, too.”

  Aerwn was still waving when she became too small for Dion to see. Dion leant back into Barric, sinking under the weight of exhaustion and sorrow, and was pulled closer.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “We’ve a long way to go yet.”

  “I was promised a bath,” said Carmine’s voice. Dion could hear it carrying from the barn, where a soft glow of light spilled out on the grass to welcome them. Kako shot her a sarcastic grin as Carmine’s voice added: “A hot bath. How can I be expected to maintain my impossibly high standard of personal beauty without the proper ablutionary requ
isites? I refuse to spend the night in straw, without even the hope of hot water.”

  They entered the barn in time to see Padraig grinning, and Dion even saw Barric’s scar twitch slightly. Fancy rolled her eyes without taking pains to hide the fact.

  “Fancy, what have I told you about rolling your eyes at me?” Carmine demanded.

  “You said to keep doing it while you were in too much danger of becoming a prat.”

  “Oh,” said Carmine. “Well, what sort of scale am I being judged by? Who decides how much danger I’m in?”

  “I do,” said Fancy. “You gave me permission.”

  “I don’t remember this. When was all this decided?”

  “One day after you were being more of a prat than usual,” said Fancy. She nodded at Barric and the two girls, and it wasn’t until the tall, dark-skinned man at her side shouldered his way past Dion to greet Kako that Dion realised there was another member of their party.

  Rafiq, she realised, as Padraig said beside her: “A neat trick, is it not?”

  “How wonderful!” said Dion, watching Rafiq and Kako critically. She wasn’t sure if Kako was aware of it, but Rafiq as a human male was even more possessive and watchful than Rafiq as a dragon had been.

  “They could hardly be better matched, could they?” murmured Padraig.

  “No,” Dion said, much amused. She thought Kako was quite intelligent, and it surprised her to see that the girl had no idea of her dragon’s attachment to her. “A dragon who can transform into a human, and a human who can transform into a dragon. What are the odds of such a beautifully matched pair meeting?”

  Padraig gave her a very deliberate wink. “Oh, better than you think, cherry, sure!”

  “What was Carmine complaining about?” Dion asked, flushing pink. “We could hear him across the yard.”

  “Rafiq said there would be hot baths and real food when we got to Lo’him,” said Padraig, accepting the change in subject with only the smallest smile hovering on his lips. “Carmine was expressing his dissatisfaction with having to wait for the three of you.”