by Jon Hollins
She could have a larger room, she knew. The Chancellor had offered one to her. But this was her home. This was the refuge she had longed for all the time she had been in Kondorra. Now that she had reclaimed it, she could not give it up for all of Avarra.
In the shadows, something creaked.
She looked up, the sound unexpected, not fitting into the usual concert of creaks and moans that filled old space. It came from somewhere near her desk, in among the piles of papers and notes, down at the unlit end of her garret.
“Pettar?” she called. Sometimes a gray feral cat would wander in and beg for scraps. But it preferred the daytime hours, when the light came in through her windows and puddled on the wooden floor. “Pettar, is that you?”
Silence. Enough of it that she thought she was making a fool of herself.
And then the misplaced creak came again.
She stepped toward the darkness.
“Pettar?”
Silence.
But then—
“Not exactly.”
She knew that voice. Knew it clearly and well. Had listened to it only an hour before as it insinuated and berated, as it revealed secrets she had not shared.
Ferra.
Fire burst out of her before she knew what she was doing. An instinctive, blazing rush of fear and hatred. Her hand slashed the air. A ribbon of fire ripped out of the cage that she pretended kept it locked up in her soul and coursed across the room.
For a moment, everything was illuminated. She saw candles catching fire, wax running free. She saw pages of her notes curling. She saw the dragon’s talon she had brought back from Kondorra and had yet to mount on the wall, glistening warmly. She saw her desk, its shadow racing up the wall trying to flee the scene. And she saw Ferra, wreathed in his robes, hood pulled high, about to die at her hands.
All this, she glimpsed in the moment it took the fire to race across the room. All this, and just time to think, How will I explain this tomorrow?
Ferra drew his hand up in a vicious slashing motion. There was a crackle and fizz. White and cold filled the far end of the garret. Her ribbon of fire smashed into a dazzling spire of sparkling white.
Her fire died.
“No,” she breathed as much in disbelief as in shock, as Ferra stepped toward her and flung out his own hands.
She saw icy hands form in the air in front of her, massive replicas of Ferra’s own, knuckles bulging, and thick, ropy sinew standing out on the backs of the palms.
The fingers closed around her arms, her chest. She gasped at the cold, driving into her, penetrating her. They clenched and she gasped again as the breath was driven out of her by the force of their pressure. Her vision blurred.
Ferra was advancing down the length of her garret, hands still outstretched, still squeezing. “As much fun as it is to watch you squirm at the Emperor’s court,” he was saying, “I am afraid I shall have to end our acquaintance now.” She could barely make out the words over the sound of her own rattling breaths.
Cold was taking her. She could hardly feel where the fingers pressed into her anymore.
She grasped for fire. So eager to race out of her a moment before, now it was cowed and cowering inside her.
Fight back! she roared at it. Do not capitulate to this thug. This bully.
Flame quivered. She roared at it. Burn his world!
Flame flared once more, a corona cocooning her. The icy hands sprang apart as if scorched, already melting. Ferra grunted, staggered back, arms flung wide. Quirk sucked down lungfuls of warm air.
With a roar, Ferra slashed his hand through the air. Something frozen and savage smashed into Quirk’s left side. She reeled across the room. But her corona of fire protected her from the worst of the cold.
She had almost recovered when Ferra’s next blow came from the right, batting her back across the garret like some child’s plaything. Her cocoon of fire quivered. She stumbled into his next blow. She staggered. He hit her again. Again.
Fuck explanations. Fuck Ferra. Fuck dragons. Fuck fear. This man was going to burn.
She lowered her head, bull-rushed him. The corona of fire stretching out in front of her, becoming a lance, a battering ram.
She heard him yell, made contact with … no, not with him. With a grinding wall of ice that pushed back, held her still.
She grit her teeth, poured all her power into the space in front of her. Her feet slipped on the floor, skidding over the rough wooden grain. She fought forward one step, two. She drew level with the old dragon talon. Icicles lined its surface.
Ferra redoubled his defenses. She felt his wall of ice stretch up, thicken. She felt her forward progress grind to a halt.
And then, slowly, inexorably, he began to push her back.
He was stronger than her. That was the detestable, unavoidable truth. He had chased her out of the Emperor’s palace, chased her back to her garret, and trapped her here like a rat. And now he would overpower her, and he would kill her. It was as simple as that.
Quirkelle Bal Tehrin was the world’s leading thaumatobiologist, the foremost expert on dragons in all of Avarra. She had been present for the Kondorran uprising, and played a critical role in the death of seven dragons. She had been a living weapon for the demigod Hethren, and had killed more men, women, and children than she could count. And all of it counted for naught in this moment.
But she would not give up and die for this man.
She dropped her defenses, her assault, let it come crashing down. And for a moment she felt Ferra hesitate, thrown off, searching for the next lance of heat.
It didn’t come.
Quirk threw herself to the left, rolled across the floor, through the scorched ashes of her research notes, skidding over patches of freezing ice.
She came up beside the dragon’s talon, scavenged from the blasted waste that lay before the Hallow’s Mouth volcano. A treasured possession. A source of awe and fear. And without ceremony she grabbed it and launched it at Ferra.
She could see him, in a beam of moonlight that streamed through a window. Could see the outline of his hooked nose as it turned in the direction of her grunt of effort. But she could not see his eyes, could not see if they went wide, or narrowed with concentration, as the talon smashed into his side.
There was a gout of blood. A yell.
She didn’t care for the rest. She was already charging, balling fire around her fists.
There was a flash of white light, a flare of freezing wind, the sound of glass breaking. Quirk threw up an arm to protect her eyes. Wind lashed at her face.
When everything cleared, she was alone. Ferra was gone. Only ice and a broken window showed that he had ever been there.
Her fragmented research notes shuddered across the floor, and Quirk pulled her robes tightly around her as the night’s cold air rushed in.
2
Shedding His Skin
Balur had the very strong urge to bite someone’s face off.
To be fair, this wasn’t an entirely unusual state of affairs for him. Back in the Analesian deserts where the lizard man had spent his formative years, faces were considered a delicacy, peeled from the skull and roasted over an open fire. Admittedly, that was how the Analesians cooked everything. They were desert nomads. It wasn’t as if they had an abundance of cooking options available.
Now, though, he sat in the heart of the grassy plains of Kondorra, his scaly posterior balanced upon a throne carved from a dragon’s skull, set at the center of a vast tent made of swooping red cloth. Outside, birds whooped and called, and horses stomped. And yet still he imagined the taste of blood on his tongue.
Also, in his defense, the Vinlander ambassador standing in front of him at that precise moment was being very insulting. Or condescending. Or both. Balur still wasn’t entirely sure about all the nuances of human interaction.
Further compounding the issue was the fact that Balur had about twelve inches and three hundred pounds on the ambassador. Plus, the ambassador wa
s entirely lacking a skin of stony scales to protect himself. Or a tail for balance. Essentially he was asking to have his face bitten off. He might as well have come in with a silver platter and a napkin in hand to make the process that much more civilized.
But he hadn’t done that. He’d come in here with an enormous army at his back instead.
“We recognize”—the ambassador slurred on, with … was it disdain perhaps?—“the great service the people of Kondorra perceive you, their so-called prophet, to have gone about doing when you killed off the Dragon Consortium. But the weight of those actions ends at your borders. Extant trade agreements do not stop there. Quite the opposite. Kondorra made some promises to Vinland—regardless of its rulership—and we expect them to be honored.” The ambassador burped.
That was, Balur suspected, staggering bullshit. He had spent enough years in mercenary armies, working for corrupt barons, earls, and lords, to know that nobody expected a new ruler to honor the agreements of the old one.
He also knew that the ambassador didn’t give a shit. Kondorra could muster a fighting force of about fifteen thousand warriors. Vinland could throw more than ten times that number at him. The math was simple: He was Vinland’s bitch.
It didn’t help that the ambassador was staggeringly drunk. The scent of alcohol reeled off the Vinlander in thick waves. Every time Balur licked the air he could taste it, heady and intoxicating—both an insult and a call to battle. Still, his advisors had told him that drunkenness was to be expected. The ambassador was from Vinland, after all, an entire nation dedicated to the worship of Barph—god of drunkenness, excess, and revelry. Being sober was a great religious offense in their eyes.
Balur would like nothing better than to be drunk. Unless possibly he could be drunk and arse-deep in concubines. But if he was drunk he suspected the few restraints he placed upon himself to stop him from removing the man’s face and slurping it down raw would be severed. And in doing that, he would condemn the entire nation of Kondorra to becoming so much fermentation materials in the Vinlander brewing pits.
So instead, he rumbled, “And if those trade agreements are lacking any paperwork, and are seeming to be incredibly detrimental to my nation, and are being brought to me on the hearsay of …” He chewed on a number of insults before reluctantly selecting “… you.”
“You question the divine word of the Vinland High Priesthood, dribbled down from the slack jaw of Barph into the waiting ears below? You question the slurry of his wisdom written large upon this world by his holy bartenders?” There was fire in the ambassador’s voice. He was, Balur had to admit, an incredibly high-functioning drunk. If the man hadn’t pissed himself halfway through the discussion, Balur would almost have been impressed by him.
When Balur had seized control of Kondorra it hadn’t seemed like it was going to be this way. He had been at the head of an army of sixty thousand, the apex of an uprising of the people. They had screamed his name, screamed for the prophet, and they had sworn their lives to his rule. He was going to forge them into a force red of tooth and claw. He was going to take them sweeping through the world, burning, and pillaging, and forging a new empire in his name.
Except what they had actually done was sober up from their bloodlust, gone back to their farms and forges, their shops and their sheep, and they had tried to rebuild the lives that had been stifled by thirty years of oppressive rule by the Dragon Consortium. And while the people of Kondorra still worshipped him with a near-religious fervor, the true pantheon of Avarra had not set a great example for what religious fervor meant. A nod of the head and a tip of the cap seemed to have been sufficient obeisance for most of the gods in the pantheon. At least for all of them, it seemed, except bloody Barph. How the drunk god was the only one who managed to elicit slavering zeal out of his followers was beyond Balur.
There again, a lot was beyond Balur these days. Like how in the Hallows he was going to deal with this Vinlander bullying.
He could go to war, of course. Part of him wanted to do that. It would mean the annexation of Kondorra and the death of tens of thousands, but it would be an absurdly impressive way to be killed. To wade into battle heinously outnumbered, to kill until he was walled in by the dead, and then only finally be overwhelmed when they collapsed the walls of his own kills upon him. Bards would sing some really epic ballads about that. They would use them to pick up a considerable number of attractive young people with self-esteem problems. It would be everything Balur had ever dreamed his death could be.
Really the only thing stopping him was that he suspected it was exactly what the Vinlanders wanted him to do. Drunk they might be. Idiots they were not. So he could either suck up a trade deal that would bankrupt him, or march into a war it was impossible to win.
The trade deal would at least buy him a few months to figure everything out.
He actually found himself wishing Will was there. Will liked all this thinking nonsense. He was the one who planned everything.
In fact, truth be told, Will was the prophet Balur was pretending to be.
Or … well, he wasn’t the prophet. There was no prophet. It was bullshit they’d sort of used to deceive the Kondorrans into rising up against their dragon overlords, and then he’d perpetuated the lie to stay in power. Not that any of that troubled Balur. He didn’t see the lie hurting anyone. Plus, he’d killed a dragon single-handedly, riding its corpse out of an exploding volcano. He’d earned everything he got.
Except what it had gotten him was a morose populace and this belligerent, drunken ambassador.
“Fine,” he sighed. “We’ll—”
“Piss on your deal! To the Hallows with your deal. With your lies! You swaggering stain on the britches of humanity! The prophet spits at you and sprays a lot of people standing around you! That little fine spittle that gets everywhere!”
Balur sighed even more heavily. Because the other thing posing as the prophet had gotten him was his very own High Priest. Firkin, the old farmhand who had grown up with Will, who had ruined pretty much everything from beginning to end with his huge, drunken mouth.
If the alcohol fumes were a fugue around the ambassador, they were a full orchestral composition around Firkin. Balur could taste them, redolent on the air. The old man half-fell across the room, waving a wineskin at the ambassador and shouting incoherently.
“… and … piss … and … fucking with … twelve well-bred sheep … some chicken feathers … ate a stew … your mother!” was about as much as Balur could make out.
The Vinlander ambassador reeled around to face his verbal assailant.
“And who,” he said, trying to look down his nose and going a bit cross-eyed, “is this human arse-sore supposed to be?”
Balur braced himself before he said it. “My High Priest, advisor to the throne, the most vaulted Firkin, esteemed by all.” The people for some gods-hexed reason loved Firkin. They hung on his every word. And it hadn’t taken Balur long to realize that keeping Firkin happy was an expedient way to get things done. And what made Firkin happy this week was stupid, stupid titles.
“He’s a dick,” said the ambassador.
“Yes,” Balur agreed.
“Must be why I was in your mum last night,” said Firkin with regrettable clarity.
The ambassador visibly bristled.
“Firkin,” said Balur, through gritted teeth, “don’t you have a speech you should be delivering?”
“No,” said Firkin, taking time out of a violent bout of flatulence to answer.
Balur wondered if he could kill Firkin, blame it on the ambassador, and use the ensuing outrage to rile up the populace enough to give the Vinlander army a proper fight. He gave the ambassador a contemplative stare. Would the people be believing that he had been biting Firkin’s face off?
He decided against it.
“We are agreeing,” Balur said as loudly and as quickly as he could. “We are agreeing to the whole stupid deal. It is being fine. Whatever. You are having the bigger dicks
today. We are congratulating on the might with which you are swinging them.”
“The piss we are!” Firkin roared. “We are cramming the deal very, very, very, very—”
“Shut up!” Balur roared. Everything had been far simpler when he hadn’t been a ruler.
“You!” Firkin yelled. “You can take your ‘shut ups’ and cram them very, very, very, very—”
Balur finally rumbled out of his throne and advanced on Firkin. “I shall be removing your spine from your body and shoving it very, very, very, very—”
“I shall be shoving myself into your mum very, very, very—”
“Oh be quiet!”
Both Balur and Firkin turned to stare at the Vinlander ambassador, who was looking at them with distaste and swaying slightly as he pulled a flask from his robes and tipped it down his throat.
“Bunch of nattering biddies,” he muttered to himself. “Get your shit sorted out and get me an answer before I make it back across the border to Vinland or I’m coming back with an army.” He made several hand gestures that his bearing would suggest were usually beneath him, and staggered back out of the tent.
“Oh that is being brilliant.” Balur threw up his hands.
“I was wondering”—Firkin stabbed a finger at him—“have you seen your balls anywhere?”
The taste of just one delicious face …
Except the problem was, Firkin was right. Running a nation was a constant exercise in emasculation. He was confined by this absurd need to look out for the well-being of others, by the need to keep them alive so that he could … what? Look out for their well-being some more?
He was getting old and soft. And in no way was that more evident than in the fact that he didn’t eviscerate Firkin on the spot, but merely head-butted him into unconsciousness, and then went off to blame it on the drink so no one would get mad at him.
Hours later, Balur watched the fire die disconsolately. His personal tent was smaller than the one in which he had met the Vinlander ambassador, though still large enough to contain several small houses. He could hear his horsemen outside, settling the camp. He had assembled them when he was still planning to sweep across the plains carrying out lightning raids, taking what he could, burning the rest.