“Suit yourself,” Lira said. She returned to the four fairies, drawing her sword.
Blaine felt pre-fight nerves tingle in his muscles and joints. A duel would do him good.
“The last time we clashed Blades, Brackendon had to break us apart.”
“I’d like to think we have more control than that now,” Darnuir said. He unsheathed the Dragon’s Blade, its hilt shining like fresh blood under the sun.
“Agreed,” said Blaine. He drew the Guardian’s Blade. Light rippled off the opals like cresting waves on a golden sea.
And so they duelled.
Not the bitter clashes they had fought before or to test who was the stronger, but to teach one another. Neither the master, neither the student. They started slow, some basic steps, a few flourishes. A little more, a little harder. Slowly building, until Blaine felt his pulse struggle to keep pace with the swing of his arms, the twists of his torso, the drive of his legs.
Through unspoken words they tested each other, pushed each other. To the onlookers their fight must have seemed a blur, and yet Blaine could not shake a feeling at the back of his mind.
We’re both weaker than before.
Phantom pain burned from his lost finger. His grip felt lax. He’d feared this, had spent weeks coaxing his left hand to work as well as his right, but being in the moment of that weakness was mortifying. Surely Darnuir was aware. His blows weren’t hitting with the force the boy was capable of. He was giving Blaine a chance. A kindness the Darnuir of old would not have granted, but one which Blaine could not reasonably allow.
Blaine noticed other telling signs. Darnuir was not ridding his mouth of the bitter taste of magic nor forcibly gulping it down in painful lumps. His sword arm was steady as a master archer, too steady for one drawing on the Cascade.
Blaine opened the door in his mind further and power billowed into his body, taking his pain away, dispelling his tiredness, rushing through shoulder to hand to Blade in a wonderful burn. Darnuir’s movements became sluggish by comparison. Blaine outstepped him and struck Darnuir with the flat of his sword. There was a crack like exploding black powder and Darnuir landed some thirty feet away, leaving a gouged trail of earth in his wake.
The King lay still.
Blaine closed the door and walked to Darnuir’s side. “You’re not using magic.”
Darnuir sat up with a groan. “I am. You just… caught me off guard.”
“I thought we were being honest with each other,” Blaine said, helping Darnuir get to his feet.
“I’m not lying. I was drawing on the Cascade. How else would I be keeping up with you?”
“Were you drawing on as much as you could?”
“As much as I felt was necessary.”
“And when we fight Rectar, how much will be necessary then?”
Darnuir massaged the back of his neck, stealing a moment in which he did not need to answer.
“We cannot hold back,” Blaine said.
“How’s your grip?”
Blaine twitched his four remaining fingers. “It’s as strong as I can make it.”
“And will that be enough?” Darnuir said. They exchanged a hard, knowing look. “You haven’t tried switching hands.”
Blaine huffed, then tossed the Guardian’s Blade between hands, catching it in his left.
“You’re right. I’ll try my untrained hand and you won’t hold back on me – agreed?”
Darnuir nodded, not meeting Blaine’s eye.
They trained again, only this time Blaine cursed himself for not maintaining his off-hand training. He drew on increasing volumes of Cascade energy to fuel his inexpert muscles, while Darnuir rained punishment down upon him.
Blaine widened the doorway in his mind until a torrent of energy poured freely, too much to maintain for long. And still he could barely match Darnuir. A sinking feeling took hold of him, even in the midst of battle. No matter what he did, how much power he drew upon, it would not be enough.
Blaine fought until the taste of bile on his tongue grew unbearable, until chewing sawdust would have been refreshing to his parched mouth. Bellowing from the effort, he blocked Darnuir’s sweeping blow, dropped to his knees, and drove the Guardian’s Blade into the soil.
“I yield,” he said. His left arm quivered violently from the poison welling up in it. Desperately, he gripped the hilt of his Blade, the veins on his hand and wrist swelling from the magic in them.
Darnuir spat the residue from his own mouth, though he looked far from worn.
“Why aren’t you pushing yourself further?” Blaine gasped.
“You don’t train someone by beating them senseless,” Darnuir said. “If we’re going to get your off-hand up to scratch, I can’t go all out.”
Blaine was still on his knees, breathing hard. “We might not have the time for that.”
“Then we train,” Darnuir said. He too knelt to Blaine’s level. “We train every morning, and every night. Every moment we can spare. Until you’re able to beat me as soundly as you did back in Val’tarra.”
“I doubt I’ll ever manage that again.”
“Aim high, grandfather,” Darnuir said. “Now get up. People are beginning to stare.”
His arm still shaking, Blaine rose. “Don’t hold back either. Not even one bit. Rectar won’t.”
“Blaine, what part of training do you—”
“Don’t use me as an excuse. You’re holding back because you don’t want to draw on magic. It’s understandable but you need to move past it.”
Darnuir suddenly became very interested in his fingernails. He looked at them, picked at them, and admired them at different angles. Blaine grasped him by the shoulder, weak hand and all.
“You cannot let what happened drag you down. I mean it when I say Rectar does not hold back. I fought him, remember. I fought him and it damned near killed me just keeping up.” But Darnuir, for all he’d aged of late, briefly became a boy again.
His mouth hung ajar, his shoulders hunched and the King’s whole presence seemed to shrink away, no longer filling the great armour he wore.
“I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be,” was all Blaine thought to say. What more could he say? That he was afraid as well? Terrified even to face this God of the Shadow again, that a part of him didn’t even wish to go on.
Darnuir’s arm began to shake. “It’s not as simple as that. I broke Blaine, or I came as close as anyone has ever come to that abyss without falling over it.”
“I can only imagine it,” Blaine began. “But this isn’t the time for—”
“You can’t imagine this,” Darnuir said. He shrugged Blaine off and staggered backwards. “I am afraid,” he wailed. “I clung onto my sanity by a thread. I heard voices, I suffered waking nightmares; all day, every day. I couldn’t tell reality from dream. I woke up as a bag of bones in a sack of skin. All of that because I couldn’t control the Cascade. All because I didn’t listen to the warnings you gave me, that Brackendon gave me. I liked how good it felt. I overindulged. And it can never happen again.” He ended on a hoarse note, staring blankly off, as though the wicked horrors from his fever-dreams had spawned into the world.
“I’m afraid, Blaine.”
Blaine couldn’t help but notice the guard members staring at them now. As before, he found he didn’t care.
Let them look, he thought. Let them see we are flesh and blood like them. Let them see we can suffer as they do.
“I’m afraid,” Blaine said, and he said it loudly. He said it again, louder this time, letting his voice carry to all the Praetorian Guard. “I am afraid.” Saying it was a relief. Saying it broke shackles on his spirit that he never knew chained him. “I am the Guardian of Tenalp, and I am afraid!”
He knew that the last one would carry far, as far as the mixed groups of training soldiers of all the Th
ree Races, who were all here at last, together, in a way no one from Blaine’s generation had ever dreamed.
Darnuir was laughing. A nervous laugh, a touch high, but a laugh nonetheless, and it came with a grin.
“Alright, I believe you. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re both terrified.”
“I have little left to be hopeful for,” Blaine said. “Being honest, we might not stand a chance, even together. Yet I feel much better facing Him again knowing you’ll be there with me.”
Darnuir nodded. “Me too, old man.” He drew the Dragon’s Blade in one fluid motion and spun it playfully around in his hand. “We better make ourselves ready, though we may not have much time.”
Blaine too twirled the Guardian’s Blade, trying out his maimed hand and then his left. It would take a lot more work yet.
“One day, one month or one year. We’ll do what we can, while we can.”
Darnuir widened his stance, bent his knees. “We’ll train.”
Chapter 23
THE DISILLUSIONED HERO
“Surely it could have been avoided? Yet such questions are moot now. Only for those who care to speculate. Or for the guilty who survived it.”
— Author Unknown
Balack – Brevia – Dragon Refugee Camps
BALACK RUBBED AT his eyes and stifled a yawn. It had been another long day in the camps, for human and dragon alike. Rain drizzled, dampening the world and their spirits.
For Balack, the constant vigilance against the crowds was the real strain. Handling a mob would be hard enough, but these were dragons. Women, children, their oldest men and the wounded, yet dragons nonetheless. At least Arkus’ musketmen helped to keep order. All were fearful of these new weapons.
He stood upon a command deck constructed at the heart of the camps, a semi-fortified area raised above the ruined mud fields below. Here the hunters and Chevaliers could keep watch and organise the dispersion of rations.
He swept his eyes over the remaining meagre supplies. There wasn’t much left. Not enough to feed those still waiting today. These were mostly the older men, wrinkled and grim, veterans of a life of war but either their age or wounds had finally caught up with them. They always let the children go first, then the women. And so, they were often the ones left starving.
Balack considered that most dangerous of all.
Old warriors who knew how to use a sword and work together. Might be they had their old equipment still. With sunken eyes and cheeks, they stood as still as statutes. They were quiet too, in a way that the less seasoned young hunters of Brevia found foreboding.
Balack eyed one young hunter now, clad in the black leather of the city but he looked barely over the age of joining. The lad still had some growing to do, and his eyes shifted nervously over the assembled dragons, his jaw clenched.
“You feeling alright there?” Balack asked.
The boy blinked and nodded. “Fine sir.” He clenched his fist, crunching up one of those Tarquill flyers in his fist.
Balack studied the hate in the boy’s eyes. “Sure about that? It’s been a tough day, you’ve worked hard. Why don’t you head home?”
That only seemed to make the boy worse. “Don’t want to go home.”
“Why’s that?”
“Mam’s too scared and angry. It’s… it’s better to go home near the end of the day when she’s too tired to be anxious. Don’t know what to do when she’s upset.”
Balack hadn’t failed to notice the pistol at the boy’s hip. Training properly with a bow took too long, so they’d shoved one of these into his hands. Neither did he fail to notice that the kid was thumbing the butt of the gun, not taking his eyes off the dragons.
“They aren’t going to hurt you, lad.”
“Really?” The boy was shaking now. “You got to have heard what happened in their city. Out east.”
“Yeh, I heard,” said Balack. The rumours and whispers were everywhere. “But you shouldn’t take hearsay for fact. We don’t know the details.”
“They say the Fifth Regiment was hit hardest,” the boy rambled on, not paying attention to Balack. “Me brother was in that company.”
Some of the dragons had noticed the boy’s fixated stare, a few holding his eyes in some wordless challenge. Balack spun the lad to face him instead.
“Only thing you know about your brother for sure is he’s out east. That’s all.” The boy nodded. “What’s your name?”
“Mikle.”
“Alright, Mikle. Listen to me. Really listen now, hey,” he snapped his fingers, “I know what’s it’s like to wait on news you’re dreading. Each moment you go from joy to terror as you turn it in over in your mind. But you can’t—”
“Lord Balack,” a crisp voice cut him off. Gellick. He’d appeared on the other side of the platform’s rail, mounted atop his great white stallion. He called him Lord in public, though he wasn’t officially titled so yet, and Gellick always said it with a hint of derision. “The southern and western quadrants have been patrolled and supplies distributed. With your leave, I’ll take my companies back to barracks.”
Balack considered this. Gellick needed his permission in theory since Arkus had made him the de facto head of camp relief. Again, he imagined Gellick only did it when other people were in earshot.
Balack straightened and adjusted his bow upon his back. “You have my leave. Return to your company and bring them this way to give Mikle here a lift back to the city.” He regarded the boy, sizing him up again. He still looked jittery and on edge. Best to keep him close. “In the meantime, you can help me with the handouts.” He thumped Mikle on the arm. “And drop that flyer. Don’t think you want the dragons reading that.”
Down below, in the quagmire of mud that rose past their calves in places, Balack passed soft apples and heels of bread to leathery dragon hands. Mostly the dragons grunted. A show of thanks might have made them less intimidating, but Balack couldn’t blame them for their bitterness either.
The latest dragon was aggrieved enough to say something. “Used to be full loaves, enough for three days,” he said, looking discouraged by his portion of stale bread.
“Times are tough for all,” Balack said.
The old dragon looked him up and down and curled his lip. Balack kept his face resolute, knowing full well that his healthy skin, fine clothes and clean hair made his words sound hollow. He thought of the smells of the palace kitchens and knew his words were hollow.
“My mam didn’t eat yesterday,” Mikle said, his voice quavering a little. “Gave all the food to me. We aren’t feastin’ either.”
Balack placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder again but spoke to the dragon. “If I had more to give you, I would. Please move along and let the next man through.”
The dragon narrowed his eyes and stood his ground.
A comrade of his stepped up. “Least you and your mother have a roof, child. Care to languish out under the stars, in the rain and the muck and the cold?”
“Leave the lad alone,” Balack said. He tried to push Mikle back behind him, but the boy resisted.
“I ain’t afraid of yous,” Mickle said. He slipped under Balack’s arm.
“Mickle. Get back.”
But the boy didn’t listen. He stood before the dragons, and what had possessed him to try and defy them Balack couldn’t say.
The dragons began to laugh. Not cruelly, but they evidently found him quite amusing. A few more gathered in about Mickle, finding a bit of light entertainment in their dreary lives.
“What yous laughing at?”
“You child. You’re a funny little human with a high squeak.” The dragon glanced from side to side and seemed to notice what Balack had just realised himself – that he and Mickle were now hemmed in against the platform. Other hunters and Chevaliers were a way off, dealing with their own queues.
The dragon smirked. “Go on child, hand us more of what’s in that sack.”
Balack took a bold step forward. “Only one portion each. You know the ru—”
“I don’t want just one portion,” said the dragon. The creases on his forehead made one large frown. “I fancy a little more today.”
Balack’s heart skipped too many beats. A sharp pain gripped his chest and for a moment he could barely breathe. Perhaps it would be better to let them have it, just this once. In future, he’d make sure to bring even more hunters to—
“You heard the Hero,” Mikle said, his voice reaching a whole new pitch. “One. Portion. Each.”
The dragons all laughed again. More pressed in, tightening the ensnarement. One sharp nosed, gaunt faced dragon even looked to Mikle with hungry eyes.
“Bet you’d taste good child.”
Balack moved in front of Mikle. “You can have it all and fight amongst yourselves to share it. All I ask is that you part and let us pass.”
They did not part.
One began sniffing the air. “Afraid are we, human? The air smells like honey.”
“Oh Gods,” another dragon said, “Don’t mention honey.”
“Nice bit of honey on bread.”
“With cheese.”
“And some meat,” said the sharp-nosed dragon. He flashed teeth that looked too pointed, a wild gleam in his eye. “Haven’t had a bit meat in ages, have we?”
He took a step forward.
The first dragon, the eldest, blocked him. “Calm yourself. You’re not some animal.” The advancing dragon brought his pointed teeth together in a clapping bite. An argument ensued.
Balack hadn’t realised he’d moved until his back hit the underside of the platform. He looked for the boy. Mikle had frozen near the sack of food.
“Come here,” Balack whispered fiercely.
The arguing dragons came to blows, the elder with the apple turned the fruit to pulp on the other’s face. Friends of the victim jumped forth, and friends of the instigator followed.
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