Of Dragon Warrens and Other Traps

by Shannon McGee

  “And you chose mercenary work?” Aella asked, quirking one eyebrow upward.

  Mariah looked sheepish. “I thought I was less likely to get knifed this way. Anyway, it’s consistent money. Every autumn I pay my dues, and then I send the rest of my earnings off to ma.” Pride bloomed on her face. “I make enough to put her up and pay the healers. She’s halfway through the treatments now. She’ll be walking soon.”

  The room was quiet. Mariah took a swig from the bottle of mead which we were passing betwixt ourselves and exhaled a little too loudly. She tapped the cork back in place and passed the bottle to me. I felt kinship with her in that moment. She didn’t say it out loud, but I had heard the unspoken dream in the way her voice cracked on the last word. Someday, when she’s better, perhaps I’ll be able to go home.

  There was a pop as I pulled cork back out. I drank deeply, tilting my head backward. The brew was sweet and heady, and one of several bottles which Luke had brought from the south and stored in his lock-space in the sheds behind the barracks. I stroked a finger down the brown, ceramic bottle.

  I wasn’t going to make the mistake of asking anyone else how they had come into mercenary work. I already knew Aella’s story and she had told me Luke’s. He had been raised by his grandparents. They had died in quick succession and he had used the money they left him to buy the necessary supplies to attempt the path to guardsman. He had been rejected not long before he was to graduate to his country circuit. Though she might have known, Aella had not let me in on what had caused him to be expelled. It was the one thing he didn’t talk freely about. After hearing Mariah’s story, I was even more hesitant to ask about it.

  I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to talk about it. It wasn’t as though I had explained the nitty-gritty reasons for my fleeing Nophgrin. There was no way to say “wrongly convicted to death” without raising even more questions. Questions I still wasn’t prepared to answer.

  I took another hefty drink, then I leaned forward and knocked the bottle against Aella’s loosely curled fingers. She took the bottle from me, cracking her eyes and beaming dreamily.

  “Are you gone already?” I teased her as she took a drink and dribbled a little down her chin.

  She brought the drop back up to her lips with her thumb, making the movement more sensuous than it needed to be, by maintaining eye contact, her gaze turning from dazed to wicked.

  Conner caught the exchange and stopped his massage. She made a noise of protest, wiggling her shoulders. “Don’t tease your roomie, Aella, it isn’t nice.” He scolded her, but his words held barely contained laughter.

  She twisted and scooted away from him, dangling the bottle casually, keeping it just out of his reach. “What’s that you said? You’re through drinking tonight?”

  He made a grab for the bottle and she yanked it even farther away. “Oh, very well,” he said, “tease your roommate—I don’t care what you do!” Shooting me a half-apologetic look, he accepted the bottle she thrust at him.

  “Weakness!” I chastised.

  “You’re a big girl. You defend yourself!” he responded with a grin. When he had taken a long, careless swig from the bottle, he passed it on to Mariah.

  She was chortling. “No tussles tonight. If we wake my neighbors they’ll pound all of us and get the commanders to stick us with their chores.” She was met with murmurs of agreement.

  “To not getting stuck with Mariah’s neighbor’s chores!” I cried. I raised one swaying arm into the air.

  “And to no training tomorrow!” Luke added raising his own arm.

  Aella laughed and copied our movements, crying, “Here, here!” The boys echoed the cheer, and Mariah rolled her eyes, though she couldn’t hide her smile.

  Tomorrow was the one day of the week where we were forbidden from practicing. Ostensibly that was so everyone could go to the altar room where service could be done for our individual gods. The sight of mercenaries trouping into that room to pay their devotions was a familiar sight. Religious services had been a weekly event in Nophgrin too. It had been a time to rejoice over Hearth Father’s blessings of sun, and to sing praises with my neighbors. These days I did not do much singing. I didn’t know what to say to my gods.

  Prayer wasn’t the only reason for the rest days though. Several mercenaries were randomly selected each week to tend to the field and its equipment. Also, besides the normal handful of people selected for cooking duty, another set was pulled to do deep cleaning in the kitchen.

  Each of our group had taken our turns with chores the last few weeks and were relieved to have no duties to attend to. If I hadn’t left most of my whittling tools in Nophgrin, I might have passed the day with that. However, in my haste I had grabbed the wrong bag, and I had left most of my tools behind. I’d made my peace with it. My good tools were too expensive for me to replace, and a bad set wasn’t worth wasting the money on.

  All of which meant that, since none of us had anything better to do tomorrow, we could get well and truly drunk tonight—so long as none of us procured any punishment duty.

  Mariah swirled the bottle, thoughtfully. Changing the subject, she said, “You know, I can’t believe winter is a third of the way through. Do any of you know where you’re headed in the spring?”

  “South,” Aella said. Luke and I nodded our agreement.

  “Seventh Company too.” Conner said. “We’re traveling with Ninth, and I suppose you lot too, until The Great Road splits, and then we go east while they go west.”

  “What work is Hamash looking for down there?” I asked.

  “Perytons, I bet,” Luke guessed.

  Conner shook his head. “Maybe, but there’s something else.” We waited patiently as he paused in suspense. “Hamash says he wants to be in the area because there’s a new gaggle of bandits making trouble. Mage bandits. Nasty ones, making a lot of fuss, for the past few months. I think he’s hoping we’ll be in the right place to nab the job.”

  Mariah and I both perked up, but she spoke first. “I know my company is going south, but Magda wouldn’t say why. She said she needed to get more information before she made any real decision. Think it’s the same thing?”

  We glanced at each other. Three companies going in one direction was generally bad business, but rogue witches would warrant it. Many people with power went to the capital to be properly trained, but for a multitude of reasons, there were some who chose to cultivate their power themselves. Without the mage council to govern them, those individuals could cause havoc.

  “Could be,” Conner said. “Aella, did your mom say what you lot were after?”

  “She said dragons, like normal,” Aella hedged. She gnawed her lower lip for a moment. “Actually, what she said was—” Aella pitched her voice, and spoke roughly from her throat, mimicking her mother, “We’re going south, as you well know. We’ll be doing the normal jobs. Unless situations arise to change that.”

  We laughed at her imitation as we were meant to, but no one spoke for a few minutes after, mulling over this new information. I had no doubt that eventually when I did fight dragons they would be scary. Regardless, I had been preparing myself for going after them. I had even gotten to the point where I was eager to try my hand at monster killing. Even if most monsters tended to avoid humans, I had heard enough stories about the bad ones to be excited to spare people the destruction they could reign when they crossed paths with humanity.

  A band of rogue witches though… that was closer to my heart’s desire. The same desire I had been actively pushing away for the past few months. True, it was unlikely that these mages were powerful in the way Master Noland was, but they were still mages using their power to harm normal people. Was this a sign from the gods for me not to ignore this calling? Or was this a test? Was I meant now to prove that I could resist the urge to chase after these things? Was I meant to insist that dragons were the most sensible way to go? My mother had always said that when the same problem kept presenting itself to you then it was the gods t
elling you that it was your task to deal with. But my mother wasn’t here now.

  “That’s some fighting I’d love to see.” Mariah passed the bottle on to Luke without drinking any more, and he did the same; I held onto it.

  “What fighting exactly?” I asked, my mind still on dragons and gods.

  “Seventh Company has three battle mages,” Mariah said earnestly. She leaned forward over her knees, causing her dark curls to tilt forward heavily. “It’s not often you get to see an out-and-out mage battle these days. Unless there’s an actual war, mostly they don’t make a lot of fireworks.”

  “Most companies employ only a healer, like Belinda,” Aella explained. “Battle mages like our Ito tend to be more expensive, and most companies can do without them. We have him because we tend to work with a lot of dangerous magical creatures. That makes him necessary and makes us capable of paying him.”

  “So how does Seventh Company afford three?”

  “They take—” Luke started, but Aella gave him a look that I didn’t understand, and he shut up.

  “They take on a lot of the same work we do,” she said. Conner quirked an eyebrow at her, and she shook her head meaningfully.

  Mariah had caught the exchange. “Oh, that’s not suspicious at all. All right you two, spill.”

  Conner rolled his eyes, sliding heavily from the bunk onto the rug with the rest of us. “It’s not a big deal. Only Aella thinks it is. We’ve got a wealthy benefactor of sorts—I mean,” he corrected hastily, “not a benefactor. We’re not allowed those, obviously. Hamash just knows a guy who will pay a hefty sum for us to bring him any of the more impressive beasties we come across. He’s got a menagerie.”

  “He what?” I asked, appalled.

  “Like, a collection of animals—”

  “I know what the word means. I meant why in the world would you collect them? Can you even collect them?”

  Conner shrugged, taking the forgotten honey wine from my hand. “He can. We subdue the thing and bundle it up in the caravan. The mages will knock it out and keep it knocked out, however they do that. Then we deliver the whole package to his gates. Once inside, his people take the caravan to the back and bring us our pay—and a new caravan if the first one is wrecked.”

  “Aella’s right. That’s sketchy.” Mariah jabbed a finger at him. “Does Hamash have it cleared with the guild?”

  “He wouldn’t do it if we didn’t have the ok.”

  Mariah pursed her lips as her gaze turned to the small hearth. When she didn’t seem likely to say any more, Aella reached out and rubbed her knee. “I asked my mother about it, back when he told me.” She looked back at Conner to gauge his reaction. Appearing unperturbed, he beckoned her on and she continued. “She said she didn’t intend for us to start in on that business, but that so long as the guild gets its dues then there wasn’t any problem with Seventh Company doing it.”

  “But this buyer could do anything with the beasts you bring to him,” I protested. Mariah still had not looked away from the fire, but she nodded stiffly at my words. “Who is this person? Have you even seen this menagerie?”

  “No. They don’t exactly invite us in for tea. And as to who it is… that’s confidential,” Conner said reluctantly, shifting uncomfortably under the stares he was receiving from Lucas and myself. “Look, he’s just an old nobleman with weird interests! He’s fine.”

  “Yeah but say you’re right about that—and I doubt you are. What happens when he dies?” Mariah asked quietly. “Who gets all of his pets then? Do they get turned loose right there? Is it your duty to return them to their home places? Or does his heir inherit them, free to do with them whatever they wish?”

  He put up his hands, as though he could block the onslaught of questions with his palms. “I don’t know! Ok? It’s not my job to know. It’s my job to do what I’m paid to do, and what my commander says we should do. Hamash is a good leader. He wouldn’t put any of us in danger.”

  It was past midnight when Aella and I walked through the mess hall to return to our building, and our beds. Both Aella and I were quiet. We had let Conner off the hook and continued to drink until Mariah’s roommates stumbled in. After that, Mariah and Luke had slipped off to his room to be alone, and Conner, clearly worn out, had gone on ahead of the two of us as we performed a quick tidy to help Mariah.

  Ordinarily the opportunity to be alone with Aella would have caused butterflies to flutter in my stomach, but tonight my thoughts were stuck on Seventh Company and their monster collector. I barely even registered the few times our fingers brushed in the cramped stairwell on our way downstairs.

  Conner had been right, I knew. It wasn’t his decision what work his company took. Our commanders would take opinions, but at the end of the day, they had the final word, and the work they did was clearly paying well, if his gear was any indication. What bothered me was that this man could be anyone, and Conner did not seem to care what the consequences were because he was following his orders. Was that what I was supposed to do? Was that what Dai expected me to learn?

  “What would you do if your mother asked us to do something like what Hamash is doing?” I asked abruptly as we pushed through the doors that led into the mess hall.

  “What, transporting dangerous creatures for a man to keep privately?” Aella had linked her fingers behind her head as she walked. She paused to look at me, swaying.

  “Really, anything. Anything you wouldn’t think was right if it was you making the call. I mean, anything that you wouldn’t do if you weren’t ordered to do it. You understand?” I fumbled with my words.

  She pursed her lips, her brow wrinkling. “But she tells us it is the right decision to make?”

  “Yeah.” My voice was quiet, but it echoed around the mess hall. The room was dim and empty now. Everyone had returned to their beds, and the room and tables had been roughly cleaned, the benches flipped on top of the tables.

  She hummed. “I don’t know. A mercenary can technically leave their company in the middle of a season, return to the guild, and file a formal complaint. It sort of means destroying your career though.” She snorted. “Either way the decision goes, you won’t be welcome back in your own company. Whether the guild leaders rule for or against your complaint you’ll be labeled a troublemaker—a liability.”

  “So, we really are just meant to do what we’re told? Even if we don’t agree with what the orders are?” I looked in the direction of the door that led to our building. It came close and then wandered farther away. At some point, perhaps I would get a handle on drinking just enough to relax and not so much that I couldn’t see straight.

  “Well, it’s not like the military where desertion or questions get you put in chains. You can talk to your commander and to your company and try and turn favor against the mission in order to keep a contract from being signed, or to break the contract. Sometimes commanders will listen. That failed, you can pay your final dues to the guild and leave, with no repercussions. But yeah, those are your options if you want to eat.”

  I yawned hugely, wrapping my arms around my middle. “But you’ve never had a problem with any of your orders?”

  She grinned. “Well, my mother is the commander. There’s not a lot that I don’t have any influence in, despite us mostly keeping business separate from our personal relationship.”

  “Right, of course.” I started to move forward again.

  She caught my arm. “It’s not Master Noland, Taryn. No one has clearance to work with him. Especially not when it comes to… something like that. Not that I’ve ever heard of him looking to hire mercenaries anyway.”

  I shrugged and pulled my arm out of her hold. The thoughts that came to me now made me feel shaky. I couldn’t keep them from tumbling out of my lips. “Not all snakes are as well-known as that man. Fact of the matter is, Master Noland did something to give Michael magic. He made a mage out of a commoner and then told him to try to capture a gryphon. Seventh Company sells to a nobleman who collects his ow
n beasties. Who knows who else is playing whatever game that they’re in? And what does that mean to us poor folk caught in the crossfire when they decide it’s time to test their collections?”

  I looked at her then and saw to my surprise that her eyes were wide and her mouth slightly agape. She shut it and swallowed, pushing hair back from her brow. The brown twists sprang back. They always did.

  She ought to wear a headband, I thought distractedly.

  “I hadn’t connected the two,” she admitted, shamefaced. “I should have. It makes sense, that some bigger plot is afoot. I hate noble folk.” The last part was said with venom. “They’re always doing something. That’s one good thing about being a mercenary. Technically, we have no sovereign. We’re based in this country, and so it doesn’t do us any good to work for enemies of the kingdom, but if things get dicey…”

  “You can run,” I finished.

  She gave an exasperated sigh. “We can relocate. Enough of this talk. It’s late, and you’re going to make my hangover come early. I’ll ask mother what she thinks in the morning. Will that satisfy you?”

  I bit my lip, gnawing at it before speaking. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s not as though there’s anything we can do.”

  “That’s not true.” Aella gave an exaggerated sweep of her arms. “Mother can talk to the guild leaders, present this new information, and propose its connection to Hamash’s work.”

  Aedith was twice as shrewd as either of us. If I had made the connection between Seventh Company’s side job and my personal tragedy, then I had to assume she already had as well. If she had, then she would have already taken it to the guild leaders. Since Conner hadn’t heard of any changes in guild policy, that had to mean they had decided it didn’t matter. Right?