Of Dragon Warrens and Other Traps

by Shannon McGee

  Up until our second week on the road I had ridden next to the caravan driver—Tess. Not the most pleasurable experience. She took great satisfaction in pointing out how much I didn’t know, while I silently fumed. I’d have much rather ridden behind Aella, but that would have been unfair to Juniper, burdened as she was with Aella’s travel gear.

  Thankfully, right before splitting off from Conner and Hamash’s company, we had ridden through a horse fair. It set up each spring off The Great Road. There, with the help of Aedith, and Hamash who knew more about horses, I had purchased my mare.

  Cinnamon was what Hamash called a blood bay, with a slim white slice along her forehead that curved over her nose and mouth. Her coat—the color of mahogany—gleamed in the desert sun while the black of her mane, tail, and points seeming to absorb light rather than reflect it. I missed Hale, but Cinnamon had been love at first sight. Battle-trained, she seemed to sense my directions before I gave them, her body moving with mine as though we were one beast.

  She had also been expensive. Fully trained horses of good quality did not come cheap, but Aedith hadn’t even blinked at the price. She said that a good horse was worth my life, but I’d never spent so much money in one place.

  I squinted through a fog of sand that rose and fell off to my right. There. Again. In the distance I spotted the shape of a lone rider, swathed from head to toe in taupe colored cloth and seated on a leggy tan horse with a white mane. They might have blended right in with the hills but for the glint of a metal pommel. That was what had caught my eye, the metal flashing before being obscured by the billowing of the rider’s poncho.

  Something about the way the sun hit the distant rider and horse made my head swim, and a fizzle rippled across my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut, cursing the heat; when I opened them again, more sand was blowing across the hills in great clouds. By the time it cleared the rider had vanished again. With a murmured excusal to Aella, I urged Cinnamon to the front of the procession, where Aedith rode with her seconds.

  “Aedith,” I said hesitantly, “I’ve been seeing a person for the past hour or so. I thought it was maybe my imagination at first, but now I’m fair certain that they’re real.”

  Aedith nodded grimly. “That’ll be a scout from a local village. The people of this desert, Taryn, are wonderfully suspicious folk. They have to be, with food and water as scarce as it is out here. It’s probable they won’t come any closer to us, so long as we don’t veer off the road or go taking water from any wells. This one’ll probably stick with us until we leave his people’s land. If you see more than one rider, then you yell an alarm.”

  I bobbed my head, reigning up to let the line of riders pass me. Feeling embarrassed, I ignored the curious looks I received from a few and the knowing look I got from Tess, who muttered something out of the side of her mouth to Harold, who was riding his horse beside her. She’d be laughing about the green recruit not knowing about the local people, no doubt. It was a relief when they had passed and I could return to my place at Aella’s right.

  “You ok?” she asked. The words were muffled as they made their way through a thick kerchief that she kept tied around her mouth through the course of every ride. The sand, she claimed, bothered her terribly.

  “I’m fine. I’ve just been seeing a rider off in the distance since the morning. I thought I’d tell your mom.”

  “The one on the palomino?” she asked. When I merely stared at her, she sighed. “It’s a horse that’s tan and white.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, feeling stupid. Two days at the horse fair had not been long enough for all the names for different horse colorings to sink in and stick to my brain.

  “Yeah, I saw him. What’d my ma say?”

  “She said he wouldn’t be any trouble so long as we didn’t touch anything that belonged to him.” I sucked at my teeth and spat, ridding my mouth of some grit.

  “Makes sense. We usually pick up a rider like him as we come down. It’s hard country. Even the ones that can afford to bring us in resent the food and water they lose to us. The ones who don’t hire us like us even less.”

  “She said he’d leave us once we left his land. How can he even tell where it ends?” I asked, squinting around me. “It’s not as though they put up fences.”

  Aella shrugged. “Whatever the maps say, they’ve had this place sliced into sections since before The Great Burning,” she said. “Knowledge that old becomes muscle memory. They know how many steps from their well to the next village’s land. They recognize different rock formations. When they come up, they even know the cacti. That sort of thing.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Even the rocks looked the same to me. “As you say.”

  Our watcher stuck with us the rest of the day, but just that one, so I said nothing else to Aedith. Instead, Aella and I passed the time playing memory games with Ito and Belinda. They were well-versed in the flora and fauna of the desert, since much of it could be used in different magical workings, and it was fun to learn about those things, as well as their more mundane qualities.

  Any residual fear I had carried in my heart towards mages was slowly but surely fading—at least when it came to those two. They were too pleasant to dislike, and I enjoyed their friendship. They weren’t afraid to tease one another, but it was always kindly meant. It also didn’t hurt that when the heat became too horrible, they weren’t stingy about cooling us off with their magic. The way Ito tried to explain it, it involved taking the heat on our bodies and putting it somewhere else. I didn’t really understand, but I appreciated it nonetheless.

  That evening, we set up camp as the sun began its descent over the western sand dunes. As we worked, the canvas of the tents were slowly bathed in the fiery pinks, yellows, and oranges of the fading sun. I paused in my setup to marvel at it, not for the first time. The heat of the day might have been sweltering, but even I could appreciate Hearth Father’s splendor here.

  When we had finished with settling in, the entire company gathered around the fire pit, which was downwind from the tents. It was habit now, after being on the road for weeks, and I barely thought about it as I joined the clump of people trooping in that direction, like a herd of sheep. Aedith and her seconds positioned themselves so they could be seen by as many people as possible, waiting patiently as the last stragglers finished and wandered closer.

  “You’ll be pleased to know that we are only half of a day’s ride from the city,” Aedith said without preamble, when the general complaints of a long day’s ride had died away.

  “That’s Dabsqin,” Aella murmured in my ear, as though I might have forgotten, and I nodded.

  The news was met with little, if any, surprise from the veterans of our company. The southern tour, as some liked to call it, was a yearly trek, and its course did not vary, much. Still, there was relief in the cheers that met the commander’s announcement. My own heart thrummed in excitement.

  Dabsqin sat at the widest point of the Lorus River—one of the main channels of the south. Kaleb had told me a little about it as we rode. He said the city was as large as both the fort and town of Forklahke combined, and then some. It would be greater than any city I had ever seen before.

  Unlike a mountain town, it was also within a day’s ride from its closest neighbor. In fact, it was a day’s ride from several towns, all of which clustered closely together along the lush banks of the river. It was a hub of agriculture and trade. While those who lived amidst the true desert rarely had enough money to hire us, those who sat on the river had more than enough. We would ride through no small number of those habitations in the next few months, doing odd jobs here and there.

  Aedith and her seconds then fielded questions, but there were very few. We all knew that we were here to hunt drakes. Ito had explained that even though Dabsqin guards were supposed to keep them in check, there had been very few years that the earl hadn’t been willing to outsource the problem when Twelfth Company rode through the city. The city’s coffers were full,
and a mercenary killed doing the work of monster hunting was not nearly so big a deal as an actual citizen. It also left the guards free to keep the peace among the civilians. However, the job wasn’t official until Aedith spoke to someone in charge, and until then, details for all of us on the exact nature of our task would be scant.

  When the informal briefing concluded, we ate quickly and then returned to our tents for bed. If anyone had asked me a year ago if a person could have been worn out from a day in the saddle, I would have laughed at them. I knew better now, and sleep was a commodity that I looked forward to each evening.

  Another change was that I now had my own tiny tent to settle down in each night. The guild had supplied me with my own gear as part of my sign-on package. Sometimes I missed Aella’s company in the evening, but I was mostly grateful for the return of the semblance of privacy my own tent provided.

  It was as I was tying my tent closed and settling into my bedroll that another thought occurred to me: Dabsqin would also have real beds and shelters for us. That would be a blessing. The only issue I found with sleeping alone was that desert nights were as cold as the days were scorching. Well, that and the fact that training was also rarely possible now, which meant my nightmares had returned. I slept fitfully, waking often with flames reaching through the darkness toward me, and now there was no Aella to sleepily pat my back, and mumble that I would be ok.

  This night was no different. I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours when I thrashed myself awake. The sweat that soaked my back chilled me quickly as I sat up, trying to keep my breathing as even and soft as I could. It was so quiet out in the desert, I could hear my heart, battering against my rib cage.

  Experience told me that a walk outside would help. It was too hard to breathe inside the little tent. Pulling on my night-shirt, I quickly unhooked the tiny clasps that secured the door flap and slipped outside. As always, the dream slipped away once I was out in the starlight. There had been fire, I knew. I had been tied to a post. I could still feel the rough wood from it pressing against my calves through my breeches… and it was gone. I scrubbed my arms as a gust of wind caused goosebumps to ripple across them.

  The glow of a fire highlighted a nearby ridge. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep. Aella would have woken me if she had decided to stay up, but she wasn’t the only person whose company I enjoyed, and I did not feel like being alone again yet.

  My boots sat outside my tent. I’d left them there to try to keep the sand from invading my bedroll. Carefully, I upended them and tapped firmly on their soles as I had been taught during the beginning of the trek. When no scorpion or other creepy-crawly fell out, I shoved my feet into them before making my way toward the crackling of the fire. I was halfway through the tents when a low growl stopped me.

  “Bit late to be up.”

  We were in the dark of the moon, and my heart jolted as Lawrence stepped from the shadows. His eyes were narrowed, and his cheeks were red and blotchy. I flared my nose, taking in the next breeze. He had been drinking. A bottle was in his hands, half empty. Behind him another dark silhouette loomed. I thought it was probably Tate. They tended to stick together.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and shrugged, attempting to affect a careless attitude. I had liked it so much better when I could avoid those of the company who I disliked. Here there was no chance of that.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Excited for your first job, I imagine. Going to be a hero, are you?” Behind him Tate made a noise too harsh to be a laugh. Lawrence’s own smile was mean, and he swayed as he spoke. “Think you’re up to it?”

  “As I’ll ever be. Kaleb and Dai seem to think I’m ready.”

  He snorted. “We’ll see. You know our last recruit—man named Miguel—he got himself,” he blinked, lost his train of thought, and then regained it, “he got himself killed his second day on the job. That’s how our lady commander got the—you know.” He drew a finger from the corner of his mouth, across his cheek. “She tried to rescue him, but it was too late. They had eaten out his middle, you know.”

  I hadn’t known. Bile rose in my throat at the picture he had presented to me. Even a healer like Belinda couldn’t save a man from being disemboweled, and that death would have been… horrific.

  I cleared my throat, trying to speak with bravado that I did not feel. “I’m not Miguel. I think I’ll do all right for myself.”

  Lawrence wrinkled his nose. “Could be you’re something other, but I think that’s just what people say. Suppose we’ll see.” He turned and lumbered back out toward his friend. Together they made their way around me and down the ridge to the fire behind me without another word.

  I stared at the space he had occupied. I had always known that being a mercenary was a hard job—the battle wounds my companions were covered in made that fact difficult to ignore. But, their last recruit had died? On only his second day in the field?

  When someone’s snore tore through the night air like a saw through a log of wood, I shook my head hard, attempting to clear it. The old man was spouting drunken nonsense. I would be fine. I had worked my tail off in training—certainly I had been in the yards more than Lawrence or Tate.

  One thing was for certain, going to the fire was out of the question, and I also wasn’t about to wake Aella in the middle of the night just because I’d had a bad dream. Feeling no better than when I had left it, I crawled back into my tent.

  I’d hoped to fall back to sleep quickly, however, sleep was in no hurry to return to me. It was the uncertainty that scared me. Images of this Miguel person kept flitting across my eyelids. Why had no one told me about him? Had he been young like me? Had he been strong, or had he been careless? Each version of him stood against my imagination’s best renditions of drakes and lost to them, and the drakes were their own frightening unknown.

  Back in Nophgrin, Nai’s bedroom walls had hangings with different monsters, drakes among them, embroidered across their plush lengths, but those had been stylized. Mariah had been able to show me slightly more accurate sketches, but I knew nothing could really prepare me for what they were like in real life. I’d grown up with gryphons, and each year they had still shocked me by their strangeness.

  I will be fine, I repeated to myself, and I willed myself to believe that. It did little good. Sleep still would not come, but I supposed that was just as well. I did not know if I could handle another nightmare, which was certain to come if I did manage to sleep.

  Instead, I lay awake listening to the different desert noises. There were some, when I really listened for them. Fleet-footed lizards and tiny rodents with long noses and large flat feet skittered across the sand on their own night-time business. I might have thought that they’d be afraid of humans. Maybe they were grateful for the shelter our tents provided from predators, as well as for the crumbs which had most assuredly been dropped during supper.

  I let those sounds ground me and then let them go. When I was calmer, I aimed to imagine not just all the ways in which things could go wrong on our hunts to come, but what I would do if they did. That was something Belinda had taught me recently. It helped—a little.

  I could hear the watch fire crackling, and the thought of those men, awake and drinking made me uneasy, in an entirely different way from future monster hunts.

  It was a few hours shy of dawn when those that had been down at the fire stumbled back to their own tents. They snuck back through the rows the way any drunk person would—loudly, cursing, and clumsy. I imagined a reprimand from the commander or her seconds was in their future, which gave me some comfort.

  When the sun came creeping over the dunes at last it was a blessing to start the work of the day and not have to think anymore. If there had been a full day’s ride ahead of us I wasn’t sure I would have made it without falling out of my saddle from sheer exhaustion. Several times I found my eyes drooping and my weight slipping to one side or the other on my saddle. Cinnamon, a placid beas
t, flicked her ears back at me in consternation and whickered disapprovingly when that happened, rousing me enough to straighten back up.

  Luckily, we reached Dabsqin not long before midday. I was beginning to crave the dried beef and apples that served as our meals more often than they didn’t when we topped one of the largest dunes thus far.

  The glitter of the Lorus caught my eyes, and not understanding at first what I saw, I reined up to better take it in. Aella glanced behind her when she no longer sensed my presence, and her eyes crinkled when she saw my awestruck expression, hinting at the grin hidden beneath her kerchief.

  “What do you think of our home for the next few weeks?”

  “It’s amazing,” I whispered earnestly.

  The Lorus River was massive, with the buildings on the far shore so small that they were little more than pinpricks. Its water was a dark blue that was almost black, and small bits of white dotted the surface—sail boats, my brain registered. Though I’d never seen them in person, I recognized them from descriptions of how the coastal people of the north navigated the Western Sea.

  My breath caught as I let my gaze backtrack across the land preceding the river. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed the sight of green things until I saw the emerald of the city’s surroundings. The desert had strange crooked trees and tall barrel-shaped plants with hot pink flowers and wicked prickers, but they were few and far between. An oasis might have grass, but they were even more rare, and Aedith had only let us stop at one so as not to tempt an attack.

  What lay before us now were expansive and lush farm fields. Greedily my eyes drank in the even rows of crops and herds of farm animals grazing. The growth stretched for what couldn’t have been more than six miles before the vegetation tapered and then ended in a distinct line between desert and coast.