For Dragons

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There were legends of them, though in a time so long passed that any real truth in the stories seemed lost. But perhaps it was naïve to think in a land with magic someone wouldn’t try to bring them back. Who can resist stories, legends passed down knowingly in circles gathered around fires, bodies huddled together against the night? Who can resist the lure of power?

The morning was grey, clouds covering the sky and shading what light managed to make its way through the languorous spread of their bodies, frost clinging jealously to the ground. Fen’s hoe bit into the earth with strength fueled more by spite than brawn. The sound of other villagers’ tools striking the dirt in random time had faded as the hours passed and the cold settled into her bones. Around them the woods looked nearly black, towering trunks spiked towards the sky fencing them all in as they worked their petty lordling’s land, the trees sentinels watching over their labour. The presence of the woods surrounding the fields pressed in on them and reminded them of the fate that awaited those who proved idle, branches sharp like the teeth of some unknowable beast’s rictus grin. Perhaps in other parts of the Valley the land was softer, yielding, the ruling aristocrat less enamoured with their meagre authority, but any who braved the woods to find out never returned to tell.

Fen paused in her work to wipe the sweat from her brow with the loose fabric of her shirt, hard eyes tracking the foreman who paced at the edge of the field. Her breath steamed in the cold morning air, stray strands of hair sticking to the sides of her face, cooling sweat urging her to move again before she froze. Still she couldn’t help but watch the man who watched them all, a burly villager who’d traded his pride for better rations, a better boot to place on the neck of those who should’ve been his fellows. He just had to look at her, just had to see that she’d stopped for a confrontation to begin. She realised her grip on the hoe was white knuckled only when she shifted and caught the edge of her hand against a sharp edge of wood, frowning as blood beaded.

“Are you mad?” the man next to her hissed. “Get back to work!”

Incandescent with it.

Her feet were heavy as she trudged home to her hut, mud walls at the far edge of the haphazardly coalesced village that never quite kept out the chill, the night sky a dark blue. She might have called the colour velvet if it was warmer, but the nights in Sauvers never came warm enough to be compared to anything you’d want wrapped around you. Dirt was on her patched pants, in the creases of her cracked hands, exhaustion weighted around her shoulders like lead. Would it have been better to say she was too tired to be angry? But it was always there, smouldering in her chest. Some days she felt more like she was drowning under the weight of it than she knew what to do with. And the rest of the village seemed fine to leave her losing bits of herself to her anger.

If she’d eaten that morning she might have heard the hoofbeats before she did, but as it was her breakfast had been snatched out of her hands by a man who’d settled the matter with a cuff to her head that made her thoughts ring and fists curl. Horses meant one wanted to hide, out of sight, but by the time her tired mind registered the sound of them coming towards her there was only time to scramble off the edge of the road into the brush, her head lowered in a forced display of respect.

She heard them stop before her, the jingle of tack, and felt her stomach clench. “Oh hoh!” came a woman’s voice, tauntingly amused. “What’s this?”

Fen recognised the riders, their settlement too insular for her to have avoided even the nobles and their spawn. The lord of Sauvers and its surrounding peasantry had two children; none of the family had earned much of a reputation for idling with their serfs, thankful as that was. The eldest, Sabine, was reputed to be clever, and known for her vocal contempt for the less than cosmopolitan circumstances which she found herself set to inherit. She looked the picture of fashion settled laconically there on her neat little horse, her dark hair curling artfully on her shoulders. Fen was unsure how nobles managed to develop such appetites, seemingly by osmosis, even ones like Sabine raised in the country and seldom allowed to risk herself on the journey through the woods.

The youngest, Yves, was a few years Fen’s senior and had the same dark hair and square features as his sister and father, though the Lord Sauvers’ once sharp jaw had begun to go a bit jowly, his eyes narrowing from the squint he’d developed as his vision dulled. His son’s features were still sharply cast, dark eyes serious and quiet; he was said — in careful whispers — to be a disappointment to his father, more fond of his solitude than advancing the Sauvers name. Fen’s eyes flickered to his hands on the reins of his horse, long ungloved fingers contrary to her expectations.

It was the third rider that was the trouble, the Duchess Clarac a rare visitor to her unimportant country cousins, but one that delighted in making sport of those who had no power to escape her, her eyes glittering like a beast’s from the dark of the woods.

“Do they not have peasants in the capital?” Sabine asked, sounding bored.

“Not ones that look quite so pitiful as this,” the Duchess replied mockingly, Fen’s head snapping up to find the woman‘s lips twisted into a wolfish smile. It grew at so easily provoking a reaction from her target.

She looked away only to find herself caught in Yves’s eyes, already fixed to her face. She’d met him once before, and had hoped she never would again. He’d been dishevelled, relaxed, letting his horse drink from a stream when she stumbled upon them. Sweat and mountain water had dripped down his neck, clinging to his skin and finding their way beneath his loosened collar. His boots sat on a rock at the water’s edge, pants rolled up his legs and still falling into the stream where he cooled his feet.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she’d said. She should have addressed him as a lord and he should have lashed her for not doing so. It could have been her surprise, or her contempt for the nobility, but she was never entirely sure that either explained the familiarity she’d addressed him with that day. She remembered him as a child, serious and quiet then too, lanky and always at a distance when she saw him across whatever corner of Sauvers. But his eyes had a way of making her feel like there was something communicated between them, even though as a girl she felt she was nothing, the village outcast, and he was the son of her lord.

He’d only shrugged, the sun seeming to caress him, painting itself over his skin, into his hair, touching him even through the dappled canopy of leaves as he tended his horse. But his eyes met hers briefly over his shoulder and again tugged at hers, giving her that feeling that there was a world beneath her skin his eyes would unlock. But she wasn’t a child anymore.

“I should go,” she’d said. Part of her had wanted him to say something. Anything. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard his voice. The rest of her had been afraid he would.

He’d grunted and she’d felt herself let out a breath in relief or disappointment.

She’d looked back at the edge of the trees only to find him watching her, her steps slowing. But he neither spoke nor looked away so she’d escaped between the tree trunks, welcoming the way they shielded her from whatever force lived in his eyes.

“You spend enough time among the lower classes to be sure?” Yves said to the Duchess, his tone devoid of any inflection or emotion, eyes not leaving Fen’s.

His voice brought her back to the present, deeper than she’d expected. He wasn’t a delicate man, tall and broad-shouldered, but it was deep enough it would have been startling from anyone but a mountain. Her lips twitched at the way his cousin’s face tightened in smothered irritation, but she did her best to keep her head bowed and draw no further attention while the noblewoman pretended to titter.

“Perhaps we should return,” Sabine suggested, raising a manicured eyebrow and still sounding as if she had rather be watching paint dry. “It seems it might be time to put my darling brother to bed, cousin. He can be an absolute bear if kept up past his bedtime.”

“I suppose it would be rude to keep your father waiting after he’s been such a ...kind host,” the Duchess said, her lip curling in clear dismissal of the accommodations. The woman spurred her horse forward, Sabine following a hair behind her. The briefest glimpse Fen caught of her face was sharper than she would’ve expected considering the broadness of her boredom during their encounter.

Yves pulled his horse up before where she stood at the edge of the road, looking down at her from its broad back. He wore all black, his horse all black, the night settling into black around them; he looked like he might disappear into the air if not for his skin and the whites of his eyes. She stared back at him, and for a moment there existed a place where she didn’t hate everything he was. But then it disappeared.

“You should be careful on the roads,” was all he said, before digging his heels into his horse’s sides, thundering after his sister and cousin.

Fear gave her the strength to run the final stretch home, though by the time she slammed the door behind herself her legs were shaking with exhaustion. She slid down the wall, trying to stop her whole body from beginning to tremble. The last villager who had caught the Duchess Clarac’s eye when she’d visited had only been found weeks after the woman left, fine pearls wrapped around the neck of her former pet in contrast to the deep wounds snaking down their body. It was difficult to forget the way their bare skin had looked, alone and broken amongst the bramble of the woods. Fen buried her hands in her hair, forcing herself to breathe at a normal pace. It never got easier, never changed. There was never anywhere for her anger to go, it just rotted ineffectually in her chest.

The knock at her door came in the middle of the night. She didn’t know if she’d been expecting it, sitting on her pallet in the dark watching the door, or if she simply was no longer in the mood to be surprised.

“Yves,” she said simply, staring up at him, the man wrong in her doorway. Her hands hung limply at her sides.

His face was shadowed strangely by the glowstone he carried, but as expressionless as it always seemed to be. “Why is your house so far from the others?”

She shrugged, and thought of how much worse the villagers would treat her if they saw her speaking to him this late at night. She considered him in her house, how it would feel like his head and shoulders scraped the roof, his arms the sides, and she would be alone with him. She closed her front door behind herself and gestured down the street leading out of the village. “Let’s talk somewhere else.”

“They don’t accept you?” he asked. He kept a respectful distance between them, but walked evenly at her side as she led him off the road onto a small path between the trees.

“I was a foundling left at the edge of the woods,” she said. “They think I’m a changeling from the fae.”

She noticed the way he looked away from her and stopped, forcing him to as well. “What are you here for, Yves?” she asked. Because we’ve both always been alone? She felt emptier around him, struck with a hollowness she didn’t have a name for. She had been watching him for years, since her first glimpse of him across the crowded Sauvers Keep yard on whatever errand she’d been sent on. He was the only beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

For a moment his face almost cracked, but then she watched it shutter itself again. “You shouldn’t look at me like that,” he said quietly.

“I know,” she said, just as quietly. “…Why did you come?”

“I came to—”

“Yves!” Fen’s neck felt like it could’ve snapped from how quickly she turned towards the sound of Sabine’s voice.

“Come,” Yves said, the undercurrent of urgency in his voice convincing her not to bristle at the command, his hand gentle as it closed around hers.

The way he moved was near silent, the man clearly used to woodscraft, despite the superstitions most treated the trees to. They’d met once in the woods, so she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. Fen knew the forest surrounding Sauvers more intimately than most, and it was strange to think Yves might have been the same. She didn’t venture into the truly dangerous parts, the ones like to swallow you, but she’d always felt at home amidst the trees. Maybe the villagers were right to distrust her.

“Yves!” came again behind them, and Fen cast him a look asking why he’d come, why his sister was following, why they were running.

“Give me your knife,” Fen whispered to him, gesturing at the wicked looking dagger at his waist.

He gave her a hard look for a moment, as if weighing how likely she was to knife his sister with it, before reluctantly handing it over.

Fen pulled her nightdress up her leg to where the scars wouldn’t be seen and drew two deep horizontal lines across the side of her thigh, her body tensing at the pain as she withheld a hiss. With her blood she could feel the power in the earth thrumming beneath her feet, the electric lines of it connected to old deep things in the woods almost blinding if she looked too closely. Otherworldly blue light rolled down their bodies, and Fen looked at Yves to find him staring hard at her already.

“You’re a Hedge,” he said.

“Not a strong one,” she said, brushing the weighty word off before it could take hold. “As long as we’re not obvious, we won’t be seen or heard. It won’t last though.” What do you want to do? she asked him silently, standing across from him in the woods in the dark of the night.

“I need to find out why Sabine has come,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he wanted her to follow or not until he hesitated.

She moved closer, her arm brushing his, though she stopped short of taking his hand. Her fingers curled into her palm so she wouldn’t be tempted. “Let’s go then. Quickly.”

“Yves!”

Sabine was perhaps the least put together Fen had ever seen her, the woman’s face irritated beyond measure as she tramped through the woods, a smudge of dirt or blood on her cheekbone, her curly hair escaping from the complicated weave of an updo it was constrained it in.

“Is there a plan beyond spying on her?” Fen whispered to Yves, the two of them crouched at the edge of the path as he satisfied whatever curiosity.

“Yes,” he said, and stepped directly into his sister’s path. “Sabine.”

“Fuck!” the noblewoman swore as he materialised seemingly from thin air, clutching at her chest. “What are you doing out here, Yves? Did you come for the girl?”

Fen flinched from her position among the trees, but Yves made no move to give her away. “Yes,” he said simply, bowing his head.

Sabine sighed, one hand on her hip, the other running tiredly through her hair. “You’re not usually one to lose your head like this, brother. I didn’t realise you were so serious—”

“I am,” Yves said, straightfaced. “About this. Her.”

Sabine’s stare was hard. “You know I expected that you’d want to stay by my side, advising me as you always have while I ruled… Instead you’ll have to leave. Tonight.”

“I know,” he replied, heavier with his sister’s reproach.

She looked at him for another long moment, silent and assessing. “I brought Edden along, as well as some supplies. He should be able to carry the both of you, if that’s what you want.”

“Thank you, Sabine.”

She held up a hand to forestall him. “It’s the last thing I’ll be able to give you. Leave quickly. Don’t come back.”

She kissed his cheek, her fingers white with the strength of her grip as she held the back of his head tightly to her before releasing him and stalking back towards the road, head held high. Yves stood watching her go.

“Yves—” Fen tried, emerging from the trees.

“I killed the Duchess,” he said without turning to face her. “I made the choice; it’s not your fault.”

“Oh,” Fen said. She wasn’t sure how she felt standing so close to a man who’d so recently taken a life and sounded so emotionless about it. Even to protect her. “Why?” she asked. “Why me?”

“You’re important,” was all he said.

She snorted. “You’re the first to think as much.”

He lifted his shoulders. “Maybe.”

Fen watched the side of his face, expressionless, seeing in his eyes that still stared after where his sister had disappeared the packing away of years of history. “Can you wait for me?” she finally asked. “I need to gather a few things.”

“The stream,” he said.

She bit her tongue at that. She didn’t know if it troubled her that she knew what he meant or if it was that he knew that she would. It would be worse if he thought about her too.

It took the space of a moment for Fen to stuff her few meagre belongings into a makeshift rucksack and sling it over her shoulders. She’d dressed and completed her morning ablutions, trying to convince herself she wasn’t being more thorough than usual when she imagined herself pressed against Yves’s solid back. It felt like nothing to turn her back on the only home she’d known, walking out of the village into the woods without a glance behind her. And it felt good that it felt like nothing; it felt like power to not be suffocating beneath her feelings for once. Three drops of blood hung in the air before her, guiding her on as she wound into parts of the woods too dark for her to usually venture into, her heart thrumming in her ears as she waited for something fanged to leap out at her. She’d considered collecting Yves before this, particularly as she was sure his sword in his hands was far more effective than his knife in hers, but she couldn’t leave with him with nothing of her own.

The drops fell to the ground in a clearing that smelled like the beginning of time, this scent of earth and oldness that had lingered in her head for days the last time she visited. The trees here would’ve taken five of Fen to circle around, old stone columns from some forgotten civilisation rising from the earth and collapsed across the ground.

“You’ve come back, witchling,” a voice rasped. It wasn’t loud, but it nonetheless rattled in Fen’s head, a taste of ozone coating her tongue. There was the sound of claws cracking stone and the creature came into view, one foot over the other as it crawled down a pillar. Clawed, taloned feet, the sinuous body of an overlarge bird of prey, and an old woman’s wrinkled face coated in the blood of the innards she still gnashed between her pointed grey teeth. “Are you willing to pay the price this time, child?” The harpy swallowed the last of her meal and cackled. “You didn’t have much of a stomach for my bargains before.”

Ivahe hung with her head pointing towards the earth, but as she watched Fen her neck twisted unnaturally like an owl’s, facing the girl directly as she stepped forward. “I need something different this time.”

“You’re going to make a journey,” the harpy said, grinning eerily. Her tone dripped with condescension. “Have you come to ask for safe passage for you and your errant lord?”

“I won’t be the only one empty handed in this, the burden without any power.”

With a rush of air that sent Fen sprawling to the forest floor, the harpy spread her wings and landed before her. “Ignorant child,” she chastised sharply, circling Fen as she climbed warily to her feet again. The old woman clucked her tongue in irritation. “You haven’t gone mad yet, which means you’ve more power than you know. It rolls off you, soiling the air with untapped potential.”

Fen clenched her hands against their shaking. “That isn’t what I came for… It’s not enough.”

The harpy stopped her movement, raising an eyebrow in interest. “You weren’t even willing to pay the price to know where you came from. You think you can afford more than your own power?”

“What do you want this time, Ivahe?” Fen asked.

The old woman’s raspy chuckle rolled out like a storm again. “Are you desperate enough to pay?”

“Ivahe,” Fen said, aware of the sky lightening though she couldn’t see it through the trees.

“I will give you what you seek. A way forward, if you can navigate the path.” The harpy’s eyes glinted, old and alien.

Fen felt her stomach tightening. “And in return?”

“A debt. You have nothing valuable enough for such a trade now, girl. Not your magic, not your fluttering heart, the truth of your past, or the colour of your witchling eyes. But you will. A piece of your life you won’t be willing to part with I’ll come to collect. Make the choice or begone once again.”

Yves had asked for nothing. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t stay in the same position she’d been in all her life. “…Deal.”

Fen saw each of the harpy’s teeth as the old woman grinned, wider across her face than human mouths could go. “May you live long enough to regret this day, witchling.”

And then the world disappeared from beneath her.

Fen saw the cave as if she was laying on the bottom of a creek bed watching water rush over the image. It was too small for her to stand upright inside it, lit by the bioluminescent glow of the worms on the ceiling reflecting off the crystalline growths at its edges. At the very back of the flickering image there was a small pool of deep black water, and Fen knew without being told that was where she needed to go. She was seized and pulled back suddenly, as if there was a rope wrapped around her middle, out of the cave and its branching warrens of tunnels, to its entrance high up a mountain face, to a view above the tops of the unfamiliar trees that sped past before she saw Sauvers Keep in the distance. And for a moment she was still, suspended in the air as life inched past below her. Before she began to fall.

It felt like Fen landed in her body as if she truly had fallen out of the sky, and for a moment she simply gasped on the ground like a fish out of water, her mouth open as she struggled uselessly to draw breath. By the time she finally managed to swallow air into her lungs, all she could do was choke and cough as she attempted to breathe, practically retching on the floor of Ivahe’s clearing. She half expected the harpy’s mockery, but by the time she’d gathered herself to look, she realised the ancient creature had left. Muttering about how she’d fulfil their bargain if she’d been eaten in her sleep, Fen hurriedly grabbed her scattered belongings from where they’d fallen and started to run.

***

Yves sat by the stream where he’d told the girl he’d wait, sharpening his sword with careful strokes of his whetstone as he watched a rabbit cook on the fire he’d built. He’d settled Edden comfortably, checked their supplies, run through basic training forms, meditated, decided he was hungry, and then caught and cleaned the rabbit. His eyes shifted to the sun’s position in the sky, high overhead. She’d given him no indication of how long she might take; it was possible she was in no danger and his interference wouldn’t be welcome. They’d parted ways perhaps a few hours after the peak of one day to another; he’d decided if she wasn’t back by a similar time that night, he’d look for her. It was one thing if she’d changed her mind about wanting to leave with him; it was another if someone was forcing her decision.

There was a rustling and then, “Yves!” She spoke no louder than she needed to as her figure appeared from between the trees, and he felt a warmth suffusing him. She was here.

There was a steadiness to her, an unchangingness he had always found unfamiliar. He felt in some way he should have known better than to expect that she wouldn’t come, or wouldn’t be able to. She was short, with the same dark hair and dark eyes most of Sauvers had, as he had, but her eyes looked melted to him, deep and warm. He liked the way her hands moved when she spoke. As he stared at her he watched a flush spread across the tops of her cheeks to the tips of her faintly pointed ears, but she didn’t look away from him. He’d always liked that too.

“What?” he asked.

“I’ve never seen you smile before,” she said, lifting one shoulder in feigned nonchalance, though she still peeked at him from beneath her lashes as she did so.

“You have leaves in your hair,” he told her.

***

Fen watched Yves eat the rabbit he’d killed, something about it oddly methodical. His horse stared at her over his shoulder as if she were an intruder. In the forest. She considered making a face at it, but didn’t want him to catch her. She sat opposite him, tending the small fire so the smoke didn’t give them away. She didn’t know what Sabine’s help meant, what forces were or weren’t pursuing Yves.

“We should leave soon,” he said, startling her out of her thoughts.

“Where are we going, Yves?” Fen asked, staring at him as if her eyes could pierce a hole in his skin and force the truth to spill out.

He shrugged. “Away. Somewhere Clarac’s allies not pacified by Sabine’s lies are unlikely to strike back.”

“You don’t have a plan?”

He wiped his hands and set aside the remains of the rabbit carcass. “No.”

Sabine swallowed the choler that wanted to rise within her at the easy answer, told herself not to rush to judgement. He had everything. “Wasn’t there anything you wanted before all this?”

Yves met her stare straight on, something too large to look at welling in her stomach. Fen’s shoulders were the ones to curve in defeat, the fight going out of her.

“What is it you want?” he asked, standing and beginning to hide the signs of their presence, the break from his focused attention letting her relax again.

Fen shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know how to answer that. Everything. The world. I want to fight to make it what it should be and win.”

Yves stared at her before an eyebrow rose. “How do you know? What it should be?”

Fen shook her head, knowing better than to start as she moved to help him. “We should leave soon.”

It took him a moment to saddle his horse and secure their supplies before swinging deftly onto its back and reaching a hand down to her. She could’ve told him, asked him to go where she wanted. He wouldn’t have said no. She thought of a broken, rent skin left in the woods to be reclaimed by the underbrush, and the silence of those discovering it.

“Fen,” Yves said, the first time he’d used her name, his hand still outstretched.

She clasped his wrist and felt the strength in his arm as he pulled her behind him in a single motion, her body settling against his. She wasn’t used to being so close to another person, the proximity she was used to a press of people all crowded around the bread lines as they were given back in meagre fashion what they’d broken their backs for. She couldn’t make herself tell him about the dragon egg she’d seen.

“Let’s go,” she said, plotting their route in her head, the words she would need to say to steer him onto it. She felt a pit settle into her stomach, the sort of seed of coldness you force yourself to swallow. Fen closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath; she was doing what she had to. She needed to believe that to move forward.

“Hold on,” Yves said, his voice a rumble in his chest, and with a press of his heels his horse moved like the flow of a mudslide down a hill beneath them, Fen clutching his waist. Onward then.