Dragonoak: Gall and Wormwood, page 22
“The healers. They know I’m a necromancer, or they’ll figure it out soon,” I grumbled, and sat upright. Burying my face in my palms, I added, “And you told The King you could find another necromancer to heal him, and you didn’t even ask me first, like I was just waiting around like Iseul was made to. Like I was waiting for someone to find a use for me.”
Claire said nothing. I immediately regretted saying it out loud, and was sick to my stomach. She had a hundred reasons to justify what she’d done. What’s more, I knew she had not done it to hurt me, and that she had not planned to say it. It had happened in the spur of the moment, while she was doing all she could to push her feelings down deep. It wasn’t intention. I was making this about me, making a greater deal of it than it was, and—
Struggling to push herself into a sitting position, Claire pressed a hand between my shoulder blades and said, “I’m sorry, Rowan. I never should’ve said that.”
No excuses. No argument.
“It’s okay. It’s just… I’ve been in this situation so many times before. My village. Orinhal. I always have to hide it, to hold it back, and there are always people who want to use me,” I said. “But no matter what I do, people always find out. And then I have to leave.”
“You will not have to leave Thule,” Claire said, resting her chin on my shoulder. “I promise you that.”
“How can you say that?” I asked. I did not doubt her; I doubted the rest of the Kingdom. “Orinhal was yours and I still had to leave.”
“Because I will be Queen. I will be Queen and I will fight for you,” she said, pressing against my back. “We brought a phoenix back from not only death, but extinction. That will mean something.”
I wanted to believe her, of course I did, but I knew what I was.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have cried when you told me about… about the drinking. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me about it. If you want to drink, if you have drunk, I want to know. I want to be able to help, even if it’s only listening. I… I understand. In a way. Getting better isn’t about always being okay, and stumbling, that’s part of it,” I said, steadying my breathing. “You’re right. What we’ve been through means we can take care of each other. You want to drink, even though you know it’s bad for you. And I... sometimes when I think about Katja, I miss her. I want her to be here. I want her to see how strong I’m getting, how my powers are flowing through me. I want her to be proud, and…”
I couldn’t finish. Not with Claire’s arms wrapped tightly around my waist in an effort not to tremble.
“I hate that this is me. I hate that I think of her. Dream of her,” I murmured.
“She is under your skin,” Claire said, kissing me behind the ear. “Never forget that this was her intention all along. You are strong, Rowan, and not only because you are a necromancer. And none of that is because of her. You are a necromancer wherever you go, that much is true, but not every healer you meet will be like Katja.”
“I miss Kondo-Kana,” I said abruptly. I’d only seen her a handful of times in my life, and one of those had been for mere minutes, but I missed her in the same way I missed the days when I was not a healer-necromancer-liar. The days when I was safe. “I miss Canth, I miss Kondo-Kana. She understood. She’d understand this.”
Claire’s grasp slackened.
Quietly, she said, “I wish I could understand all of this, Rowan. I wish I could help you in all ways, but I am not a necromancer. And she is.”
“I love you. You know that,” I rushed to explain. “But it wouldn’t be fair for me to expect you to be everything to me. You mean everything, but I can’t ask the impossible of you. And it’s not that I love Kondo-Kana – or that I don’t – but it’s different. When I’m with you, it’s safe because I’ve spent so much time getting to know you, learning about you bit by bit. We went through so much together and you completely changed my life. I know you. As a person. But Kondo-Kana is… familiar. I know what she is. She knows what I am. I just… it’s like there’s a part of me that no one else has, except for her. And she understands.”
“You don’t have to explain yourself,” Claire said. “I’ll help you write to her, if you would like.”
“It’d take eight weeks to get a letter there, eight weeks to get back,” I said, not dismissing the idea out of hand. “And Kondo-Kana will probably be sleeping for weeks, or she’ll take her time in answering, and then it’ll be months.”
“You have a dragon,” Claire pointed out. “Those months could be turned into weeks.”
Managing a hint of a smile, I wrapped my arms around her as I eased her back into bed.
“You need to talk to your dad,” I murmured, letting my eyes close. “You need to talk to him properly.”
“I know,” she whispered, chest rising and falling beneath me.
CHAPTER XII
There were thirty-one pane left in Thule. The oldest was over a hundred, verging on ten feet tall, while the youngest had yet to start growing horns. They were scarred in the way the pane up in the mountains weren't: their skin did not show the balance between work done cheerfully and dutifully, and time spent around the fire pit. They were not covered in callouses, or all the accidental bumps and bruises that become part of a person.
Most were wrapped in burns. They spread across their arms and faces, turning their tough skin shiny and smoothing out their scales. Some had tusks missing, and others had chipped horns; some had suffered broken bones that never healed properly, and others had scars across their faces and hands.
They all had the same distant look in their eyes. It was a look that said whatever had hurt them would be let too close, if they allowed themselves to linger on the past for so much as a second. All they could do was shut it out.
One of the servants' dormitories had been emptied out and given to them. The beds were not large enough for most of them, but I knew that they had to be better than where they were kept before. Akela had come down every day since they arrived in Thule with a hammer and saw hooked on her belt, a handful of nails held between her teeth, and a pile of wood to help reinforce the beds. All morning, she set about making frames for even the tallest of the pane.
They didn't leave the room often. The door was never locked and Sen had fought for there not to be guards lingering in the corridor beyond, and it was not simply a case of them being uncertain how to nurture their newfound freedom. Rather, the humans in the castle beyond let it be known, both with and without words, that pane did not belong on the flatlands.
They had gone from being imprisoned by one type of Felheimer to another. They could not go back to their tribes, as so many suggested. Of the pane who remained, they either had no tribe to return to, or could not face their people.
The humans in the castle complained about the abundance of meat going to waste, and Queen Aren ensured everyone knew that the pane were there because of Claire. When asked why they were taking up so much space, Claire said that it was our duty to care for our own people and did not explain beyond that.
I went with Akela and Sen to the dormitory, when I could. I helped Akela put together the last of the beds, tended to what wounds were fresh enough to be fixed, but more than that, I listened. The pane would not ask me for anything, no matter how much they needed it. Asking had never been an option for them before this. I listened to all they didn't say and brought them what I could.
“Did you know Iseul?” I asked one of them in a whisper.
The pane was perhaps fifty or sixty, and I did not think it kind to ask how much of his life had been spent north of the mountains. His ears drooped at the question, shoulders rising to meet them. He had learnt the hard way that questions asked by humans were to be answered, but Iseul's name dredged up something uncomfortable within him.
“It's okay,” I rushed to assure him. His reaction was enough. “You don't have to talk about it.”
“It's... it's...” He began, claws curling in the air to find the words. “It is hard to know how to feel about him. That man. What he did to the dragons...”
The woman next to him, who'd been given a book by Sen, looked up from the open pages and frowned.
“What we were all doing to the dragons,” she said. “That life-giver was forced to do as he did. Same as us.”
“Yes. Yes, I understand that, but... Without his powers.”
“Without his powers, they would've found someone else,” she said. The scars on her face and horns misshapen from a lack of meat said that the woman had been in the Bloodless Lands for a decade or more, and the way she was determined to live her life in spite of that all made me ashamed. “In the end, he did what he could to save us. Him and that other. He got them out, got them to Kouris.”
The man nodded and rubbed his face. A few of the other pane had turned towards us, each of them as torn on the matter as he was. None had asked where Iseul was, and I didn't know whether they didn't want to know, or if they could do nothing but assume the worst.
Sen, Akela and I stayed with them for a few hours, as we did most days. Without fail, each and every last minute was gruelling. It would've been so much easier to hear the news from Kouris, know that the pane had been saved, and leave it at that. All I could do was remind myself that I had been in their position, or one like it. I hadn't wanted to leave Reis' hut for a month, had believed all of the good parts of my life to be over, and never would've left that room and the dark corners of my mind without my friends' unfaltering kindness.
“I wish we could just tell everyone in the castle why the pane are here. What they've been through,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets. “Then everyone might stop giving them such a hard time.”
“Ha! Northwood, always, you are seeing too much good in too many of the people. The humans, they are never stopping giving the pane a hard time,” Akela said. “And it is not our story to be telling, yes? When the pane are wanting people to know what is happening, they are using their own voices, and they are saying it in a way that is belonging to them.”
“Yeah,” I said, sighing.
“A-and if the pane talk about... how they were used, what r-really happened,” Sen said, glancing skittishly at every person we passed, “All the humans will hear is... that dragons attacked them, and it's all because... because of us.”
And that would play right into Queen Aren's hands. The pane were the perfect scapegoat: she could draw attention to their part in this, and they wouldn't fight back. Her husband may have ordained the dragon attacks, but the pane were the ones out in the Bloodless Lands, working alongside necromancers to bend the dragons into malevolent, driven forces of nature.
“It’s, um…” Sen mumbled, lifting a hand. I thought she meant to hide behind it, but it soon became clear she was tapping the place her second horn had once been. “When the dragons came to Isin, I’d… I’d only just left my tribe. And people, they were… they were angry. A-and that would’ve been okay, because e-everyone had lost so much. But they thought that the pane, that we’d… that we’d sent the dragons. And so they… They took me, and—and…”
I put a hand on her arm, wanting her to know that she didn’t have to say any more. I couldn’t say anything, and I wasn’t the one who’d had their horn hacked off. Pane horns weren’t as strong as dragon-bone, but that wasn’t to say they were brittle or frail. They were far denser than bone, and bone was—
I screwed my eyes shut. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
Sen’s hand found my shoulder. She shouldn’t have been the one comforting me. She was the one who’d been taken when she was so new to this world, to the flatlands, she was the one who had suffered the humans’ hate and anger and misdirected grief. And in spite of that, she was doing everything in her power to help others. She had been there for Claire; she had cared for her, and been allowed close, as so few were.
She had kept Claire together. Claire, the Knight. The slayer of dragons. Claire, whose family had been responsible for so much suffering, Sen’s included.
“I just want to help them,” I said, hooking an arm around Sen's. I wanted to be as good, as kind, as she was.
“W-we are. Every day, Kouris and I, we're working on getting our land back,” Sen said firmly. Akela smiled at her softly; she must have known the truth behind her missing horn already. “And when Claire is Queen...”
“When Claire is being Queen, she is making this process much, much faster. We are finding nice homes for all of the pane, kicking Rylan in the teeth and other places, I am too polite to be mentioning those, fixing what is once being Kastelir, cleaning up the mess that is always being Agados...” Pausing, she took a deep breath for effect. “And once that is being done, I am taking Sen, and we are going for vacation!”
Sen laughed, light and soft, but her ears twitched in embarrassment at the sound. I gave her arm a squeeze, letting her know that it was alright to be happy.
Turning a corner, we came to a courtyard I could not yet distinguish from half a dozen others, and our rising mood was interrupted by a call of, “Commander!”
I was rolling my eyes before I turned around.
The Mansels had tracked us down, as they always did. I could not remember the last time I went for a walk without them just so happening to stumble across me.
They were out of their armour and dressed as well as any Baron or Duke. They wore similar outfits – loose shirts with gaping necks and knee-high boots – and each carried a dragon-bone sword at their hip. I understood that they were not only Knights, but the Queen's personal guard, making them incredibly powerful and privileged, but I could no longer bring myself to feel intimidated by them.
They were insufferable. It took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to bring my hands to my face and groan into them.
“Don't you get bored of spying on us for the Queen?” I asked.
“Who says we're spying!” Emma said. Or perhaps it was Amy. Either way, she stood with her hands on her hips, one eyebrow arched. “We just want a word with the Commander.”
Amy (or Emma) was about to agree, but decided her time was better spent sneering at Sen.
“What's with this, anyway? The Princess' band of broken pane,” she said, looking Sen up and down. “Thought you were meant to stick to the servants' quarters.”
“I—I'm n-not,” Sen started, face shifting into an expression that pushed my heart into my throat.
“Excuse me, she is not being one of the pane that is being brought here. And even if she is, I am thinking you are doing well to be treating her with more kindness than this,” Akela said. The Mansels took her marginally more seriously than they would've, had I said the exact same thing. “If you are having so much time that is being free that you are following me around wherever I am going, then you are either stopping with this nonsense and finally asking if I am wanting to go to dinner, or you are going and you are helping those pane.”
Emma snorted a laugh but didn't look entirely unreceptive to Akela's first suggestion.
“If she isn't one of that lot, then what's with this?” Amy asked, pointing at the scarred flesh where a horn used to be.
Sen looked away, dark eyes shining, and her ears stuck flat against her neck.
“What do you want?” I asked them, because I knew leave her alone! would give them more chances to be cruel.
“We're here for the Commander,” Amy said, and they both turned towards Akela. “Look. You didn't get where you are because you're not smart.”
“Actually, I am mostly getting the role because Queen Kidira, she is falling in love with me,” Akela said, shrugging blithely. “And who is blaming her! Really, all I am being good at is taking my axe and breaking things into smaller pieces than they are starting as. You are knowing that I am doing this to a Knight once, yes? Oh, it is not to kill him. Kouris is doing that! It is Kidira, you are seeing; she is not wanting anyone to recognise him. And so my axe and his face, they are becoming most intimate. I am not denying that I am in love with Queen Kidira in return, I am never doing this, and so you must understand that I am doing whatever she asks of me, or whatever her good friend Claire is asking of her.”
“Er,” Emma said, fingers twitching against the hilt of her sword.
“Anyway,” Amy said, brow furrowed. “You're not as dumb as you want us to think you are. You know how this is going to go. Or you know how it's not gonna go: the Princess is never going to get the throne, not while Queen Aren's around, and we know all about what you've got up to. We wouldn't even need to try to have you exiled from Felheim and Kastelir.”
“Not that we want to!” Emma perked up. “We’d be happy to have you with us. Our army's taken a hit because of Rylan, that much is true, and the Queen would be able to put you to good use. That way, you wouldn't have to worry about your future when the inevitable happens, and you wouldn't have to worry about Kidira, either.”
At the mention of Kidira's name, Akela stepped closer to the Mansels. Emma took the brunt of it, having dared to speak the words. When Akela jabbed a finger against her chest, Emma looked as though she'd never picked up a weapon in her life and had forgotten all about slaying dragons.
“I am not knowing what is offending me more. First, that you are thinking I am betraying my friend, second, that you are thinking you can threaten Kidira, or number three, that you are thinking Kidira is needing me to protect her. Are you knowing who you are talking about, or are you picking random names and those are the ones you are using in your sentences?”
“Look,” Amy said, battling Akela's arm away from Emma's chest. “We don't expect you to come over to our way of thinking straight away, and we don't expect it to be easy for you. Just know that you have options. You don't have to be tainted by association, and all that. Think about it, alright? You've got a little time.”
Akela didn't blink. Emma left with an exaggerated bow, and Amy turned away without another word.
“That's it?” I called after them. “You just come here and say all of that in front of me, as though I'm not going to tell Claire?”
