Chapter Five #2
Juniper woke to the bright light of the sun rising through the trees and the warmth of the day and the cheerful greeting— Oh no, those were screams.
And an inferno of blazing fire.
And it was still the middle of the night.
Juniper scrambled to his feet. Or tried to, tangling in his narrow bedroll and tripping, feet bound together by the fabric.
It was Mo who was shouting, a hoarse, deep-throated yell to grab what belongings he could, because the forest was ablaze. “Get the fuck up!” he yelled at Juniper.
Juniper kicked off his bedroll, freeing his legs and sending it flying.
It sailed in a beautiful arc across their campsite and into the fire blazing at the edge of it.
He watched it in silence, pants-free as he realized his trouser-pillow (oh, how he longed for his makeshift pillow now that he had cast it into the fire) had gone with it.
“Oh, by Divona’s balls,” he said. “Mo?”
Mo, already fully dressed and in his boots, was heedless to Juniper’s devastating loss. “Grab your pack,” he shouted, shoving things into his own.
Juniper knew it was a grave situation, because in any other moment, Mo would not have been able to help explaining that Divona, historically speaking, likely did not have balls.
“Where will we go?” Juniper yelled back over the roar of the fire, more useless than usual as he stood there, pantsless and frozen in the face of chaos. “What’s happening?”
It was rare for a forest fire to hit this side of the world so late in the year. Those were a springtime occurrence, and oh, fuck, it didn’t matter, did it? The fire was sweeping up the hillside, catching each tree in its path.
“Come on,” Mo yelled.
So Juniper did. He snatched up his pack, which somehow seemed just as heavy as it had the day before, despite being bereft of his bedroll. He had to shove the boots into his pack, because there was no time to put them on, and then he ran after Mo into the only patch of forest that was not on fire.
“Divona’s sake,” Mo was saying, over and over again. His eyes were round and wide, joy flickering in his dark eyes like sunlight over rippling waters. “I saw it. Juniper, I saw it.”
Juniper’s throat was ragged with the smoke and the running and the panic. “What do you mean you saw it?” Despite the heat, cold slithered down into the pit of Juniper’s stomach and settled there.
The dragon was supposed to be much farther north, at least a day or two’s journey away.
Mo plunged into the creek, the very same one that wound through their farm and around the village and through these woods.
Juniper only hesitated a moment, considering the awful cold. One look up the hill at the wall of flames bearing down on him, though, and he leaped after Mo.
The current was frigid, a brutal shock to his body, but they were safe. Safe from the fire, at least.
Juniper reached out, offering his own hand to Mo.
Mo loved the water as much as Juniper did, but Mo had—well, he had a thing about cold water, and by a thing, Juniper meant a wee bit of panic.
There had been an incident once, as children, with a whole pack of older boys who played a prank on Mo in some icy, dark waters, and he just hadn’t been the same since.
So Juniper grabbed Mo’s hand and held on, now, because this, at least, he knew how to do, while the fire licked at the banks of the river and their packs grew increasingly heavier with the water.
When the roar of the fire had quieted, Mo turned to him, his cold hand still holding fast to Juniper’s, his eyes scanning Juniper’s face in that slow, thorough way that always made Juniper blush. Was it his imagination? Mo’s gaze lingering on his lips?
Juniper took in a rasping breath of air, leaning slightly forward, and—
“Did you really throw your pants into the fire?” Mo asked.
Juniper groaned and dropped his gaze. “I was trying to get them off me,” he began to explain.
Mo’s confusion deepened visibly. “You wanted to take your pants off?” he asked. “Before running from the fire?”
“They were already off,” Juniper attempted. “I was stuck in my bedroll.”
“Ah.” Mo’s lips twitched.
It wasn’t funny, everything be cursed—but camping be cursed more than everything else. Juniper was down to only one pair of pants, which was supposed to be his spare dry set (not that they had any spare dry clothes to speak of anymore) and zero bedrolls.
“So you…so you saw the dragon, then?” Juniper asked after a beat of silence had passed.
Mo nodded, just once.
The flames danced in his dark brown eyes.
“Was it as large and terrifying as all the legends?” Juniper asked him when Mo gave him no more answer than that. Sometimes he forgot that Mo didn’t view a question as an invitation to tell him more, and he had to continue extending invitations to get the full story out of Mo.
Mo shivered, but he did not look nearly as scared as he should have. No, it was wonder still on his face. As if someone had shown him a new constellation. As if he’d been given a gift.
Juniper began wading across the creek to the opposite side, where the underbrush was just lightly singed but not ablaze.
“It was not so big, no. Not much bigger than you, really,” Mo answered. He reached out and steadied Juniper as Juniper climbed up the steep bank. “I’m not sure—I’m not sure, but I thought I might have seen two.”
Juniper reached back and took first Mo’s pack and then Mo’s hand to help him up onto land. They were both shivering, Juniper more than Mo.
“What woke you?” Juniper asked.
It was an uneasy sort of feeling, realizing that he would have just been burned as badly as he burned his toast over the hearth fire every day, if not for Mo crying the alarm.
“All the heat?” Mo said. He stripped off his shirt and hung it over a nearby branch. “You didn’t wake at all?”
“Oh.” Realization struck Juniper at the same time as Mo spoke. He had…he had maybe been awake when the dragons first neared camp, actually.
He had seen a pair of eyes, told them to eat whatever they wanted, but not him, or something of the sort, and then gone straight off to sleep, lulled by flames. Even though their campfire had died out long before that.
Shit.
“What is it?” Mo asked.
“Ah,” Juniper said. “I think I may have been lulled to sleep by the dragon’s flames. Unfortunately.”
That meant it was Juniper’s fault, again, that their bad situation had gotten worse. If he’d paid attention, if he’d thought for a moment about what it meant, he could have woken Mo and they might have made it out without losing anything important. Like pants.
Mo cursed under his breath as he began to dig through his pack before hanging his shirt to dry on a nearby branch. “Get your wet things off,” he grunted.
The night had not yet passed, but the fire across the creek had died down, and the first gray light of dawn was beginning to wander in through the trees to the east.
“I really, really have to take a piss,” Juniper announced loudly.
And that was the moment the man crested the hill, dressed in the finest armor Juniper had ever seen, carrying a magnificent sword as if he knew how to use it.
The steel of his blade was so fine it barely looked real—certainly more than some lads from Tús would have ever been able to afford—and his lush golden hair curled perfectly over his forehead. He stared down at them.
It would have been bad enough, of course, to meet a beautiful, wealthy man with a sword after one has been camping and chased by dragons, but because nobody had ever had such poor luck as Juniper O’Reilly, the stranger also happened to have a thin band of gold on his forehead, resting like a halo around his sun-drenched hair.
So that was how Juniper O’Reilly first met Prince Edward, Regent of Quests and Conqueror of the Salt Marsh: soot-covered and as wet as a drowned rat, pants-free, and announcing with great urgency his need to pee.