Chapter Ten
Ten
One moment Juniper was eye-to-eye with a raging ball of fire, facing down the end of his life while wearing the most uncomfortable pair of trousers anyone had ever worn.
The next his feet were off the ground—was he flying?
No, Mo’s shoulder was jammed into Juniper’s side, and Juniper was being tackled to the ground. Better than death in hard pants, at least.
They hit the hay with a hard thump, and for a moment, the whole world went completely quiet.
Juniper didn’t hear the men shouting, the crackle of flames above him, the roar of the dragon girl.
It was just Mo on top of him, a breath away from Juniper’s face.
Mo’s eyes were wide with panic, his broad chest heaving.
“Morn,” Juniper said when his best friend didn’t move. “Mo. It’s okay. We’re okay.”
Okayish.
Juniper had seen that kind of panic on his best friend’s face before. Mo was tough. Good in a crisis. Amazing in a brawl.
But sometimes—sometimes Mo disappeared into a cloud of panic, usually when Juniper’s safety (or lack thereof) was involved. And in those moments, Juniper could solve anything.
He gently rolled Mo off him, squeezing his friend’s shoulder. “We’re okay,” he repeated firmly.
Mo shook his head as if clearing away cobwebs.
Juniper took a deep breath and pushed himself up from the hay, swaying only a little bit on his feet.
Prince Edward was standing in the doorway to the barn, his expression furious, though he still looked remarkably heroic. Juniper sighed deeply.
That was, as the bruggane called it, rizz, an ancient word in their culture that meant someone was particularly gifted at having no bad angles, no matter the conditions.
“It wasn’t—”
“Did you know?” Prince Edward snarled.
Mo scrambled to his feet, grabbing Juniper’s shoulder with one bulky hand. “Behind me,” he said softly.
Mo was back, panic erased from his face as if it had never been there at all.
“I’ve got this,” Juniper said, though this was rarely true, especially when it came to quests. “Your Honor—Your Majesty? Your Highness, please.” Juniper got there eventually. And that was the part that counted. “We didn’t know she was a dragon until just this very moment.”
Though in retrospect, they totally should have. Since she had told them, fairly straightforwardly, that her mother had flown away through the hole in the roof.
“And I’m supposed to believe you?” Prince Edward asked, advancing toward them.
Again, Mo tried to push Juniper behind him, but Juniper—while he very much did not want to be poked full of holes with a royal sword, no matter how handsome the wielder—was feeling quite heroic himself, actually. Mo had been scared. Even if he wasn’t now. Juniper was on it.
“Why would we lie to you?” Juniper asked. “We only get the reward money if we catch that dragon. We thought she was a little girl—we literally just met her—and we were going to try to find her family.”
Mo looked outraged. He opened his mouth, surging forward, and the prince drew his sword.
And then he leveled that sword at Mo’s throat.
To make matters worse, Bill stomped into the barn behind him, followed by Phteven and a few others. “Your Highness,” Bill began. “I think—”
Phteven cleared his throat, placing a hand on Bill’s brawny arm, and Bill fell silent. “Hey now,” Juniper said anyway. “Bill, you can keep your mouth shut. This is between Prince Edward and I, and—if I may—” He shuffled around the bright tip of the sword, closer to the prince.
Mo stood with his head high, holding eye contact with the prince for a length of time Juniper would have found utterly terrifying. He seemed unmoved by the sword at his throat.
“If I may,” Juniper repeated, clearing his throat for added dramatic effect. “We are all on the same side here, just like you said, Your Highness. We all want the dragon off these lands, and the realm safe, and—”
“Dead,” Bill interrupted with a snide look at Juniper. “We want the dragon dead.”
“She is a child,” Mo snarled.
Oh dear. Oh dear.
Mo didn’t start brawls; he ended them. Juniper was the problem, one or two drinks in and ready to wrestle at the first sign of a willing co-participant. But that voice, that spark in his eye…that was Mo’s tell.
And it was all the warning anyone ever got.
Like the night a traveling mercenary had come up behind Juniper and, mistaking him for someone else, pulled him off his stool at the tavern.
Mo had been on his feet, fast as lightning, and then the mercenary had been on the floor, and Juniper had been pulling Mo off.
Well, the bruggane had had to pull Mo off, but Juniper had helped.
When Juniper was going to brawl, he danced around with his fists up for quite some time first, tempting fate, bruggane bouncers, and whoever he was about to fight.
When Mo wanted to brawl, he just swung.
And sword or no sword, he looked as if he was about to swing.
“Bill is ugly,” Juniper interjected desperately, continuing past Bill’s loud HEY. “But he’s not wrong. Of course we all want to be esteemed dragon hunters, just like Bill was when he caught those dogs.”
“Werewolves,” Bill yelled.
Now Phteven had a sword in his hand, though he wasn’t brandishing it just yet.
Why hadn’t Juniper brought a sword? Or even a pitchfork?
The prince turned his beautiful golden gaze on Juniper. “Do you?” he asked. “If she were standing here right now, would you draw your sword and kill her?”
“I would,” Juniper lied magnificently. He did not even have a sword. And if he couldn’t kill Brenda the rooster after Brenda had chased him daily for six months, he absolutely would not when it was a little girl. Even if she was a little girl with a dragon form.
“It’s wrong,” Mo said, in that low, familiar gravelly voice that always made Juniper feel as warm as their hearth fire at home did.
Right now, though, Juniper’s stomach sank like a stone.
Oh, Mo, you beautiful, beautiful idiot. Now is the time to lie to princes.
“Mo,” Juniper said softly, begging his friend to read the undercurrent, just this once, or at the very least to trust him if he did not. “What my friend means is that it would be wrong—to let a dragon escape! So let’s all pack up our cheese, our gear, our horses—”
“You don’t have a horse—”
“Shut up, Bill—”
“It’s wrong to hunt a child,” Mo said flatly.
The other mercenaries shifted uncomfortably, even Bill.
“Is she really—”
“I didn’t get a good look—”
“Of course we wouldn’t hunt a child—”
The prince held up his hand for silence and then opened his mouth—though what he was about to say would remain a mystery, because at that moment there was a loud whoosh and then the wall of the barn was on fire.
Juniper grabbed Mo’s hand, before Mo could do anything stupidly heroic again, and ran for the open door.
“Dragon!” the prince yelled. “All men to their posts!”
Bill and Phteven, who definitely didn’t know what their posts were, because they were as untrained and useless as Juniper, scattered, their footsteps thundering behind Juniper and Mo as they ran for the door, too.
“Hey!” the prince was yelling behind them. “Get your weapons, and fight!”
Juniper didn’t look back. Just clung to Mo’s hand and dragged him forward.
“You two,” Prince Edward shouted. “You two, stay right where you are! I want to know what you were—”
Another blast of fire hit the barn, and from the crash behind them, Juniper knew something must have caved in.
“Juniper.” Mo’s voice was a snarl, a tone Juniper had never heard him take with anyone, not even in a brawl. He pulled them up short, stopping Juniper in his tracks. “We have to help her.”
Bear was hovering just at the tree line, fire raging from her open jaws. One mercenary ran for his arrows, and she sent fire chasing after him, incinerating his arrows before he could reach them.
Oh, Divona’s sake.
Mo’s dark brown eyes were crackling as fiercely as the fire.
It sent a shiver down Juniper’s spine, and it also sent a shiver to…other places. Which was confusing, not to mention the wrong time, and certainly the wrong pants, for that kind of tingle.
The prince was waving his sword and shouting something Juniper couldn’t quite make out, and then Bear swooped low, fire rushing toward a few of the people in Bill’s party.
They scattered, diving out of the way, and then Bear was gone, flying into the dense forest beyond the edge of the clearing.
“Let’s go.” Juniper dragged Mo forward. He grabbed his pack with one hand and swung it up onto his shoulder. “Get your pack.”
“After it!” the prince was shouting. “And those men, too! Bring them back. I want to know what they know about the dragon, do you understand me?”
Mo snatched up his pack and they made for the edge of the clearing, still running.
The second they were under cover of the tree line, Juniper slowed his pace. “Juniper,” Mo hissed. “We have to keep moving. They’re going to hurt that little girl. Come on.”
“Trust me,” Juniper said. He fumbled into his bag, not for the mead, or even the cheese (which was definitely lighter than it had been before; Bill was undoubtedly to blame). Juniper would be going for a sword, if he had one.
But since he didn’t, he went for the next best thing: the good liquor, the small bottle of fire ale he’d lifted from a bruggane bouncer when being thrown out of a tavern once.
He’d been saving it for a special occasion, and brought it along for just such a reason as this: when Mo’s eyes were that deep, worried brown, when they were surrounded by trouble, when it was time to show Bill up.
He grabbed a handkerchief, too, a little sadly—he’d embroidered those mushrooms onto it himself last winter, while Mo knit in the rocker next to him and hummed softly.
Footsteps were closer now.
“Mo.” Juniper handed him the handkerchief. “Light this.”
Confusion flickered in Mo’s eyes, but he nodded, pulled his matches and tinder from his pocket, and lit the handkerchief.
Bill and the prince charged through the trees, the prince still waving his sword menacingly.
“Hey! What are you doing?” The prince stomped closer, waving his sword menacingly. “Why did you light that little hankie on fire? What are you planning?”
“This,” Juniper said. “So sorry. It’s all a misunderstanding, but we have to go. Our apologies—”
He jerked his head at Mo to run again.
Mo did, still carrying the handkerchief, which was burning merrily.
The prince shouted at them to stop, but they were already running.
As soon as they had a few trees between them and their pursuers, Juniper grabbed the flaming hankie from Mo’s hand, shoved it into the bottle of fire ale, and threw it over his shoulder in the direction of Bill.
With any luck, the prince would think the resulting fire came from Bear—not Juniper—but it was the best distraction they had, at the moment.
Tragically, it meant Juniper would not be able to see Bill look like a fool when the fire ale lit the forest around him. He did enjoy Bill’s shriek in the distance as Juniper and Mo, once again, ran for their fucking lives.