11. When the Sacrifices Are Worse Than What We’re Fighting
11. WHEN THE SACRIFICES ARE WORSE THAN WHAT WE’RE FIGHTING
~ ELOWYN ~
Clutching Saffron close to my chest, my boots squished across the sludgy forest floor as I raced toward where Xeno’s dragon had fallen.
The moon was little more than a miserly sliver that scarcely illuminated below the dense tree canopies. Nothing about the Sorumbra was welcoming. I wanted to escape it with the same kind of desperation I’d wished to flee the queen. It was a bitter irony that this nightmare was the only place I might be safe from her.
There ! A mound perhaps the size of half a dozen horses shifted on the ground.
Though he was the youngest of all the protectors in Nightguard, Xeno’s beast was formidable. It had to be for him to be one of the elite warriors tasked with defending the last surviving dragons.
I stumbled over what was either a fallen branch or a monster tentacle, lost my balance, but managed to swing an arm to catch myself and the little dragon in my embrace, and slid to an inelegant stop next to what I hoped was Xeno. His tattered wings were tucked in tightly to his body and he was curled in on himself. It was a position I’d never seen his dragon in before. My glow was fading rapidly, and my terror for Xeno only seemed to dim it more.
Not fucking good .
The footfalls of the others slapped wet ground behind me as I reached a hand forward. The light emanating off my skin was now no stronger than that of a guttering candle, its wick on its last breaths. But under its fading light I could make out the elegant pattern of scales as it peeked out from beneath a thick coating of poisonous monster guts.
Tentatively, I ran my fingertips along what I thought was his clean side. “Xeno?”
He’d been my only friend in Nightguard, the only one of the shifters to really see me as more than a servant—to see me for who I was, and all that I might become thanks to my constant dedication and training.
Always amazed by the dragons, I’d studied his beast more than most. When his wings were spread, his dragon was large as a yurt that could sleep dozens, and his teeth and claws were crowning points to a perfect musculature and shape that should have put him at the very pinnacle of the food chain.
“Xeno,” I whispered again, trailing my fingers along what I was now certain was his side, just beneath one of the wings he crimped tightly against his chest.
In response, he groaned, muffled and brief.
Finnian and Pru arrived first, shoring up near me, then Roan, who crouched beside me, his expression grim beneath all that beard. The dim light flowing from my skin was just enough to cast his concern in sinister shadows.
Reed moved to stand beside Roan and pointed his blazing torch toward the dragon.
When the firelight flickered across Xeno’s back, I sucked in a gasp and couldn’t immediately let it go.
“Oh no,” I murmured. “Oh, Xeno, no.”
With him protecting his wings by folding them closed, I couldn’t examine the tears I already knew would be there, but I couldn’t miss the many gashes, large and small, that sliced his body.
Dozens of the monsters must have descended on him at once, overpowering him. Blood, violet in the flickering light, congealed across his cuts, where it mixed with enough poison to take down a whole den of dragons.
Xeno moaned and attempted to stand. He only managed to lift his head, wobble, then crash back down to the ground.
“He’s not goin’ anywhere like this, lassie,” Roan said.
“Yeah, no shit,” I snapped. “I can see that.”
Saffron squirmed in my arms, and Xeno released a shaky exhale.
I closed my eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry, Roan. I didn’t mean to take all the shit I’m feeling out on you. My bad.”
“It’s all right, lass. You’ve been through a lot lately. Besides, just wait and see what I’m gonna do to these umbracs for hurtin’ my boy Rompa-Romp.”
One hand on Xeno, the other on Saffron, I faced the dwarf. “Is that what the monsters are? Umbracs?”
“Can’t be sure, but I’m guessin’ so. Never had the misfortune o’ seein’ one before, but met a guy once who’d fought one.” He scratched his beard, which was splattered in the putrid sludge. “Don’t think the man ever slept a full night again without wakin’ up with nightmares.”
“I can understand that.” I scanned the deep darkness that stretched toward us on all sides. The hissing that had erupted when Finnian tightened his tourniquet had subsided, but the chittering was so prevalent, so constant, that I feared I’d hear it long after we emerged from the Wilds.
With his torch, Reed pushed back the monsters so that I couldn’t make out their many eyes nor count their tentacles. I could, however, make out the writhing mass of black that stretched upward to meet the night. They looked like they were piling on top of each other, trying to get to us, held at bay by Reed’s measly flame and my failing power.
“They’re definitely umbracs,” Finnian said. “My grandfather lost an eye to them. Can Xeno shift into his man form?”
“I...” I trailed my palm up Xeno’s side and under his wing. He jerked away from my light touch. “I’m pretty sure he would’ve already if he could’ve. I think dragon shifters heal more quickly when they’re in their creatures. He may be worried his wings won’t recover properly if he shifts back right now.”
“Then we have to leave him and get you away from here,” Finnian said.
Instinctively, my hand on Xeno’s side clenched, and he groaned. Grimacing, I relaxed to run my fingers soothingly along his battered flesh.
As I petted both dragons, I told Finnian, “I understand you barely know me. We met when you were helping abduct me, for sunshine’s sake. We literally come from different worlds, and after what you did to Sandor, I see that our ideas of loyalty are very different. So I won’t hold your suggestion against you. But … there isn’t a chance in all the fuckery of both our worlds that I’m going to leave Xeno like this, hurt and unprotected.”
“You have to.”
“No, I don’t. In every situation, there’s always a choice.”
“So after all Rush sacrificed for you, you’d throw that all away?”
I felt my nostrils flare, but then I could only smell the stench of dead and dying umbracs all the better. Anger, frustration, and a despondent sense of helplessness surged all at once, mixing into a pungent cocktail. “Last I checked, I’m the one who ended up with a blade through the heart, not him.”
“There are many different kinds of pain, lassie,” Roan offered.
I ignored him and his unusually gentle tone. “Rush chose to stab me and practically kill me. Finnian, you chose to let the queen torture Sandor, knowing how awful it’d be. And I choose not to abandon my friend, who, by the way, took an arrow to the heart trying to save me from Embermere, from you .”
I felt Finnian’s stare on me like a searing brand, but I didn’t look away from my friend.
“We fight as one in the light and die alone in the darkness,” Finnian said to the chorus of chittering that had wormed its way under my skin. “I didn’t choose to let Sandor die. I chose to do my part to free Embermere and the rest of the mirror world.”
“There must’ve been another way,” I said, mostly because I was busy praying a solution would magically appear that didn’t involve me holding vigil all night next to a collapsed Dragon Xeno in a circling swarm of our vicious enemies. “There’s always another way.”
“Don’t be so na?ve, Elowyn,” Roan said, using my name for the first time I could remember. “This life is about sacrifices, and when you’ve lived in the shadow of the queen’s darkness as long as we have, you understand that sometimes the sacrifices are almost worse than what we’re fighting against.” He grunted and stood. “But that doesn’t mean we stop fighting. ’Cause if we stop...”
“There’ll be no one left to fight her,” Finnian completed. “And whatever light is left in the mirror world will vanish forever. This is a fight much bigger than any one of us or any one of our friends.”
Roan told me, “You must not realize how big a deal ‘tis to find your mate. Most fae don’t ever, and when ya live as long as we do ... well, let me just say that’s a long-ass time to do without the person who’s a mirror to your very essence.” He pushed onto his tiptoes as he peered into the night beyond Xeno’s fallen form, seeking out the horses, I imagined. “Rush gave that all up to save you.”
“But he stabbed me,” I retorted right away, though my protest was softer than I’d intended it. “From what you’ve all told me, I was carted out of Embermere strapped to the back of a horse like a corpse.”
“Yah, lassie, you were supposed to look like a bloody corpse,” Roan said. “Else the queen woulda realized Rush was only trying to save ya ‘stead of what it looked like.”
My hands still fluttering across Xeno’s and Saffron’s scales, I opened my mouth, but eventually closed it without saying another word.
Finnian faced the umbracs as if anticipating they’d attack again at any moment. I rose, preparing to pass Saffron back to Pru. If I was going to have to figure out how to glow more, I didn’t want to accidentally hurt him. As if the dragonling knew what I was thinking, he climbed farther up my torso, scrabbling and scratching at the many cuts that already stung across my skin.
I bit my lip to keep from crying out. My injuries were nothing compared to Xeno’s, compared to what I’d already survived.
Finnian’s voice was resigned and unwavering when he next spoke: “Elowyn, if you can refuel your power and hold the umbracs off a little longer, I can attempt to speed up Xeno’s healing. Perhaps the goblin will help me?”
When Pru hesitated, Finnian added, “You don’t need to reveal your secrets. But I’ve seen some of what your kind can do. You could help.”
Pru didn’t answer for several moments, then, “I’ll think about it.”
I spun toward her. “Pru!”
But the goblin, often meek and too often subservient, met my disbelief head-on before encompassing everyone else with a turn of her head. “You’re trying to save the mirror world. I want that too. But my duty is to protect the goblins’ secrets so we can save our kind. Do you think the nobles will remember us when they’re setting everyone else free? No, of course not. They don’t even notice us when we’re standing right in front of them, not even when it’s off with our heads. The nobles see what they want to see, nothing more. Never us.”
After more unnerving chittering and the hooo , hooo of Reed waving the torch at the umbracs, I held Saffron out toward the goblin and said, “I’d never forget you, Pru. We’re friends.”
She stared back at me, her pupil-less eyes glinting in the light of Reed’s flame, before extending her arms to receive Saffron. He only clung to me harder.
She sighed.
I tucked Saffron better onto my hip and bent so my eyes stared straight into hers. “Even if we weren’t friends, if I knew you were in trouble, I’d try to help. But that doesn’t matter, because we are friends, and I’d never walk away from you without fighting for you.”
Pru’s lower lip trembled, but she tilted up her chin defiantly. “Mistress, there’s only one of you. Nobody’ll fight for my granddoody if I don’t.”
“I will,” Reed said without turning, pushing his torch at an umbrac that was undulating more than the rest. “I’ll fight for you and your family.”
“As will I,” Roan said. “I know what it’s like to be underestimated and dismissed just because of what you’re like.”
“None of us are going to be fighting anyone if we don’t get out of here alive,” Finnian said. “Elowyn, your power, can you increase it?”
“I damn well hope so, because we’re all getting out of here in one piece.” I kissed the dragonling on the nose. “Saffron, you need to go with Pru now. I need to kick some motherfucking ass.”