Chapter 6 #2
We occasionally passed other travelers. Some on foot.
A few in wagons. Every one of them bleak-eyed and twitchy, the lines of their faces strained and tight as they assessed us atop our mounts.
These people, the common folk of Penterra, did not look well.
They appeared in need of a hearty meal and better, warmer clothing.
For some, their feet were covered with little more than scraps of cloth.
And beyond that, the way they eyed us, almost fearfully, troubled me. Did they sense something—see the magic in us?
Then I realized they could not possibly suspect what we were. No, they were merely so downtrodden that anyone who appeared stronger or more prosperous represented a threat.
These people looked hunted because they were and not by a threat borne of magic. They were hunted by their own kind.
I recalled the crossing north. The evidence of poverty and famine everywhere. The bandits we’d encountered. Things had been bad then. Now they were worse. Without Fell leading the north, they had to be worse. I knew this. Felt it in the fog-less air. Tasted it upon my skin. Breathed it in my pores.
Profound guilt weighed on me, because I had not considered this before. I’d thought only of myself. Only of my pain and survival … my needs.
As we neared the town, I was made to understand the true decline of this world more fully. The road rounded a bend, widening as we neared the town. Several pikes lined the thoroughfare, and the sight jolted me like a slap to the face.
“Fucking hell,” Harald cursed beside me.
We stopped.
I went cold, my skin clammy even as sweat dampened my armpits.
My breathing came hard and fast. My mare wasn’t happy either. She danced in place, hoofing the ground, agitated by the scent of blood, by the cries of agony. I tightened my grip on the reins and pulled hard to bring her under control.
“And they call us monsters,” Vetr muttered with heavy disgust. “Look what they do to each other, their own kind.”
I did look.
I could not not look.
I stared and breathed heavily, stomach churning, the food I ate now threatening to return on me.
Pikes were buried deep in the soil on either side of the road.
Bodies were skewered upon these wooden poles.
Humans. People. Men and women impaled. Over a dozen.
Perhaps twenty. Most dead already, corpses, but not all.
Some still lived, writhing and crying, begging for an end to their lives, garbling words gurgled through blood and mucus, impeded by the blunt-tipped pikes poking out from their mouths.
“Sadists. They use rounded tips so the poor wretches don’t die instantly,” Harald pronounced. “No vital organs are penetrated, and they live longer. Bleed out slowly.”
I couldn’t fight the heaving in my stomach any longer. I leaned over my horse and expelled my breakfast onto the ground below. Pressing the back of my hand against my mouth, my tearing gaze returned to the bodies staked in the ground.
Choking down bile, I nudged my mount closer to an impaled woman. She was young. Close to my own age.
No one deserved such a horrific fate. It was beyond imagining. I looked to Vetr. His expression was cold, impassive. There was nothing at all in his frosty gaze.
I nodded to her. “Let’s get her down.”
“She is dead,” Harald pronounced flatly, urging his mount forward again, no longer looking at any of them. “They all are. There is nothing we can do.”
“But she still lives. And she is suffering!”
Harald ignored me and continued ahead, avoiding looking left or right as he rode down the center of the road for town. Perhaps it was easier for him if he didn’t look at them—if he pretended they weren’t there.
Horrible as the sight was, I could not do the same.
I could not look away from the gore and the blood and what once amounted to a life.
I stared up into her wild eyes, into those pain-soaked depths, an unblinking blend of gray and green.
Somehow, I felt that if I looked away, I would be deserting her, this woman I did not know, and yet in her I saw myself.
Lost and terrified and alone even among others.
I was the only thing left to her now, in this moment that must feel like an eternity. I would not ride away. I would not leave her alone. I could not.
Whatever I was and would become, I could not do that.
Suddenly Vetr was there, moving between me and the woman, his big body atop his horse blocking the sight of her. He withdrew his sword with a singing hiss and swung his arm.
I leaned forward, peering around him.
The woman’s eyes widened for a fraction of a breath with a flash of surprise—and gratitude, then they diminished, shrinking, the misery fading away along with her inner light, leaving nothing behind. A dull film swept over unseeing hazel orbs.
I exhaled. She was gone.
“There,” he declared. “It is done.”
I cringed, swallowing down my strangled gasp—not that it would be heard over the pitiful sounds from those still clinging to life.
Vetr moved on, finishing off the others. It was merciful, and I didn’t know if he did it for me or them, but I was thankful. Their suffering had come to an end whatever the case.
I moved forward, following Harald, who looked at me strangely and then cast a wary glance about as though there might be someone watching us even now. “I don’t expect the ones who put them up there wanted us to do that.”
“Should we care what the monsters who did that want?” I demanded.
As far as I was concerned, only the dregs of humanity could do such a thing.
The lowest of the low. The absolutely soulless.
My skin prickled, the smolder gathering at the back of my throat like a building storm.
“I hope they are watching! Let them see!” I boldly flung out, longing to give them a taste of my fire.
“You little fool! You should care,” Vetr growled as he came alongside me, blasting me with a look of censure as he cleaned off his sword, his movements hard and angry.
Clearly he resented being compelled to use it in the first place—resented me.
A colossal failure as a dragon. Too dense, too slow, too weak.
“We are here to observe and learn what they think and how they behave so that we may know them—so that we will never be caught unawares and subject to another Threshing. We are not here to attract the attention of the current regime. What they do to each other is none of our concern.” His words lashed out, striking me like the whips that had once flayed my skin.
And yet he had acted. He’d stepped forward and done the merciful thing.
I stared at Vetr in challenge. “Then why end their suffering?”
Harald looked at him pointedly, as though he, too, shared this question.
“Enough. Let us leave this grisly scene.” His nostrils twitched. “The stink of human blood offends me.”
Vetr nudged his mount ahead of us, entering the town. I studied the back of him, wondering if he was truly so heartless.
Catching up with him, I sent him a sideways glance, scarcely sparing a look for the seaside town emerging before us. “Who would do such a thing?”
“Who else?” He shrugged. “Humans.”
Humans. Said with a mixture of contempt and derision.
He really hated us—them. Them. Someday I wouldn’t have to correct myself.
Someday I would feel more dragon and less human.
It was already happening. Each day I spent in the Crags, in the pride, was another day, another piece of the old me gone, chipped away, making way for the new.
To Vetr, humans were all alike. He didn’t differentiate between residents of the Borderlands and those who lived in the south. He likely didn’t even know the difference. He did not care enough to know.
The most prosperous Penterrans lived in the south with its bustling cities, with schools and libraries, culture and society, where the palace sprawled with all its white, sun-washed towers glinting in the daylight.
Home. Or what used to be my home. Barbarians lived in the north, the roughest, wildest part of the country.
No human was alike, but to him a human was a human. All the same. All bad. And that, right there, was what made him a dragon—more than his wings and scaled flesh. It was his inability to see a human as anything else … as anything good.
“From what I’ve observed, brutality isn’t a trait exclusive to humans. You fight with … others.” I hesitated to speak the word aloud. I would not put a name to what we were. It felt too risky to say it out loud here. “You’re not above discord with your own kind.”
“You defend them?” His expression tightened with disdain.
I swallowed. That was a misstep. Anything construed as accord with humankind was not accepted.
“I only speak of what I see. There are two sides to everything.”
“Said like a true diplomat.”
“Maybe I am.” I tossed the words down boldly, taking a risk to add, “Maybe that is what I can offer. A bridge between two worlds.” He stared at me for a long moment, his nostrils flaring with a huff of breath. I knew it was more than he wanted of me—more than he was asking.
He wanted my insights. He brought me here because I’d lived as a human in this world, and he thought I might be good at ferreting out information about the enemy. He did not want me to be some manner of ambassador between our two worlds.
“I don’t want a bridge,” he finally said, his gaze flicking over my face, taking me in all at once.
“I want a wall between us and them. Your job,” he said, jabbing a finger at me, “just so we’re clear, is to give me the bricks to build this wall.
Nothing gets in the way of that. Nothing gets in the way of protecting the pride. Understand?”
I nodded jerkily even as every bit of me rebelled at his words, at his commanding tone. Why did the safety of one eliminate the other? Why must it be humankind or dragonkind?
Why could both not simply … be?
I wanted to tell him no. No to helping him build his wall. No to him telling me what to do as though I was subject to him. No to informing on the world that still held people I cared about—just a few, but enough to make me hesitate to do anything that might harm them.
No. No. No.
I was no longer a whipping girl to be led about and controlled by anyone. Not anymore.
I held my tongue, though. The wisest thing sometimes was to say nothing at all.
He faced forward again and rode on.