Chapter 33 #2
As if she couldn’t see the dark mark of Luna’s hand on his forearm. She had a nightmare of a grip, in retrospect. It saved his life, so he couldn’t complain much.
“The treatment is going to take about an hour. After that, the arm stays in the sling, but it should stop hurting as much. I’m going to need to do this every day for at least two weeks.”
That suggested she expected him to stay here for that time. “Understood.”
“Good.” She selected one of the thin silver needles, threading it with a strand of magic that glowed between her fingers. “Now, hold still and don’t talk to me. I need to concentrate.”
He held still. The needle went in at his elbow, and what followed was the most precise, controlled, and thoroughly unpleasant hour of his life in this world.
Arleria worked with focused intensity, each needle placement deliberate, each pulse of healing energy calibrated to the specific tissue it targeted.
He didn’t talk, his jaw so clenched he wouldn’t be able to form words even if he tried.
When she finally withdrew the last needle and dispelled the active healing, the relief finally came. The arm still hurt, but differently. A deep ache instead of sharp, blinding pain. Functional discomfort instead of the kind that made his vision blur.
“Better?” she asked, already cleaning the instruments.
“Significantly.”
“Good. Now we need to make you presentable.” She stood, wiping her hands on a cloth. “There’s a bath behind the partition. The water’s been heating since we arrived. Use it. I’ll find something for you to wear.”
“I have my own clothes.”
“You have clothes that look nice, but don’t match mine. You need to not stick out at the audience.” She looked him over with the same appraising efficiency she’d used on his arm. “I kept some things here from a previous arrangement. They should fit you well enough.”
He knew better than to ask about the previous arrangement. Instead, he went for the bath.
He washed. Got out. Dried off one-handed, which was harder than it sounded. Arleria had left clothes on a stool outside the partition. Dark fabric, well-made, a fitted coat over a clean white shirt with trousers that looked like they’d been tailored for someone roughly his build.
The coat was black with subtle embroidery along the collar and cuffs. He managed most of it one-handed. The coat’s buttons defeated him. “Arleria?”
She came around the partition, took one look at him struggling with the buttons, and closed the distance without a word. Her fingers worked the buttons with quick efficiency, starting from the bottom, her eyes focused on the task. When she reached his collar, her hands slowed.
She straightened the fabric, smoothing it across his shoulders. Then she stepped back, studied him, and adjusted his collar with a final, precise touch.
“There.” She tilted her head. “That will do.”
“Whose were these?”
“Someone who isn’t coming back for them.” Her tone closed the topic. She stepped around him, reaching for something on the shelf. A comb, which she handed to him. “Fix your hair. You look like you fought a mountain.”
“I did.”
“And you won, but you need to stop looking like it.”
He combed his hair one-handed, using the small mirror propped against her bookshelf. The reflection showed someone he didn’t entirely recognize.
He looked so much rougher, with a stubbly beard and long hair, even though his face matched his old life. The body also looked like that of a seasoned adventurer. Walking all the time while mostly on an all-meat diet did that.
The arm in the sling underlined it. Scars came with adventure, a cost of facing danger.
Arleria had changed while he wasn’t looking. She now wore a dark gray coat over a deep burgundy blouse, her hair pulled back, her posture that of careful composure.
They left Arleria’s place with an hour of daylight left. The streets of Vellhorn carried the amber light of the late afternoon, long shadows stretching between buildings, the market stalls packing up for the evening. The city moved around them with its usual indifference.
The fountain near the merchant quarter came into view.
Derell leaned against the stone basin, arms crossed, wearing clean armor with the dents hammered out.
Malick stood beside him in his usual practical attire, though he’d trimmed his beard and found a fresh surcoat.
Kern perched on the fountain’s edge, his bow across his knees, looking like he’d barely changed except that his hair was wet.
Three out of four.
“Where’s Luna?” Malick asked as they approached.
Alsen had been asking himself the same question. “She knows about the audience,” Alsen said. “The drakes told us within earshot of her.”
Arleria’s eyes narrowed. “She was behind us on the road. I didn’t see her since we entered the city.”
“She most likely won’t show,” Alsen said, hoping he was right.
Kern’s eyebrows performed a complicated operation that communicated something between that explains a lot and that doesn’t help us right now.
“We can’t wait,” Arleria said. “The summons was for before sundown. If she’s choosing not to come, that’s her decision.”
Derell shrugged. “We managed the mountain without her.”
A beat of silence followed, during which nobody agreed with that statement.
“Let’s go,” Alsen said.
They walked.
The route to the dragon’s hoard didn’t take long.
Verathras occupied the center of Vellhorn in the same way a boulder occupies a stream, by being too large and too permanent for anything to do about it.
The city had simply grown around him, streets curving to accommodate his bulk, buildings maintaining a respectful distance that had been established through a combination of precedent and fire.
As they got closer, the streets emptied. The market noise faded behind them, replaced by a silence that felt deliberate, cultivated. Nobody lived within two blocks of the hoard. The buildings here stood vacant, their windows dark, their doors marked with symbols.
The air grew warmer. Not dramatically, but enough to notice. Verathras radiated heat like a furnace, constantly, unavoidably, and in sufficient quantity to affect the local climate. The cobblestones under their feet were warm to the touch.
Then the buildings fell away, and the hoard spread before them.
Gold covered the ruins of what had once been a castle, probably.
More gold than Alsen had remembered, though he’d stood at this same distance on his first day in Vellhorn.
Hills of coins that caught the dying sunlight and threw it back in every direction, a false dawn concentrated in the center of the city.
Goblets, jewelry, weapons, armor, gemstones, artifacts of every description, all of it heaped and mixed and layered into mounds that reached three stories high.
By its side, the four drakes awaited.
And on top of it all, Verathras.
Up close, Verathras was even bigger than Alsen expected.
The dragon lay among literal hills of gold, easily hundreds of yards long. He couldn’t tell how much, but he definitely wouldn’t fit on a football field.
He watched them with casual indifference, crimson scales catching the last of the afternoon sun and throwing it back in fractured light.
His wings lay folded along his flanks, each one absurdly large even when folded.
Steam rose from the gaps between his scales in thin, lazy threads, joining the heat haze that warped the air above the hoard.
His eyes alone were each the size of a small car. The irises burned amber, with a vertical slit of a pupil that contracted as it focused on them. Alsen felt the weight of it settle on him like a physical thing, a pressure against his chest, a tightening behind his eyes.
The four drakes flanked the base of the golden hill. They sat in a loose semicircle, their postures somewhere between ceremonial guard and dogs waiting for scraps. Two of them Alsen recognized as the usual duo. The other two were the ones from the cages.
Arleria stopped first. The rest of them arranged behind her, a loose line that placed Alsen at its center. Nobody had discussed the formation. It simply happened, the kind of instinctive positioning that came from spending weeks surviving together.
“Approach,” Verathras said. The word rolled across the hoard like distant thunder, deep enough that Alsen felt it in his ribs. The dragon’s jaw hadn’t moved much, the sound emerging from somewhere in the massive throat, shaped by structures that had nothing in common with a human mouth.
They approached. Coins shifted underfoot, gold and silver sliding against each other in tiny avalanches with every step. Alsen’s boots sank half an inch with each footfall. Walking on a dragon’s hoard felt exactly like walking on a very expensive beach.
They stopped about thirty paces from the base of the hill. Close enough to hear, far enough that the heat didn’t burn. Verathras’s head rested on a pile of gold that put it roughly at their level, the eye watching them with the same lazy focus a cat gives to a beetle it hasn’t decided to eat yet.
“You are the group that went to the northern mountains,” Verathras stated.
Arleria inclined her head. “We are, my lord.”
“And you brought back my lost kin.” The dragon’s eye shifted, tracking across the group. “I have heard the account from the drakes. The younglings are recovering. You have my thanks for that, such as it is.”
Arleria bowed deeper. “We were honored to assist.”
“Mm.” The sound vibrated through the gold. Coins rattled around them. “Yet, there is the matter of the explosion.”
His gaze found Alsen.
He met it. The amber iris burned with intelligence that went beyond what any animal should possess. This was a creature that had ruled for decades, that had burned temples and broken kingdoms.
And it was curious.
“Even I saw the detonation in the sky,” Verathras continued. “And felt the touch of the released shockwave.” A note of displeasure entered the rumble. “It rattled my gold.”