Chapter 19
No surprise, really, one part of the Dervish said. He’s scared, he’s about to die, and I am extremely handsome.
Another part of the Dervish felt that when you were being passionately kissed by a rather nice man, you kissed back. Even if they weren’t exactly your type.
Edmund’s skin was cold, but his mouth was shockingly hot.
The Dervish had been out of the sword long enough to have developed stubble and for a moment the sandpaper scrape of their skin together was enough to distract him.
Then the scholar’s tongue began working against the Dervish’s lips, which was a great deal more aggressive than he had expected from Edmund.
Ancestors, there’s a lot more than barnacle pigeons going on in there …
The Dervish opened his mouth—and Edmund pushed something long and hard into it.
The Dervish had, it must be said, had a number of men slide something long and hard into his mouth, although the long hard things in question had usually been slightly less hard and a lot longer.
Also they hadn’t usually tasted … metallic?
Edmund stepped back. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking anywhere but the Dervish. Dawn was far enough advanced that his blush stood out like blood on snow.
The Dervish grunted. There wasn’t much else he could do, with the metal object in his mouth. Suddenly the reason for Edmund’s silence became obvious.
“Done?” asked the guard, not unsympathetically.
“Yes,” Edmund said, straightening. “Thank you.”
The Dervish felt the edges of the object with his tongue … rounded ends, a little over an inch long, odd ridges that ran the length …
Ancestors have mercy, it’s Alba’s pocketknife. Edmund must have palmed it.
He lifted his bound hands to his mouth, ostensibly to wipe it after the kiss, and slipped the blade into his hand. Edmund couldn’t have done that with his hands behind his back, which explained why he’d passed it to the Dervish.
Clever. Very clever. And there was absolutely no reason why he should wonder if Edmund had wanted to kiss him at all.
His well-trained vanity stepped in. Don’t be ridiculous. With a face like this? Of course he did.
Some part of him wondered, though, if Edmund might not want more than a pretty … fine, a devastatingly handsome face. Someone deeper. Someone who understood about barnacle pigeons and green parakeets.
What about someone not about to be eaten by a dragon?
The guard led them forward on the rope leashes, around the wagon. The horse, no longer placid, was stamping and rolling its eyes, clearly smelling dragon.
A moment later, the Dervish smelled it, too—a rotten, carrion stench, combined with the musk of a large carnivore, and the peculiar flat smell of reptile. The scent rolled out of an opening in the hillside perhaps fifty yards away, less a cave than an enormous crack in the stone.
The clearing in front of it had a certain trampled look that bespoke long use. The Dervish couldn’t help but notice that there was an actual road to it, wide enough to get a wagon through. It may only have been five years since they started this, but they’ve been doing it quite a lot since then.
Posts had been driven into the ground in the center of the clearing. The ropes around their necks attached quite nicely to rings screwed into the posts, and the knots pulled tight. “I see you’ve gotten this human-sacrifice thing down to a science,” said the Dervish pleasantly.
“I really am sorry,” the guard muttered. “It ain’t right, after what you did for Taz.”
“You could let us go.”
“And go against him?” The man’s eyes flicked to Otto, who had stayed with the restless horse. “I’d be the next one down the dragon’s gullet.”
The Dervish sighed. “I suppose I could make an impassioned speech about how you’re all stronger together and could overpower him, but I doubt it’ll matter and I’m sure you’re eager to get going, so let’s just pretend I did, shall we?”
Edmund’s laugh was high and panicky, but a laugh nonetheless. The guard shook his head, gave the crack in the wall a last nervous look, and retreated to the safety of the wagon. The sound of creaking wheels reached them a moment later.
“I guess they’re not staying to watch,” Edmund said.
“And risk the dragon getting them next?” The Dervish flicked the knife open and began sawing at the knot beside his neck. Hemp burned his skin as he worked, but he ignored it. Compared to the priest of the Lord of the Book, Otto’s people had been rank amateurs. “How long do you think we have?”
“Dragons are reptilian, mostly. It was trying to soak up heat from that rock, remember? It probably won’t be out until it warms up a little.” Edmund frowned. “That explains what Alba said at first. So soon? I suspect it hibernates in winter and they weren’t expecting it to be out and about yet.”
The Dervish grunted, still hacking at the rope. The knife was just about the worst possible tool for such work, but strands kept parting, one by one. It would have gone much quicker if he could hold the rope taut, but he’d have needed an extra thumb, given how his wrists were tied.
“Alba gave me the knife,” Edmund added.
“Did she?” The Dervish replayed the scene in his head, Alba taking both of Edmund’s hands, and Edmund asking for water, lifting the cup to his mouth … “I take back at least a quarter of the horribly unkind things I’ve thought about her.”
“I feel sorry for her.”
“You feel sorry for everyone.” That came out rather harsher than intended, but the Dervish could feel his panic at being bound starting to rise, like thin claws sinking in under his sternum.
“You even feel sorry for me, and I’m a total bastard.
” He did like that word, he decided. It had a nice snap to it.
“No, you’re not.”
“I absolutely am.” Was the rope halfway cut? Not quite, he decided.
“Why do you keeping saying that? You’re not. You saved my life and you helped rescue Sweetness and Large Francis and Dog Violet, and you’re funny and … and decent…”
“Decent!” The word came out much louder than he intended and echoed against the stones.
The Dervish winced and continued, “I am nothing like decent. I ran away from my family because being a guard was so damn dull. Seduced a lovely young princeling who promised to take me away from it all, and set our families at each other’s throats.
” He snorted. “They were at war, last I heard.”
“You couldn’t have known,” said Edmund, although he sounded much less certain than before.
“No, I was really an extraordinary fool about the whole thing. Two weeks of moonlight rides across the plains—and some very wild riding in private—until we reached his kingdom, and then I discovered that my lovely princeling already had quite a collection and that he intended to keep me in it. By force, if necessary.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“It wasn’t pleasant, no. Particularly when I found out that his solution involved hamstringing the ones who tried to run.” The second twist of hemp unraveled, leaving him with only one remaining.
“My god!”
“Yes, well.” The Dervish kept hacking at the rope.
The knife was getting duller and progress was getting slower.
His arms ached, but the memory of old betrayal kept him going.
Betrayal and, to be honest, shame. Father’s Brother would have cursed him up one side and down the other, but Father’s Brother had died the winter before.
Lockjaw, when a colt bit him and the wound went bad.
He’d gotten up the strength to go out into the cold and sat down and froze to death, rather than die a slow, agonizing death.
After that, the Dervish couldn’t get away from the family lands soon enough.
The princeling had still been an incredibly foolish mistake.
“I tried to murder him instead. I kept my hamstrings, but he had me poisoned.” He laughed softly, humorlessly.
“He said that beauty like mine should be preserved, even in death.”
“That’s…” Edmund swallowed hard.
“Not making you feel less sorry for me, I realize. Bad example.” He was almost through the rope, even though the knife had started to crush the strands rather than cut. He was starting to think that they might live through this after all.
Something scraped inside the crack in the wall. Something very large. He froze, and watched pebbles bounce down from the opening and patter on the ground.
The dragon, it seemed, was awake.
The Dervish would have sworn that he was cutting the ropes as fast as he could, but it seemed that he could indeed go faster. The last strands of rope parted and he staggered backward, then turned and rushed to Edmund.
“Go!” Edmund said, in a furious whisper. “Save yourself!”
“I’m immortal,” the Dervish whispered back, hacking at the rope around Edmund’s neck. “If it eats me, I’ll be out of the sword in a week or two. Maybe a month. It will be horrible, but I don’t die, remember?”
Edmund winced, whether from the truth of this or because of the rope burns that the Dervish was inflicting on his neck.
The sword kept trying to get him to intervene between the rope and Edmund’s skin, and only the fact that it would have meant effectively strangling the scholar let the Dervish fight the compulsion off.
More scraping came from inside the crack in the hillside. The Dervish didn’t dare take his eyes from the rope, but he knew when the dragon emerged because Edmund said a word that the sword didn’t even try to translate.
He risked looking up.
The dragon’s small, absurd-looking head emerged first. It looked around and then yawned, revealing a thicket of teeth like yellowed pine needles.
And its mouth just … kept … opening. Its jaw hung almost perpendicular to its skull and the skin of its throat unfurled like a tightly wrapped flag.
The flesh revealed was an absurdly delicate lavender.
All the Dervish could think in that moment was The commander hunted that?