Chapter 6
Kael
My heart beat hard and fast as I held my dragon closer. He radiated a warmth I’d never thought I’d feel again. Then this grizzled old bastard had to say those words.
“You lie.” The dragon’s head popped up at that. Probably because my growl was a fair approximation of his. The beast’s eyes swung around to take in the man who destroyed my life, and he let out a throaty growl of his own. “You just want the dragons for my… the Duke.”
“You think I’d give those beasties to that prick?” The Executioner shook his head. “Bad enough that him and his sister are planning to overthrow the king and replace them with his nephew. Can’t imagine what he’d be like if he got his hands on dragons as well.”
His lips thinned in a way I knew well. I wore the same expression often enough.
“Look, I’m not going to sit in a hole in the ground and argue this out.
” He pulled something from his belt that had us all stiffening.
“Not sure about you lads, but I’ve got a rope, and I intend to use it to get out of here.
If you want to go back to the city and try to hide three growing dragons, be my guest. Otherwise, I’ll meet you out the other side of Drathnor’s cave.
Your mother doesn’t like if I’m gone for long, and I intend to get back to her by morning. ”
I watched him like a hawk as he tied a loop in the rope before throwing it upwards. With a tug, he seemed satisfied it would hold his weight and then he climbed up without another word.
How could the assassin’s words seem even more unreal than the dragon in my arms?
See Mother? I’d grieved for her. Built a cairn up on the hills around Blackreach like poor people did, unable to afford a burial plot.
Each day my heart ached from the absence of her, only for me to remind myself she was never coming back.
“He’s lying.” Lorien scrambled closer, a sleepy peep registering from his shirt. “He is. Why would the bloody Executioner help the likes of us? He’ll knock us on the head and take the dragons as soon as we step out of the cave.”
“No, he won’t.”
Dain rose to his feet without further explanation. As he wrapped his hands around the rope and pulled himself up, we followed along behind him, half expecting the rope to be cut off midway. Instead, we clambered up and outside of the hole and back onto solid ground.
“So which way is the entrance the Executioner talked about?” Lorien asked, but before he could answer, he turned around. “Hey, what’s that?”
For a moment I thought it was another dragon’s egg, but at closer inspection, it was an egg-shaped stone. Lorien’s hand went out to take it, only for Dain to stop him.
“Don’t touch that.” He glanced up at the cave roof and pebbles dropped as the stones themselves started to shake slightly. “You’ll have the cavern down on our heads.” And how did he know that? We’d never get an answer, because Dain had none himself. “This way.”
Sure enough, we followed Dain out of the cave, this time without the oppressive atmosphere of fear bearing down on us, but I admit to taking a deeper breath in when we emerged out onto the plain outside of the walls of Blackreach.
“Time to make a break for it?” Lorien asked. “We could head for the forests and live rough, hunting rabbits and birds to feed ourselves and our dragons.”
As if in response to that, the coach rattled up. The horse came to a stop and then looked over our way, snorting to indicate how he felt about us. The man who said he had my mother looked down from the long seat at the front and then asked, “Well, you coming or not?”
“What do you think?”
My brothers looked to me as if I had the answers, but all I had was one.
“If he has my mother… If she’s at his estate, like he says, I need to find out.”
“Blackreach is a cesspit,” Dain growled.
“One filled to the brim with the rotting corpses of rats.” Lorien shrugged his shoulders. “We have dragons and a pocketful of gold.” A glance at the coach and then back at us. “If the old bastard is trying to trick us, we can stick him in the neck and leave him bleeding on the road.”
“I heard that,” the man said, his horse shifting restlessly.
“Good.” My jaw jerked upwards and I stared him down. “Because we’ll make you regret your treachery three times over if you’re lying.”
The Executioner let out a sigh.
“Your mother will be so pleased to see how you’ve turned out.”
With that, we moved closer. He wanted us to sit in the back, but we made clear that would never happen, squishing up beside him on the front seat.
“So what’s your name?” Lorien asked, conversational as you please. “Can’t keep calling you the Executioner.”
His hands wrapped tighter around the reins and then he let out a whistle of breath.
“Barry.”
“Barry?” Lorien looked at me, his amusement plain. “Barry? Your name is not Barry.”
“Bartholomew when I was born, but I go by Barry now.”
At the sound of Lorien’s laughter, he flicked the reins and urged the horse on.
A full day later, I had a dragon demanding yet more food, and so did my brothers.
“Here, here.” Lorien shoved a wad of meat into my hand.
Cut from the wild goose Barry had shot down with his crossbow, the dragons had damn near plucked it bare with their incessant appetite.
“Hope you’ve got a lot of geese out at this estate of yours, Barry, because these beasties have a hell of a big appetite. ”
My dragon tried to snatch all of the meat from my fingers in his haste to fill his aching body.
“Slowly, you silly creature,” I said, pulling off a smaller chunk. He swallowed that without even chewing, then cried for more. “Here you go.”
His hunger was mine, an ache in my chest, in my belly, that wasn’t satisfied until he was.
But even when that feeling of wellbeing that came each time his stomach was full didn’t ease the other pain.
I wanted Barry’s words to be true with every breath, and yet I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge if it was.
“I’m going to call you Gobble Guts,” Lorien announced, even as his dragon crawled up onto his shoulder, rubbing his face against my brother’s.
“You can’t call a dragon Gobble Guts,” Dain rumbled.
“So what’re you calling your dragon?” Lorien shot back.
Barry let out a huff of breath, scrupulously keeping his eyes on the road.
“Argent.” That was dragged out of the depths of Dain. He only spoke freely when complaining about Lorien or when those strange fits came upon him.
“Argent? Why Argent?” Lorien spluttered.
“Means silver.”
We all stared at Barry. The man said very little. That was maybe because Lorien and Dain were squabbling the entire time, but I got the feeling he was a man of few words. That was fine, but he’d have a few to say to me.
“You called your silver dragon, Silver?” Lorien snorted before turning back to his dragon. “I’ll come up with something far grander for you, lad. How about… Steelheart?”
“Steel’s a totally different metal,” Dain shot back.
“Then… Brightfang.” The dragon on Lorien’s shoulder lifted his head at that. “You like that one, lad? Brightfang it is.”
“What about you?”
I blinked, Barry looking my way finally. He seemed pretty content to ignore me the entire journey, making me more suspicious by the moment.
“What about you?” I replied, shooting him a dark look.
“Don’t have a dragon.”
The twist of his lips made clear he was mocking me deliberately, and that had my back straightening.
I glanced down at the sleeping creature in my arms, wondering how the hell Mother came up with a name for me, when his eye opened just a crack.
Each dragon was as silver as a newly minted coin, but his was a darker shade.
It kind of reminded me of the roof tiles we’d skimmed across too many times.
“Slate,” I said, and my dragon nodded. That feeling of wellbeing bloomed hotter in my chest, making clear he approved.
My fingers twitched, wanting to stroke his butter soft scales.
He liked it, dropping into deeper sleep as a result, but I stopped myself.
“So what’s your story? Last time I saw you was when you dragged my mother screaming out of our home. ”
Barry stopped staring at me, focussing instead on the road.
“If you don’t tell me, we’re—”
“The Duke…” Not many people said the man’s title with the same kind of loathing I did.
“He sends me to ‘clean up his messes.’ Thinks he knows what that entails, but he doesn’t.
Every child of some lord who fucked the wrong woman, every malcontent.
I’m supposed to knife them in the dark, but instead, I made a public spectacle of their ‘removal.’ His lordship liked that.
Thinks it makes him seem more frightening than he is.
Gave me a perfect means to drag people out of the city with much hue and cry.
No one steps in to save the victims, though. ”
His jaw muscle twitched.
“At first, that just pissed me off. Why not stand up for your fellows? The Duke can only do what he does because we allow it. Well, if they weren’t going to act, I was.
” His eyes gleamed in the low light as he stared at me.
“Got the job because my father and his father before him killed the Duke’s enemies for him, but I saw something they didn’t.
People shrink back in the face of the Executioner.
I could use that power to save the victims, not kill them. ”
What he described, it couldn’t be real. All those people he’d dragged from the city. Where…? How…? I was about to find out, because as the horse walked up to the top of a rise, I saw it.
Wasn’t a fancy place, not like those on Silk Row in Blackreach, but it was a big, sprawling building.
Smoke curled up from the chimney lazily, but it wasn’t that which had my attention.
Children roamed around the garden, either working in the vegetable patches or weeding the flower beds, and with them?
I reached down, sure Slate had dug his claws into my chest, but he slept on peacefully. Because there she was.
A small figure, the details not clear from this distance, but something white hot coursed through my veins, burning brand new channels.
Hope, I realised, as I fought to take a breath.
She lifted her hand, put it to her brow to help her see more clearly, and I followed every movement as we got closer and closer.
Then as the horse pulled up out front the house, I saw that Barry hadn’t lied.
“Mother…?”
Slate stirred, making a sleepy sound, but I could only hold him tightly as I dropped down from the coach before it fully stopped. My feet were moving towards her, across the yard, up to the small gate, and then through it.
“Mother…”
“And who do we have here?”
Her gentle tone, I knew it as well as my own. She scanned the lot of us with a welcoming smile, which faltered when she saw me. Her face fell and so did her mouth, gaping as she stared, then she took a small step forward. My strides closed the gap in seconds, my spare hand reaching for her.
Perhaps this was all just part of the nightmare of Drathnor’s cave. Maybe I was lying on the cavern floor, bleeding out from the Executioner’s blade, believing I’d bonded with a dragon and had found my mother.
“Kael…?” She sobbed out my name, tears gleaming bright in the evening light as she clasped my hand. “Oh, my boy! He found you!”
I was yanked closer, enfolded in her arms, only for Slate to protest, scrambling up onto my shoulder and hissing at Mother. That had her crying, laughing as she pulled back and looked the both of us over.
“And who’s this, then?”
“Slate, my dragon, and…”
I couldn’t say anymore. It felt like a weight I’d been carrying since I was ten years old fell away then and I was impossibly light as a result. An arm was wrapped around her waist and I hoisted her up, spinning my mother around before setting her back down again.
“Lad.” My throat was almost closed up as I spoke to my dragon. “This is my mother.”
He leaned forward, sniffing with an air of suspicion before finally relaxing the grip his claws had on my shoulder. With a happy chirrup, he ruffled his wings and sat back.
“Well, aren’t you a marvellous beastie?” She dashed her tears out of her eyes and then gestured for the lot of us. “Come inside. The children have all had their supper, but I’m sure I can rustle something up for the lot of you.”
My fingers clasped hers, holding on like I was still a little boy as she led us into the house.