24. A Magic Touch
A Magic Touch
They put me to work . . . their captive guest.
I’m grateful to be preoccupied—to keep my mind and hands busy. It helps the time pass, and I need that, need the winter to drop away.
Sometimes as I’m washing laundry or filleting fish for dinner, I even forget that I’m a prisoner, so focused on my task.
Until I look up and catch Danhy’s or Cyphus’s hostile stares.
Until I breathe in and I’m reacquainted with the damp, loamy scent of my surroundings.
Until I stand and move through the pervasive mist, feeling its tickle on my legs.
Until a burst of throbbing cold finds its way in the cave from the outside.
Then I’m reminded of what they are—what I am—and that those around me wish me gone or dead.
They don’t keep me informed or enlighten me on matters of dragonkind. Such kinship doesn’t exist between us, but I quickly learn they only ever transform into dragons at night, under the cover of mist and darkness. This is when they stretch their wings and take to the skies.
Sometimes they hunt on their nightly forays, but mostly they scout the surrounding areas, always on guard against the skelm and other dragons.
There are other prides, groups of dragons not nearly as violent or dangerous as the skelm.
None of this I’m told directly, but I piece it together over the days like a puzzle spread out on a table before me.
They cover great distances in the air, while also monitoring human activities.
Enemy dragons aren’t the only threat. Soldiers from Veturland and Penterra cut through the Crags on their quests, and they require a watchful eye.
Sometimes when they return home in the mornings and sit at the trestle table to break their fast, eating gluttonously as though starved for days, I can smell the smoke mingling with the ice on their skin and I wonder if they flew south on those occasions and walked the ruins of other ravaged villages.
Did they stand in the charred rubble and survey the destroyed lives?
Did it make them think of me, the woman they’d plucked from the wreckage and brought home with them?
Viggo is the one who assigns my tasks. Tage avoids me. Mostly.
A week ago, days after they’d uprooted me from the rubble, he had just returned from the outside, entering the cavern in an icy gust, the wind chasing him, mist coiling at his ankles.
It was still night, hours after we had eaten.
His cheeks were wind-flushed, his eyes as bright as polished marbles, and he was naked .
. . which made me flush hot despite the winter cold pervading the cave.
His sculpted body on full display would never not feel awkward. Would never not make my mouth dry.
I felt him enter the kitchen. I didn’t need to look up.
I knew it was him.
His wintry scent swirled around me. I wore a covering over my head as I worked, my hair completely hidden. It only made my face feel more exposed. My burning cheeks, the strangeness of my mismatched eyes . . . all were much too visible.
I resisted fidgeting beneath the weight of his stare. Moments passed. Unable to resist, I risked a glance and hastily looked back down to the venison I was salting for future meals as though it required my full concentration. His otherworldly gaze unnerved me.
I told myself it was because of the way his pupils shuddered every so often, vertical one moment and round the next. It was this—their innate otherworldliness—and the inescapable awareness that he was not a mere man.
And yet even with my head bowed I could still feel his eyes on me.
I could still see the flickering iridescent purple.
I chanced another glance, then tried to look away, but I failed.
He stood in the threshold, his features as calm as a windless lake, his eyes flickering, the only thing showing any emotion, flowing over me like a stream.
I wet my suddenly dry lips, and he caught that, too, his gaze missing nothing.
“What are you looking at?” The question escaped me with undeniable challenge.
I held his stare, detecting the barest movement on his lips, almost like he wanted to smile. “You.”
A single word. A simple response.
But it dropped through me like a stone, settling heavily in my belly.
Nothing was simple about my full-body cringe, about the way it felt to be so wholly examined when no one had looked at me in forever.
I hated that I should feel so ill at ease, but I could not forget Arvos’s comment about my mismatched eyes. Weird, he’d said. And there was the aura thing. If the witch’s curse manifested itself in a glow around me, I offered plenty for examination.
A long beat passed before Tage finally finished his inspection of me and turned away, vanishing down the tunnel, presumably to his chamber.
My shoulders sagged in relief even as a part of him remained with me, lingering like a tangible presence as I went about my task.
You.
The echo of that word reverberates through me as I imagine him alone in his den, thinking about the weird human. Or not thinking about me at all because I do not matter. Because I’m nothing, without worth among them. I’m not sure which would be worse.
They call the smaller chambers dens, and they each have one to themselves.
Not that I’ve been given a glimpse inside any of them.
I don’t get a tour. They leave me to sleep near the fire each night.
I’m consigned to the central space with the great firepit or the kitchen and laundry.
That is the extent of my world here. I am an exile among them.
The nights are the easiest part of my day, when everyone has gone to bed or is out scouting or hunting and a pervasive quiet descends over the cavernous space.
I drift to sleep staring at the brilliant gemstones encircling the fire, the flames setting the rainbow of colors ablaze, the howl of the Crags a soothing lullaby in my ears.
Other than when Viggo assigns me a task or the encounter in the kitchen with Tage, no one talks to me in any real or substantial way. I’m a ghost (again). A reviled human in their midst.
If they got their way, this would be for the rest of my life.
I would be kept here, a servant to these dragons for all my days. They never speak to me of the future, but they give no indication that their attitudes toward me have changed—that they might one day be willing to set me free. In many ways, I’m still invisible.
Of course, I know this will not be for the rest of my life. It will not be my forever. I won’t allow it. Once winter passes, I will be gone. I’ll pilfer supplies and gear and escape into the Crags.
I mark the days in my head. They fall into a pattern, the chores rote. I require less instruction from Viggo. I simply see the things that need doing and I do them.
I’m preparing bone marrow jelly the evening things change . . . when the monotony finally breaks.
Marrow extraction is a painstaking process. I’m sweating by the time I’ve finished splitting the elk bones with a hammerstone, the tendrils along my hairline moist with perspiration.
Earlier in the day, Tage carried in the carcass as though it was no more substantial than a rabbit and not several hundred pounds.
He deposited it in the kitchen without acknowledging me.
I told myself this was a good thing, that I don’t need looks or words from him, and set to work butchering the meat alongside Viggo.
Now, hours later, I’m scooping the marrow from the bones when the din reaches my ears. Viggo and I exchange quick glances, hurriedly wash our hands, and remove our stained leather aprons before leaving the kitchen.
Danhy and Cyphus carry a howling, red-faced Arvos between them.
Arvos’s screams are like the bellows of a gutted animal, bouncing off the cavernous walls. My heart pounds in my too-tight chest at the horrible sound . . . at the glimpse of his tormented face.
Viggo directs them to put Arvos down on the trestle table.
I inch closer, attempting to peer between the press of bodies.
Tage materializes, naked from the waist up, indifferent to the cold.
Droplets of water on his torso indicate that the commotion interrupted him at his bath.
Instantly I feel a stab of envy and resentment.
I clean myself from a basin of fresh water in the kitchen at the end of each day.
It’s sufficient, but hardly the thorough washing I’m accustomed to after a day’s exertion.
His brow creases in worry. “What happened?”
“We were hunting musk oxen.” Cyphus noticeably hesitates. “In the south, in the bluffs . . . when we stumbled on a sounder of battle boars.”
“Why the bluffs?” Viggo demands. “You know battle boars forage there.”
Danhy’s breath saws hard from her trembling lips.
“It shouldn’t have happened.” She shakes her head remorsefully, as though the mistake is hers.
Purple blood, dragon blood, Arvos’s blood, streaks her cheek.
“We were so concerned with staying south, away from the soldiers we spotted in the north.” She sucks in a shuddering breath.
“Arvos was gored before we even had time to react and dispatch them.”
I wince, imagining the horrible scene. It’s barely evening yet. They would not have been in their dragon forms, so clearly ill-equipped to defend against battle boars.
“I had to turn,” Cyphus admits with a defiant thrust of his square, brutish jaw. “But I never took to air.”
Battle boars easily weigh a thousand pounds each.
I’ve never heard of a human who survived an encounter with one.
They’d once been instrumental in battle, thereby earning them the moniker.
With their great size and tusks that drip venom and vicious temperaments and an appetite for dragon meat, humans had harnessed them, feeding them the remains of dragons and forever instilling a hunger in them for the magical creatures.
After the Threshing they’d been released into the wild, too difficult to control and no longer needed.
Dragons were thought to be extinct, after all.