20
____________________
“Raegan, would you slow down!” Killian roared as he, along with Niamh and I, shot out of the castle.
No matter how quickly we walked, how long our strides were, Raegan was out-pacing us two-to-one.
Somewhere along the way Niamh had retrieved a bow and a quiver, sliding them over her gown as she trotted at my side to keep up with the two males.
“You all should stay here,” Raegan finally snarled as he refused to look at us.
No one stopped following him.
“What exactly is the plan here, Raegan?” Killian huffed, his pace uneven as he fought against the confines of his attire.
Raegan's lack of response spoke lengths about what his plan was.
“You cannot cross over Uisge without permission. And I’m not sure if you noticed or not, but the very person you need permission from is back in your castle.”
We arrived in the clearing, home to the barn and all of its creatures, just as Raegan lifted his hand to his mouth and released a shrill whistle.
When Rìoghail emerged from deep within one of the pastures blanketed with the blackness of night, he was not the only one who heard Raegan’s call.
Alongside him, riding her pegasus, was Shea.
She looked more unkempt than usual, her face blotchy and raw and her eyes puffy.
“Shea?” Niamh coughed out. “What are you doing out here?”
“Practicing,” she spat back. “What are you lot doing out here?”
“Apparently, going to Cluaineach.”
Shea lifted both brows as she watched us from atop her steed, no one saying anything as Raegan stormed his way to Rìoghail and whispered to him.
When the stallion responded with a press of his muzzle against Raegan’s cheek, the Prince performed a swift mount by swinging up and over his stallion's back.
“Would you just hold on for one minute,” Killian seethed as he stepped in front of Rìoghail, stretching his arms out as if he could halt the beast. “Please, Raegan.”
Niamh was gentler than Killian as she harnessed her soft voice. “What you are about to do could be conceived as an act of war, Raegan.”
The Prince bared his teeth, flashing elongated canines, as he snarled. “Good. Maybe then everyone will pull their heads out of their asses long enough to listen to us.”
Killian didn’t move. Rìoghail blew a huff of moisture in his face.
“Come or don’t, Killian. But if you do not move out of my way, I will plough you down.”
Killian growled something as he motioned for Niamh to call her own mount. Within seconds the third pegasus was in front of us. With a promise of caraid, she mounted and looked down her nose at Killian and I.
The unspeakable lingered between us all.
Killian no longer had Gaoth.
“Killian, ride with Milis and I.” Shea offered, her hand outstretched to her friend. He nodded to her, taking her wrist and hoisting himself up and over.
“Sonus and I have room for one more.” Niamh smiled at me, offering her hand as well.
As I approached the dark creature, I whispered my request for partnership, to which I got a face full of whiskers and a snort into my hair.
The height at which I had to pinch my gown in order to seat myself over his back was less than ideal.
Raegan pivoted on Rìoghail, looking back at us all with something strange on his face. “You do not need to risk yourselves for me.”
Shea scoffed at him. “You might be an impulsive moron, Raegan, but you’re our impulsive moron. And whether you like it or not, we are beside you, always.” She squared her shoulders, lifting a hand to the sky. “What are you waiting for?”
His brows shadowed his eyes as he nodded to each of them, pushing at Rìoghail with his calves and taking to the night-sky before anyone could change their mind.
~
It became increasingly apparent that no one but Raegan, and perhaps me, knew where the dragons resided. At first, I thought that to be strange. How many times had he travelled with his friends and not taken them to Gliocas, who seemed to be the most important thing in his life?
I swallowed those thoughts right as the three pegasus’ landed on that choppy cliff-side, carefully placing their hooves so as not to step on the dozens of shredded bodies that were blasted along the stone ground.
Innards and entrails were sprawled across every surface, a spraying of crimson between each severed limb.
No matter what horrors I had seen in the clinic, nothing compared to the mass slaughter of so many pixies before me.
While I wanted to feel sympathy for them, one thing was constant between each of the various torn-at skulls — they all lacked ears.
Niamh landed behind me a second later.
“What is it about their ears?” I whispered to her as we watched Raegan shoot off of Rìoghail, sprinting his way into the cave-opening.
“They cut them off,” she growled before spitting out at one of the bodies next to us. “To prove they belong to no part of Saoghal.”
Grimacing, I tried my best to follow her skipping-motion through the strewn out bodies until we halted in front of the cave-mouth. Very little light entered that cavernous space, leaving the four of us to peer into the blackness in hopes of seeing something.
“Olivia?” Raegan called out, making Niamh, Shea, and Killian all turn and frown at me. I only shrugged at them, wondering what he could possibly want with me. “Come, please. It’s Gliocas.”
His voice was shaky and hollow, which was the only reason I sprinted away from the others before I could offer them an explanation.
Deep in the back of the shadowed cave, illuminated only by a single flickering flame at the tip of his finger, was Raegan. His eyes shot towards me, a panic in them that did not belong to a prince.
I ran towards him, slamming to a stop and dropping down to my knees so I was at his side. “What is it?”
He looked back to what was before him. Gliocas, sprawled out on the floor of the cave, breathing slow and laboured with raspy attempts that stretched at his ribs.
“Little,” I heard from behind me, a guttural purr that belonged to none other than Urram. Swinging my chin over my shoulder, I saw his familiar moon-lit eyes peering down at Raegan and I from the height of the cave.
Feeling both better and worse at his sudden appearance, I turned back to Gliocas whose nostrils had begun to whine.
“Is he hurt?” I whispered to Raegan, who nodded his head. He lifted his other hand, which I saw was dripping with blood from where he had tried to press against the dragon's wound.
“A sword,” Raegan began, using his finger to point out the beginning of the ravenous gash that started at the dragon’s soft, fleshy skin beneath his wing. “It swiped, starting here and ending there.”
It was at least as long as the full span on my arms from finger-to-finger.
I shouldn’t have, but I gasped. He was bleeding out, and fast. That was only further proved as Gliocas’ eyes fell shut and his body went limp in front of us.
“He’s going to die,” Raegan said, to no one in particular.
“Yes,” I sighed, looking around the cave desperately. “Unless…”
“Unless what, Olivia?”
I turned to see tears lining the Prince of Choilltean’s eyes.
Whispering a curse to myself, I continued to scan the cave. “We need to stop the bleeding, first. But I don’t have any of my tools.”
“What do you need?”
What didn’t I need? I needed the clinic and a clear mind to work on a creature a hundred-times larger than the cats and dogs I normally worked on.
And I needed to stop my hands from shaking. It was one thought, one small thought, that brought a calm to me at last.
I had asked myself, over and over, why I was in Saoghal. Maybe it had been to show me the light that I had given up chasing years ago, or maybe it was for this. Maybe it was to be given the opportunity to save the already broken heart of a Prince.
So I let out one last shaking breath, squared my shoulders, and looked at Raegan. “I don’t have many options, but we need to stop this bleeding and we need to stop it quickly. Your flame – can you… Can you press it on his wound?”
Urram growled at the sound of that, but I chose to ignore him.
Raegan looked hesitant.
“We need to close as many of the vessels as we can before he bleeds out, Raegan.”
While the Prince contemplated this, I shot my voice towards the cave-entrance. “Do any of these fields have poppy?”
Niamh, quieter than usual, responded. “I think so!”
“Get as much as you can, now.”
The faint patter of boots on stone rang out before it was followed with the heavy beating of wings.
Raegan still hadn’t begun to burn Gliocas’ wound. His hand trembled where it hovered over Gliocas’ body. I set mine over top of it and squeezed. “Raegan, please.”
His eyes met mine and heat erupted in the small contact between our skin. I pulled away just as flames wrapped around his fingers, where he finally set them against Gliocas.
The dragon roared, the cave shuddering with every release of his powerful voice. Urram whined behind us, moving closer and placing his head against Gliocas’ where he lay beside his friend.
Moments later, Niamh sprinted into the cave with enough poppy flowers to fill an entire basin. She and Killian dropped them at our feet, carpeting the ground with vibrant hues of red far too similar to the blood that laid beneath them.
“Now what?” Raegan muttered as he continued to let fire flow from his fingers, Gliocas still crying out in agony.
“We need the oil from them but… I don’t know how.”
“Just feed them to him,” Urram grumbled.
Taking his word for it, I left Raegan as he continued to cauterize and started to shovel handful after handful of the flowers into Gliocas’ mouth.
He fought against me, wriggling his head side to side as his carmine eyes snapped open, steam blowing from his nose.
Even when the sharpest of his fangs caught my forearm and ripped open my skin, I continued to push more and more into his mouth.
Finally, he slumped over, his mind lost to a deep sleep that allowed me to loosen a deep sigh.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I muttered to Raegan, who cut off the flow of amber at once. Shuffling my way closer to the wound, I tried my best to examine what was left of it. Large clumps of flaky flesh stuck out from the wound, coupled with small rocks and pieces of dirt.
“I need to clean out his wound.”
“Okay.” Raegan nodded, his whole being completely at my mercy as he stared.
“But—” I glanced down at my hands, the skin that had touched a thousand different things in the last few hours. “I need to sanitize my hands and I don’t know how, out here.”
There was also the problem of the copious amount of blood that was dripping from my own wound, but I hid it away from the others.
“Do what you must, Little,” Urram said, his muzzle pressed against the slow-moving nostrils of Gliocas.
He was right – what choice did we have?
With a tight-locked jaw, I got to work on picking various pieces from Gliocas’ wound, tossing them aside only to dive back in again. After several minutes of that, I stepped back and away from him, my head tilted as I looked at it.
“What’s wrong?” Raegan pleaded.
“I think the wound is opening up already.”
Raegan looked back at it, trying to decipher if my words were true or not.
“Shit… I think… I think I need to stitch it.” My stomach churned as I said it, at the horrible realization that not only did I have nothing to stitch it with, but I wasn’t sure there would be any needle strong enough to pierce the hide.
“Then stitch it.”
“I don’t have —” I cut myself off to look at the faint glint that appeared in Raegan’s waist band. The dagger, that he had hidden away in his chest-plate, had been placed in his pants for the entirety of the Beltane Ball.
“Dammit.”
“What is it?’
Groaning, I took a step away from them and pulled at the length of my gown, peeling it off of my body in one swift moment. Not a single one of them said a thing, only stared at me as if I was the strange one.
“Give me your dagger.”
Raegan didn’t question me, he simply pulled it from its hiding place and handed it over leather-handled side first. I took it from him and moved towards Gliocas, where I took a pinch of his hide and tugged at it.
It was tough. Far too strong for mere thread, I wasn’t sure if even rope would be capable of holding stitches.
“They’re not going to be pretty, but I’m going to do a dozen stitches all along here,” I paused to run my finger along the length of the wound. I wasn’t even sure why I was explaining it to them, perhaps because I wanted to hear the reasoning myself as I played through my plan.
Dropping to my knees once more, placing the gown on the floor in front of me, I began to trace a long line of the material with the blade. Except it didn’t cut.
“What is this made of?” I groaned as I pushed the knife harder, still making no advancements through the silk.
“Spider-silk,” Niamh mumbled through the hand over her mouth. “The toughest material we have.”
A curse and a blessing — if I could cut through it, it looked like it just might hold up.
Raegan noticed my shaking hand and clenched jaw and took the blade from me. “Show me where to cut.” Adding heat to the dagger through his burning palm, he pressed the edge of the blade where I told him to and dragged.
Once my dress was torn into twelve equal-sized, thick spindles of rope, Raegan helped me with the part I had been secretly dreading.
Using the dagger as a needle, we poked at the tough hide in order to make twenty-four small holes, big enough to thread the spider-silk through and tie on the opposite side.
It took far longer than it would have in the clinic, had Gliocas been a cat, but after a gruelling few hours his wound was stretched as close as we could manage, and the blood-loss had slowed itself to a normal droplet here and there.
With a huff of defeat and a dash of success, my whole body collapsed and curled itself into a tight ball against Urram, where I found the deepest sleep of my life.