He woke and it was dark and he was lying on his back on the marble floor. One of his furs rolled under his head, his arm against the base of the raised bed Kayhi lay on. He could see instantly in the dark as always and he looked and did not even need to for he could hear her breathing in the night. Still that harsh and strangled sound, but still breathing.
His own heart in his chest pounding and all around him that long ago mountain field fading, the stone house behind them and the soft pressure of her head on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and it was gone and he scowled in fury. At what he knew not. Perhaps just himself. For the warped and shattered memories he carried and the way his dreams now twisted them in the night.
Because that day she'd not spoken at all of a girl who would not be born for nearly a year, a small and furious girl thrust screaming into the world two months before her time and writhing and strong even so. On that day when they'd actually sat looking out at the world below them, soaring over it and everything it was, she'd said:
Nowhere. Nowhere at all.
When he woke the next morning they were in the room and he did not move, watching them in their red robes as they worked over her. He did not think they knew he was awake but then without turning one of them said to him:
“She's alive.”
What a world it was, he thought, where that was welcome news. He sat up slowly and stiffly and looked over to where Juoth and the dead girl were also waking and then pulled himself to his feet. He thought how quiet it was and then realized her breathing had softened and he looked at her and some of the color had come back to her face. Her eyes closed, her lips parted and free of blood. Her chest just rising and falling.
One of them turned to him then while the other helped her drink again from the vial, and she said:
“I can't tell you what the future is for her, but she won't die today. She may not die at all from this. She's very lucky. You both are.”
“I know,” he said.
They finished with her and he watched and felt helpless, so lost in this. The opposite of his trade. Something he knew nothing of and never would and in that some hopelessness but it was what it was. When they were done they both nodded to him but did not speak and went out the way they always did and it was silent in the spire.
Juoth came over and stood in the window and then they just sat for a long time. Something they had not done in he did not know how long. Since eating with the farmer who was now dead by the fields that were long burned. Perhaps then. Other times as well but nothing like this.
Every time after he hunted he felt empty. It was a thing that wrapped him up and consumed him and became the entire world. The stalking and baiting and lying in wait. Listening for black wings in the air or standing in the scent of smoke distant and drifting. Planning the kill and working with arrow and blade to be ready and then it was all fire and steel and the eternal screaming as a being nearly eternal itself was slaughtered. A fraction of a breath compared to the whole hunt, and then a ringing silence and nothing left for his ravenous appetite.
“Are they always like this?” Juoth said. Looking down at his gloved hand, flexing it there in the pale light.
“Like what?”
“I saw them. The way they watched us in the street. The distance they gave you.”
Brack smiled sadly. “Yes,” he said. “In the cities. They always are.”
“Do they know what you did?”
“Of course they know what I did.”
“Then there should be a damned feast. Not these cowards shuffling in the dirt.”
Brack shook his head. “Most men cannot kill other men,” he said. “The men who can, can't kill dragons. I'm a man who kills dragons.”
“And so you terrify them.”
“I don't blame them.”
“You should. You damned well should.”
In the rising sunlight the dust and smoke had settled beyond the wall. People were in the streets again, more people than he could believe were crawling from this rubble. Thousands living in the dark and shattered stone and now finally clawing to the daylight with the dragon dead. He knew there were more in the fields beyond, probably with their tents thrown and fires roaring and camping even now all around the cold body of the beast. As if in that they could claim some of the kill. A piece perhaps of another history that would in time be forgotten.
Juoth looked at him again. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Who says I'm going to do anything with it?”
“All this time. Don't think I think you're a fool.”
“I have what I came for.”
“So you're going to take this chance again? Two hundred years and you didn't learn a damn thing? Two hundred from now you want to stand in front of some other city and kill this thing again.”
He was quiet, thinking. Looking at Kayhi. She did look better but she had not opened her eyes and it was those eyes he wanted to see.
“All right,” he said. “I'm going to do something.”
“You going to tell me what it is?”
“I'm going to have you do it is what I'm going to do.”
Juoth grinned and looked off over that battered world and nodded. The skin on the side of his face healing but pale where it would scar. In that a constant reminder of that town burning to the ice, the old bones in the ash. The hair growing back thin and the color of smoke.
“You were wrong,” he said. He did not look at Brack as he said it.
“I've been wrong about a great many things.”
“About the dragon.” An aching pause. “And your daughter.”
“When?”
“What you told me. What you told the priest. It's a small room.”
“I told him what I saw.”
“Then your eyes aren't Tarek's eyes.”
Brack felt the flinch in his own jaw and for a heartbeat sat holding it and knowing what it was and then closed his eyes and breathed and opened them again.
“It never wanted to kill her in front of you,” Juoth said. “This whole time that's what you said and the whole time you were wrong. She'd be dead if you weren't. That tower like a torch. That's what you saw.”
Another breath. Then: “I know.”
“Well.”
“It was to force me to make a mistake. I ran in alone, with a knife and a sword. Me. A hunter all these years. Like a child to the slaughter.” Looking behind him. That small body on the wide bed. “And it would have worked.”
“I spent years with your son,” Juoth said. “And he told me one thing more times than I can count.”
“Tell me.”
“There's always more,” he said. “When you think you've found it there's always more.” Looking over at last. “There's a depth to everything in this world. It may be endless. Everything we believe is there on the top and it floats and dies but what is real is somewhere lower. In the shadows of what we see. And all that matters is what's real.”
“You add that part yourself?”
“Listen to me.”
Brack reached, put a hand on his shoulder. Nodded once and felt that depth all below him as it had always been and also felt that no matter how deep he swam in the murk and the dark all he did was find that it was deeper and deeper, some cavernous expanse swallowing time and fate and desire and the world itself as it moved out in all directions and everyone he'd ever known mired in it and out there somewhere swimming silently the passing shadow of a great and unknown beast, a leviathan toward which they all descended.
“I am listening,” he said.
The morning burned on and after a long time he finally felt hungry. He knew he had eaten in the field but he could not remember it and he did not know what it was he'd eaten. Could not remember a single meal since he left the keep. As it always was. Knowing the tables he'd sat at and the fires he'd cooked over but nothing more.