He went to the bed and stood. Thinking of the moment of her birth and the way she'd looked at him with those eyes and the blood in her hair. Her weight the first time he held her.
And then far off in the field he heard a horn sounding. One long note, clear and ringing in the air, and then another. He could almost hear the banners flapping in the wind, the rattle of the armor and swords, the soft thud of the horses' hooves magnified to a dull thunder as they came on.
The horn paused for just a moment and then called out again.
Beside him, Kayhi opened her eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Five
He stood in the field with the sword heavy on his back and he could smell the blood and the dragon burning. The grass beneath his feet cracked and withered from the heat. The smoke rising thick and gray into the morning sky.
They'd quartered it before dawn, working in the moonlight. At first just him and Juoth with sword and ax. Then others coming and joining. A solider with an ax of his own. Two carpenters with hatchets. A group of men and women from the forest with a long, two-handled saw. Dragging on either end and singing as they worked, some song in a language he'd never heard, surely as crude and vile as he thought it was from the light in their eyes and the roaring laughter every time they hit the refrain. Laboriously hauling that saw through flesh and bone and the blood splattering all down the front of their clothes.
He'd dragged the head aside as they worked. Looked once again at those darkened sockets, just two pits where the eyes had been. He'd seen this same beast die twice and now as he pulled the head aside he couldn't help but feel like the jaws were going to open again. That the furnace was going to burn, even with the head torn from its body. And so he'd taken his sword and swung in long, sure strikes to cut the flesh and hide and skull itself into pieces.
And then he'd carried them over and started the fire. There were plenty of logs and beams from this battered town, and half of them had just burned. It did not take long until it was raging and he could hear the dragonflesh sizzling as they threw it on. Committing this beast that was so much fire itself to a last inferno. Turning finally to ash. One last time through the flames.
Now he stood and watched and there were more people than he could count. Perhaps all here to extract in this way some vengeance on this creature that had come for them. That had killed their families and torn apart their walls and brought on them some dark wrath they'd thought was only found elsewhere. In the hinterlands. The mountains. The wastes. He'd killed the red dragon before the Ringed City's gates just two decades ago but it was not the first time that he'd seen a lingering disbelief in this stretching world, nor would it be the last.
As with most things too terrifying for men to believe, they never really did until it was upon them. Always believing the dragons would come for someone else until they lay dying among the slaughtered masses of a burned city and only then knowing that, if given the time, the dragons would come for them all.
Once it had been quartered they'd begun flaying off pieces of flesh. Ten men carrying them and covered in blood. Children walking with splintered bones and flaps of skin. Stacking them all on the fire like kindling and logs, watching as it burned. That black blood turning to steam, and the flesh and bone rising as smoke.
When it was done there would be nothing left but charred and blackened pieces. Nothing that could ever draw breath again.
Though he still felt himself looking to the sky, waiting for the hammering of wings in the air.
She came slowly across the field, walking in her white dress among the twisting, maddened crowd. These butchers that they were. The smoke a wall behind her, the dirt and mud and bootprints a maze in all directions. A flurry of activity, and yet she looked only at him as she walked.
“Kayhi,” he said as she stopped in front of him. He'd sat with her all the day before, leaving the dragon to rot and cool. Just sitting with her, then staying up half the night before tearing himself away to set to this gristly work. He didn't feel it was real there in the spire, surrounded by marble and doors he couldn't see, and he didn't feel it was real here on the field of battle. That she was real.
“How are you?” he said.
“Fine.”
“I told you to stay there.”
She smiled. “I know what you told me.”
He looked out again to where the company of soldiers sat on the edge of the field. All from the Ringed City, and what a march it must have been. Their armor sleek and smooth, the same deep silver of his own, like the slate gray of a morning sky on the water. The furs they wore underneath, and those dark helmets. Some with rising horns or antlers or wings, others smooth and unadorned. Red capes blowing in the wind.
It was their warhorn that Kayhi had heard.
“Should we go with them?” she said.
“I don't know.”
“What do you want?”
He waved a hand out before him, where the carnage continued. Two women walked by with a split leg bone between them, carried like a slain deer. Walking toward the spitting fires. “I want to burn this thing and be done with it.”
“You know that's no answer.”
“Some damned type of daughter you are.”
“I blame my father.”
“Then tell him what you think.”
She shrugged, also looking at the soldiers. Those who had come unannounced, but had left for this city long before word of the dragon could have reached them. Long before the keep fell in fire and snow. More than half a year they had to have marched to get this far.
“I think,” she said, “that you can pretend that this is the end all you want. You, a dragon killer, just doing what he was made to do. But you know that it's not the end. You don't kill a dragon twice and think that's all there is to it. Or you'll be killing them all twice and then all three times and then you'll be dead.”
“You think it'll happen again.”
“Anything that happened once can damned well happen again.”
He licked his lips, chapped and covered in soot and sweat. Closing his eyes and thinking of riding down in the snow, of the dry fields and dead cattle, of the forests and the plains. All that for one dragon that he didn't know where it came from or how it was alive. And now it was dead again and he knew just the same and perhaps less.
And she was right. Everything he'd done would be done eternally if killing a dragon no longer meant tearing it out of existence. If it meant anything less than finality, he was lost.
They were all lost.
He went into the tent, still smelling the caribou in the dried furs, their tireless muscles in the frozen wastelands of the north, and stepped into the lamplight. His eyes not needing to adjust to this darkness, always as they were ready for any light. The warmth thrown about on the walls, dried and taught, from two lamps on the ground.
Havrain stood looking at him with his arms folded across his chest. He wore his thin furs and the long red cape but his armor and helmet lay piled on the cot. There were no tables for the soldiers of the Ringed City cared nothing for appearance and everything for warfare; one less table was perhaps one more sword, one more crossbow. They brought only what they needed when they marched and nothing more and when the land behind them was red mud with their enemies lying slain in it, they left with just as little.
“Captain,” Brack said. Raising his closed fist briefly to touch his chest. A salute he'd not done in a long time.