But he hadn't. He'd come this far to save her and she'd saved them all and now he was being asked to leave her again. All the time he had and it was never enough.
He kept waiting for her to turn and see him but she did not. Watching the burning of the dragon, its hewn body turning to ash and smoke, the great killer of the world finally drenched in a death of its own.
As he stood looking Havrain came out and stood next to him. His arms folded. The sun flashing in that red cape and off the hilt of his sword. This a sword unadorned, not the sword of a king set with jewels and forged into the rampant form of a lion or a horse or an eagle with outstretched wings. A simple tool, the sword of a man who used it to kill and then cleaned it and then used it again and who did not think of the way it looked but only of what it could do and what he could do when he held it.
“I'm not asking,” he said quietly.
“I know you're not,” Brack said.
He'd known since he heard the horn and knew again when he saw the company. The captain could tell him any damned thing he wanted about where they were or why they were marching, but he'd come with a company because it was an order, not a request.
They knew something of what he was in the Ringed City. Perhaps half of it. Hunters there were talented killers. Men with years of training. When one rode in the ranks on a field of battle, men looked to him. Whispered about what he could do and waited for the slaughter. A single hunter riding with an army could rally them all because they felt, deeply within themselves, that the hunters had no equals.
But, always, they thought those hunters were men.
He didn't know how old Havrain thought he was. But the things he'd spoken of had happened so recently. There were many other things Brack had done, things now passing into legend, attributed to hunters most believed to be dead. Other men living other lives. Things that made the stand on the wall of Terrorth seem like nothing at all, the blood pouring down that wall like a mere pinprick.
A company could never take him. Even in the place where they bred their hunters, almost no one knew what they truly were.
But the company meant they would try.
“Let me finish this,” he said then. Still watching Kayhi with her back to him. “Let me burn this dragon. I'll come to you in the morning and we'll talk.”
“We ride in the morning. We have to.”
“Then we ride. But give me this first. I hunted this thing down from the mountains and it killed my cousins, my grandfather. Let me burn it.” He turned and looked at the captain, his thick beard the same color as the furs he wore, a man so entrenched in who he was that he'd never sit quietly before a fire in old age, closing his eyes in the silence. He'd sit with a sword across his knees and a scowl on his lips.
Or he'd not live to old age at all, because someone equally entrenched would someday arrive and tear out his throat and then move on toward his own end.
Havrain nodded, watching the smoke as well. The fire in his eyes like flame on glass. “The morning, then.”
Brack walked slowly across that field, torn up by the dragon and the horses and the men, a sea of mud and the coming winter. The ash falling back to earth and melting into that sludge and the dragon slowly becoming the very place it had destroyed. Becoming the soil and the mud and the grass itself. Perhaps eventually the stone. Thinly, very thinly, the dragon becoming everything they knew, even the place where someday children would run and laugh and play in the summer warmth. Beneath them always the dispersed and dismantled body of this creature of darkness and fire.
He got to what remained of the head, just shattered bones and bloodsoaked earth and a scattering of ripped flesh. Knelt there and reached into the mud and picked up one of those teeth. As long nearly as the hunting knife he wore on his calf. A small and meaningless tooth for a dragon, but enough to reach his heart. The larger ones already cast into the flame.
He held it up carefully in the sunlight, turning it, then softly touched it to his lips. Taking from his pocket a long leather strand. Wrapping it about the tooth, knotting it, then raising it and circling it around his neck. The leather cold and hard but the tooth warm where it fell against his breastbone.
The fingers that took that strand from him were slender and cold as well, delicately tying it so that the knot settled against his spine. He knelt there, tipping his head down and looking at the carnage around him, until he felt them slip away. The tooth hanging firmly in its place.
Then he stood and turned, and Kayhi was there, looking up at him. This girl he knew only one way to save. One way that he hated and loathed more than anything, but also the one way he could stop hearing her mother's voice.
Or, perhaps, the reason he was hearing it at all.
Some things in this world impossible to know until they were behind you and it was all too late.
You'll kill her.
“Why?” she said.
He didn't answer, just tipped his head to the side. Blinking away the memory.
“Why the tooth?” she said. “Don't tell me you're taking trophies now.”
He smiled. “No, I certainly am not.”
“Then why?”
“This dragon was killed before,” he said softly. “You know it. The head cut off. The body buried. It should have been gone, consumed by the earth and the water alike, but it came back.” He reached up, laid his fingers against the tooth. The heat moving through it. “Someone told me that anything that can happen once can happen again. At least now I'll know if I have to kill it a third time.”
He stood in the spire, that pristine marble and the furs on the bed. Juoth sitting on those furs and tying on his boots. The dead girl standing and looking out the window. Turning once to look at him and her face impassive and unreadable, those pale eyes blinking twice and then turning back to the view.
“What did you do for her?” he said.
“For your sister?” the priest asked.
Brack looked at him and he did not turn away. Holding his gaze unflinchingly, but with great knowledge in his eyes. Both of them knowing he lied even as he lied.
“Yes,” Brack said. For there was comfort in lies. And he'd never met a priest who did something, no matter how small, without reason.
The priest nodded. “She wasn't badly hurt. Just knocked unconscious. They gave her some herbs, a drink. She should be fine. There wasn't any bleeding on her brain. We didn't have to drill.”
“Then how did you know?”
The priest smiled.
Brack looked again at the dead girl. She was so still as she stood in that window. Almost carved of marble herself.
“That one,” the priest said. “What happened to her?”
“I don't know,” Brack said.
“Ah.”
For the third time, that knowledge.
“Watch her,” the priest said. Something changing in his voice. “To be sure she's all right.”
“I will.”
“You must.”
Juoth rose and Brack reached a hand out to the priest. He took it carefully, and there was such strength in his grip, despite his age. The vigor of a man decades his junior. Brack had expected it and again it was a thing they both knew and he nodded and then they went out and down that spiraling iron staircase like descending some great throat in the middle of the temple and out into the courtyard. The city empty now with everyone outside still in the field. A cold wind coming up and sweeping over the walls. He almost looked up to see her and her hair caught in that wind but he did not and instead just went to the switchback stone staircase beside the gate and began to climb.