Flying back to Karakan was miserable. Not because of the rain; without Herald on my back I could fly above the clouds. It was miserable because I had a small leather pouch in my mouth, and whatever it had been treated with tasted like acid and crap. But I didn’t have a bag or tube to carry Herald’s letter in, and I wasn’t going back to face Tam without something to explain why our sister wasn’t with me. I hadn’t talked to him before taking her with me, this time, but I had no doubt that our agreement not to return without her was still in effect in his mind. So I had a small leather pouch containing a folded letter in my mouth, and it tasted awful.

  Gods, Tam wasn’t going to be happy about me leaving Herald with Reaper, letter or no. He wouldn’t care that I’d been so thoroughly outmaneuvered, so I was glad that I’d only be staying for a day or so.

  Carrying only the pouch in my mouth, I Shifted high above the inn and drifted down to the yard. I might not care about people seeing me anymore, but that didn’t mean that I wanted to announce my comings and goings. And it wasn’t like I needed to be able to knock; Mak had the doors open and waiting as soon as I set down, and I could barely hear her when she told me in a whisper to “Shift back before you come in!” Confused and curious I did as she said, bringing the rain with me inside.

  The reason for her warning became clear immediately. I’d expected Mak and maybe some others to be excited and take the time to come see me, but not that there’d be something of a house meeting in the cellar. Mak and Tam and Val, Kira and Ardek, Avjilan, even Reben was there for some reason.

  That was the weird, standout attendee. I wouldn’t have gotten worried if Reben hadn't been there, even though the mood wasn’t the greatest to start with, and Tam’s eyes turned as hard as I’d ever seen them when I stepped inside and Herald failed to appear behind me.

  I didn’t wait for him to speak. I mumbled something utterly unintelligible, then took the pouch out of my mouth and told him, “Before you say anything, read this,” tossing the awful thing to him. “Herald is as safe as she can be. Ask Mak if you don’t believe me.”

  Without a word, barely taking his eyes off me, he opened the pouch, repeatedly wiping his hands on his baggy trousers. He fished out the letter, unfolding and reading it as the others watched with varying levels of concern.

  I didn’t know what the letter said, other than having asked Herald to explain why she wasn’t coming back with me. But I could tell when he read about her staying with Reaper, because he looked like he might tear the letter in two until Val, reading over his shoulder, put a calming hand on his and pointed excitedly farther down. Tam’s eyes nearly fell out of their sockets as he looked at me with utter disbelief.

  “Guessing you got to the part about the book?”

  “Is she serious?” Val asked hoarsely.

  “I couldn’t drag her away. She maneuvered me so I’d have to let her stay!”

  “What are you talking about?” Mak took the letter from Tam’s unresisting fingers and read it quickly. Her voice was as tight as Val’s when she said, “Reben, wait in the kitchen please. We’ll call you in a moment.”

  Reben looked worried, and like he was dying to know what was going on, but he nodded and said, “Of course, Lady Drakonum.”

  Asking Reben to leave was too much for Ardek. He’d stood patiently next to Avjilan, with his arms around Kira, but as soon as the upstairs door had closed he blurted, “Boss! Mak! Anyone! What’s going on?”

  Mak held up her hand, calling for silence, then choked out, “A library!? You found a library?”

  I couldn’t help but grin at their reactions. “We did, yeah.”

  “An Old Mallinean library?”

  “Right.”

  “And there’s—” Val’s voice failed him. He had to swallow twice before he tried again. “There is a book which will let Herald… which will let us learn the language? Which will let us translate the books there?”

  “That’s what she told me. Though she needs to brush up on her elder Tekereteki.”

  “That should be easy enough. Tekeretek has produced much literature, and many philosophers, over the centuries. There are sure to be dictionaries and grammars in the academy’s library, and scholars who know the language.”

  “How many books, Draka?” Mak had managed to get her voice back, and she looked at me with excitement and an undisguised avarice that I was only used to seeing in Herald. “You know what we got for one well preserved book. How many are there in the library?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Oh, gods.” She sat down on a bench, resting her face in her hands. ”Oh, gods and Mercies, this is the kind of news I need. I need something to look forward to.”

  “Yeah?” My good mood wavered, concern for my sister leaking in. Looking at her now, I could see how tired she was. Looking around — Wan faces, bags under their eyes, hastily tied up hair — they all were.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s with the mood? Why was Reben here?”

  “Right,” Tam said. “We should call him back down. Ardek?”

  “Sure, boss.” Ardek gave Kira a squeeze then took the stairs two at a time, returning moments later with Reben.

  “Draka,” Mak said, “we’ve had some trouble while you were away. Bad trouble. The kind that’s going to get worse.”

  My mood cracked. “Because of Reaper?”

  “No. The reaction to Reaper has been… muted. Knowing about you probably helped. If one dragon has been here for weeks, and nothing happened, maybe the other one won’t do anything either? That sort of thing. There was some minor panic when you two circled the city, but then you left, so… I think with the war and the rain people have too much to worry about to add her to their burdens. They’re quietly afraid, but doing anything about it would make it too real.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t thought much about that when I took my mother for a turn above the city. I just wanted to make it impossible for the Council to deny that I’d met her. “What was the trouble, then?”

  “Do you remember Vakkal? The guard captain?”

  “Sure, yeah. The guy Zabra was maybe paying off?”

  “She was. He’s dead.” She paused, looking at me, silently asking for forgiveness. “I killed him.”

  “Oh.” If she was afraid of me getting angry, that wasn’t happening. I trusted her judgment. If anything I was relieved, hoping that was the only thing she wanted to tell me. “Why?” I asked, hoping for some simple explanation.

  “He attacked me. He and three others, in the street. Tried to arrest me. Or abduct me, more likely, since he wasn’t in uniform. I killed them all.”

  “Shit.” I marveled at my own eloquence for a while, then asked the obvious question, “Why would he do that?”

  “To get to you. He admitted as much. And I don’t think he was working on his own. Two nights later, the inn was attacked. Reben’s granddaughter was hurt.”

  A faint ringing began at the edge of my hearing. I turned my head stiffly to look at Reben, who nodded sadly. “She’ll live. Lady Drakonum and Miss Kira tended to her, and there were potions close at hand. But she’s only a girl, Lady Dragon. She’s in a bad way. Sleeping poorly. Jumping at shadows.”

  “They tried to kill or capture us. One of them almost made off with Kira,” Mak continued bitterly. “Should have been suspicious when we sold so many rooms. When was the last time this inn sold ten rooms in one day? Even before we bought it? Too damn good to be true.”

  “Hey, at least they paid up front,” Tam said. From his tone, he was trying to inject some levity, but it fell flat.

  It was getting hard to follow the conversation. My sister, my family, my inn, my friends — they’d been attacked. I’d been gone for just a few days, and they’d been attacked. The ringing was getting louder. There was a bitter taste in my mouth all of a sudden, and my limbs trembled with tension. I started asking myself if bringing Reaper into this might be the right thing to do. I wasn’t sure who needed to die, but I suspected that might be an academic question if I told my mother that someone in this city had tried to hurt me by proxy.

  I looked at Kira, who’d followed the conversation well enough to nod.

  “What happened?” I asked her in her own tongue, my tone remarkably calm.

  “Ardek’s kids started throwing rocks at her,” Kira said with an empty chuckle. “One of them stabbed her in the knee. Then I smashed her in the head with a lightstone.”

  All I could do for a few seconds was to blink at her. The tension inside me slowly released. Not the anger — that would burn until someone suffered for this. But the ringing in my ears, the red that had been creeping into my vision, the directionless rage — I took them and shoved them down beneath the surface, where I could bring them out when I needed them. Kira was hurting. Someone had tried to take her and made her hurt them. I didn’t need the rage right now. Not until I found who was responsible.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  I just couldn’t conjure a mental image of Kira bashing someone in the head with a shiny rock.

  “Ah, right,” I said, and hopefully no one but Mak would have any idea how close I’d been to leaving to find someone to lash out at. “Yeah. Well done! Is she…?”

  “I healed her!” Kira said hurriedly, as though I would have thought less of her if she hadn’t. “The moment I saw that she was out. We have her in the makeshift cell. But she’s not keen on talking. We were hoping you could get something out of her.”

  “You have her,” I said, and the fire struggled to burst free again.

  Kira read me well enough despite my efforts. “Please, Draka! Don’t kill her! I’m sure she knows things. If anyone can make her talk, it’s you.”

  “Kira,” I said evenly, “you know I don’t like to— we’ve talked about this.”

  “With all respect, my lady, you may not even need to break her. You’re impressive, just as you are.”

  “Kira right,” Mak said. Her face scrunched in the barest frown. “Kira is right. Sorry, Heart almost empty. Language becoming hard, and I barely learn. Rely too much on Advancement.” She gave in to her frustration there and continued in Karakani, “The woman we captured, Sari, she’s an adventurer. I don’t know her too well, but I know of her. Nothing bad, either, so I don’t know how she agreed to attack us the way they did. She won’t talk, either. Best I can get out of her, she’s more scared of whoever hired her than whatever we might do to her.”

  “The downside of an honorable reputation,” Val weighed in. “She does not believe that we have it in us to force her to speak. And perhaps she is right.”

  I looked around the group. Whoever this Sari was, I agreed. She was right. With the exception of Avjilan, who I didn’t know well enough, I could confidently say that they were neither interrogators nor torturers. Even Mak had felt her abuse of Zabra weighing on her once the latter’s defiance broke.

  But me? I had an anger in me now that I hadn’t felt since we escaped Zabra’s clutches. I felt pretty damn capable of making someone talk in that moment, shadows or no.

  “No shame in that,” I told them. “I don’t know who you’d be if you were that kind of people. It’d be useful, but I doubt you’d be the people I care for so much. Mak, Kira, come with me. Let’s talk to this woman.”

  They filled me in a little more before we went in. They told me about the attacks on each of their rooms, and how one man had woken Reben’s granddaughter as he ransacked the office, then stabbed her when she stumbled upon him. They told me about the fight in the common room, which had damaged or destroyed a significant amount of furniture. And they told me the whole story of how Sari had taken Kira by surprise, putting a blade to her throat and leading her out into the night, where she was rescued by a pack of kids who should have been sleeping, and who had a combined age of less than fifty.

  A charitable person might have considered that this woman didn’t kill Kira and run when she had the chance. I was not feeling charitable.

  The woman revealed by the glow of Kira’s lightstone was a bit of a mess. She looked young and, above all, afraid, her eyes sunken and her skin sallow. Perhaps it was true that Sari was scared of her distant employer. I couldn’t tell. If she was, she was heaps more scared of the very present dragon that wrapped its claws around her neck, lifting her two feet off the ground to slam against the wall. By the way she’d screamed and retreated into the corner of the room when I entered, she’d had no idea who she was dealing with. That helped — she hadn’t had a chance to prepare herself for meeting me.

  I could tell by one look, one sniff, that no shadows would be required. I looked her in the eyes and told her, “You will answer my questions,” and she did her level best to nod despite my thumb digging in under her chin. Clever girl.

  Instinct had been unusually well behaved since meeting Mother, but I was angry, and she fed off that. Took advantage of it, even. My shadow surged forward, eager to break this woman who’d attacked our humans, eager to claim another servant, and with my Heart so full it was a struggle to hold it back. Holding back had nothing to do with mercy or sympathy; after hearing what this woman had done to Kira, those were in short supply. No, it was all about me not wanting another Tammy occupying my mind. And since I couldn’t break her the easy way, and since I was more than a little upset about what she’d done, I may have been rougher than strictly necessary, to the point that Kira herself asked me, very politely but with some urgency, to let her would-be kidnapper breathe.

  I dropped Sari. With her hands and feet chained she couldn’t do much about the landing. A shock went through her as her feet hit the stone, like the worst missed stair imaginable, followed by her crumpling with a Crack as her head hit the stone. Conscience stirred uncomfortably inside me, but she was drowned out by an empathetic whine from Kira.

  “Do what you need to,” I told her, and she immediately knelt by Sari’s side, putting her hands on the woman’s head and focusing. The golden light of magic streamed from Kira into the groaning prisoner for a few, long seconds, and then Kira sat her up against the wall.

  “No bad damage,” Kira said with relief.

  “She really is too kind for her own good, sometimes,” Mak whispered to me with equal parts exasperation and fondness.

  “Yeah,” I murmured back. “Wouldn’t have her any other way.”

  “Yeah.”

  The prisoner stirred. She had her head bowed, and when she spoke, a whispered “I’m sorry,” she did so to her lap. Then she raised her head and looked directly at Kira, and I was pretty sure that the shame and remorse on her face wasn’t only about the shit situation she’d put herself in. I actually believed her when she said, “I never wanted to hurt anyone. I didn’t.”

  Kira just nodded to her, then stood up and took a step back.

  I put my face a hand’s breadth from Sari’s. That always got people’s attention. I did it slowly, letting her press herself into the wall, then grimace and turn her face away, but I knew that she was listening. “My friends,” I told her, “are too kind to break bones or joints or pull nails to make you talk. I’m not, but I also don’t want to waste my time. I’ll make it easy on myself. If you don’t talk, I will grab you in my talons, and I will fly you up above the clouds. I’ll go high enough that the air gets thin and your fingers start to go numb, high enough that you really have time to think about it, and then I’ll drop you into the sea. Speak, and live, or come fly with me. Those are your options. If you fear whoever hired you, I will keep you safe until they’re no longer a concern. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded sharply.

  “Words.”

  “Yes,” she said, like the last breath leaving a corpse.

  “Will you tell us what we want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you lie?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Mak?”

  Mak was only too happy to take over, leaving me as a menacing background presence. She straddled Sari’s knees, dropping into a relaxed squat so their faces were level. Grabbing Sari’s chin in one hand, she turned her head so they were eye to eye. “If you didn’t want to hurt anyone, what were you doing dragging my friend out of my inn at knifepoint?”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Sure you did. You could have refused.”

  “Not if I wanted to live!”

  “Oh? So you were threatened? You couldn’t run? You’d rather kill innocent people than fight back?”

  Sari closed her eyes. She tried to turn her face away, but Mak’s grip on her chin was strong.

  “I don’t know you, Sari, but I’ve heard your name. I’ve seen you around. You’re a scout and a hunter. You kill monsters and Advanced animals, I know that much about you. You’re not a fighter. What were you doing playing heavy in our inn?”

  “I have debts,” Sari said softly. She looked too young to have racked up a bunch of debt. Twenty at most. But people could make bad decisions, or be in a bad situation, at any age. “They gave me a choice. I could have my debts forgiven, or I could end up in the river.”

  “The job?”

  “You, your siblings, Valmik. A young guy whose name I don’t know. He was there, in the fight. Capture you if possible, kill you if not. The healer,” her eyes darted to Kira, “she was to be taken alive at all cost. I swear, I wasn’t going to hurt her, it was all posturing! I did my best not to—”

  Mak slapped her. She didn’t haul off; I had no doubt that she could have broken Sari’s jaw, maybe even her neck, but this was cold, controlled, lightning quick and nowhere near as hard as it could have been. The Crack of it still rang loudly in the small room, and Sari’s head snapped to the side.

  “Not interested in excuses,” Mak said, in the same dead voice she’d used when she questioned Tarkarran. “Who?”

  Sari didn’t answer. She kept her head turned how the slap had left it. The white patch on her cheek slowly turned pink, then an angry red as she began to shake silently with small, tired sobs like little hiccups.

  “Sari.” Mak took her by the chin again. “You have to answer all our questions.”

  “They’ll kill me.”

  “Lady Draka will kill you,” Mak corrected her. “Or she will protect you. Your choice.”

  By the fact that she was chained instead of bound, and from what Kira had told me about her grip, I guessed that Sari had a strength Advancement. It didn’t help her when she tried to turn her face away from Mak; I could see the muscles bunching at the base of her neck, but her head barely budged. When she gave up her eyes turned to me. I didn’t do anything. Not consciously. I just looked at her.

  Whatever she saw, or whatever her mind conjured up for her, it was enough for her to screw her eyes shut and start crying for real.

  Mak gave her five seconds before telling her, “It’s time to answer me.”

  “Vestel,” Sari sobbed. “It was Vestel, all right?”

  “Vestel?” Mak’s face scrunched up. “Who’s that?”

  Our prisoner was so surprised by that response that she stopped crying, looking at Mak, then me in confusion. “You don’t—? He runs half the gambling houses in the north city!”

  “I’m a west city girl,” Mak said absentmindedly. “Vestel. I have no damn idea. Why would some small-time crime lord hire a bunch of underqualified idiots to attack us?”

  Mak was looking at me, but anyone could tell that she was thinking out loud. Sari, though, had made her choice and was only too happy to answer any question, directed at her or not.

  “He didn’t say! All he told us was to take rooms at the inn then make our move in the night. He had keys for us, marked with the room numbers and all. That’s all I know, I swear! I never even saw those other guys until the morning before we came here!”

  “What is it with crime lords in this city and not telling their minions about the dragon?” I asked the room at large. “Two for two, now.”

  “Kira,” Mak said, releasing Sari’s chin and turning to the healer, “bring Ardek downstairs, would you?”

  Kira gave Sari a worried look.

  “I won’t touch her unless she gives me a good reason,” Mak reassured her. Kira nodded and left. She took the lightstone with her, leaving us in near darkness with only the barest hint of light trickling in through the door.

  Once Kira was gone, Sari started shaking and sniffling again. Mak rose smoothly to her feet. “You should thank the Mercies that Kira of all people was who you tried to grab,” she told Sari. “Not many people in this world who’d beg a dragon to spare their kidnapper’s life. Remember that when she comes to take care of you.”

  “I will!” the woman on the floor promised between sobs. “I will, I will, I—”

  She was still promising when we closed the door.

  “Vestel?” Ardek told us two minutes later, in the main cellar. “Sure, yeah, I know of him. Runs a bunch of gambling houses in the north end, mostly east of the gate. Have we had any business with him?”

  “No, that’s what makes this so odd,” Mak said. “Any idea how we’d get a hold of him?”

  “We could probably find him in a few days… honestly, though, I’d probably ask Hardal. Can’t imagine the Night Blossom doesn’t have an in with him.”

  “So why not just ask Zabra?” I asked.

  “Right, yeah, that’s a thing you could do.” He spoke half to himself, like the idea had never occurred to him. As though it was roughly as fantastical as the fact that the question had been asked by a dragon. “I kind of figured you both hated her, though.”

  “I—” I huffed. I didn’t particularly want to get into the mess that was my feelings about that woman. “It’s complicated. But, good call. Take care of it.”

  “Yes, boss. Soon as?”

  “Soon as,” I confirmed, and he took off up the stairs.

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