That night I brought Herald to my hoard. It would add a little bit to our travel time the next day, but it had been a good while since I checked on Tammy, and I wanted to ask if she knew where my scouting flight might be most profitable. If I had infinite time I would probably use my dreamwalking every night. But, I wanted to be close to my humans when I slept, and between having to travel between Karakan and my lair and having to hunt down a Rift every day, I’d be spending something like two hours. That was just a bigger investment than I was willing to make.

  I’d expected Herald to make herself comfortable, to snuggle up against me and maybe read a little; I knew that she had a scroll or two with her. And she did both of those things, once we’d settled. But I didn’t expect her to heave a relieved sigh as we stepped into the little side chamber where I had my hoard, a sound like she’d just returned home after a long time away.

  She didn’t acknowledge it, and I couldn’t tell if it had been entirely unconscious, but I let it rest. Talking about it wouldn’t change anything. Though, it was nice that the worries she’d once had, about me trying to confine her to my hoard, were so long gone that coming here relaxed her.

  When I drifted off, Herald was still reading in the light of a lightstone, even though she didn’t need it; unlike mine, her shadowsight could apparently see text just fine. She just liked the light. “It is a lamp worth several years’ income. Am I supposed to not use it?” she said when I asked her about it. “Besides, look at how the coins sparkle!”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Finding Tammy in the dreamscape was easy. I’d ordered her, once, to make sure to sleep properly whenever possible, and to her my words were religious commandments. Once I entered the lucid dream I barely had to think about her before I was soaring high above the world, with her relaxed in my arms. I could feel her contentment change to unbridled joy as she realized that I was really there. That the one who carried her was not just her idealized memory of me, but the real deal.

  “How are you?” I’d wanted to sound commanding. Imperious, even, a goddess deigning to ask about something so unimportant as the health and happiness of her least servant. Instead I couldn’t keep the concern out of my voice.

  “Much better now the rains have stopped, and now you’re here, Great Lady!” Tammy was almost giddy with excitement.

  “Anything to report?”

  “Yes, Great Lady! They attempted to send me back to Tekeretek some weeks ago, but I snuck over the railing as the ship prepared to set sail, and swam ashore.”

  You what? I thought.

  “Since then I’ve been hiding in the countryside, keeping an eye on Happaran troop movements. There are several other mercenary companies here, mostly heavy infantry. I have a list, with my best counts for their numbers. And with how far the front has moved they’ve started driving the goblins, valkin, and trolls further north to cause trouble behind the Karakani lines. The Happarans are recruiting heavily, especially cavalry—”

  “Stop. You’re living in the countryside?”

  “Yes, Great Lady!” The pride with which she said that sure was a thing.

  “Hiding from Happarans, mercenaries, and, I assume, Karakani scouts and raiders.”

  “Yes, Great Lady!”

  “Do you have a tent?”

  “No, Great Lady!”

  “How are you still alive?”

  “I gained an Advancement, Great Lady, which makes me much stealthier while I’m in shadow. I’ve been using it to steal food and supplies, and to evade capture.”

  Again I thought, You what?

  “I have a good cloak,” she continued, “and I’ve been using healing potions to stave off the worst infections. The fever was quite bad a week ago and I only have a little left, but the cough is—”

  Something inside me snapped. “Yeah, nah! No way! This isn’t… do you still have the medallion?”

  “Of course, Great Lady!”

  “Okay. Good. Make your way toward the river, and when you reach it, keep going toward the bridge. I don’t know if there’s more than one now, but the old one, the main one. You know. Pack whatever you want to keep, but nothing too heavy. And don’t get bloody caught in the next twenty hours!”

  I didn’t need to tell her what I had in mind. “As— as you say, Great Lady!” she stuttered, her voice thick with anticipation, and then I stepped out of her dream.

  Sorrows take her, I loathed Tammy. Kira was going to be pissed, though wonderful woman that she was, she’d never show it.

  I dropped in on Jekrie after that, and found that they were packed and prepared to leave by sunrise. He tried to hide his disappointment when I told him that I would neither come visit in the morning nor, most likely, be in the city when they arrived. But he knew where to go, and seemed satisfied with my promise that all things going well, we could have breakfast together the day after next.

  My final visit was Onur. He was more than a little shocked at my arrival in the middle of some market or other, where he was having a pointlessly normal dream about searching all the stalls for something.

  “I know you would never even consider betraying me,” I told him. “But it is important that you understand that even if you somehow manage to work up the will to try and escape me, I can always find you in your dreams. And through them, I can find you wherever you are in the world. Do you believe me?”

  With blank horror on his face he said, “Yes, Lady Draka.”

  “Good! Now, I want you to find out all that you can about Lord Exchequer Soandel, without arousing suspicion. Property he owns, who his friends are, who he might be conspiring with, things like that. Anything you know, or anything you find, write it down and send it to Lady Drakonum. And do it in a way that won’t connect the two of you. Understood?”

  He nodded mutely.

  “Excellent. Do a good job, and you won’t hear from me for a nice, long while. G’night, now!”

  A whispered, “Good night,” followed me out of his dream. Polite bloke, I thought as I slipped into regular, non-lucid sleep.

  I’d intended to go straight to the front. My talk with Tammy changed that. Instead of having Herald eat her packed food and take care of necessities up on the mountain, we flew right back to Karakan to pick up the tracking medallion that I’d left with Kira.

  She fetched it for me without comment, but she didn’t look anything like happy about it. She didn’t like reminders of her old life with the Spurs. So of course I had to go and make it worse.

  “Listen, Kira,” I told her as she gave the medallion to me. “I’m bringing her back here. Leretem.”

  Kira closed her eyes. She took a deep breath through her nose, letting it out slowly before saying anything. She rarely spoke ill of anyone, but Leretem was one person she’d never found anything good to say about. I didn’t look forward how she’d react to seeing the woman again, but I was sure that it would be worse if I surprised her.

  “Okay,” she said. “If that’s what you must do.”

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  “She’s not the same person anymore,” I said, trying to reassure her. “Tammy will be nothing but kind to you, I’ll make sure of it. I know that she’ll be a reminder of what you had to live through, but she doesn’t have to stay here forever. I’ll try to find somewhere else for her. But I hope that you can at least put up with her for a few days.”

  She nodded, eyes still closed. Then she said, with a kind of desperate hope, “Barlean. She speaks some Barlean!”

  “Oh?”

  “She could… the Tesprils. They speak Barlean, too. At least a little.”

  “They do!” I agreed. That was brilliant! I could put all of my least favorite people in one place and let them be horrible where they didn’t bother anyone I liked! “Kira, ask Mak to send them a message. They’ll have a guest tonight.”

  The relief on her face could have inspired poetry, if I’d ever had a poetic bone in my body.

  We got a bit of a late start. But Herald was used to flying, and I was used to having her on my back, so I set a blinding pace south. Herald hung on for dear life, but I didn’t worry. She was an unrepentant speed junkie, and whenever I slowed down to check that she was all right there was a giggle in her voice as she told me that yes, she was fine, and go faster, dammit!

  Sarvalian’s camp had moved something like ten miles north in the weeks since I’d gone south. Not a huge distance in the grand scheme of things, but a bad sign for how the war was going. I’d had more pressing things to occupy my time, but for some reason I’d assumed that things would be going better. Where the hell were the League’s reinforcements? What was the point of an alliance if they wouldn’t back each other up? Did it really take this long to bring troops across the sea?

  Okay, maybe it did. I wouldn’t pretend to know anything about military logistics, no matter what period of history I was in. But I didn’t like it.

  I slowed down to a comfortable soaring speed once the river was in sight, and it didn’t take long for Herald to start telling me what she saw. At the speed we were going, she didn’t even have to shout. We were well over a thousand feet up, but it was a clear day, and her combination of an improved vision Advancement and the Rift energy boost was a hell of a thing.

  “Lots of cavalry. Mostly Happaran colors, but we knew that. Looks like they do not want to engage; they are mostly riding around each other, posturing and harassing at range. Maybe there is something very clever going on, but I do not know enough about strategy and tactics to know.”

  “No fighting? Nothing that really sticks out, or looks off?”

  “No battles, no. Not even a skirmish that I can see. There are some valkin camped down there.” She pointed, and I entirely failed to see what she was trying to show me. “A big group of them, far behind the Happaran lines. Some goblins over that way.” She pointed again. “That is about it. Maybe it would be more useful for us to look farther into Happar?”

  “Agreed. We can see if the Happarans are moving in more troops, and where. Tammy said that they were recruiting a lot. Getting more mercenaries, too.”

  We spent the next three hours flying almost all the way to Happar, following the main southern road, and then back north farther inland, where Herald could see to the feet of the mountains. Troops were indeed moving north, but it was more of a trickle than any kind of major reinforcements. Horsemen moved in small groups, but there weren’t that many of them. Less than two hundred, all in all, and they were poorly equipped. Between us, Herald and I agreed that they were probably fresh recruits moving north to join the companies already there. Nothing too interesting.

  “More valkin down there,” Herald said as they crossed back into Karakani territory. “Among the hills to the north. Looks like they are coming this way. And…” Herald’s voice changed, laced with concern for the first time in hours.

  “What is it?”

  “Humans. Just walking behind them. In Karakani colors.”

  “Prisoners?”

  “I would say so, but they all have packs, there are more of them than the valkin, and they are barely under guard. Draka, this is too familiar.”

  “It damn well is,” I agreed, an anxious knot twisting in my stomach. “Is there…?”

  “Already looking. Can you get me closer, or change the angle? They have some cover.”

  At Herald’s direction I turned north-west, and soon she said, “There, I see them again, cresting a hill.” She quieted for a few seconds. “Draka, they have one of those staves. The ones they use to control people. The other valkin I’ve seen didn’t have those.”

  An awful cocktail of emotions sent a chill up my spine. They couldn’t do much against me except give me a headache, but that didn’t matter much. There was still the memory of the terror I felt at smelling the dragonbone in the valkins’ staves. Shame, at how I’d fled the first time. Rage, both in the memory of how I’d destroyed one such staff and at what they did with them. And a kind of helpless outrage at the fact that the dragon whose body they’d desecrated to make these staves was almost certainly my father.

  Then she added, “The leader, the one with the staff, has a scar on its face. I think it is the same bastard one as in the mountains!”

  I tasted my own venom, leaking uncontrollably in response to my anger, the way a dog might salivate at a steak. I’d promised not to put Herald in any danger, but it was a struggle not to dive in and tear those valkin to shreds. “What do you suggest,” I asked, using the words to anchor me; trying to force myself to think instead of just act. “Should we report it to Sarvalian?”

  “Are you joking? We need to kill those things! And help the soldiers!”

  “I promised Tam—”

  “I am not going to tell him! Are you?”

  “I still promised! I’m not going to break a promise, especially not to our brother!”

  Herald groaned, pressing her forehead into the base of my neck. “Fine,” she said. “Put me down and do it without me. Gods know you can deal with… twenty or so valkin on your own.”

  Mercies, she was pissed off. And I understood completely. One of the first things I’d learned about her was that she absolutely hated being coddled. The fact that I didn’t do that was one of the things that had brought us together, and I couldn’t stand the idea of it driving a wedge between us, no matter how thin.

  “Dammit,” I swore, and dove. I dropped to no more than a few feet, drawing an excited squeak out of Herald despite her indignation as I skimmed bushes and shrubs while dodging the sparse trees and keeping out of sight.

  I’d promised Tam that I wouldn’t put Herald in danger. That I wouldn’t bring her within a thousand feet of the enemy. I preferred to uphold the spirit of my promises, not just the letter, but I could be shamefully flexible when Herald was involved.

  “Any chance that they’ve seen us yet?” I asked after braking hard and setting down on the far side of a hill from the valkin.

  “Only if they have eyes like mine,” she said sourly.

  “Great. Well, I’ll just drop you off here. Not sure how far we are from the bastards, really. Could be ten miles. Could be as close as a quarter mile.” I stressed the last part, giving her a meaningful look. “But I know for sure that you can honestly tell Tam that I never brought you within a thousand feet of them.”

  “A quarter mile?”

  “Or more. Possibly.”

  “And you do not have any particular instructions for me?” she asked as she slid off my back.

  “You know what?” I took a few steps away and tore a small tree out by the roots, hefting it. A hundred and fifty, two hundred pounds. It would do. “I probably should have told you to stay put or something, shouldn’t I? How careless of me.”

  “Terribly,” she agreed. She drew her dagger and tested its edge, then shook out her legs as I spread my wings.

  The moment I turned my back on her I felt her moving away from me, straight for the crest of the hill. I was annoyed with her for demanding to be allowed to put herself in danger, and I was terrified that she might get hurt, relying on her shadow form in daylight. But I was so goddamn proud of her. My little dragon had seen a terrible injustice, and she was going to do something about it.

  Or maybe she’d just seen an excuse to get violent, which I couldn’t discount entirely. But, if so, it was for a good cause!

  The valkin may or may not have seen me before we landed, but I made sure that they saw me now. Flying low, I circled them, listening to their fearful screams as I herded them toward a nice, shadowy bunch of trees. “Hassaaak!” was the one word that I thought I knew of their harsh, sibilant language. I’d heard it once before, when we rescued a bunch of hypnotized villagers who were probably about to be killed for not being valuable enough as slaves, or something equally heinous. “Hassaaak,” if I had it right, meant “dragon.”

  It might also mean “I surrender,” or “Oh, God, please don’t kill me,” but I wasn’t inclined to acquiesce.

  The Valkin were still a bit spread out when the main mass of them reached the small copse of trees. Some of them had been escorting the prisoners, and some had just been walking a bit farther from the group. That was fine. Herald was only one woman, after all.

  I dove on them, aiming for the leader. It raised that hateful staff it carried, and I felt a pressure begin to grow in my skull. A pressure that vanished suddenly as the shadow of the trees reached out and drew a sliver of darkness under the leader’s chin.

  The group erupted into absolute chaos. As the leader collapsed, trying to stop the blood gushing from its throat, Herald withdrew to the shadows where I’d sensed her. The other valkin started screaming, turning, stabbing at the air, swinging at nothing. A few ran. Those that didn’t got to experience a small tree falling on them at near terminal velocity. It might not have been as effective as a rock of a similar weight, but at that speed it was mostly academic. The tree had a breadth of impact going for it, and anything it hit was as good as dead. Herald made sure of that when she returned, a few moments later.

  I ruthlessly tore into any valkin still on their feet around the impact site, then set to grabbing runners and dropping them on each other as Herald got to work with her dagger. Between the two of us, it took about three minutes to wipe out two dozen valkin.

  Nasty job, well done. Now we just had to deal with their captives, and that horrid staff.

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