In three minutes we’d turned the hilltop into a bloodbath.

  I felt not a shred of guilt. It wasn’t like I went around wiping valkin out wherever I found them; I’d left plenty of valkin camps and bands alone when I scouted the border. But these particular valkin carried one of those vile staves, and that was unforgivable. It still lay where their leader had dropped it, offending me with its very existence, the scent of it burrowing into my mind and filling me with a disgust and a fear that I could only master thanks to the far greater anger that accompanied them.

  Herald was having a similar reaction to the thing, and she was, consciously or not, keeping her distance from it. When she approached me, she traced a large half-circle around the dead leader rather than get closer; though she stepped over the bodies of other valkin without a second glance.

  “You really think it’s the same one?” I asked her.

  “I am almost certain. Where else do you think they got the staff from?” she asked, glancing toward the item in question before looking away in disgust.

  “Couldn’t tell you. It’s a single tooth and not that much bone. Who knows how many of the cursed things there are?”

  She contemplated that with a deep scowl, then said, “You may be right, but there is the scar. I really do think it is the same one.”

  “Didn’t the Cranes wipe them out?”

  “They were supposed to, yes,” she said, voice dripping with disdain. ”But we both know how seriously they took their contract.”

  “Backstabbing bastards,” I muttered in agreement. Not that I really cared about them breaking their contract with Karakan to instead attack the Council on behalf of Happar — my quarrel with them was that they’d gone after the Gray Wolves, where I had friends, which brought the fight to my family’s inn.

  I’d made sure they suffered for it. None of the survivors would ever be able to ride in the open again without looking anxiously at the sky.

  As for whether these were the same valkin as we’d encountered before, I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t gotten a close enough look, and it had been too long ago for me to recognize them. But if Herald thought so, I had no problem believing that she was right. More than that, I wanted her to be. I’d wanted to punish those bastards for the slaves they’d taken and sold, and if it was indeed them it would mean one less of these disgusting dragon bone staves in existence.

  “Do you think they will wake on their own?” Herald asked. I followed her gaze to the four dozen or so blank-faced soldiers who’d stopped and were now just standing around in the scrubby grass, waiting for orders.

  “If they didn’t wake when you killed the leader, shaman, sorcerer, whatever it was, then I doubt it. We’ll have to smash the staff.”

  “Right. Sure. I can—” Herald took a single step toward the fallen staff then stopped. She took another half of a hesitant step but pulled her foot back and looked back at me, licking her lips nervously. “Actually, are teeth not quite hard? Perhaps you should do it. I am not nearly as strong as you.”

  “You feel it, don’t you?” I asked. With a few reluctant steps I was at her side, looking at the staff, fifteen feet away.

  “I suppose I must look ridiculous,” she said. Then she forced a laugh. “I held my ground against Embers, but now my feet refuse to move. And I cannot tell you why. Something in my gut tells me not to get closer to that thing. That even being near means impending doom. But I cannot say why. I hate it.”

  “What was different before?” I asked. I had a good idea already, but I wanted her to think about it, to hear what she had to say. “You cut the leader’s throat easily enough.”

  “I was angry, then. Furious, about the soldiers, and about the other innocent people the valkin have taken with those staves. I wanted to get in there and do something about it. Now that it is over, though… I feel so weak.”

  As gently as I could, I said, “You’re not fleeing in a panic. That’s better than I managed the first time I got close to a staff like that. Might even have been this staff.”

  “Then you can imagine how hard I am fighting to not take a step back right now.”

  “Yeah.” I nuzzled her hair. “If you’re forcing yourself to stay to prove something to yourself, that’s one thing. But don’t be afraid of looking weak to me. I know how strong you are.”

  She shook her head sharply, the tendons on her neck standing out as her whole body strained. “No. This is for me.”

  “All right. Well, I’m going to destroy the damn thing before you have an aneurysm.”

  “Please do.”

  It wasn’t easy. Herald had said that the difference was that when she'd been able to approach the staff, she'd been furious, and eager to act. I felt the same, and now I had to stoke my anger until I saw red. My fury at what the staff represented — what it was used for, how it was created through the desecration of my father’s body — finally grew stronger than my disgust and fear, and I surged forward. Without giving myself a chance to think or to feel, I grabbed the abomination and smashed it into a rock, shattering it in a single, sharp blow. Herald gasped, and I turned at the sound to see her stagger back a few steps, then bend forward to support herself on her knees, breathing heavily.

  Behind her, the soldiers came to, some stumbling, some looking around in surprise, others simply blinking groggily as the spell broke. It only took moments for the first shouts to sound, fearful and angry, and things, I decided, were likely to get out of hand soon. On the principle of “an ounce of prevention et cetera,” I took a few steps toward them, spread my wings with a loud Fwoomp to draw their attention, and roared, “Shut up and pay attention!”

  It worked wonderfully. Now, instead of scared and angry, they were scared and thoroughly intimidated. “I hope at least some of you recognize me. If not, I’m Draka. Yes, I’m a dragon, and if the news hasn't reached you, I’m a legal resident of Karakan. I’m friendly.”

  That statements drew almost as many sceptical looks as Herald’s presence drew distrustful ones, but no one said a thing.

  “Myself and the young lady behind me, who is a Karakani citizen from birth, have freed you from the valkin. Now, is there an officer among you?”

  “Here, Lady Draka!” A muscular, balding man who might have been in his late fifties pushed his way to the front. Despite the permanent scowl etched into his face, he looked as unsettled as anyone else, and when he spoke he sounded badly shaken. “Gods only know where the captain is, so it looks like I’m the ranking officer unfortunate enough to be in command of this lot. Quartermaster Parion, at your service, and we’ve all received orders to give you any aid you ask for, within reason. Though there’s not much I can offer at the moment, I suppose. Any chance you can tell us why we’re suddenly standing around in the hills?”

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  “Well, Quartermaster, the short of it is that some valkin used magic to hypnotize you, or something like that. They were marching you south, and in the best case I imagine they’d hand you over to the Happarans as prisoners of war. But now you’re free, and we have to figure out how to get you back where you need to be. So! I need you to organize your soldiers and see what you have for supplies, while Herald and I go up and see if there are any friendlies we can lead you to. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, my lady,” the quartermaster said, and I couldn’t tell if he was more relieved at me giving him an idea of what happened, or that I was willing to help.

  “And burn this, would you?” I said, throwing the remains of the staff at his feet.

  He looked at it curiously, but nodded.

  From the air, Herald spotted a camp some twenty-five or thirty miles north, guarding a ford on a river. Her Heart was entirely exhausted from staying in shadow form despite the daylight, and she didn’t have the frankly disgusting eyesight she’d had before the fight, but the camp was still large enough to spot it from a few miles out. A closer look showed it to be recently abandoned, which might have been a coincidence, but I doubted it. There were more camps spread along the river, but none were appreciably closer than the abandoned one, and unfortunately, getting the Parion and his soldiers back behind friendly lines wouldn’t be as simple as pointing them in the right direction. The hills in between there and where we’d hit the valkin weren't exactly friendly — we saw several cavalry patrols in Happaran colors, ranging in size from four to four dozen. Meanwhile, the only weapons Parion and his soldiers had were whatever they could take from the dead valkin. It was a recipe for disaster.

  “I have good news and bad news,” I told Parion without preamble once I’d landed. Fear and confusion still hung over the small company, and most of them looked exhausted now that they’d had a chance to take stock of themselves, but Parion had done a good job of getting them organized. The soldiers all sat in ranks, their gear unpacked and spread before them for inspection. “The good news is you’re a long day’s march from the nearest friendlies — thirty miles at most. Do you have everything you need to make it that far?”

  “Damndest thing, my lady,” the quartermaster replied, no less disturbed than when we’d left him. “We’re packed for a long march, but not one of us remember doing it. We’re missing the big tents, the wagons, things like that, but every soldier has their pack, including rations. No weapons, though. Utility knives and some hatchets, but that’s it. Well, except for the spears and knives we got off those valkin you slaughtered, but they are, if you forgive my language, utter shit.”

  “Yeah. That’s where the bad news come in.”

  “Cavalry,” he sighed with a nod. “We were stationed at a ford on the river Ripine, to keep the bastards from crossing and causing mischief. I don’t imagine they’ve all crossed?”

  “No, they have not. And there’s far more of them than you. I must admit I’m not sure what to do here. I have things to do, but I don’t feel great about leaving you all to fend for yourselves.”

  Parion scowled; I suspected that it wasn’t so much an expression of displeasure as him trying to keep his face carefully neutral. He just looked like that. “My lady, we’d gratefully accept any help you can offer, for any length of time, but if not… well, we’re soldiers. Danger comes with the job. We have our knives, and those insults to the very concept of a spear, and we’ll do our best to avoid any engagements.”

  I could smell the desperation on him, and I couldn’t blame him. He was in a godawful position — far behind enemy lines, his troops already tired from presumably marching all day, with little in the way of weapons and no bows at all. Most cavalry troops had mounted archers among them, so if they were faced with a cavalry force half their own size they’d be forced to surrender without a fight or be picked off with no chance of retaliating. Then, here I was, an invaluable resource. Common sense would have him beg me for help. But could he risk offending me or putting himself and his superiors in my debt? What might a dragon ask in return for her time and effort in shepherding four dozen soldiers back to safety?

  Nothing, in this case. I’d gone south to be seen and do recon, intending to report to Sarvalian for a bit of extra goodwill. Rescuing half a hundred soldiers should meet my PR needs nicely.

  “I’ll keep an eye on you until you reach the river, Quartermaster,” I told him with all the magnanimity I could muster. “And don’t you worry. I have experience destroying cavalry companies.”

  After I casually dropped that, I turned my back on a gaping Parion and made my way over to the shade of a tree, where Herald lay resting on a blanket, looking at the sky.

  “I need another Heart,” she told me as I lay down beside her. “I feel empty. Weak. I hate it.”

  “There are some just south of here. We could pop down, pick one, and be back within the hour.”

  “Yeah.” Her cheeks ballooned as she blew out a long, slow breath. “But I do not feel comfortable leaving these soldiers unprotected. And I do not believe that I will need to be able to see to the horizon to help keep them safe.”

  “All right.” I shuffled over and rested my head on her stomach, getting a little “Oof!” out of her before she started scratching the base of my nubby left horn. “You’re a good person, you know that?”

  “Am I?” To my immense disappointment, the scratching stopped as she pushed herself up on her elbows to look at me. “Hmm. Perhaps I am. I do try to learn from you.”

  “The right thing to do right now is to keep scratching, if that helps.”

  She snorted. “An invaluable lesson, I am sure, Miss,” she said and lay back down. But she got back to work, really digging her nails in around my horn — a win in my book.

  Parion and his soldiers really impressed me. They didn’t go fast, but they made it a good ten miles north before it got dark enough that they absolutely had to stop, and then they set up a proper camp on top of that. I spent the whole time sending good feelings to Mak, so that she could explain to the others that while no, we weren’t back yet, everything was fine.

  Nobody bothered them, but that didn’t mean that they went unnoticed. It only meant that the patrols that spotted them were too small to do anything about it.

  I stayed high in the air, so there was no telling if they’d spotted me. My guess was that they didn’t, because otherwise whoever they reported to was an absolute drongo.

  The whole of the larger cavalry force that we’d seen, along with some patrols and totalling over sixty strong, came charging in the middle of the night. Their horses must have been as well trained as the riders, moving confidently in the dark in perfect formation. They were already pretty much guaranteed a victory, but it seemed they wanted surprise on their side as well. Unsurprisingly, choosing to fight at night when your opponent has a black, especially stealthy dragon on their side turned out to be a terrible idea.

  The camp had a central fire, but neither attackers nor defenders had any torches, instead relying on people like Darim who could see in the dark. And when I dropped out of the sky, silent as death, one or two of the riders with that ability spotted me and cried out a warning that did fuck all but sow confusion, since no one else could see what they were shouting about. Then I dropped a tree on them.

  Where a two-hundred pound stone moving at over a hundred miles per hour had gone through the White Cranes like a cannonball, a twelve-foot section of tree trunk at the same speed instead clotheslined the entire four middle files of their formation. I then wheeled around and fell on their right flank, spraying venom and using one of my favorite tactics — yanking someone out of the saddle and using them to knock someone else out of theirs would never get old.

  The center was down, and the right flank was busy trying to fight a nightmare. That still left a good twenty of them on the left flank who reached the camp. And if the Karakani soldiers had been asleep, it would have been a massacre. But they weren’t. I’d been flying around, keeping an eye on the area, and had spotted the Happarans coming miles and miles out. The whole camp was awake and silently prepared.

  It still wasn’t an easy fight. The Happarans were outnumbered, but they had horses and better equipment, and the Karakani were exhausted from only resting a few hours after marching Mercies only knew how many miles. They didn’t even have Herald poking out of the shadows to support them — no matter how much she wanted to join the battle, I wasn’t going to risk her getting trampled, and I’d extracted a promise from her to stay well away and up a small tree. It wasn’t until I left what remained of the right flank and threw myself into the melee that the fight really turned in our favor. Of course, once you add a dragon into a fight on that scale, the outcome is a forgone conclusion. The only question was how long it would take before they broke.

  There had been over sixty Happarans coming in, and I counted less than two dozen riding south in the aftermath. Of those they left behind, less than a dozen survived to be taken prisoner. On our side we lost less than ten men, which was more than I would have liked but far less than any likely outcome if I hadn’t been there.

  Frankly, I felt a little bad for the Happarans. But no guilt. They meant no more to me than the valkin.

  The next day we escorted Parion and his soldiers back to friendly territory, along with their prisoners and the dozen horses they’d managed to capture. It took the whole morning, and Herald sooked the whole way.

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