Chapter 31

  Dava walked with Dalex, who carried Hitasa on his back, to a small stone house built into the side of the canyon wall. Seventh still hovered somewhere in the skies above the city, vigilant for any of Castreier’s soldiers that might be lingering. Dalex was under no illusions that Castreier was finished with him. He seemed like the kind of man who couldn’t take a hint, even if it involved grievous bodily injury.

  Before Dava led them inside his home, Dalex said, “Yesui had a point. Taking us in will probably put you and your family in danger. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  The wolf-eared beastkin gave him a wan smile. “I’m afraid I have no family for you to endanger, and I do not fear for myself. I haven’t for a long time.”

  He opened the front door and Dalex carried Hitasa inside. There wasn’t much space—just enough for an aging bachelor who spent days at a time on the hunt away from home. Dava showed Dalex to his room, where Dalex deposited Hitasa so she could get some real sleep.

  The second her head hit a soft pillow, she bolted upright and looked at the man and beastkin, both surprised to see her awake.

  “Where am I?”

  Dalex explained the situation and told her to go back to bed.

  She gave him an accusing look. “Will you get the paper soon?”

  He smiled and nodded. “I’ll have it ready before you wake up.”

  The elf’s exhaustion finally got the better of her. She collapsed back onto the bed and Dalex and Dava left her to sleep.

  “What is her story?” Dava asked when they were alone in what amounted to his living room. They sat on wooden chairs around a small table with a candle at its center.

  “I don’t have the full picture,” Dalex said, “but I think it comes down to ‘frustrated writer’.”

  Dava chewed on that for a moment and then nodded. “I think I understand.”

  “And,” Dalex added, “Great Lord Jean Castreier killed her brother a few days ago. Came close to killing her too. That’s how we met.”

  “So that is where he enters the stew. I have never met Castreier, but I have read his publications. He uses some nasty words of power.”

  An idea occurred to Dalex, one that should have crossed his mind earlier. “Where could I find one of these publications? It would be handy to know all of the tools in my enemy’s kit.”

  “I can tell you some of what I know from memory. I don’t know how they handle it where you’re from, but here the humans take back their pamphlets after you read them. Or they announced new publicized words orally. They don’t like the paper being out in the wind, and they don’t count on the publication to spread beyond the people they show it to.”

  “I see,” Dalex said. He guessed that the humans’ control on distribution of their words limited the strength of their magic somewhat, but it also eliminated some loose ends. And, it cut down on the number of people that could collect a list of all of a person’s powers and use it against them.

  “It’s been a long day, and I don’t want to keep you up any longer, Ser Dalex,” Dava said, “But I needed to ask you two questions.”

  “If you drop the ‘ser’ I’ll answer as many questions as you like.”

  Dava humored him. “Very well, Dalex. My first question is this: What do you think of your fellow humans?”

  Dalex hummed in thought. “The answer to that question is a bit more complex than you would expect, and not for any reason you might be thinking of. I’ll say this, I do not consider them to be my fellow humans. We may be the same species, but I do not belong to them, and they do not belong to me. In a way, I see them as very poorly behaved children, and I’m here to discipline them.”

  “That is indeed not an answer I would have expected,” Dava said, leaning back in his chair and scrutinizing Dalex a little closer. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “That’s what I thought, first time I saw you. You have the body of a full-grown man, but the energy of a cub. And yet I sometimes forget you are almost two decades younger than me.”

  That made Dalex chuckle. It wasn’t the first time he had heard such a sentiment. All of his nurses and doctors had told him he seemed mature for his age.

  “Let’s just say I had a strong incentive to get older faster than most boys.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Dalex, or rather Owen Little, had known he probably wouldn’t get to grow old.

  “Perhaps my second question will clarify a few things for me,” Dava resumed. “What do you think of elves and beastkin?”

  This question was not unexpected after the first, so Dalex was prepared with an answer. “I haven’t quite figured out you beastkin yet. Your people directly supervise the elves, keeping them in check when the humans and dragons aren’t watching. But there are also beastkin like you who seem dissatisfied with their lot. Castreier’s kind might give you responsibility, but they throw your lives away just as easily as an elf’s.”

  “You understand better than you realize,” Dava said.

  “As for the elves,” Dalex continued, “I feel like I have a lot more in common with them than I do with men like Castreier, Michel, or Arnaut.”

  Dava made a choking noise. “Arnaut? As in, the hero Arnaut Edmond Gasceny?”

  “I think that was his full name.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  Dalex gestured to a window that looked out over the bottom of the canyon. “He was out there with Castreier trying to kill me and Hitasa tonight.”

  “Arnaut of Angars was here? In Batulan-bar?”

  “He might still be, but I think I gave him sufficient reason to stay clear for now.”

  Dava went quiet. He stared at Dalex for a long time. Dalex started to worry he might have unknowingly given away something important, something that would turn Dava against him.

  But Dava only clasped his hands together and placed his forehead on the tabletop.

  Dalex sat forward. “Is something wrong?”

  “No. It is so perfect that it is hard to believe. Either you are everything you say you are, or you are a spy attempting to trap me in the most elaborate ruse imaginable. Considering how unimportant I am to the Wolf Brigade, I have to assume it is the former.”

  “I can assure you, I’m not that great.”

  Dava looked back up at him. “Why do you say you feel kinship with the elves?”

  For whatever reason, this was the question that caught Dalex off guard. He sat back and looked at the ceiling, pondering his answer. Why did he feel connected to the elves? How could he claim kinship with a race of people who were one step short of gods in most of the fiction he had read on Earth? Even on Gaia Eta, where elves were trodden down by the other races, he sensed their nobility. They were the elves of his imagination, and yet he could read their hearts through their expressions and body language.

  “I know what it means to live a life that isn’t a life—to expect everything to end before you can even start dreaming. Somehow, I was blessed with the opportunity to escape that fate. My life was given back to me. Hitasa and the rest of her people are still trapped, artificially living lives that aren’t lives.”

  He paused. That kind of despair had wiped out so many of his friends in the hospital. There had been days when it nearly consumed him as well.

  “And, you know what?” Dalex said. “I’ll be damned if I let it stay like that.”

  ***

  Dalex knew the conversation was not nearly done, but Dava did not want to ask any more questions until he could talk to Metsa. Whatever Dava wanted from him—and Dalex knew he wanted something—Metsa needed to be consulted first. Dalex had a good idea of where this was going, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, but he would wait until they came to him with their full proposal to make any decisions.

  He and Dava both finally went to bed, capping off the second longest day of Dalex’s life.

  But Dalex only let himself sleep for three hours.

  While Hitasa and Dava still slumbered, he slipped out of the house and took to the skies with {fly}. Seventh met him in the air with a cup of warm coffee.

  “I have unfortunately found no sign of Jean Castreier,” she told him. “Whatever method he used to escape, it left no lasting trail for me to follow. If we encounter him again in the future, I will be sure to have more advanced tracking methods ready.”

  She handed the cup off to him and he took it gratefully. It warmed his hands and the bitterness of the drink woke him up before the caffeine even hit his blood stream. Next time, he would ask her to synthesize something with a bit more flavor.

  “That’s okay,” he said between sips. “We’ll be ready for him next time.”

  Seventh went on, “Arnaut Edmond Gasceny reentered Batulan-bar around the time you went to sleep, but he did not come within a mile of your position, or that of the Hunters’ Lodge or the Cantering Colt inn. I will continue to track his location, but it seems he is uninterested in further confrontation.”

  “Good work. As long as he doesn’t bother us, we won’t bother him.” Though Dalex wondered what kept the man from running? Stubbornness? Duty? Ego? A desire for revenge? “Mark him on our city map so I don’t get too close by accident.” Dalex used his armor to open the map in question and saw a red diamond highlighting Arnaut’s position. “With that out of the way, let’s get to work.”

  Dalex spent the next two hours turning Batulan-bar into a fortress. It seemed likely he would be spending a fair amount of time in the city, and that meant the next time Castreier showed up to cause trouble, it would probably be here. Further, Castreier would probably bring a lot more firepower with him.

  First, Dalex went to each point of entry and set {wards}. The roads in and out of town were the major points of interest, but he also set a {ward} at each lift going up and down the canyon walls. The {wards} would alert him if anyone matching Castreier’s description passed into the city, along with anyone resembling a Wolf Brigade soldier. They all wore similar armor and uniforms, though if they dressed like the local populace, the {wards} might not catch them.

  Once the entry points were covered, Dalex took two {attack golems} from the tunnel exploration mission and retasked them to patrol the skies above the city. The {golems} had covered most of the tunnel network and not found a single mutt, so Dalex was ready to assume the mutts had abandoned their extensive lair after their run-in with him. To bolster the city’s defenses, he summoned two {steel wyverns}—he had decided {golem albatross} just wasn’t cutting it—to support the {golems}, orbiting the Batulan-bar perimeter at ten thousand feet.

  If Castreier tried to sneak into the city, Dalex would know. If the humans sent an army to occupy Batulan-bar, Dalex would blow it away before it came within a mile. And if a dragon swept down from the clouds to turn the canyon into a river of lava, Dalex would shoot it out of the sky before it could take a deep breath.

  When he felt the city was safe, he clapped his hands and took the ream of paper Seventh had been keeping all this time. If Hitasa was awake, Dalex knew she would be itching to write a few things down. He desperately wanted to see her make a spell that could kill dragons.

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