As I cruised above enemy lines, I tried to imagine myself human again. I imagined what it would be like down there, standing among them and looking up to see a black shape against the blue sky. Wondering if it’s a bird and then realizing that, hey, wait a minute, the shape of the wings is wrong, and is that a tail? And then people around me would start muttering, and I’d remember the stories. The rumors that Karakan had enslaved a dragon, or that the city was under the sway of a dragon, or that there was a whole clan of Tekereteki dragon shifters hiding in the city who’d been forced to reveal themselves and join the war.

  Then I’d remember what the rumors said about what that dragon had done. About entire mercenary companies wiped out, and battles that should have been won but instead ended in absolute slaughter, with only a handful of my compatriots making it out alive.

  I’d look to the sky, and I’d pray to whatever gods I kept that the stories were either false, or that the shape in the sky kept moving. Preferably both.

  Well, lucky you, imaginary human on the ground, I thought. I’ve promised my mum to be a good girl and stay out of trouble, so I won’t be swooping down on any cavalry patrols, or causing mayhem in the middle of any marching archery companies.

  “That’s a grim fucking sight,” Darim called, breaking me out of my reverie. “I don’t know if they have fresh mercs, or if they’re recruiting more heavily than we are, or if their casualties are just a lot lighter. Maybe it’s all of them. They’ve got numbers on us now, either way.”

  “Why don’t you just conscript?” I called back. “I don’t get it! I know it wouldn’t be popular, but this is a damn existential threat, isn’t it?”

  “Draka, that is so many ranks above me I can’t even begin to guess. All I can do is to hope that the Council have a good reason.”

  My question to Darim had been mostly just to whinge. I knew some of those reasons, after all; I’d been there for one of the debates. And keeping Karakan’s army as small as possible had been one of the schemes in the report Soandel had delivered to Herald, detailing the ways he’d been trying to weaken the city and make it ripe for conquest by Tekeretek. On that point, though, he hadn’t needed to do much; expanding the army had never been popular, and that extended even to the lord speaker Berkia and the lady justice Sempralia, both of whom I somewhat respected and even liked. Their arguments were simple: forcing people to fight was wrong and would, as it happened, piss them off. It was better to encourage them to enlist voluntarily.

  They had tried to enlist more mercenaries, but had met with trouble on that front. The reason everyone knew was the risk of Happaran or Tekereteki ships attacking any transports, which made mercenaries leery of crossing the sea. Besides that, Soandel privately suspected that Tavvanar was “discouraging” the various companies from taking Karakan’s offers, presumably so they could generously swoop in to save the day once the city was under siege — or occupied.

  It seemed like a dangerous gamble to me. Gods only knew if they’d manage to dislodge the attackers at that point. But I didn’t intend to let it get that far.

  “Have you seen any obvious command tents yet?” I asked Darim a little later. We’d flown over several camps, but while it was easy enough to differentiate between tents of different sizes, I wasn’t experienced enough to say if a large tent housed important people, or if it was just to keep supplies out of the weather.

  “A few,” she confirmed. “I’ve been marking them as we go. I can show you next time we land.”

  We were doing a pretty comprehensive scouting flight, and while Darim had a good memory we weren’t going to rely on it. Every so often I’d head back behind friendly lines and set down, so that Darim could update the map she’d brought while she had things fresh in her mind.

  “Here,” she told me twenty minutes later, pointing to a camp several miles behind enemy lines. “This one definitely belongs to a high-ranking commander of some kind. And these—” she pointed to three camps closer to the front “—all had tents with people running, not walking, in and out, which makes me think ‘officer’s tent’.”

  I peered down at the map thoughtfully. Flying in a long zig-zagging pattern, we’d covered half the front, forty miles wide between the mountains and the sea, in a few hours. The map was pretty good, but Darim had made plenty of corrections. Some of those corrections, which tore at me more than Instinct thought they should, were villages and, in one case, a whole town that simply weren’t there anymore. They’d been reduced to smoldering ruins by the invaders as they passed through, and enough time had passed for their surviving inhabitants to have come out of hiding, setting up simple shelters in the ashes of their homes.

  The ones that weren’t occupied by goblins, trolls, or valkin, that was. There weren’t any more rifts than normal this far from the old border, but the Happarans had some way of bringing — or driving — the monsters north. For what purpose, I wasn’t sure; neither was Darim, or Sarvalian for that matter. The monsters didn’t take part in any offensives; they were mostly just there, far behind the front line and making life more difficult for people who were already suffering.

  I hadn’t had any real compunctions about what I’d planned for the next couple of nights. It was necessary, and it was the most effective I could be without blatantly breaking the promise we’d made to Mother. But having seen the destruction left in the wake of the advancing Happarans, I was eager to get to work. So was Instinct, and Conscience, when she said anything, never once tried to discourage me. Of the three of us, she was probably the most angry; she just didn’t cheer me on the way Instinct did.

  Conscience wasn’t soft — she just didn’t want me to hurt people who didn’t deserve it. She had no problem with unleashing hell on the deserving.

  We finished our mission over the next few hours, returning to the general’s camp as the sun was setting. Darim went to report; I took a nap. Then, when night had well and truly fallen, and after reviewing the updated map with Tribune Veretil, I went to educate the invaders in what happens when you unwittingly challenged a dragon for her territory.

  Chance is a funny thing. You might go on a trip somewhere, staying for months, only to meet the love of your life on your last day there. You might find a scratchy on the floor and win ten thousand dollars. Or you might set up camp a mile from the river that marks the new frontline between your own city and its hereditary rival, go to sleep after a hard day patrolling or planning the next offensive, only to wake up — very briefly — to a tree crashing through your tent, wiping it and everyone inside it from the face of the earth.

  Bad luck, you. Even worse if the dragon who’d dropped said tree only picked your camp, and your tent, because it happened to be on the way to her real target.

  I left the mayhem behind me without bothering to look back, feeling quite satisfied with myself. The enemy had sentries who could see in the dark, and while I was confident they hadn’t seen me, they’d certainly seen what I was carrying. But they’d taken a few moments to realize that, yes, that was a tree and yes, it was approaching them at monstrous speed, and by the time they raised the alarm it was far too late.

  I hoped that the tent I hit belonged to the commanding officer, but if not, so be it. I couldn’t imagine that morale would be great in the morning either way, and the small camp I’d hit wasn’t even the target of the night’s mission. Whatever damage I’d done was just a bonus.

  It took me less than ten minutes to reach my actual destination: a camp that was significantly smaller than General Sarvalian’s command camp, yet much larger than the many, spread out camps the Happarans preferred. Similarly to Sarvalian’s camp, though, this one was centered around a group of larger tents, where Darim had seen groups of important-looking people moving around as we passed. I had very high hopes for what — and who — I might find inside.

  After taking a turn around the camp to make sure that none of the sentries saw me and raised the alarm, I Shifted mid-air. It was a maneuver I didn’t use much — I dropped anything or anyone I was carrying, I had very little control of where I ended up, and while a few very careful experiments had shown that hitting the ground didn’t actually harm me, it was extremely uncomfortable. In this situation it was perfect, though. After a handful of minutes, I landed just outside the camp then made my way unseen between the lights of the few fires that burned among the tents. Most of the soldiers not on watch slept, but I heard a few hushed voices as I passed close to one tent or another; excited, fearful, or just speaking normally about normal things. They wouldn’t be involved in the night’s activities. Lucky them.

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  I passed the second, inner line of sentries as silently as the first, a shadow among shadows, and made my way to the grouping of larger tents in the center of the camp. The place was still and calm; the only people I saw were the pair of guards standing vigil outside the largest — but not the fanciest — of the tents. Even lacking color as I did while Shifted, I could tell that the guards were mismatched; their uniforms were of different cuts and different patterns, and from how the two men turned their heads, they didn’t seem to have divided the area to be watched between them so much as they were studiously ignoring each other.

  Behind them the tent flaps were closed, but light spilled out from around them. My plan had been to circle the tent to find an open ventilation flap to sneak in through, but now I was curious. What might be going on so late? I stopped for a while and listened. There were at least three people in there. They kept their voices low, and the thick cloth muted that further. I could only make out fragments of words here and there, all in vulgar Tekereteki. But though I couldn’t quite tell what they were saying, one thing was clear; they were not happy with each other.

  Well, that just made the whole thing all that much more exciting. I continued my circuit of the tent, and only a few moments later I found one of the vent flaps that I’d expected, eight feet up and a foot square. Back on earth it would have had a net in it to keep mozzies and other little nasties out, but not here; probably wasn’t worth the cost.

  I slipped inside easily, finding myself in a division with a relatively simple tent bed, a low working desk of the kneeling variety with a scroll and writing supplies on it, a few closed coffers, and a sort of simple mannequin with a set of armor on it, helm and all. It was spartan, really.

  To my great convenience, the flap of cloth that served as a door for the division was rolled up. There was no need for me to Shift back before I was good and ready.

  The door opened directly into the main section of the tent, where three figures faced each other over a small table. Two were what I’d come to think of as Sareyan: Karakani, Tavvannarian, Happaran, Marbeki, provincial Tekereteki... Their languages differed a little, but as far as I could tell they were all one ethnicity. The third, though, was definitely Tekereteki. An aristocrat, too, by my guess. Not only did she have that, “I am simply better than you” kind of bearing, but she spoke the vulgar Tekereteki with practically classical grammar and pronunciation, as though the language itself offended her.

  “I am telling you, and I will continue to tell you, that the grand strategist has instructed you to await reinforcement!” she told the other two. She wasn’t sneering, exactly, but from the way she spoke and looked at the other two she might as well have been scolding two badly behaved dogs. “It makes no difference how carefully laid out your plans for this offensive are. Your attempts to convince me are so much wasted breath!”

  One of the two men shrank away from the Tekereteki woman's scorn, his eyes cast down and fixed on whatever was on the table. The other, though, looked like he’d had enough of her shit. “I suspected as much,” he said indifferently. “I also suspect that the grand strategist will understand what an opportunity we have here, which is the only reason I have again laid out my plans to you in any detail. The Karakani are disorganised. In two weeks they won't be. A position that's easily winnable with what we currently have will turn into a grind, even with reinforcements. So you can tell the grand strategist that while we appreciate the additional troops, they can join us before the walls of the city, where they’ll be needed!”

  The two bickered a little more, with the third wheel mostly just standing around looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. I listened with one formless ear as I got into position, but the most interesting thing I learned was that there were Tekereteki troops arriving in about two weeks. Beyond that it was mostly the Tekereteki woman insisting that the man I assumed to be a — or the — Happaran commander hold back, and he reiterating that there was no way in hell he’d do so. He was going to break the Karakani army at the Grayrun, then chase them across the Sickle and beyond without giving them a chance to regroup. If he had his way, he’d be at the walls of the city by the same time the following week, with the Karakani army broken and either dead or captured.

  Unfortunately for him, he personally was never going to see those walls.

  Even before I arrived, I had something of a plan — which, to be fair to myself, is usually the time for it. At least, there were three things I wanted to make sure of. The first, in order of difficulty and starting with the easiest, was that the Happaran commander — and now these two guests of his — didn’t escape. That should be easy. I didn’t know about their fighting prowess, but they were trapped in a confined space with a dragon. Their prospects were dim.

  The second was that I wanted to keep the tent from collapsing on us too soon. That would not be a problem for any human attacker; the tent had a nine-foot ceiling, was thirty feet wide and probably forty-five long. The thing was, I was eight-and-a-half feet tall at the shoulder, with a twenty-five foot wingspan. Thus, the “too soon”; I wasn’t expecting to make it out of that tent without tearing it down.

  The third and most difficult thing, and one of the reasons I expected to have to tear the tent apart to escape, was that I wanted witnesses to see and remember what had happened. I wanted them to know exactly who and what had killed their commander. I would have considered either the awkward man or the Tekereteki woman, but unfortunately for them they were going to see me appear literally out of the shadows. I couldn’t have word of that getting around. In their stead, the two guards outside would do nicely — I didn’t want to fight them if I could avoid it, anyway.

  This wasn’t the most difficult thing because I expected to fall into a red rage and slaughter all comers, or anything like that. It was the most difficult thing because I’d gotten it into my head that I wanted to say something pithy, something that would strike fear and stick with them while at the same time neatly summarizing why their commander was now not so much the sum as a distribution of his parts. And I was not and had never been good at one-liners.

  Unfortunately, time was of the essence. The Tekereteki attaché, or whatever she was, finally had enough and threw up her hands.

  “Fine!” she declared. “Listen to me, or do not! They are your troops, as you are so diligent in reminding me, and the mercenaries we have so generously provided you with seem to care not one whit about who pays them. But be sure that I will detail in my report exactly what has been said here tonight!”

  With that, she turned in a huff toward the exit. It was go time, and I gave up on trying to come up with something clever and went with the first thing that came to mind.

  Even in English, what I came up with was a little cringe. Too generic, if nothing else. In Tekereteki it lacked all the connotations of the English equivalent, and came out extremely literal. On the bright side, on later reflection I imagined it would probably haunt the witnesses and anyone they told for the rest of their lives. Unfortunate for them, but good for me!

  What I roared as loudly as I could, as I emerged from the shadows and crashed into the trio, was an entirely too amused, “Welcome to Karakan, motherfuckers!”

  It took three seconds for the two guards to enter the tent. That was one second too long to save the awkwardly silent man, who had the bad luck of being farthest from me and thus had to watch me go literally through the Tekereteki attaché and the Happaran commander on my way to him. When the flap opened behind me and the guards entered I whipped his torn body at them, forcing one to leap to the side and catching the other full on. Then I stormed out the side of the tent, grabbing two handfuls of cloth and tearing it from bottom to top in one movement.

  It collapsed on top of me, of course. My wings caught in the fabric, pulling the whole thing down. But I had the way ahead free, and the anchor lines were properly set, so I pulled myself out easily enough. I left a screaming confusion behind me as I took to the sky, vanishing back into the darkness from which I’d come.

  There was a second large camp further west. The commander there was peacefully asleep in his bed, which seemed terribly unfair to me considering how much suffering his troops had caused. I gave him a faceful of venom, then left as silently as I’d arrived. Let them guess at what had happened, after the carnage at the first camp.

  “Let their leaders try to sleep through the night now!” Instinct crowed as I returned to Sarvalians camp. “Let them look at a shadow without flinching!”

  Let the bastards think twice about invading a peaceful neighbour, Conscience added. You’ll hear not a word from me on this except “Well done!” They had it coming!

  For a rare moment, all three of us were in complete agreement. They only had themselves to blame.

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