“So, yes, I do admit that I could have thought that through better,” Herald said reasonably. “But in my defense, it was damn effective!”

  “Din’t… fuckin…” Mak mumbled, aiming a quite literally anemic kick at her sister’s ankle. Through her alcohol-induced haze she misjudged the distance quite badly and missed by a good foot.

  “Lie still, please,” Kira murmured. “I am not finished healing you.”

  Driving a sword into the enormous cat’s brain had, as Herald said, been damn effective. It had also made the thing fall out of the giant tree, crashing right through one of the normal trees below before smashing into the forest floor. We had to leave it there for a while, with Herald’s sword and three of her one-gold-a-pop enchanted arrows in it, because I needed to get Mak to Kira as fast as draconically possible. Mak, thank the gods, Mercies, Sorrows, and anything else that might have been watching, hadn’t followed the cat on its two-hundred-and-fifty foot journey to become one with the earth; by some combination of acrobatics and sheer grit, she’d ended up dangling from my leg instead of the cat’s. Unfortunately, she hadn’t exactly been secure; she’d had a death-grip on one of my toes, and as the cat plummeted, Mak didn’t look like she had much left in her.

  Mak had gotten more comfortable flying with me over the months. That didn’t mean she appreciated dangling one-handed, hundreds of feet above the ground, for the short time it took before I could set her down on a branch to get a proper grip on her and fly her at all speed back to the rest of the party.

  Once there, Kira had taken one look at her and summarily shooed away all the men as Herald poured a healing potion down our sister’s throat. I’d had some reservations about that — Mak hadn’t been an alcoholic, as such, but she’d definitely had an unhealthy relationship to alcohol. As far as I knew she hadn’t had more than a sip or two for the last several months, and I had no idea what the equivalent of five shots of high-proof liquor would do to her. With the amount of blood she’d lost, though, there really wasn’t any other choice; magical healing did wonders for wounds, but it struggled to replace lost blood. Potions were an order of magnitude better for that. We’d just have to keep an eye on her.

  Once Mak had drunk the whole potion they’d gently stripped her upper body and laid her down on a bed of folded blankets. Then Kira got to work helping that healing potion do its work.

  Which brought us to Herald defending her decision to kill that cat, when it had been the only thing keeping Mak from doing her best dropped-egg impression. She really didn’t have much to offer beyond “Hey, it worked out fine!” and “I was really bloody angry at the time,” but all I could muster was a disappointed scolding. As for Mak, she was a small woman with a lot of alcohol in her. Together with the blood loss, she was well beyond meting out any retribution of her own.

  “It cannot have been that bad,” Herald said, managing to sound a little contrite at least. I was pretty sure that her protestations of innocence were just her way of hiding how scared she’d been and how mortified she was over the danger she herself had put Mak in. I also knew that she’d apologize later, when the adrenaline was entirely out of her system and Mak had recovered and sobered up.

  “Fuckin’ heights, Kitten! One hand!” Mak slurred, then finally relaxed completely and let Kira do her job.

  “She’s going to be all right, yeah?” Sarina asked. She’d been sitting silently next to Mak, looking torn between supporting her mistress in all things and worrying for someone who’d been her travelling companion for nearly two weeks.

  “Mak is the toughest woman alive,” I stated, and I meant that with absolute confidence. “Even if she wasn’t, I’ve seen Kira quite literally bring a woman back from the dead. Mak is going to be just fine.”

  “From the dead?” Sarina sounded like she very much wanted to call me out on something, realized that might be a terribly self-destructive thing to do, then tried to backpedal when she couldn’t help herself. She topped off her little exclamation by covering her mouth, staring at me wide-eyed, then turning to Herald for help.

  “From the dead,” Herald confirmed. “Her whole front cut open, more blood out than in, and a death-rattle and everything. Kira brought her back.”

  “Mercies preserve us,” Sarina whispered behind her hand, looking at Kira with a mix of terror and awe — almost like she’d found someone worthy of standing side by side with Herald.

  “Not sure she was dead,” Kira protested unhappily. “And if she was, I failed. Should not have died.”

  “You did not fail,” I told her firmly. “You know full well that no one else could have saved Kesra. Not as badly injured as she was. Whether she was entirely gone or not, you brought her back. And I am so proud of you for that.”

  While Sarina only looked confused at the Tekereteki, Kira continued her focus on healing Mak, working on each puncture in turn. But she relaxed a little, the corners of her mouth quirking up at my praise.

  However I felt about my humans’ dependency on me, it sure was nice to be able to make someone smile so easily.

  Mak had passed out entirely during that little exchange. Once Kira finished healing her, the ladies wiped her down and dressed her in fresh clothes, then called the men back while Herald and I went off to retrace the giant cat’s path from where it took Mak to the tree.

  It took some searching, but we found Mak’s spear where she’d either dropped or discarded it. Finding the rather flat and leaky carcass was much easier. There are a lot of fragrant things inside a cat the size of a grizzly, and when you drop it from several hundred feet, those things go all over the place; all I had to do was follow my nose.

  Our purpose was to retrieve Herald’s arrows. Their enchantments had held, and not so much as a fletching was ruined, which was very nice considering she’d paid a gold Dragon — a year’s wages for a laborer — for each of them. Considering what the drop had done to the cat, though, I could tell that retrieving them was not going to be a fun or easy experience. And, I decided, she needed some kind of punishment for her hasty and nearly disastrous decision.

  “There they are,” I told her, gesturing expansively to the cat. “Well, they’re probably in there somewhere, at least. Have fun.”

  “Ech,” she said unhappily and started walking toward the remains. Then she stopped, turning to look back at me in confusion. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘Have fun’?” she asked. “Why are you just standing there?”

  “They’re your arrows.”

  “And I shot them when we were saving our sister!”

  “Whom you then proceeded to almost kill through your recklessness,” I said, a little sharper than I’d intended. Much sharper than I ever spoke to her, really.

  Herald flinched and looked away, ashamed, and it broke my heart to see it. But I didn’t back down. “Go on,” I told her. “You should have plenty of time to think about what you could have done better as you dig your arrows out. I’ll be right here making sure that nothing disturbs you.”

  “I was going to apologize…” she muttered, still shamefaced.

  “I know,” I said, softening my voice. “And I don’t doubt that she’ll have forgiven you before the tears have time to dry. But there needs to be some kind of consequences for what was, you have to admit, a nearly catastrophic fuck-up, and I… you know I can’t do anything to truly punish you. So go dig through that offal and think about what you did!”

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  It took her a little while to find and extract all three arrows, covered in assorted gore as they were, but it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes in the end. Ten very long minutes in her case, considering the unfortunate sounds she kept making. I spent that time watching through Kira or Ardek’s eyes, making sure that all was well with them, and wondering if I was actually teaching Herald any kind of lesson or just being a colossal, scaly bitch. It wasn’t like I knew anything about parenting. I didn’t even, to use an unfair comparison, have any experience training animals. The closest I got was when I taught and coached climbers, and I’d always been more of a positive reinforcement kind of girl; mistakes on the wall tended to punish themselves, as I’d learned repeatedly. Fatally, the last time.

  It had been getting longer and longer between times I actually thought about that.

  I wondered if one day, my whole human life — Conscience’s life — would all feel like a strange dream. It may. The idea of walking on two legs, of wearing clothes, of not being so much more than everyone around me, of not being able to fly, it all had a kind of alien distance to it.

  “Can we go now?”

  Herald’s question brought me out of my reverie, and I turned to give her my full attention. She’d stripped down to her underthings before getting her hands — and much of the rest of her — dirty, and a good thing, too. She was covered to her elbows and halfway to her knees in blood, with spatters here and there contrasting against the warm brown of her skin and the paler lines of her scars. She had her arrows in one hand, and the hilt of her sword in the other; the blade had snapped a few inches above the guard.

  “Yeah,” I told her. “We can go.”

  “I really am sorry,” she said quietly as I very carefully opened her waterskin and helped her rinse the worst of the blood off her arms and legs. “I was furious, and excited, and I saw a chance to kill the thing and took it. I did not think at all about where we were, or what would happen when it died where it did.”

  “I know. That fury and bloodlust… I’ve been wondering if you get it from me, somehow. And maybe you do, on some level. Maybe I make it stronger? I don’t know. But I remember, months ago, at the bandit camp. I was fighting one of those guys who rode out, and you finished him off. And I looked up at you—”

  “You were so small then,” she laughed. “Mercies, was that only last summer?”

  “It was. And yeah, I was! Anyway, I looked up at you, and there was this… joy in your eyes. Like you’d just realized that nothing could stand in your way. And yeah, you cried about killing those men, despite who and what they were, but you never lost that joy.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, her voice breathy and her eyes far away.

  “Yeah. Right, I had a point with this! What I wanted to say was, I feel the same way. The freedom of just letting myself go, just letting everything out on those who deserve it. Call it bloodlust or battle rage or whatever. I’m sure Val could put it into words beautifully. I feel it, almost every time. I’m getting it somewhat under control, and you’ll need to as well, but I understand. And I’m sure that Mak will, too.”

  “But I almost killed her,” she said heavily.

  “You could have, yeah. I might’ve caught her; I might’ve not. And no matter how tough she is, I doubt she would have survived that drop. At least not in her state. Luckily, we didn’t have to find out, because she’s tough enough to hang on even with one arm lame and half her blood missing.” Then I sighed. Trying to be tough with her was emotionally draining, and I was done with it. “I still love you, little dragon. No matter what. You know that, right?”

  “I know,” she said, full of warmth despite her embarrassment. “I love you too.”

  Once she’d dressed, her armor strapped on loosely to let some air in, she vaulted onto my back with Mak’s spear in her hand. I took the arrows in my mouth, and we returned to the others. There we switched, strapping Mak to my back, between my wings and on top of some blankets. She barely even stirred.

  “The bloodloss is the worst part,” Kira told me. She spoke in her own dialect of Tekereteki, as she usually did when talking about anything important. “The injuries were simple enough to heal, but magical healing is quite weak when it comes to restoring blood. It can speed it up, but she will need rich foods — red meat and organs would be best — and water.”

  “Something a bit better than rations, then,” I concluded. “We’ll get you all to the temple, and then I’ll go hunting.”

  There was no more carefree exploration as we continued toward the tall wedge of rock that wore Malyon’s high city. My companions still looked around curiously, but everyone stayed close to me, with Herald, Maglan and Avjilan acting as vanguard and Tam and Val bringing up the rear. If the terms even applied when I insisted on no one walking more than ten feet away from me. I’d relied on my presence keeping any predators far away; clearly, that had been a mistake. Hopefully, keeping the humans and the mules close would be enough to prevent a repeat incident. Hell I would have had them glued to me if Ashen and Apple were willing to walk any closer to me than those ten feet.

  I could only thank God, the stars, and the Mercies that of all people, it was Mak who’d been taken. Val or Marvan might have survived long enough for me to try and rescue them, but I doubted they would have survived the attempt itself. Considering the speed and force with which the cat must have hit Mak, if it had gone after any of the others they probably wouldn’t have survived the pounce. I looked at Kira, who was walking beside me with Ardek. She was almost as short as Mak but with a much less athletic build. I could see her neck shattering like a pretzel stick from the sudden impact, and it was enough to make me second-guess my decision to ever bring them here. I could have just left them in Lady’s Rest; they wouldn’t have been any kind of burden. But I’d thought a little adventure would be exciting, fun, and profitable, so I’d sent them into danger, thinking that I could keep them safe.

  And then, I’d failed them. I refused to do so again.

  Either through luck or everyone’s closeness to me, we were spared any more attacks. That wasn’t to say that we weren’t watched far more than I was comfortable with. With the humans on high alert we spotted everything from cats to wolves and foxes, all following for a distance and looking for an opening before giving up and peeling off. No bears, thankfully. I couldn’t help but worry that we’d be attacked by one the size of a dump truck; something like the stealthy giant that Herald and I had once driven off. With my new size I was fairly sure that I might have been able to take one on, and I was even eager to test it, in a purely biggest-baddest-bitch kind of way, but while I was with a bunch of squishy mammals. The potential for collateral damage was just too high.

  We also spotted one of the giant eagles I’d shared the skies with, once or twice when the canopy opened up a little. Or rather, Herald spotted it; it was far too high above us for anyone without her eyes to have a chance. The bird didn’t worry me overmuch, though. Sure, it was big enough that it would have been able to easily grab anyone smaller than Marvan, which was most of the Party, but I couldn’t see it crashing down through the trees. We stayed in cover, and trusted that to encourage our feathered stalker to go after easier prey, if my presence wasn’t enough.

  Just because we weren’t attacked by massive predators didn’t mean that we went entirely unmolested. Bugs seemed less likely to turn monstrous than other creatures — astronomically less likely, going by how many bugs there are to every mammal, reptile, bird, or pretty much anything else except worms. But it did happen, and they were far more common in and around the city than further south. They had about the same level of intelligence and sense of self-preservation as a regular sized equivalent. Seeing a mozzy the size of a small bird coming right for me was disturbing on a very primal, residual-monkey-brain level; seeing Val step up and smash it out of the air with his shield, then stomp it into the dirt with some of the least eloquent words I’d ever heard out of the man, was equally satisfying.

  Slowly, hacking our way through overgrown, rubble-strewn streets and occasionally targeted by oversized gnats, mozzies, and flies of all kinds, we made our way to the middle of the city. Soon the streets began to climb; not much longer and half-buried stairs along their sides became common. And then, many hours after we’d first entered the city, with the mules lathered and the humans not much better off — except for the still peacefully sleeping Mak — Herald and I began to recognize our surroundings. We guided the others onto a wide, familiar street, and minutes later the ever-present forest gave way to a wide, open swath of charred, broken trunks and baked earth, which was already turning green with intrepid undergrowth.

  “Here we are!” Herald exclaimed, the excitement bubbling out of her as she ran the last few steps to stand before the doors of the temple. “Welcome, weary travellers, to the most divine camp you will ever— Oh, shit!”

  I had to give it to that goddamn eagle; it was patient. It picked a reasonable target by going after Sarina, and it picked a good time for it; it must have started its dive as soon as she and Marvan separated from me at a leisurely walk, moving to stay close to their mistress. There was no way for it to know just how bloody badly it had fucked itself by not going after something less risky, like, say, a fully grown male troll.

  By the time Mag and Avjilan reacted, Herald had already nocked, drawn her bow, and loosed. They each had an arrow on the way by the time she shot her second. Meanwhile Sarina stood still, looking up and trying to see what they were shooting at, but Marvan had spotted the eagle and seen that it was headed for one of the two of them. He grabbed his wife around the waist, and with a surprised yelp from her he pulled them both out of the way, just before a bird the size of a small airplane bounced off the ground where she’d stood.

  The whole thing was over in seconds. A stunned silence followed the wet thump and the sound of hundred of delicate bones turning to splinters.

  My first thought, as my brain caught up with events, was, Gravity two, monsters zero. Didn’t see that coming.

  My second, and the one I expressed to the others, was, “Well, I guess that’s hunting taken care of. Has anyone tried eagle before?”

  Only Avjilan had.

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