Chapter 38: Daddy Issues
The freshly renamed Dragon’s Den inn was warm from the weeks of produced a heat that built up in the wood of the walls and the low beams of the ceiling. The smell of tallow candles and spilt ale and old cook-fire smoke settled over everything like a second ceiling. Most of the patrons had gone. A few remained at the far end of the room, bent over their cups.
Veliah sat with her teacup between both hands and looked at her father. Her grip was white because of the pressure she was exerting on the cup as she maintained her self-control to just smash it in his face.
He had been talking for a while. Roads he had travelled. Difficult passages. The price of goods in the eastern towns. Information she had not asked for and did not need, delivered with the energy of a man who had rehearsed the beginning of a conversation but not how to actually get to that part that would start it.
She let him talk for a while, waiting for him to get somewhere. But he never seemed to manage.
Honestly, Veliah was not sure why she had agreed to sit down with him at all. This was the man who had tried to sell her twice, each time to something he knew to be a monster. He might as well have attempted to cut her throat in her sleep. The effect of that would have at least been more merciful than the presumed fates he had been more than willing to drop her into.
"Why are you here?" she asked finally, cutting him off.
He stopped mid-sentence, opening his eyes. He looked at her across the small table with an expression she didn't immediately recognise.
"Well. I've been circling the mountain for weeks now," he said. "Looking for you, Princess."
Veliah blinked.
Her hands left the teacup. They hit the table with a flat sound that was louder than she intended. "'Looking'?" The word came out sharp. "You knew damn well where I was!"
He shrank back slightly. He reached up and took off his hat. He held it in both hands in his lap, his fingers working the brim.
"...I know," he said.
Veliah leaned over the table, about to jump across it. "You couldn't wait to get rid of me." She looked at him steadily, letting the words land where they would. "First you wanted to sell me to that awful man. And then you were willing to let me die for your gold."
"You seem alive and well."
Veliah let go of the table and rose slowly, looking down at him from the full advantage of her height. "You didn't know that would be the case." Her voice had gone quiet. "I'm leaving. I would be overjoyed to never have to see you again."
She began to slide out from the bench.
"Veliah, wait—!"
She kept moving.
"I am sorry."
She stopped.
The words sat in the air between them with an unfamiliar weight. She had not expected to hear them. In all the versions of this conversation she had run through her head over the past months, across all the nights she had lain in the hoard room listening to Barjuchne breathe, she had not once imagined him saying those two words in that order with that particular quality in his voice.
Veliah turned her head over her shoulder and looked at him.
He looked genuinely distraught. Older than she remembered. His hands were still working the brim of his hat. "I am sorry," he said again, as if once had not been enough. "Please. Give me a few minutes to explain and—"
"Why would I want to spend a single minute more here?" she said, cutting across him. "I have somewhere more important to be. I have someone who actually loves me now and is waiting on me to come home."
He reached out and caught her wrist. Veliah's hand cracked against his face, the loud slap echoing through the bar. The innkeeper looked and then turned away, walking into a backroom.
"Your mother," he said, slowly turning his eyes back to face her.
Veliah went still.
The inn noise faded to something distant. The candles on the nearest table guttered and steadied.
Veliah spoke measuredly. "You don't get to speak about her. She would be disgusted if she knew what sort of creature you have become."
"Being around you reminded me of her," he said. His voice came out rough at the edges, unpolished in a way she had never heard from him. "Every day, looking at your face. It made me so miserable.” Her father shook his head. “I blamed you for that." He stopped. Started again. "And when I saw an opportunity to end that hurt, I took it. That's why I did what I did."
Veliah said nothing for a long moment.
"...That's supposed to make me feel better?" she asked at last. Her voice came out quieter than she intended. "That's the most awful thing anyone has ever said to me."
She looked at the window.
It hurt so much.
But at least it was finally something honest. This might be the first time he'd ever been open with her.
Outside, the night was fully dark. The mountain's silhouette was invisible beyond the town's lights, but she knew where it was. Barjuchne was up there. Sick, with the medicine sitting in a bag that she should have already delivered.
"Give me just five minutes," he said. "That's all. Then I'll let you go forever. You'll never see me again."
Veliah looked at the teacup on the table. She slowly sat back down at the very edge of the bench, facing outward toward the room rather than toward him. "You have until I finish my tea," she said. “Not a second longer.”
She picked up the cup and took a large gulp.
Back inside the mountain, deep in its inner chambers, a goblin attendant was moving.
A bowl of cool water and a stack of clean fabric sat on the floor between two low cots. The stone walls radiated warmth in slow, pressing waves.
Princess Bruschetta lay on the nearest cot with her wool clinging to her skin in damp curls. The heat of the mountain had reached levels that her travelling cloak was entirely unsuited for, and she had dispensed with it sometime in the last hour. She stared at the ceiling with the focused intensity of someone whose mind was elsewhere.
Strangely enough, the heat felt good. The hot, damp air soothed the ache her muscles and bones had become accustomed to and allowed her a vitality she hadn’t known was missing until it returned to her.
"When can I see her?" she asked.
"The Dragon Queen will come see you when she is ready," said the goblin attendant, moving past her with the bowl.
Bruschetta wasn’t the one being tended to.
"Is the dragon hurt?" Bruschetta's head lifted from the pillow. "Is she ill?" Her mouth moved quickly, her fingers gripping the edge of the cot. "I'll help her feel better! I can sit with her. I'm very good at that. I've had a lot of practice being ill and I know—"
She stopped.
Her eyes had moved to the second cot.
"Did she hurt her?!" The question came out sharp, with an edge that had nothing to do with concern for anyone's well-being and everything to do with something considerably less charitable. Her narrowed, brown eyes had fixed on the figure lying bound on the adjacent cot that was sagging lower on one end.
"You will stay right there," said the goblin attendant, crossing between them and pressing a fresh medicine-soaked cloth against the wound on the bound figure's head.
The wizard princess Ead lay on her back with her hands and ankles tied with careful, practical knots. Her wide-brimmed hat had been removed and set against the wall. Her pale hair stuck to her temples with the dried residue of the wound Bruschetta had administered.
She was deeply unconscious, her robes plastering her flat against the cot as they clung to her. She mumbled something occasionally, too quiet and too disordered to interpret. The bruise across her forehead had developed into something spectacular in shades of deep purple and yellowish green.
The goblin attendant replaced the cloth and moved away. The room settled.
"I need to see the Dragon Queen," Bruschetta said to the ceiling. "Right away."
"When she is ready," the goblin repeated. "You will."
Bruschetta’s fingers were tapping against the cot impatiently. “This is your fault,” she said to the unconscious princess next to her.
The inn was nearly empty now.
The last dedicated drinkers had called it a night sometime in the past hour, and the inn was emptied out.
Veliah sat with her arms crossed and her eyes closed.
He had been talking for a long time. There were apologies in it. Explanations that did not excuse anything but at least arranged the facts into a shape she could look at directly. There were things about her mother she had not known. Things about the years after her mother's death that she had been too young to see or had not wanted to see.
To her own surprise, Veliah was still listening when he stopped.
The silence arrived and she sat in it for a moment.
"...I see," she said, summarising it all in just that one statement.
Her voice came out more neutral than she felt.
It hadn't fixed anything. The weight in her chest was still there, a wound that had been there so long it had become load-bearing to her sense of self, keeping something else from collapsing. What he had said didn't ease it. But it had given it a shape she hadn't had before, and that was something.
Something thin. But something.
Her teacup was empty. Taking the last sip, she set it down into the saucer with an audible clank.
Veliah looked at him. He looked back at her as she got up to leave. She'd heard enough and was ready to say goodbye now. None of this excused what he had put her through; it just contextualised it. But at least their goodbye would be in the light of this parting. A sweet poison, rather than one that was bitter.
Veliah looked at the table, picking up her rucksack and starting to shoulder it. She had to get home now. "...You know," she said quietly, "you're going to be a grandfather soon. Sort of. I suppose."
He went still.
"I know this will sound strange, but—"
"This her?" said a voice from nearby. A foreign dialect, carrying the rolled cadence of coastal speech. "The dragon's girl?"
Veliah turned.
Three strangers stood beside the table. Their boots were dark with waterline stains, stiff with the residue of salt. The kind of boots that came from long sea-work rather than road travel. One of them held a fat coin purse loose in one hand, swinging it slightly with the relaxed confidence of someone who had already completed the transaction.
Veliah looked back across the table.
The coin purse landed in front of her father with a soft, heavy sound.
The man sitting across from her looked at it. His hands were in his lap.
Something cracked open in Veliah's heart.
"You absolute piece of—"
Hands closed around her from behind. One across her mouth, firm. She was lifted and turned in a single movement, her bag of potions swinging wildly from her shoulder, her heels catching air before she could find her footing.
Her father sat quietly at the small table. He was counting through the coin purse.
The door opened. Cold air hit her face.
Then darkness.
She fought as they pulled her out into the night.
“Straight to the captain! Ride fast," said one, throwing Veliah over the back of an anqa that then bolted down the dark road.
The hoard room was warm and low-lit, the coins beneath the quilt radiating their stored heat upward in slow, comfortable waves. The twin saintess priestesses lay at Barjuchne's sides, spent from storytime, their hair fanned out across the treasure beneath them. They laid there like a pair of perfect, identical statues that were just another part of the gold.
The two of them were odd, mostly ostracised by the human world for their unusual mannerisms; they seemed exceptionally thrilled to have someone around who was interested in them being nearby. Their stiff, robotic mannerisms seemed to ease around the dragon.
Barjuchne was somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. The cold had not entirely left her system.
Something warm landed on her.
Then a smell.
Her instincts registered it before her conscious mind caught up.
— Princess blood.
Her eyes shot open.
Above her, suspended in her field of vision, was a face she had seen once before in a snowfield for only a few seconds before everything became extremely confusing.
The face was very close.
Its owner was sitting on her lap with both hands pressed against her own cheeks, her fingers slightly red and bloodstained, her smile wide and fixed. Her eyes were very large. They were not blinking with any regularity.
"Hi!" said Bruschetta, her voice cracking.
“What the…?” Barjuchne stared at her from below with a confused expression.
"I came all the way here to find you, you know," said the sheep princess, her voice carrying a brightness that did not quite match the intensity of her eyes. "Just like you told me to!"
Barjuchne blinked slowly, processing. She has no idea what this girl was talking about.
"So you can't just expect me to wait around in the dark for you, silly!" Bruschetta laughed; the sound, however, was shrill and rapid. Manic, even. The beastkin princess’ fingers pressed deeper into her own cheeks, pressing through her matted wool. Her eyes widened further, which Barjuchne had not believed possible, watching them turn into saucers. “I’m here to help you, you know.”
The dragon lay very still beneath the strange, warm, wool-covered weight on her.
Barjuchne tried to think of the right thing to say.
She found nothing.
“...You have crazy eyes," said Barjuchne ultimately, staring at the stranger. The princess' face looked like the mugshot of a lunatic serial killer portrayed in a newspaper.
Somehow, that seemed to have landed as a compliment, rather than as a factual statement.
Bruschetta looked down at her, unblinking, smiling, her blood-smeared fingers still framing her own cheeks like a portrait as her chest heaved. A red droplet fell down onto Barjuchne.
"You're mine now," whispered the sheep princess.
Barjuchne wasn’t sure if this girl understood how this whole thing worked.
The dragon turned her head, looking around at her collection. One of them was still missing.
Did Veliah choose to sleep in her quarters tonight to not wake her?
Barjuchne looked back at Bruschetta, who was closer than before, her heaving face an inch away. "Whose blood is that?" asked the dragon.