Chapter 39: Breath of Life
The ice had not been there the last time Barjuchne left the room to drop her latest acquisitions off.
The dragon girl stood in the corridor outside the holding chamber and looked at the mound of pale blue ice that had consumed approximately a third of the available floor space. It rose from the stone in a rough dome, dense and cloudy, with a vague human silhouette visible somewhere inside it, arms crossed.
The wizard girl had frozen herself in a shielding wall of ice, and even from here, the frozen blood on her was visible from the failed assassination.
The goblin guards flanking the door were standing at full attention with the rigid posture of people who had a great deal to explain and were hoping very much that they wouldn't have to.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" asked Barjuchne, her voice shaking the cavernous walls.
But she wasn't talking to the guards. She was talking to the vildt princess, Bruschetta, now freshly shackled to the wall on the other side of the room, who was glaring at the ice dome.
"If we wait long enough, it will melt and I can finish the job!" said Bruschetta. Bruschetta's wool was pressed flat against the shackles at her wrists, her cheeks flushed with the mountain's heat. She was panting, as if overexerted from excitement.
"That... is not the issue," replied Barjuchne, staring her down. But it was odd. Most of her princesses had been terrified of her before, in one way or another. But this sheep beastkin girl was just all-in. It was honestly a little unnerving.
She was too eager. That made it feel weird. Maybe the hunt is what made it enticing for her?
Oh well. A princess was a princess and her draconic heart was overjoyed with the thought of one more, even if the rest of her was deeply confused.
"She hurt you!" said Bruschetta, her voice breathless. "So I had to make sure she wouldn't do it aga—" She coughed. A single, wet sound that rattled slightly at its end. "Again."
Barjuchne looked at her eyes. Too bright. The shine of them was off, sitting slightly ahead of the face rather than in it, the way eyes look when a fever is running the body and the mind is just along for the ride. She approached Bruschetta, the sheep princess almost melting down against her shackles as Barjuchne grabbed her head, turning it as she sank down toward her neck and inhaled.
A sharp sound, followed by an exhalation.
There was something off with Bruschetta's smell. The sheepish princess had a tinge of miasma around her.
Illness?
"Are you sick?" asked Barjuchne. She tilted the sheepgirl's head from side to side, inspecting it like an animal at market.
"Ah, I mean I—" started Bruschetta. One could see the glow behind her eyes changing in many shapes. Perhaps this was a question she had been asked often before in life. And perhaps having answered it had closed just as many doors for her in the past as well.
Barjuchne started into her eyes, watching them shift and try to find a way out. But at some point, they seemed to realise they were in a dead end and instead lost the light they had in them, the enthusiasm dampening.
"...Yes," relented Bruschetta, her head falling. She seemed to become sad. The princess, who had melted against Barjuchne in a rabid attack, now just seemed to melt as a whole. She drooped. Her head, shoulders, and body all reflected the slacking of her spirit.
Barjuchne studied her for a moment, then she realised. The breathlessness, the wheezing, the panting. It wasn't just because she was an awkward, psychotic stalker.
Bruschetta was a psychotic stalker with breathing issues.
"But don't worry," said Bruschetta, sounding as if she were reciting something she had said a thousand times before. Even if it had never worked, she was still ritualised enough to say it, even if her eyes had gone darker in expression. "Please stay and talk to me a little. I have the Consumption." Her expression reflected that monotone candour. "I am not infe—"
A noise. Bruschetta's breath was unable to leave her, instead flowing back from her throat into her lungs again. The princess' eyes expanded like moons as Barjuchne pushed against her, taking her in a sudden kiss that shoved her back against the wall.
But that moment was cut short, briefly before Bruschetta could decide if tongue was appropriate for her first kiss, by the blindingly bright glow coming from their connection. Bruschetta was sure she had been taken by an angel because her sight left her, as did her capacity to breathe.
Although that might be because she was being inhaled into.
The holy-magic breath the dragon let out flowed into the princess' ill-fallen lungs, radiating through them in a wave of purifying energy that cascaded over a deeply set black rot. Old, dead flesh started to flake and burn away and new sinew began to appear. Bruschetta inhaled sharply as their not-actually-a-kiss broke.
"You stay there until I get back," said Barjuchne, letting her go.
Bruschetta was looking around, breathing frantically. In part because of what just happened, but in part because she actually could. The sheepish princess inhaled large lungfuls of hot, damp dungeon air. She seemed to be as spellbound by that as she was before. Her inhaling and exhaling gave her the appearance of someone flexing a hand that they had but hadn't ever had feeling in until now.
The dragon looked sideways at the goblin guards. Both of them stiffened under the weight of her gaze, their spear grips tightening, their chins rising.
Barjuchne didn't say anything. She didn't need to. The understanding between them was complete and immediate and required no words to be perfectly, uncomfortably clear. There wouldn't be a second forgiveness. She turned toward the door.
"Wait!" Bruschetta's chains rattled as she reached after the dragon Barjuchne. "Where are you going?! I love you!"
Barjuchne looked back over her shoulder at the stranger she had met for the first time only a few hours ago.
"I know," she replied, and left.
The clanking of chains faded behind Barjuchne as she moved through the corridor, replaced by the distant, regular sounds of the dungeon at work. Her mind was already ahead of her feet, running the hours since Veliah had left against the hours that had now passed and finding the gap between them deeply unsatisfactory.
Veliah should have returned by now. The Vale was an hour down the mountain.
Salt and timber and the sharpness of tar came off the vessel in waves that hit her senses. Veliah had noticed the smell before she'd seen the ship. They had taken her fast and far away from the mountain, toward the inland bays of the south on an unusually fast anqa.
Even before seeing, the elf remembered this place from its smell alone from her travels back with her father. It was impossible to mistake for stemming from anywhere else.
The rope around her wrists was good quality. She had assessed it in the first minutes and arrived at the conclusion that fighting it directly was not going to be productive immediately. The mast she was bound against was old hardwood, firm with years of sunlight and saltwater swabbing, its grain running in long, tight lines beneath her back.
Out of sight, she pressed her finger against the wood and began rubbing.
"You've made a huge mistake," said Veliah, watching the large naga woman across the deck.
The naga woman moved with unhurried confidence. Her captain's hat sat at a slight angle. The scimitar at her waist swayed in its cloth sash with the motion of her lower coils, which carried her across the deck with a smooth, rippling efficiency that made the boards creak beneath her weight. The pirate leader was massive. She turned at Veliah's voice and leant down, her sun-owned face arriving at Veliah's level.
"And why is that?" asked the captain, a serpentine tongue flicking out to smell the air.
Not intimidated by that after so many stare-downs with a literal dragon, Veliah held the gaze with confidence. "She's going to come and get me." The rope shifted against her wrists as Veliah turned her head slightly. The wood under her finger was warm from friction. "Your stupid boat won't help you against a dragon."
The captain's eyes moved across Veliah's face with the assessing quality of someone reading a document. Then she straightened up and looked at the horizon.
She turned her head toward the deck. "Swain!"
A human boy near the forecastle snapped upright. His youth was evident in the speed of the reaction. "We're ready, Captain! She's loaded."
The naga smiled. It had the same quality as a blade catching light.
The naga looked back at Veliah. "You should know," she said, "I have more than one stupid boat. And unlike the relic of the past you like to ride, mine all belong to the modern world."
Veliah pressed her rubbing finger harder against the wood.
The skin on her finger had gone past discomfort into something that stung in short, specific pulses.
Over the horizon, shapes crested into view. Black-sailed. Multiple. A pirate fleet. Their hulls were low and fast in the water, their flags catching the wind in snapping arcs.
Along the ship's port side, wooden shutters opened one after another in a sequence that moved from bow to stern. Through each opened shutter, the dark mouth of a cannon pressed outward into the air.
One.
Then the next.
Then the next.
Jaesowen Vale burnt behind Barjuchne.
People were running and screaming in all directions, lizardmen hissing and corralling them away from the mess of it all.
The elven merchant hung by his neck from Barjuchne's grip, his boots a foot above the cobblestones, his hands scrabbling at her clasp. Around them, villagers had made the entirely sensible decision to be elsewhere.
Barjuchne had recognised him immediately.
She knew this face from months of sleeping next to someone who had this face's eyes and colouring and the particular way of pressing their lips together when something was wrong.
Hearing the rumours that a few terrified villagers had given her of what happened in the tavern, Barjuchne had pieced it together quickly. As soon as people saw the actual dragon come down their way from the mountain, words and pointing fingers came very fast.
"It's just- business," he choked, his fingers working at her grip. "You understand."
Barjuchne did not understand.
Filled with wild rage, Barjuchne nonetheless tried to control herself. She needed him. So she loosened her hold slightly, enough to let his weight settle and enough to let air find its way down his throat.
Barjuchne, panting and wild as she stood there, was doing her best to not eat him piece by piece, to not burn him alive in her hands.
The human side of her was expecting something. She was expecting him to feel remorse, to tell her that he was wrong and he just kept making mistakes because of the flaws of his heart and beg him to go save his daughter.
And even if not that, she was expecting him to beg for his life.
Wincing, he opened an eye and looked at Barjuchne. "I'll tell you where they took her," he said in a rasp. His voice was rough but working.
Good.
She started to lower him back down.
"For double what they paid m—"
The audible crack was small.
Very small.
It was the sound a dry branch makes when it passes its limit.
Barjuchne stared at the hand that had tightened. At the now-limp elven man it was holding. His head had gone sideways on his neck, pushed aside past its core vertebrae.
"Shit," she said.
She looked at the square. At the burning stalls.
"Shit!" she yelled louder.
He was her only lead. He was the only person she had found in this square who knew where Veliah was, and she had just killed him with her bare hands in the two seconds between him finishing his sentence and her understanding it fully.
And even worse, Veliah might not forgive her for this. Not because the man deserved better, but because he was still her father.
Barjuchne held the dangling body and felt the full weight of the moment pressing down on her from above. The longer she held him up, the heavier his corpse became for her.
But then she smelt something. Barjuchne lifted her head, looking toward its source.
The smell was faint, carried on the wind. But it was unmistakable. In the last fourty-eight hours alone, she had abundant contact with it.
Blood. Princess blood.
And it was most certainly Veliah's blood.
Barjuchne stood very still for a few full seconds.
Then without a second thought, she dropped the dead elf and opened her wings.
Veliah had been rubbing her finger against the wooden mast she was tied to long enough for the skin to peel and blood to start leaking out. A droplet of it struck against the wooden deck of the pirate ship.
Summoned by the single, insignificant impact, a black meteor shattered the horizon. The clouds there were vaporising, the same as the land beneath them as the shape shot toward the ocean like an arrow launched from the drawn bowstring of the curved horizon.
The captain turned from the rail. The shark grin was back.
"Let's make some money, you dogs!" she shouted, her voice carrying over the deck. Lit, the fuses moved along their paths as the cannons aimed toward the sky.