Chapter 42: The Wider World
The rocks of the basalt shoreline were wet and cold and surprisingly sharp at the edges, and the coastline smelt of salt, burning timber, and the sour mixture of things that were meant to stay underwater. Wreckage from the fleet turned in slow circles on the current, some of it still smoking. A mast section drifted past, trailing its rope behind it in a long dark line.
Beyond the tideline, the land rose in a wall of green Barjuchne had only ever seen from above, a canopy of broad-fanned leaves and slouching palms, trunks leaning out over the water as if trying to get a better look at the wreckage. Something with too many wings moved low over the treeline and vanished. Even at this hour, with smoke on the water, the air was warm and wet and smelt faintly of overripe fruit.
Past her drifted small motes of drifting light. At first she thought they were embers. But it was actually the ordinary shimmer of ambient magic in a place thick with it, hanging over the tidepools like pollen that had never bothered to fall.
Water still dripping from her sleek, smooth exterior, Barjuchne sat on a flat rock at the water's edge and exhaled. The rock was very uncomfortable, which was in part the rock's fault, but in part a fault of her own new demi-human shape.
How long had she been in this world? She had flown over ocean coastlines like this a hundred times, a shape blurred beneath her wings, there and gone in the space of a thought. She had never once smelt one or been down in it.
Her demi-human form had come back on its own, somewhere in the black water between the seafloor and the surface. Her back hurt. The nubs of her shoulders where her wings used to be pained her greatly.
Six days.
She dismissed the window and looked at the water instead.
Veliah sat a few feet away, wringing out her hair with both hands, her travelling clothes soaked through and heavy. A rope cut ran along her forearm. She didn't look at Barjuchne. She looked at the water.
The waves came in at regular intervals, touched the rocks, and went back out.
"How bad is it?" Veliah asked, eventually.
"I'm fine," said Barjuchne.
Veliah nodded. She'd seen the attempt. She wrung the last of the water from her hair and pulled it loose over one shoulder. "Can you walk?"
"Yes."
"Good. We're going to have a long walk back home," said the elf, turning to look at the landmass. "I'm guessing you can't change back to your big shape with the wings?" she asked, gesturing with her hands to make a small fluttering pair of wings.
Barjuchne got up.
"Not anytime soon, I think," replied the dragon girl.
In the panic of the moment she'd unravelled her entire upgrade path and dumped everything she could into it as fast as possible, choosing the Hydra evolution line without much thought for what else came bundled in.
Who knew what kind of stuff was packed in there? But there were definitely no wings, that much was clear.
The problem was straightforward.
No flight. No full form. The injury would heal, but not today, not tomorrow, probably not for days. And the mountain was a very long way from a rocky coastline with no road in sight and a debris field smouldering on the water behind them.
"We'll just walk back home then," said Veliah, as if it were nothing. "Maybe we can find a church to bring us to a fairy circle somewhere nearby. No big deal."
"You realise that this isn't safe, right?" asked Barjuchne. "I'm hurt. I can't protect you well out here, away from the mountain."
The elf shook her head. "That's fine. You won't need to."
"Veliah. I'm a wanted person in half of the world right now. You remember that, right?" asked Barjuchne.
Veliah sat across from her on a lower rock. "The lizardmen have been walking these roads for months," she said. "Scaled. Two legs. About your height in this form. A little less. People are used to them."
Barjuchne glanced at her.
Veliah nodded, already approving of her own scheme. "Nobody will look at you twice. They'll just think you're another lizardman. Maybe a weird one, but... Since they're in the markets everywhere anyway, nobody will care. They're running patrol circuits through every town in the country at this point."
"I am not a lizardman."
"Well, they won't know that," replied Veliah. She gestured toward Barjuchne. "You don't really look, uh… the same, right now," she explained.
Barjuchne said nothing. She looked down at her own hands.
They were indeed different. Her skin was smoother and sleeker than before. Her scales had changed shape, becoming a dense, leathery meld of skin in many places instead of hard armour plating. She was a smooth, slick, leathery thing. Barjuchne had never touched a whale, but she felt like she looked like the underside of an orca. Her shape was changed, her frame altered to be able to move more dynamically in water, rather than on land. Her muscles and skin felt denser and more internal.
Truly, she looked like a sea creature.
It wasn't only her second-stage evolution that had changed. Plenty of her pre-transformation features had shifted with it, adapted to the crisis.
"So smooth…" said Veliah in fascination, her hands rubbing along Barjuchne's arm. "Oh, wow." Veliah smiled, rubbing her. "You're so glossy now."
"Am I ugly now?" asked Barjuchne, examining her own changed body in a sort of quiet horror, like opening your eyes after a haircut only to be terrified at what you see. "Oh god. My tail is so small now," she said, genuinely distressed about that. Before, it was a trunk capable of holding her entire body weight. This one couldn't even hold Rou-Ya.
Veliah laughed. "I like this too," she replied, pulling on it. Barjuchne yanked it out of her hands.
Veliah produced the soaked travelling cloak, grey-green and practical. She held it out.
Barjuchne looked at it. She took it.
It did not fit. The shoulders were cut for an elf-sized frame, and the hood sat at an angle no matter what she did.
"Perfect," said Veliah.
Barjuchne looked down at herself. "...I am an abomination."
"My perfect abomination," replied Veliah, taking her hand.
Barjuchne had flown over roads. She knew what they looked like from above.
From the ground, they were different. The trees were taller than altitude had suggested, their canopies closing over the path in sections so the light came through in broken pieces, dappled and shifting, and something in the undergrowth kept pace with them for a while before losing interest. Fat white blossoms grew in clusters along one stretch, releasing a sweetness so strong it was almost a taste. Fungus in improbable violet grew in rings around the base of the older trunks, and once, in a shadowed hollow off the path, she saw a cluster of tiny lights hovering in a loose orbit around nothing at all, gone the moment she slowed to look properly. Cart ruts had dried into hard ridges in the clay. Stones worked up through the surface at irregular intervals, and her soft, now-padded, feet had to account for every one.
It had been a long time since she'd simply been underway like this in the wild, on foot, at ground level, close enough to smell the flowers instead of the wind.
And other travellers took up space. Not much, but the road had a width, and people occupied portions of it, and moving around them required a constant stream of small adjustments she had never once needed in the air. A man with two laden anqas held the left side for a long stretch. A knot of travellers walking abreast had to be circled entirely.
People used to give Barjuchne a lot of space. But right now, somehow, she seemed to have lost her intimidation factor.
She wasn't sure if she liked that.
Personally, she thought it was because of the cloak. It made her look silly, she was sure. A merchant cart came up from behind, the anqa at a working pace, the driver up on the box with the relaxed attention of a man who had done this trip before. As he drew alongside, he looked down at Barjuchne.
A nod. Brief. Incurious. The acknowledgement of something present, accounted for, and requiring no further consideration.
Almost shocked by that casual gesture, she just nodded back.
"Does he know that I own this place?" asked Barjuchne.
"Shh!" hissed the elf, elbowing her.
Barjuchne gasped, feeling the sharp elbow press into her, and leant over, holding the tender spot.
"Sorry!" said Veliah. "I'm not used to you being so… soft." The two of them stared at each other.
Veliah poked her again.
"Knock it off!" snapped Barjuchne, swiping at her hand.
The settlement appeared at midday, in the open ground between two low hills.
Palms and broad-leafed trees gave way to cleared fields ringed by low stone walls, and the heat lay thicker here, trapped between the hills, shimmering faintly above the packed soil road. Market stalls lined the main street under canvas faded by the summer sun and striped in colours. Strings of small glass bulbs hung between the stalls, unlit at this hour, waiting for dusk to fill them with the soft captive light she recognised from the mountain's own lanterns, only smaller, cheaper, and entirely unremarkable to everyone but her. The well at the market's centre had been carved with a ring of old ward marks around its lip, worn nearly smooth.
That seemed odd. It was like there was a spell to keep anything from coming out of the well.
Barjuchne thought that would be terrifying as a concept, but nobody even seemed to care. The well was old. Maybe this was just some folk tradition?
The dragon realised she ruled over a people whose culture she didn't even really know. She'd have to learn more about them.
Women queued there, their buckets set down in a row. Children ran the perimeter of the market, fully committed to a game. Dogs threaded between the stall legs. From somewhere left of the entrance came the smell of fat and bread cooking together, and beneath it, unfamiliar and sharp, the smell of fruit she'd never encountered, piled in pyramids on a cart, skins the colour of a coastal sunset.
Barjuchne stopped at the town's edge.
She looked at all of it. The organised, ordinary noise of people conducting commerce with each other on an ordinary day.
There, she realised, suddenly, that she had never experienced this world's most ordinary places, not in a way that didn't leave the people around her disturbed. From the air, a town was a shape and a scatter of rooftops, gone in a second. From here, it was noise and heat and the smell of a hundred small transactions and magic sitting so casually inside all of it that nobody bothered to remark on it at all.
"If we take an anqa, we'll be faster," said the dragon girl, looking at the parked carriage.
"I think you weigh too much for that," said Veliah.
"We'll use a carriage!" snapped Barjuchne at her. Veliah had a quip to shoot back at her.
The elf laughed. "Well. Do you have any money with you?"
"I… uh," started Barjuchne. Her heart sank as she realised she wasn't anywhere near her gold.
Horror.
Not because of her changed body or their predicament. But true, ice-cold terror shot through the dragon as she had a most awful realisation in that moment, standing there.
She was, in this instant functionally, a poor person.
"...Oh my God," she said to nobody at all, her already very large eyes widening. Her eyes had got bigger during the transformation. That was its own issue. "We can offer to pay them once we arrive?"
That must have been visible on her face, because Veliah squeezed her fingers.
"Yeah. Nobody is going to believe that deal," she said. "Come on."
Veliah dragged her into the market. It was louder from the inside.
The crowd flowed in every direction, but its movement had a logic, a shared social traffic that everyone present had absorbed long ago and operated on without thinking. She found the rhythm and matched it.
A cloth merchant. A grain seller. A woman with dried herbs in tied bundles. A smith with small domestic ironwork laid out on a cloth.
The toymaker's cart stood against the market's far wall. She saw the little dragons before she reached them.
A dozen of them, in various sizes. Carved from the same basic template, four legs, two wings, and a long tail. They were painted black with red dots for eyes. The craft was not fine. The paint was thick, the wood grain visible beneath it. The smallest ones fit in a palm.
Flattered, Barjuchne picked one up.
She turned it over in her hands. The tail had been nailed on at a slight angle. The wings were flat scrap wood, shaped with a saw rather than carved. The eyes were two uneven dots applied with a brush end.
The toymaker quoted her a frankly terrifying price. She set it back down and walked away.
Veliah, who had been examining a thread merchant's goods one stall over, rejoined her without comment.
"Veliah. When I get back to the mountain, remind me to have the Dragon Clan start making toys."
"Aw…" said Veliah, genuinely disarmed. "That's so cute! Did you turn soft inside too?"
"Huh?" asked Barjuchne. "No, what? I mean, just think about all the money I'm missing out on!" Barjuchne struck her own forehead. "All of this time, I could have been selling merchandise!" she said, as if it were obvious.
Veliah rolled her eyes. "I guess your mind hasn't changed as much as the rest of you," she said.
Further along stood the baker's cart, its trays stacked with dragon-shaped pastries. The smell was good.
"We could use the magma chambers to power ovens," said Barjuchne.
"Will you please stop thinking about making a profit?" snapped Veliah. "Just for a minute?"
They looked at each other.
"...Would you ask a dog to stop wagging its tail?" asked Barjuchne, putting her hands on her hips and leaning down toward the elf. "You monster."
Not intimidated, Veliah leaned forward and looked up at her. "No. But I'd scold it for being at the table."
Both of them held eye contact until a voice broke the moment.
"She came from the mountain like fire from the sky!" yelled a man. He was some kind of raggedy street preacher. His hands traced broad shapes in the air. "A giant, her eyes burning like coals in the dark, her voice shaking the very stones of the world!"
Barjuchne stood at the back of the crowd and listened. Barjuchne found herself grading him. "See? He only has good things to say," said Barjuchne, looking at Veliah.
"Well, he doesn't live with you," replied Veliah, standing with her arms crossed.
Barjuchne smiled.
Veliah was the only one of her princesses who would openly oppose her like this. Barjuchne appreciated that about her, actually. It was good to have someone who would talk straight for a change.
And then she remembered that Veliah didn't know yet about her father. About the fact that she had killed him.
Her smile fading, Barjuchne looked back toward the preacher, listening to him tell the world about all the great things she was.
There was no other way. She was going to have to tell her.
"Ah. You're here early," said a voice. The two of them turned. An assistant to the preacher had come over, seeing Barjuchne standing there. "Here is our collected tribute for this month," said the boy, holding out a box full of coins for them to take.
Barjuchne and Veliah exchanged a glance.
The inn was two storeys, set back from the road's junction, its common room quiet ahead of the dinner crowd. The innkeeper looked at Barjuchne as they came through the door, registered her, and turned to Veliah to take the room request.
"Don't they... usually sleep outside?" he asked, in a lowered voice.
Barjuchne snarled at him. Her large, red eyes said, 'No, that's where you're going to be buried', but Veliah's hand squeezing her digits below the counter told her to keep that thought inside for now.
The cover was working. This was good for them right now. But Barjuchne decided that she really had to work on her brand image when they made it back home.
The room was at the back of the second floor, above the kitchen, which meant it was warm. One window. One narrow bed against the wall. A table with a candle. The ceiling was low enough that Barjuchne, standing in the centre of the room, could touch it.
Barjuchne reached up and pressed her palm flat against the plaster. A little bit of her skin flaked and she pulled back.
Instead, she moved to the corner and sat down on the floor with her back against the wall. The chair didn't look confident enough to hold her. One good thing about her massive tail being gone was that she could sit like this. It had been a while since she leaned against a wall. It felt odd to think about such a thing.
Veliah set her pack on the table and did not comment on the seating choice. She began laying out what had survived the water, sorting it into salvageable and unsalvageable.
She looked at the medicine. It was completely waterlogged.
"Oh, damn it. I completely forgot," said the elf, quickly looking back at Barjuchne. "How are you fee—"
Barjuchne was slumped over.
The fever arrived in force sometime in the night.
Barjuchne surfaced from a sleep that had been less like sleep and more like sinking. Her body was heavy, but this time the heaviness was hers alone. Heat moved under her skin in slow waves.
The now very pliable dragon blinked at the window until it went away.
Something tight was wrapped around her. Barjuchne felt constricted. It was moist. It felt like a cocoon.
Looking down, she found that she was covered in wet fabric. Blankets, coats. Anything. The blanket from the bed, the spare from the chest at its foot, Veliah's travelling cloak and her own borrowed one. The elf's roughened blouse was wrapped around her shoulder and her trousers around her arm. The whole inventory of fabric the room possessed was soaked, piled and tucked around her with a thoroughness that had clearly been done while she slept and done more than once.
A bucket was there, the trail of splashed water next to it making clear that it had been back and forth from here upstairs down to the well outside several times.
The water felt good. It was soaking into her, moving in through her.
Of course. The hydra was a water transformation. Barjuchne remembered now seeing the window all of those months ago. How absent-minded. She hadn't even thought about the fact that she needed to stay near water now.
Veliah knew it, though. The elf didn't even see that system window. She just knew.
As always, Barjuchne couldn't help but admire her insightfulness.
And Veliah was in the wet heap with Barjuchne, as unpleasant as that must have been for her.
Soaked in the sweat of labour and water, the elf lay along Barjuchne's side, half buried in the same pile, one arm across her, clinging on and around tightly to make just as much skin contact as the wet fabrics. She was not sleeping. Her breathing was too deliberate for sleep. She was awake and lending heat, the way you would for anyone shivering, except that she had been doing it for hours, and the candle stub on the table said how many.
Barjuchne lay still and let the guilt arrive.
It came the way the fever had, in slow waves.
There were things Veliah did not know. One thing in particular. It sat in Barjuchne's chest, and tonight, with her defences fever-soft and the debt between them grown so large, it began to climb toward her mouth.
"Veliah."
"You're awake." Veliah's voice was low. "Good. Drink something."
"There's something I have to tell you." The words came out rough. "About your father. Listen—"
"—No."
The word was quiet and immediate and final, all three at once.
A pause. The candle stub flickered.
"I never want to hear about that man again. Not from you. Not from anyone," said Veliah. "Whatever it is you're carrying, you can put it down somewhere where I am not, but you will not hand it to me." Her voice stayed level the whole way through, which was somehow worse than if it hadn't. "He can go die, as far as I'm concerned. I genuinely don't care."
The room was quiet.
Barjuchne had heard what Veliah just said. But… she wasn't rightly sure the elf really meant it.
The heat from the kitchen came up through the floorboards. Somewhere below, a pot shifted on its hook.
"If you don't want to drink something," Veliah said, "then go back to sleep."
Barjuchne studied Veliah for a long moment. The guilt in her chest climbed back down and settled where it had been before. Heavier now, somehow, for having been refused.
"I haven't thanked you yet for saving me, again," said Veliah, turning her face in against Barjuchne's side and inhaling deeply. She took a long time to exhale. "Thank you. I am sorry that I put you into such a mess with my carelessness."
Barjuchne's focus turned quietly back up toward the ceiling.
"That makes two of us, I guess," replied the dragon girl.
It was quiet for a time. The few remaining noises of the world outside came in through the single-pane glass window, rattled ever-so-slightly by the night breeze.
Feeling herself being watched, Barjuchne rolled her head over and looked back again, droplets of water rolling off of her. Veliah was staring and so Barjuchne stared back.
Veliah moved in closer, and so she moved in closer in turn, cradling the back of her head.
"Ow!" yelped Veliah suddenly, holding her mouth and then recoiling.
Slowly, she lowered her hand and then worked her tongue and lips. They were fine. There was just a small red mark.
"Sorry. I've got sharper teeth now," explained Barjuchne, pulling her own rubbery lip aside to reveal a row of what looked like thin, razor-sharp shark's teeth.
The elf rolled her eyes. But, still being held, Veliah let herself be pulled back in as a second hand came to collect the rest of her with possessive greed.
Water was compressed out of the soaked blankets as they rose and fell from the two of them pressing together to refind a rhythm and pace for something that was now different.
The candle stub across the room burnt through the last of itself and went out.