Draka

“The council was most pleased,” Rallon told me after we’d gotten through with the pleasantries.

This was my first real outing since returning to my cave three days earlier. I’d had a quick trip to check the tree and grab a goat, which I’d brought back to the cave. Other than that I’d been sleeping and healing on my hoard.

We met by night in the usual place. There had been some people at the camp, but some of Rallon’s people had ‘encouraged’ them to stay away for a while. It made me think that I needed a new place to meet people. I’d been using this place out of convenience, but anyone could tell that a literal campsite near the main road was not a good place for secret meetings.

“Criers have been announcing the rescue of two dozen citizens every morning for a few days now,” he continued. “Not that anyone knew that they were gone. With a small hamlet like that, it might have been weeks before anyone realised that it was deserted.”

I’d seen the remains of deserted settlements before. Usually only some stone foundations and possibly a few decaying walls would remain. I’d asked Herald about it, and she’d pretty much shrugged it off. Bandits, monster attacks, blood feuds – who knew why a small collection of houses might be abandoned? These things happened, and if it was small enough and in an area that wasn’t well travelled a hamlet might spring up, exist for a few decades, and vanish without ever existing in a record or on a map. The only reason we’d heard about the nameless village in the mountains was that a few of them had left for the city before the valkin struck.

“Did you get anything out of the guy we captured?” I asked.

“Unfortunately not. We questioned him–”

“He is dead,” Herald, standing next to me, added bluntly in Tekereteki.

Rallon looked at her with annoyance, straightening and tensing slightly. “Though I do not speak the language, I have some guesses as to what Miss Herald just said. As I was saying, we questioned him, quite thoroughly, and unfortunately my interrogator may have become too enthusiastic. The man expired without giving us anything useful. If we could have handed him over to the council’s experts, perhaps they would have been more successful, but…”

“Neither of us would want that,” I finished for him.

It was too bad. I’d hoped that we could have found out who the slavers worked for. On the bright side, the man being dead tied up a loose end. There was still the problem of one that got away, but he didn’t know that I could speak. Best case he’d think that he and his crew had been attacked by the infamous wyvern, and that the human attackers had taken advantage of that. Maybe he’d think that they were controlling me. Either way I hadn’t said a word in front of the man, so I wasn’t too worried about him. The council’s investigator apparently had some hope of tracing the weapons, but Rallon didn’t recognise the maker’s mark and thought it more likely that they’d been brought in from outside.

We finished our conversation with mutual reassurances that we wanted to continue working together. The terms were simple. If I found anything that threatened the people of Karakan or might otherwise be of interest to the Wolves, I’d get in touch. Even if I didn’t get involved directly I’d still get a finder’s fee of at least ten Eagles to make it worth my time. On their part, if there was something I was uniquely suited to helping them with, they’d get in touch with me and we’d discuss compensation depending on what they wanted.

The whole arrangement felt comfortable and lucrative. And to drive home the point of just how lucrative it could be, Rallon asked Herald to hand over my payment for this first job we’d done together, which she’d been holding for me.

Herald opened up a deceptively small pouch and poured its contents into her hand. In the lantern light I saw the shine of maybe two dozen silver coins, and the beautiful gleam of seven smaller golden ones, enough that she could only barely hold them in one hand without spilling.

“The council paid us a bonus of 1500 silver Eagles,” Rallon told me. “Since there were no significant unexpected expenses, and since you, Lady Draka, secured the safety of the unwanted prisoners on your own, I thought we could forget about the whole ‘after expenses’ clause of our agreement. So, there is your share. Seven gold Dragons, and twenty silver Eagles.”

I was glad that I had enough of a sense of shame that I didn’t just bury my face in Herald’s hand. That, and I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of Rallon. Still, I couldn’t wait to get my new treasure back home. I think Rallon noticed how distracted I was, because he bid me farewell right after that, returning to his people to wait for Herald and me to finish. Thankfully I managed to control myself, and didn’t start rumbling until he was out of earshot. I had an image to maintain, and purring like an overgrown house cat was not part of it.

Wait. Something was wrong. I looked at the coins in Herald’s hand. There were seven Dragons and twenty Eagles, just like Rallon had said. I looked at Herald. “You did not spend any of it,” I scolded her. “Yet I notice that you have a large sack with you.”

Herald looked away with an embarrassed smile. “I wanted to make it a present. To show my gratitude.”

“How much did it cost?” I asked sternly.

“There is no need to worry about that.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-four eagles,” she admitted.

“Herald,” I said after doing the numbers in my head, “that is a third of your share!”

“I know, but I wanted to–”

“My friend,” I said to her, though I had to force the words out. “Please take the money out of my share. Helping me buy these things is thanks enough, if you need it. Spend your money on yourself. You have a bow to save for, remember?”

“But–”

“Herald. Please.”

She looked at me, then relented. “Fine,” she said with a sigh. She put my money in the bag minus a Dragon, then counted out the difference from her own purse.

Money taken care of, Herald was eager to show me the purchases I’d asked her to make for me. “I will confess that it was amusing, shopping for such things for a dragon,” she said with a wry smile, “but who am I to question a lady’s desire for comfort?”

Herald opened up the large bag she’d brought, carefully emptying it for me. First came a folded tarp-style sheet, which she opened up partially on the ground. On top of that she placed a nicely carved wooden chest, from which she took out two thick blankets of dyed wool. Finally, four square pillows in different colours come out of the sack.

“Thank you, Herald,” I said happily. “This will do nicely.”

“Now that you have begun to decorate, when will I get to see your home?”

“As soon as I figure out a way to get you up there safely.” I’d been thinking about it off and on, but my most realistic idea so far was to just grab her and fly. I might be strong enough, but there was no way that I was going to risk dropping my best friend in the world a thousand feet if I was wrong.

“Until then, perhaps we could bring you into the city? There is much that I would like to show you.”

“I would love that,” I told her, squooshing one of the pillows. They were soft, and must have been stuffed with some kind of fibre. Wool, maybe. “And getting in would be easy. It is remaining unseen that worries me.”

“We will think of something. Now, let me pack this back up for you.”

She put everything back neatly in the sack along with the money pouch, folding the sheet so that the dirty side wouldn’t touch the pillows. The sack had a drawstring to close it and a sturdy strap sewn onto it, letting me hang it around my neck for extra support. Now I had two different ways of transporting things depending on size and weight, and both were thanks to Herald.

“I hope you do not mind that we did not sell the illumination orbs,” she said as she packed. “They are far too useful, and since we have some money now…”

“Not at all.” I liked having the one that Valmik had brought out for me, as well. Darkness wasn’t a problem for me, but I needed light to see any kind of colour. Or to be able to read, for that matter. I couldn’t see any letters with shadowsight, for some reason. Besides, I’d discovered, after some trial and error, that my intent when I charged the light-ball let me change the temperature of the light. Now I could have my cave bathed in a nice, warm glow whenever I wanted.

“What will you do with your share of the reward?” I asked Herald as I got ready to go. I was mostly putting off leaving her, and I knew that, but I was genuinely curious. “Are you not fairly rich, now?”

Even in the lantern light Herald’s smile was radiant. “We are all quite well off now, yes. We talked briefly about buying a house, actually. But none of us is of a particularly domestic nature. We would need one servant at least, and all that, so we rejected the idea. Besides, we can live well at an inn for over a year on what we have. No, I think that I shall be buying myself a nice new outfit or two, and a fine bow. Perhaps a new set of armour, if I find a good one that fits.”

She looked suddenly shy. “And I think if I grease the right palm I might be able to get a letter to Maglan. The officers can still send and receive mail, and I know some people. I couldn’t justify the cost of the bribe before, but now…”

Right. Maglan. For a while I’d forgotten that he even existed. I wondered briefly if that made me a bad friend, but it wasn’t as if Herald brought him up very often.

“Good luck with that,” I told her, trying to be sincere. “I hope you get a reply.”

“As do I.” She paused. “I have been thinking about what you said. While we were going to rescue the others, I mean. How I need to figure out how I miss him? And I really do miss him. Miss his company. I keep reading his letters and, you know, I miss what we did. Before he left.” She blushed and cleared her throat. “But now that I have not seen him or heard from him for months… I just want to know that he is safe.”

“There is nothing wrong with that. But if you do get a letter to him, be clear. Do not let him think that you will want to marry him or something like that when he comes back.”

She sighed sadly. “I suppose I should. I am not looking forward to writing this letter, though.”

I gave her a sympathetic bump on the arm with my head.

“Well,” she said. “I think I have held the others up long enough. Do you want me to get you anything else for next time? It is no trouble.”

“Thank you, but nothing right now. See you soon?”

“I hope so.”

After that I sent my greetings to the others, and with a quick hug, made awkward by the sack I was carrying, we were both off.

Carrying the sack worked well. Between the strap around my neck and my arms gripping it, I never felt worried about dropping the thing, and my Strength let me fly with it without any trouble. It was a huge difference compared to when I’d hauled my loot back from the bandit camp.

That brought my thoughts back to the bag I’d brought home that day, and it made me think. That bag had contained more gold and silver coins than I’d been paid today, as well as a significant amount of precious metals in the form of items, which made no difference to me. Getting paid was nice, sure. But hadn’t I earned that loot as much as I had what I’d been paid tonight?

Of course, that way of getting more treasure meant that I needed to find someone who deserved losing their loot, and possibly their lives. I was going to have to think more about that.

Ever since I’d woken up in this world, a lot of the things I’d done, and the habits I’d settled into, had been out of convenience or immediate necessity. My choice of meeting place at the lake was one, though it was objectively not a good place for secret meetings. But now I was starting to really look towards the future, and part of that was tying up loose ends, dealing with things I’d been putting off, and settling in in a deliberate way. I had a mental list of things I wanted to do – to which I added 'get some dragon-appropriate writing materials’ – and the things Herald had bought for me were essential for item one: making a home.

‘Home’ so far had just been the cave, and the place where I’d put my hoard. But it wasn’t homey, or comfortable, or even very convenient. It was time to change that, and I arrived at my cave eager to get started. I didn't think that it would be a huge job, but I'd wanted to lay down the groundwork before I got started. I didn't want to just dump my stuff on the ground the way I had been doing.

I was making a nest, and I was making it nice.

The place I'd picked was not far from my hoard's current location. Only a little deeper than the crevice, before the vertical shaft that led into the depths of the cave system, a turn in the passage bulged into a chamber. Even better, a line of narrow columns separated the bulge from the passage, creating the effect of a room. Sure, water trickled down the walls onto the floor, but that was what the tarp was for.

But I wasn't throwing that straight on the floor, either. I had work to do. I unpacked everything from the sack near my old sleeping spot at the cave entrance, and then I headed back into the forest.

The sack was large, but it still took multiple trips and what was left of the night to gather what I needed. When I was done, though, the floor of my new nest was covered in a thick mat of fir boughs, and on top of those I spread the tarp. Or sail cloth, or whatever it was. It made a wide, dry surface to sleep on, and when I completed it with my pillows and blankets I was pretty damn satisfied with my work. My books went in the chest, and then I was done with the heavy work for the night.

I spent the last bit of time before sunrise sitting at the cave entrance, trying out the firesteel. This was really item six on the list, but it was easy to slot in when I had time. I’d found a piece of flint that I could hold, and I’d gathered a bunch of dry grass and twigs and such. Herald had shown me what to do, so I made a little ball of grass, practised with the flint and steel until I could reliably make some good sparks, and then I got to work.

By the time the sun rose I had a cheerful little fire burning, and I was very pleased with myself.

I should have slept like a baby that day, but when I woke up, late in the afternoon, I was a bundle of nerves. This night I’d be moving my hoard, and a deeply rooted part of me was very anxious about the whole idea. It was doable, I knew that much. The problem was the risk. The tiny, tiny risk that something might be lost on the way. I told myself that it was irrational. That my plan was pretty much foolproof, with almost no chance of anything going wrong. But it didn’t help. The idea of a single coin being lost on the way was intolerable, and I had the feeling that I’d have to power through and live with the anxiety until everything was collected and accounted for in my new nest.

The plan was very simple. I had some bags, and I had a pole. The same way that I’d recently gotten some silver in, I could get everything out. It took a couple of nerve wracking trips back and forth, and I did end up scrabbling madly to recover the pouch once when it landed almost exactly in the middle of the crevice, but after an indeterminate amount of time I had everything collected in the sack.

I learned something interesting about myself that night, and that was that I knew immediately when something was missing from my hoard. Sure, I knew that I was removing things and transferring them, and I could see pretty clearly that the pile was shrinking, but it wasn’t that. It was deeper, an instinctive knowledge every time I saw the pile that something was missing, without necessarily knowing what or how much. Together with that was a growing need to find whatever had been lost, to recover it and return it to the hoard, and to utterly and horribly destroy whoever was responsible. Thankfully this didn’t lead to any self-destructive ideas. On the other hand, I was constantly fighting an urge to return everything to the pile, an urge that grew stronger with every bag I moved.

The dragon was hardly unaffected, either, though she seemed to understand what I was doing and why. Her contribution to the whole process was to urge me to be faster and more careful. Repeatedly and frequently. Sometimes, several times per minute.

I also learned that I had no idea about what would actually be considered a hoard. While the pile was shrinking I still recognized it as my hoard. Even when the pile was gone and everything was gathered in a sack, that didn’t become my hoard. No, my hoard was gone, lost, on the move and potentially in the hands of thieves. It was one of the worst experiences of either of my lives, and the panic only went away once I emptied the sack among the pillows and blankets and fell onto the carpet of precious metals, emotionally exhausted. At that point everything seemed to shift, and I felt whole again. My hoard was safe. What my eyes and my mind told me was true. My hoard was in a different location, but it was whole, and it was safe.

I still had to take a nice long nap on it to fully convince myself, but by the time I woke up everything felt fine.

Item one on the list was done, and I had made myself a home.