Epilogue

‘Good morning, Lady Henkman.’

I tried to lift my head from my arms and gave up with a groan. It felt like my skull had shrunk overnight and any movement would burst it. I liked Firewater, but I liked it far too much when other people were buying it.

I grunted as I slowly pushed myself to a sitting position and looked at the priest standing in the doorway, then at the four stone walls that surrounded me. There was old, damp straw on the floor and a coarse blanket a mule would reject across my legs. No boots, no sword. Vomit on my tunic and torn trousers. Scraps of the night before flashed before my eyes, and I groaned as I remembered where I’d seen him before.

‘How’s the cock today, your grace?’ I croaked. I knew it was probably stupid to bait him like that, but as usual it was out before I could stop myself.

His already sour expression curdled further at the memory of how my knee had reminded him of his supposed vow of celibacy the night before. Sadly it didn’t even raise as much of a smirk from the over-muscled goon standing behind him.

His grimace became a tight lipped smile. ‘Laugh all you wish, heretic.’

‘Whoa! Since when is being a bit drunk heresy?’ I said. Being a bitch was one thing, but when priests started spouting heresy, even I knew to tread cautiously.

‘It is when you consort with devils.’

‘Now, hold on, Father. The only devil I tangled with last night came with a cork.’

‘Don’t take us for fools, woman. You know of what I speak.’

Staying in Falkenburg while Lucien and Jean returned to the capital for the triumphal march had been a mistake. I should have fought harder to go with them and not listened to their bullshit about figureheads for the people. It was nice when everyone was buying me a drink, but it hadn’t been a night for good decisions.

‘Where is the beast now?’ he asked, stepping closer. ‘It would go well for you if you co-operate.’

I hugged legs to my chest as I tried to think past the thickness in my head and sourness in my gut. I should have just bought the food and kept walking.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He, it, abandoned me here. Ask Fronsac, he was there.’

‘So you wish to name that apostate as your defence?’

‘He’s a licensed wizard. I want to help you, but I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’

‘It’s my experience that people remember more than they think they do. They simply lack the requisite motivation.’ He gestured to the goon, who backed out of the cell. ‘You have until nightfall to consider your options.’

‘What happens at nightfall?’

He smiled then, a proper shit-eating grin that made my stomach twist again. ‘That is when we decide how much help you need.’

He slammed the door with unnecessary force, making my skull constrict even more. Despite everything I still managed to pass out again, until sometime later when a tray was slid in the cell. It was just bread and pottage, both of which were remarkable only for their lack of mould or spoil, but there was even a small beer, which I gulped greedily to ease the painful dryness in my throat. It wasn’t much, but at least afterwards it no longer felt like my head was going to pop like a tick’s backside.

That, however, was a far as the good news went. I was still locked up with a bloody charge of heresy hanging over my head, and quite possibly treason too. I fell back onto the cot with yet another groan. That bloody dragon.

I’d been so goddamned angry with him for leaving without me. Hurt too, but mostly just angry, and it didn’t help that Fronsac agreed with him, nor that I knew they were right. None of it helped me now in the slightest.

I watched the sky beyond the tiny excuse for a window darken, and soon after heard the tramp of heavy feet outside the cell. I had cleaned myself up as best I could, but still felt quite grubby as four priests and two squires squeezed into the cell. The priests simply stared at me, while the squires hastily set up a small table, book and ink.

‘Where is the beast?’ asked the fattest of the four without any preamble.

‘I don’t know. As I said to—’

‘How do you control it?’

‘Control it? He’s a dragon. No one can control him.’

One of the other priests stepped forward now, much younger and almost good looking if you ignored how flat and dead his eyes were.

‘What did you offer it in return for it teaching you witchcraft?’

I stared at him as a nasty, creeping sensation crawled through my gut. ‘Witchcraft?’

‘You deny this?’

‘Absolutely. With all due respect, your grace, this is ridiculous. A witch? What is this, the fucking Dawn Age?’

That didn’t go down very well, and after a few more pointless questions that I chose not to answer in case my big mouth made things worse, they filed from the room, the squires hastily dismantling the table and running after them as if scared to be left alone with me.

The smug priest I’d kneed in the balls returned the next morning wearing the same greasy smile. ‘Would you like the long or short version?’

‘Short.’

‘The council has deemed you to be a heretic and a witch. You are to be taken for Questioning, after which you will be hung and quartered.’

‘What? I saved this city, damn you. I demand to speak to Prince Jean!’

‘Heretics make no demands upon the Church, especially not condemned ones.’

He clicked his fingers, and three guards in Church tabards rushed in. I knew what they did with witches, and I fought them with everything I had. It was really a useless gesture, and all it got me was a split lip, swollen eye and bruised tits before they clubbed me across the head.

I knew nothing more until I woke up strapped to a cross shaped table, surrounded by the tools that would be equally at home in either a smithy or a surgery. They left me alone there for half a candle, more than long enough for me to appreciate how badly screwed I was.

I’d forgotten about the enchantment that Stratus had put on me until I licked my lips and found my lip was whole. My eye had gone down too, and even my head had stopped hurting. Which meant he was still alive, which made me smile until I started thinking about how much fun being tortured was going to be if I kept healing. They’d never stop, and would probably take it as proof of my so called witchcraft. As if I wouldn’t magic my way out of this shit-hole if I could.

The Questioning began not long after. The cell door swung open and three hooded men marched in. The first two tightened my restraints while the third fired off a barrage of sharp punches to my gut and one to my face that made my eye swell up again almost immediately, which I suppose was a blessing in disguise as it hid my healing. Then he cut my clothes off with a skinning knife, but just my top mind you, since the church deplores vulgarity, even if they don’t mind cutting bits of you off or burning you alive. Those are pious acts.

‘Are you a witch?’ said the smallest of them, his northern accent a thick drawl.

‘No.’

That earned me a few more punches. Saying yes would only make them stop for a short while before they started with a new and equally damning question, so it was all a pointless charade. I’d seen it before, albeit not from this side of things. Witchcraft. Men with gifts were taught to be wizards, but the gods help any woman so afflicted.

‘Are you a witch? Admit your guilt and the pain will stop.’

Always deny everything. ‘Fuck you.’

They tossed me back into my cell after a good dozen rounds of similarly witty banter. I crawled back onto my cot, and all I could think of was that at least it was just a beating, which meant they wouldn’t be able to see that the injuries had faded. There was to be no rest for me though. Whenever I drifted off, some prick would come in and throw a bucket of cold water over me.

They started the burning on the third day, holding a bodkin like poker above my skin until it bubbled like goddamn crackling on a roast pig. I screamed like a banshee, but that pain wasn’t anything like what waited for me when they found my skin unblemished and healthy the morning after.

Two priests stood witness to what they did to me over the next few days, taking notes and discussing how they should test how much damage my evil powers could repair. I tried to beat my brains out against the bars of my cell that night but stupidly managed to knock myself out before I could do the job properly. After that they manacled me to the cot.

Time has no meaning in a dungeon. When you’re being tortured, it stretches out endlessly, yet when you’re not it speeds past so that it feels none has passed. There was no sunlight either, so I had no idea how long I had been down there when the tremors struck. The first of them loosened a few years’ worth of dust and soot from the roof, but after that it only grew worse until it felt like the chamber was going to shake itself apart.

‘She is using her foul magic!’ the first priest shouted, as if I wouldn’t have tried that days ago if I’d been able to. This set the torturer’s assistant to beating me about the head with a cudgel, but the iron bands they’d used to hold my head to the table while they skinned my arm now acted as a helmet of sorts, which was nice because if he’d managed to hit me I might have missed the moment when five curved claws the length of longswords pierced the roof and ripped it away, flooding their sordid little chamber with dust and sunlight.

Something roared outside, an immense, bestial sound that carried such bottomless rage that my heart skipped and tripped in raw, elemental terror. Unable to obey the need to flee, I felt more helpless and fragile in those moments than at any other time in my life, torture included. I would have shit myself if I hadn’t already done so earlier that morning.

Those same black claws reached in through the missing roof and tore the rest of the chamber open, and a moment later a blast of hot air rolled wind in, reeking of burned meat and sulphur. I twisted on the table and looked up to see Stratus hunkered above the hole while stones and smashed timbers rained down around me. I could feel the rage rolling off him like heat from an open oven.

He reached down and ripped my bindings apart with one of those immense and deadly claws. I fell from the cross, but it didn’t hurt, not even my skinned arm. I clutched it to me gingerly as I pushed myself to my feet, but rather than the burning pain I expected it felt cool and prickly. I dared a glimpse at it and sobbed when I saw the new, pink skin covering it.

One of the priests lurched towards me, brandishing a bloodied book of prayers, but he’d barely taken two steps before one of those same claws stabbed down through the top of his head and burst out of his arse. Stratus flicked him away as I would a ball of snot, then held his bloody hand out to me. I didn’t hesitate and clung to his fingers as he lifted me out and gave me my first look at the devastation he’d brought to Falkenburg.

He’d flattened everything in a two block wide swathe from the town walls to the cathedral of St Tomas, which looked far worse now than it did during the siege. The roof was all but gone and great plumes of black smoke were billowing from the ragged holes where the great windows had been. Fires were raging everywhere, with tongues of orange flame thirty foot high chasing the columns of smoke into the air.

‘Are you well?’ he asked, tilting his head towards me like the world’s biggest songbird while his words reverberated in my chest.

I couldn’t help but laugh then. It was good, old-fashioned hysteria but even though I knew that, I couldn’t stop. Laughter and tears erupted from me, and I laughed harder than I had ever had before. Or since, for that matter.

‘I wanted to come and say goodbye,’ he said, his voice vibrating deep within me. ‘And then I felt your distress.’

‘Goodbye?’ I managed to croak.

‘The Archmage is dead.’

I stared up at him. ‘Dead? You defeated him?’

An arrow careened off the bony ridge on his cheek as he nodded, but he didn’t seem to notice. I felt the melancholy emanating from him as I had before he’d left, but it felt different now.

‘Oh Stratus,’ I said as the pieces fell together. ‘Anakhara.’

He bared his teeth in the same lopsided smile he’d had as a man. ‘She is free now, and with me forever.’

More arrows were bouncing from his hide now, and I felt his irritation growing.

‘Kill the witch!’ screamed a voice below us, and we both looked down to where the other priest was exhorting a cohort of archers to loose another volley.

For all of his size, Stratus moved as fast as a striking snake, his head rearing back as he spat a stream of pungent fluid at the group. They staggered back and then burst into flame, their screams becoming something less than human as the flame devoured them.

‘Brace yourself,’ he said, and launched himself into the air, scattering their burning bodies like leaves. He flew upwards, his huge wings beating with a sure strength, taking us through the clouds and into the serenity that lay above them. I breathed the clear, sweet air and luxuriated in the comforting warmth of his fingers curled around me.

 ‘We are going home,’ he said after perhaps an hour of flying. ‘To Draksgard, but I wanted to thank you for your friendship and to say goodbye properly this time.’ He looked down at me. ‘Were these hurts because of me?’

‘No. These hurts were because men are idiots.’ I squeezed his hand as best I could. ‘Thank you, my friend.’

‘It is my pleasure.’ He looked off into the distance and smiled.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing. But I want you to meet someone.’ He opened his mouth and roared, not the angry, pants-wetting sound of earlier, but something higher and clearer, almost like the cry of a fish eagle.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, twisting in his hand so I could look out over the wispy surface of the clouds.

His smiled only broadened, and for a moment I felt a terrible fear that whatever horrors he had faced had scarred him in more ways than were obvious to see, but then the clouds in front of us bulged upwards and another dragon rose from them, vapours streaming from its wings and bony ridges as it rose to meet us. It was smaller than Stratus, leaner and more ragged, but here and there I caught the gleam of gold at the edge of its black scales.

It spun in a lazy spiral and slowed so that we were flying just above it. I sagged against his hand, unable to speak as the realisation sank in. I saw him smile once more.

He said something in his own language, a strangely musical sound, and Anakhara spun so she was upside down and looking straight at me, her eyes flashing like amber crystals. She righted herself once more, and with a similar cry she sunk back into the clouds and vanished.

‘She likes you,’ he said.

‘She’s beautiful,’ I said, forcing the words out around the lump in my throat.

‘That she is,’ he rumbled. ‘The scars of his cruelty will take time to heal, but she will be whole again.’

‘I am happy for you, my friend.’

‘Thank you. Now tell me, where shall I take you? It seems Falkenburg’s welcome has passed.’

I thought about that. With Navar fallen and a dragon in our skies, the kings and princes were meeting to agree an end to the war and argue about who owned what, and from the priests’ questioning that conversation clearly included Stratus. I was so tired of all it. I wanted peace, and somewhere warm where I could leave the name Henkman behind, and I said as much.

‘I know somewhere,’ he said. ‘It is a place of spices, endless horizons and storytellers.’

‘Is there wine?’

‘The finest, and fruit sweeter than any nectar.’

‘It sounds perfect.’

‘Then it is decided.’ A moment later the sun slipped away and he turned west. ‘We could all use some time under the sun’s healing touch. Rest now, and worry no more.’

He lifted me onto his back and I settled into the same notch where I’d sat when he destroyed the Penullin army, something that already felt like a lifetime ago. I leaned back against a jutting horn and watched as Anakhara’s shimmering form rose to skim across the tops of the clouds below us.