Endless Stars

“Tell me what you did,” she said. That damn bird and the squalled contraption were still making noise, but they had the sense to get quiet around the words.

Mawla looked at the robed doctor. “Nah.” At that, she watched the doctor flick a tongue, and then stare like one of them was stupid. A moment, and the sifter kept talking, “Doesn’t matter,” said she. “Ain’t your job to care.”

“It is exactly my job, so long as you wish for me to examine you.” The doctor was standing in front of the yellowbrown wiver, and was pulling open drawers. She got out bandages, wire, and a kind of iron lighter Mawla recognized. It lit a flame that ate blood, not air. All this she sat uncaringly down on a counter and stopped and didn’t pull out anything else as her spiny frills twitched and waited for a reply.

Mawla knew her own fangs were salty. Teeth gritted, she stiffed her frills, and strove to ignore the loud fast pulse quivering in them. Coulda been anger, or it coulda been fear. Didn’t matter.

“Was it your job to see Kinri run dewin out here?” Mawla asked, the answer written in her pause, and she continued, “Your job is makin so that my leg doesn’t scream the next time I try to walk. Obviously.” The yellowbrown wiver looked away. If her words were bending the dustone, the scowl that wanted to show itself woulda broke it.

Mawla couldn’t be sure — it was just in the corner of her eye — but just then the doctor mighta smirked.

By way of excuse, the doctor said, “Were you to be bitten by some wild animal, it would be my job to remove any parasites and see that they do not bother you further. But if you choose not to inform me of that — and if I didn’t know to look for them, then I am left to excise only what I can find myself.”

Mawla knew that smug tone exactly. The doctor wasn’t the the first one and she wouldn’t be the last one to think Mawla was stupid and expect that she wouldn’t taste every flavor of the meaning slipped into their words. It was an allusion, what the doctor said, some kind of sideways glance to what they were really talkin about.

Kinri, obviously.

But Mawla could play this game that the forest​-​dweller had started. Better, she thought.

“This is a nice room you got down here,” Mawla drawled as she slinked over toward the doctor’s bed. “Chiller than the night, bigger than my whole house. You’ve got everything all set up down here, even your singing little birdie.” The bird — black feathers, with tufts of them behind its head like fake dragon horns — it was squawking without breaking pitch. Well, it didn’t quite squawk; where a squawk went high, this sound went low. The thing had snapped around its head as if it didn’t want to look at her, but the single wide eye which pointed toward her seemed to be watching.

Mawla paused a breath and looked around like she was taking it all in: the chiming contraption, and the shelf with piled up vellum scrolls and a skull, and the rows of Gwymri glass beakers with tubes whose liquids had unnecessary colors. The dresser by the bed had a little painting which was the doctor standing high, bird on head, and beside her was a winsome red wiver.

Sitting plop on the bed and looking back to the doctor, Mawla said, “Color me impressed, I guess. Never woulda bet a forest​-​dweller could get and keep an arragement like this.”

Mawla smiled, and she liked the confusion that wrinkled into the doctor’s frills. “But forget all that. I’ll fly straight: I am tired and done with getting interrogated tonight.” And then in a muttter, “Ought to be glad I have the wits to not try and slap that grin off your damn face.” The doctor was not grinning, and never was. Mawla saw her frown at this, but the sifter continued, pauseless for correction: “Fix my leg. That’s what I came here for. Do that, and I might forget to tell Sinig what I think of you.”

This was a trick she got from a friend who wished he was a storyteller or a comedian, and Mawla liked the drama of it. Pile on the oil and water words, give them lock after lock without a key, drum up the confusion till their eyes are close to glazing… and then — you always saved the keystone sentence for last place, the punchline that made it all makes sense. Mawla hoped punchline had been less of a dead metaphor in this case; she couldn’t punch with words as well as she could with feet, but she could learn.

All of this is really to say, the speech was supposed to cow her. But the doctor was nodding, her brilles coming clear like she’d seen something in Mawla’s tirade. “He came by here too, you know.” The doctor watched the sifter tilt her head. “Rhyfel. He’d squeezed himself into in an tight ashcloak that was about to tear off around him, wearing a hood that kept dragons from seeing his face. He grinned except when he spoke, and it sounded like something had gone very wrong, like some important thing was missing. He asked about you, and Sinig, and Hinte.”

The sifter’s scowl scrolled closer to the surface.

“I didn’t tell him anything,” the doctor said.

Mawla opened her mouth, closed it, and there was a silence for a moment. The bird, beak wide, still sung those low notes, and Mawla was full tired of that chiming fragment the doctor’s whirling contraption repeated like an anthem.

Mawla wondered if half her frustration could be tied to having to listen to what the squirrels pass off as music for a quater ring now.

Fuck.

Mawla let out a breath. Too slight and silent to be a sigh, but with all the drama of one. She looked back at the robed forest​-​dweller witchdoctor.

She knew better than this, obviously. Forest​-​dwellers were already twitched, squalled folk. This one had a godspat necklace of bones for Dwylla’s sake. Dragon bones. Mawla needed the doctor to fix up her leg, that was it. She didn’t need to give anyone an excuse to remember her as a nuissance, or troublemaker, or enemy.

But Mawla had already pushed, and while the doctor pushed back — she, in the end, folded. If they had been in the doctor’s place… Dieithr would have just smiled while his eyes said that he would remember this; and Wrang would have shut her up with a lecture longer than days till her fangs were bleeding guilt. And Brigg would have hit her.

(And Kinri would have stuttered some apology.)

So Mawla made a face showing her teeth, and she only said, “Must be nice, to be able to keep silent.” She reached into the bag strapped to her side and found the crumpled leafpaper and tossed it toward the doctor’s face.

With how many times she read it, she knew what it said. Mawla of Aludu Dymestl. Charming, guileful, elusive. Of negligible danger. Reward a dozen dozen aris for information leading to capture.

“I spilled everything on the slightest chance it’d have him let me go.” Mawla’s voice was high, highest most anyone ever heard. She knew dragons found it grating, and the state of her throat did little to help that. But she’d lost control, and now her words were fighting that chiming machine for pitch.

Wringing her voice lower, Mawla said, “But sure. I appreciate the brag.”

It, like most of the tossed​-​up buildings on the south end, stood just sturdy enough the winds wouldn’t call it on its dillershit.

The rain and ash might though, with the way the ceiling was already curving under their combined attentions. That wasn’t a surprise, though.

Your first hint had been the walls beside the road: black bamboo supports buckling under the dirt that rain and gravity had pushed away. Well, no, your real first hint had been the road itself: it was “cobbled” the same way the sky was packed with skylands. The haphazard stones that poked up from the dirt looked more like traps for carts than any gesture in service of them. It meant Mlaen, even with how she tossed money around for “public improvement projects” obviously didn’t care enough to make this gate and road look like it lead to a town with dragons still in it.

Earlier that evening, Mawla had stood leering at this mess. She might’ve been the first dragon to seriously object to its look in a while, and even now it was only because she was studiously looking at the scenery, and not anything, anyone, else.

Couldn’t quite look away with your earholes though, not without making it obvious you wanted to pretend something wasn’t about to go very, very wrong.

So obviously she heard when the growling voice addressed her. Really addressed her, not doing that cutesy, vague, ‘someone, whom I won’t name, has shat in my cereal’ kind of nonsense.

“All my cards are on the slab. Why don’t you do the same, Mawla? All I gotta ask is three questions, then the investigation can all fall on Wrang where it belongs.”

The red bastard, head of the guard, her nightmare in flesh, took a step toward her. “Or are you going to run away again?”

Mawla lifted her head, gauging the sky and winds for flight — but she couldn’t outfly the head guard. She looked up the road toward the now​-​closed gate, and down toward town. Obviously she didn’t like her chances of running.

Mawla thought of a bowstring drawn taut and held till your muscles were dying under the strain. Or — less violence, more calm — like a guitar string held the same way. Tension is the word Kinri would probably use for it. Or stress. Talky words.

Mawla didn’t like talking. So she just grounded herself by will, drawing in a breath and letting it fire out, clouding her eyes till they were bloated red with blood and letting them clear, clenching her claws and tightning her legs and bristling her wings and then — relaxing.

She slumped and she said, gaze snapping back to the guard: “Fine. I’ll answer your questions. Kinri can back me up.” She winked a frill at the slinky blue dragons beside her, who smiled her little smile.

“Hah. But no. You think I want to write my report saying a Specter was listening in on this, let alone giving input? Do you know what they say about Specters?” Not much at all. Because you have to be pretty damn posh to care about Specters. “Fires, do you know what they say about sky​-​dwellers?”

“Thank gods the Empyrean is broken dead?” Mawla’s sort — Kinri excepted — didn’t even know what an Empyrean was. But the head guard had six scrolls that she could see poking out of his robes. So she took a guess.

“Hah, but no. Liars, manipulators and mages, the all of them. It’s prolly not true — prolly not the all of them — but it’s what they say. If it were just me, if it were just me and Mlaen, sure, maybe I’d let her. But this is everybody’s business after the market attack. And Mlaen’s other advisers? They haven’t met your little friend. They just know she’s a Specter, a sky exile, and to them that just means she’s worse than the stereotype.”

“And if you mention her sister near killed a couple guards —”

“It’s a bad look. You get it.”

But Kinri was frowning, and Mawla was too. The exile said, “If I’m that much of a problem, then —”

Mawla reached out, laying a wing on the exile’s withers, and she stopped with a squeak. The sifter said, “How about this: Kinri’s here to back me up, and you just forget to mention her in your report or whatever.”

“Lie? No. I live on my word.” Mawla rolled her eyes, and in that she caught Kinri furrowing her brow, head slightly tilting.

“It’s a simple thing,” Mawla said. “I’ve told you how I’ll have this go.” There was a salty anger all over those words. A good punch or slap would be an a easier, quicker way to make her point. But more than the salty dew right beside her tongue, Mawla smelt that awful poison​-​fiber armor that fit better on a mercenary. It gave her pause enough to remember who this was.

The dark blue wiver was looking between Mawla and the head guard, silver eyes bright in the lamplight. “Mawla, I’ll wait over by the gate. This doesn’t have to be a fight.”

You aren’t going to stay with me? She tried hard not to say it, and tried harder not to weigh it on Kinri. Mawla glanced up at the sky again, and up and down the road. Her hindleg lifted to take her a step back from the head guard before she stopped herself. Kinri didn’t know she should have stayed and far from absolving her, it was damning. She thought she was some kind of master manipulator, and she misread the situation that badly?

But. Fuck. Maybe it was Mawla’s fault. Kinri was so nice — obviously she didn’t like arguing. Obviously she didn’t like it when Mawla argued.

She looked to Kinri’s dark blue scaled face, whose wide frills had a downcast that was half concerned and half overwhelmed. Her silvery eyes reflected light like little moons, and her short, cute snout was scrunched in a grimace, which revealed sharp teeth between her puffy lipscales. She really had the exotic, arch features of a sky​-​dweller princess.

The yellowbrown wiver still had her wing thrown around her, but it fell off as the exile walked away.

The sifter watched her leave. The blue wiver’s head turned away on a slender neck, and you followed it down to her cloak, a dazzling storm of colors that enveloped her. Her feet came out almost discretely under the shadow of the cloak, wrapped in sandals. (Mawla was barefoot.) The scutes were uncalloused, soft, and what little of her forelegs you could make out were thin and unmuscled; the word the came to mind was dainty.

The exile had turned away in full, and Mawla’s eyes glided past her massive wings. The wiver’s plump tail must’ve been coiled around a leg, but almost selfconsciously it lashed back out. The quick motion throw up the end of her cloak unintentionally, and Mawla caught a glimpse underneath.

When she turned around to face the head guard, she met with a scowl his savage grin.

Flatly, she asked, “What were your three questions?”

“Do —”

“No.”

“Fine.

“Can I ask how exactly it is you know Kinri, or are you going to be coy about that as well?”

“I’m counting that as one of your questions.”

“It isn’t,” he said it definitely, seriously, and it erased any hope — not that Mawla had much of it — that the head guard’s grin was more than a lie, that he’d treat this with any kind of levity.

“You make the rules, I guess.”

“I only enforce them.”

“Sure.”

The head guard sighed. Grin all the way gone, and in place was a teeth grit kind of exasperation Mawla could almost believe. It wasn’t enough for her sympathy, but it’d probably be enough for Kinri’s. He said, “I’m going to suspend my disbelief for a second, and pretend you’re going to be cooperative. Tell, what should I ask about to get useful information out of you?”

“You aren’t going to believe this —”

“I know.”

“— but ask me about how I got this limp.”

Kinri acted surprised when Mawla mentioned it. Mawla didn’t know how she missed it, but maybe she didn’t have her instincts.

Mawla landed a few flaps down from the south gate. Came down soft on the gravel, and held close to the shadows beside the gully wall as she went.

Threw up her ashcloak hood over her head, too — that’s just common sense.

When she rounded the last bend before the gate, she slowed a bit and stared. One guard up top, one guard down by the gate ready to open it. Weapons on one (something long?) and none on the other. She was a good twenty strides away at this point, and lowered her head as she approached.

What happened next was all luck.

The big guy on top — Kinri would call him Ffrom, later — yelled down, “Hey, lift your head? You hidin something?”

The plain​-​dweller by the gate, who was chewing something and holding a lantern in a lazy grip, looked up at Ffrom, and saied, “Not everyone who passes through is some high kinda criminal, you know?”

And that was when Mawla looked up from the ground, neither guard able to see her — big guy couldn’t for the hood, other guy couldn’t for looking away. She glanced around, keeping her sense of surroundings fresh, and in a snap she caught the wanted poster, bright like it was new. Mawla ac Aludu Dymestl.

She vitrified, and that could have been what damned her, but instinct and reflex were whispering in her ear.

She made to take a step forward, and yelped then faltered over like she’d tripped. Both gazes — she guessed — snapped to her, but her face was again concealed as she held her gaze at the ground.

“Fuck, dropped something,” she said.

Mawla reached out and grasped at nothing in the dark, at the same time a hindleg was reaching into her bag for a kerchief. The other guard was crouching down, looking to see what she was doing, and it put a tremor in her legs. But with her wings she passed the kerchief under her cloak. She saw the guard opening his mouth, brow furrowed in suspicion. Fuck. The kerchief was slid to her rising forefoot. She threw it at her face. It curled around her snout, and her wings, still under her cloak, caught with alulae the edges and and tied it secure.

She breathed a sigh through the fabric, and she looked up, smiling but they couldn’t see that. The chewing guard rose after her, head cocked but silent.

Mawla didn’t quite care if she looked suspicious, but she had another quick idea. She brought a wing up to her mouth and coughed. She had sifter’s throat, and it sounded real because it was real.

“Lovely weather this evening, eh?” she said in a raw, monster’s voice.

If they’d cared at all, it was gone before the wiver saw it on their faces. She let out another invisible sigh behind her kerchief.

The other guard just said, “Just sign your name here on the exit sheet and mind the border.”

And she did. Alwam. Stupid, yes. But there was, against all sense, a joy in dangling just in front of scrutiny, knowing you wouldn’t be caught — and maybe Kinri would catch it.

There was a name above hers on the exit sheet — scrawled cursive and unreadable. Should have merited a thought, but caution can’t catch everything.

(“Yes, Sofrani, all of this is important. Trust me to tell my own story, gods.”)

Past the south gate, her fake name on the lips of a guard, she saw number of “cobbled” stones jutting out the ground didn’t fall off, but did get less flat. On the buttes around her were scruffy bushes and sparse patches of wild black bamboo. Down in the gullies between buttes, it was mostly just prickly moss and a kind of leafy fungus that cared about sunlight.

The red mud in the cliffs southern seemed to save a bit of dampness even days after it’d rained — after days of two suns burning down on it — and the stuff always no matter what clung to your foot.

Mawla’d felt the wind when she flew. A warm southeasterly that smelled like fresh glass, blowing against her as she paced into the cliffs southern, ruffling the autumnal leaves of the trio of bushes beside her.

So she opened her mouth, frills folding back, and lifted a forefoot, cupping it to amplify her voice.

Caution can’t catch everything.

She roared out, “Kinri,” a sound the whole cliffs southern would have heard. That was her mistake.

She had a lot of luck that evening. It was the southeasterly wind that carried the scent, half faintly metallic and half a reek of dragon, and it was reflex that had her dodge into the trio of bushes and she peered up — an unseen shadow in her black cloak — and saw a figure standing silhouetted against a twilight moon behind them, their cloak trailing in the wind.

One thing you probably don’t know — okay, you probably do know, Sofrani, but most don’t — is what the metallic smell means. If you could catch a whiff of it (already an if) you would think it was just blood. If your tongue was keen enough, and you had enough wits, you’d might realize there was something off about it.

But the name Aludu Dymestl means something. Mawla knew it was the smell of magic. It smells like it does because most magic sucked up a little blood just to work. Granted, the really good magic eats up bones instead (better if they aren’t yours), but you don’t want to be in spitting distance of magic either way.

Mawla would say one of the big differences between brown scales and red scales is that one of them knows when to tuck their tails and get their asses the ash away. No offense intended, Sofrani. (Didn’t believe that? Well, it was worth a try.)

This was all a long way of saying as soon as the moon​-​silhouette up on that butte leapt high and started flying away, Mawla hopped out of the bushes and turned back toward the south gate.

Didn’t get two steps before she stopped, though. Kinri was going to meet her here. And she was going to just abandon that?

She could go back through the gate and wait with the guards, but she didn’t like guards. And their protection wouldn’t be much (isn’t much — they’re bloody Gwymri night guards), if the mage she saw decided to kill them.

Of course, if that was the case, what hope did she have either way?

So she turned around, and started deeper into the cliffs sourthern. Best case, the silhouette didn’t give a spit about her. Worst case, she’d kick their ass and Kinri would see how badass her new friend was.

(She had a lot of luck that night. It started running dry about then.)

Didn’t get two steps before a shadow raced across the ground.

Mawla would have just said caution can’t catch everything — but really, this was just stupid. Why did she think he was flying away, not flying around to find whoever had roared? Too busy patting herself on the back for getting the flames out of dodge when magic was rearing its head. Too busy pissing herself when magic reared its head.

Whatever. She reached down to pick up a rock and took aim at the draconic form twisting around and angling down. She had good aim, and the rock flew at the dragon’s head, particles of dirt raining off it as it spun.

They jerked their head out of the way, but Mawla expected that. It missed their head, but hit the hand of their wing, and flipped over the rolled down the top of the membrance. She hoped it scratched the shit up right.

The wing crumpled when it was hit and the dragon was spinning through the air. Mawla took her chance then, and started running. If she got far enough away, they would have to fly after her, and she could pull that same trick again.

She’d get farther by flying, but at the cost of stealth, and payback was something she was scared of.

(Did Kinri have friends who knew magic? Hinte. But the cloak was green in the moonlight, and too deep to just be the moon Ceiwad coloring it. And honestly, Mawla didn’t think she could hit Hinte with a rock. But regardless, the fact is, friend of Kinri or not, magic wasn’t something you tolerated. It was a danger.)

Mawla had flown over the cliffs southern before, albeit not while paying much attention. The buttes didn’t rise as high here as in the cliffs proper, and the gaps between them were less thin, less deep.

She thought of cracked glass, or a maze. Gullies twisting around randomly, the kind of mess you needed a map or lifetime experience to navigate. Nobody had either, not for the cliffs southern.

It meant the simple way to make herself hard to find was to scramble up the trying slope of a one butte where the sun​-​hungry bamboo up top grew hopefully tall. She slipped between the black stalks, and already guessed she’d be hard to see. But she dashed over the butte, and lept off the other edge, skidding down the slope on her hindfeet and flapping her wings to shed momentum.

(Her frills were fanned, but there never came a crash or thud. The mage must’ve landed alright.)

She spooked some sleepless turts munching on bushes. They crouched down low, legs half slipping into their shells, and three pairs of their uncanny eyes were on her.

Then she had a dumb idea.

Turts were nice enough, mostly because they could afford to be. They seemed slow because most had never seen one run, and these wild stoneshells got big. They had mouths wide enough to eat a dragon head, and the jaws that could take it clean off. And their necks — if you thought you were out of range, take a step back anyway.

Her plan was dumb, because it required both the tortoises and the mage to be dumb. But as long as she could fly, she couldn’t see it going too wrong, obviously.

Mawla wrenched another rock from the ground — only to find it was far bigger than she thought, most of its mass underground. She grabbed another rock, and threw it dead at a tortoise, smacking it aside the head. The tortoise growled deep behind its beak. Two more rocks, and two more smacks. Two more deep angry growls, practically snarls.

Turts liked defense. There was the shell of course (even if stonestells were too big and fat to fit all the way into them) but it had a higher level: earlier, when she had skipped down the side of the butte, the turts had backed up so that a wall was behind them. Defensive.

And now, with her atop the opposite butte — unseen, but the turts were smart enough to figure out where — they couldnt reach here. They retracted their head as close to shell as it’d go, and started milling away.

The plan itself was simple. The turts were mad right now, and the mage had to have heard the turt’s growl or seen or guessed that she’d go this way. And when he came flying back, she’d hit him with a big rock and knock him into the valley between this butte and the other. The angry turts would fuck him up then.

If you tried to stack rocks, you might could get one to stay still atop another, if you had the patience and luck you might could get two. But Mawla could feel that this plan was trying to balance too many rocks, it wasn’t gonna stay tall.

Still, Mawla dutifully picked up a rock, and held on to it while she counted breaths.

The first thing she didn’t expect was the mage — still able to fly — went up high, at least twenty flaps up in the air. He turned, making an upside down u​-​shape at his apex, and then kept his wings folded as he dove down toward her.

The speed of the wind blew back his hood, and his straight horns added an edge to his silhouette.

High up, wings folded, they mage struck a smaller target now. But at the speed he was going, a good shot might kill him.

Mawla pulled back, and covered an eye with a frill as she burnt seconds trying to perfect her aim.

She’d rubbed the rock while she waited, so no dirt flecked off as it flew.

Her aim was off, subtly. She’d known he was far away, and aimed up so the arc would line up. She’d known the east winds were blowing it rightward, and adjusted for that.

(Did her muscles twitch wrong? Did she forget the winds would be stronger high above? Did her luck just run that low?)

The rock was going to miss, or at best graze the mage.

And then they held out their foreleg.

It held a club, which they swung hard and smashed against the rock and shattered fragments rained down.

He could have dodged. It wouldn’t have been hard. Mawla guessed he wanted to impress, but the display was just comical.

The smart thing to do — Mawla always knew what the smart thing was even if she didn’t do it — would have been to run away from the diving dragon with a club and a score to settle.

But Mawla was a good enough skirm player to beat Sinig. She didn’t set pieces up and abandon them.

That’s what she was telling herself as she skidded down the butte’s scarp toward the snarling tortoises. The nearest one — who’d backed up against this butte when Mawla first skidded down — was a few strides away and stomping toward her.

There were dragons who were good at running. Mawla wasn’t one of them. So her gait, as she scrambled between the tortoises, was less of a run than her repeatedly, clumsily dodging in the direction she wanted to go.

There was three sounds in the night, as Mawla played her risky gambit. There was the hard snaps of the tortoise beaks coming to a cutting close toewidths away from scales. There was the flapping of anurognaths fluttering away matched with the frantic flapping of the mage as he spun trying to right his course. And the loud thump sound Mawla couldn’t place until she realized it was her heart.

At some point — after she’d lost a tatter of her cloak from dodging too close to a tortoise, Mawla thought of leaping, and that realization was enough to put good distance between her and the turts.

And she was glad for it as soon as she rounded the bend. If the cliffs southern were like a maze, she just found a dead end branch.

She glanced back to see the mage had spiraled around and was again diving toward her like he’d been going in this direction from the start. That was a tricky maneuver and she couldn’t have pulled off on a good day, and never that fast. Just her luck she’d have to fight a mage who wasn’t a piss poor flyer like her.

“You better be proud of me, Kinri,” the wiver muttered under her breath. That prompted the thought: would the exile really be happy if she kicked somebody’s ass? And then a more useful thought: was this her enemy, or an enemy of Kinri’s? They’d reacted to her name, after all.

Mawla sighed. It said something that that was a list that needed to be naroowed down in either case.

Mawla wondered if she could keep up this strategy of outwitting. At some point, the mage would just give up trying to predict her.

Mawla turned and faced the coming flyer. She didn’t crawl up the scarp. If the flyer landed, it would have to be between her and the angry tortoises who were still watching her, one still stomping toward her.

They were going fast (diving would do that), and distance was eaten without them even flapping to slow down, let alone trying to land.

Mawla then realized that the robed mage had to be planning to smack her with the club at full flight speed.

“What kind of mage uses a club anyway…” she again muttered under her breath as she crouched and leapt and started flying at the mage.

It was these kinds of gambits that kept her alive, but you wouldn’t believe from just her telling you. Flying at the mage, she was threshing her wings enough that the muscles felt sore and burning, and it was just enough to lift her to skim above the mage.

The poor dragon was bewildered at her tactic. She kicked down with all four legs, using them like a little platform to jump higher.

The sifter was laughing as she flew away. But when she looked back, she saw the robed dragon had graced onto the face of the deadend scarp and kicked themself back into the air without spending more than a few breaths aground.

Already they were flying after her, and this time close enough behind her she tried to get a good look. The hood had been pulled back over their head and tied tight, and all the rest of their scales were covered by the deep green robes they wore. Their big wings were bigger than her even though the body was smaller, slimmer. A drake?

Behind him as he flew, the tail was lashing in rage, and Mawla decided he might be stupid enough with anger for her to handle in a fight.

And she didn’t exactly have much chance of outflying him, even if she had the advantage in less exhaustion.

Mawla flapped up to an apex, and folded her wings as she dove down behind the butte covered in that leafy fungus. She rose again, and decided to save her energy and just land on the next butte.

She looked around. It was a high butte, only topped by a cliff rising to the north crowned with a boulder. No bamboo, no bushes, nothing tricky she could rely on in a right.

Shame she didn’t pack any of her meaner weapons, thinking this would just be a innocent night out with Kinri.

The sifter didn’t have to wait long for the mage. He lighted down even softer than she, and didn’t even pant, merely drawing in a deep breath, and hefting his club.

“Alwam?” he sneered with a laugh. “Were you even *attempting** to hide?”

(What, Sofrani? No, why would I tell him my fake name? No, obviously I didn’t see anyone else at the gate.)

The sifter snapped her tongue. “Nope.”

“Of course you weren’t.” The mage shook his head, and took a step forward, hefting that club in a now​-​free wing. “Your Kinri won’t have anything to be proud of, I’m afraid.” Another step.

Mawla took a step back. She’d been waiting centermost on the butte, so she didn’t mind ceding ground. She was thinking. Because he had a club, none of his magic could be offensive. But because she had smelt it, he to be using it for something, whatever it did, and it had to be helping him somehow.

Fuck. There had to be clues in his behavior — because it had to be helping him, it was obviously reflected in how he acted, somehow.

Mawla settled her gaze on the club, a thing of aluminum. Was it magical? What would you even need magic in a club for?

“I can see you looking. What kind of mage uses a club? The kind with a sense of importance. You’re not worth using an implement. I don’t need one to teach you a lesson.”

And that was the key that opened the lock. There had been clues she’d missed — calling her Alwam, saying Kinri wouldn’t be proud — but the direct quote? Mawla knew she muttered under her breath sometimes, but she knew that there was no way he could have heard any of it from flaps away, with wind roaring in his ears.

Magic frills? She looked, but his were covered by the hood. Whatever it was, it had to be something that enhanced his hearing.

“Oh, what’s this? Has the mudling finally learned when to be silent? But it’s far too late now.”

Mawla muttered quietly, “Shut the ash up already.”

“It’s not your place to command me, mudling.”

Yep. She was right — obviously she was, her wits hadn’t failed her yet. Now, knowing what his magic didn’t didn’t really do anything for her. But it wasn’t doing anything for him now. Probably he found her from hearing her heartbeat or something, but she wasn’t hiding now.

“I just have one question before I do what I came here to do.” He watched the sifter meet his gaze, scowl written on her face. “What under the stars does Wrang see in you?”

Mawla kept thinking. He knows Wrang? He knows that Wrang knows her?

“The traveler, he has wealth, experience, and nothing weighing his name down. The priestess, she has connections and informations. And the child, he has more claim than Bariaeth. Those all make sense. Of course you’d bother with them. But you? You’re just a sifter.”

It would have been strategic to go cloud​-​faced, to not leak any information. But Mawla was relaxing — what threat did the mage really pose? She had him almost figured out.

“He calls you Mawla ac Gwymr, like you’re some kind of ward of the faer, so he can’t be aware that you’re the scion of Aludu Dymestl.”

The mage took a step forward. Mawla took a step toward him.

“And this is Wrang, so I know it’s not out of the goodness of his heart.”

The mage stretches, bones of his wings and back popping. Mawla yawned.

“So which is it? Is it the smuggling? I know you’re the reason we have Yakah roots at all in the cliffs. Is it the stealing? I know you didn’t get into the market by waiting in line. Is it the drugs? …Or does he think you’ll make some kind of spy? Oh do tell, why does Wrang bother with you at all?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Mawla said, matching the mage’s earlier sneer tone.

The mage lunged out, swinging with the club, and Mawla dodged. A cocky kind of dodge that had her feeling the wind of the passage of the club.

“I will ask only once. If you insist on being difficult, I hope you’ll find breath to tell me between your screams.”

If this were someone Mawla should really be afraid of, he wouldn’t have waited till he stoped talking and wouldn’t have drawn back the club like that before swinging it.

Was he an amateur, or just not thinking out of rage or witlessness? Either way worked in Mawla’s favor.

She had dodged just as the last word was leaving his mouth, and it meant the swing missed, once again.

“Don’t count the clouds before they rain.”

She felt properly smug as she said it, but it might have been better to take her own advice. Her luck had run dry, after all.

Mawla was laughing as she dodged yet another club swing, and she went as far as to cloud her eyes. Then she felt the mage grab her bicep.

She was wrenching herself free as the mage leapt, pivoting himself around her to land on top.

“Get the fuck off me,” Mawla roared, loud and echoing. She crouched down quickly to pull the mage downward past her side and drove back the knee of her left leg to hit him in the gut and she was twisting around so the mage was falling off and she bit his arm to remove his last grip on her, and tasted blood.

Mawla was leaping away, spreading her wings to fly away, when a wild swing of the club caught her wings and kept going till it smashed against her leg with a flash of pain, and she was going down.

Mawla coughed, the wind knocked out of her. She looked over at the mage, who hadn’t even yelped in pain. The sifter said, “Kinri is coming and she’ll ground you. You’ll see. She’s definitely coming. Obviously.”

Their head twitched, frills rippling under the hood, like they were reacting to some unheard sound.

And the tone of their voice went higher, more acidic, and it was like they were amping up their pretenses for the sake of some unseen audience.

“The useless Specter. Might I ask where she is? If she’ll bother with you — and why would she? — then what ever is keeping her?”

The mage continued his approach, bitter venom on their faces, and the slightest nervous flutter to their grip on the club.

“I don’t know… She had something to handle at the market, I saw her there. But she’s coming. She said she would.”

Mawla looked up at the stars, praying herself right and the mage wrong — praying Kinri would come.

= = =

“Bold of you to list out your crimes like that,” the head guard said.

“It’s nothing you haven’t already heard from about anyone on the street. If that hasn’t been enough to convict me, this won’t. ’Less you wanted me to lie about what Baume said so I got to look better?”

“Guileful,” the guard said in some kind of quoting voice.

“Need to be.” Mawla said pointedly. Most times people didn’t notice. If you were good, people weren’t supposed to notice. “Just because I might be lying doesn’t mean it isn’t true, obviously.”

“That,” the head guard started. And then just stopped there because he wasn’t sure where to even attach a reply. “That was a joke,” he eventually realized.

“I thought you’d be quicker on the uptake,” Mawla said. They say the head guard is soo smart. Outwardly, to the scarlet drake, she was smiling. It didn’t reach her eyes. She didn’t think he’d believe it if it did.

Mawla noticed a movement, a low shadow shifting or something. She glanced over, then around, but the wiver was still waiting by the wall (frills flared wide), the guards were still lumps on the ground, and the parrot.

“I was taking this seriously.” He shook his head. “Back the original matter — forgive me for caring to look twice when the supposed truth lands so conveniently for you.”

“Just because it’s convenient —”

“The joke won’t work the next time, either.”

Mawla rolled her head. She appreciated, at least, that he’d taken this attempted joke better than her first, before the Bauume story.

Strides distant, Kinri had been watching them the entire time. Mawla had seen her gaze moving between the head guard and Mawla as they went back and forth. It was disappointing. But at least when Mawla made it apparent she’d noticed, Kinri smiled back at her.

Mawla was about to say something — to the drake, or to Kinri, or to both (at this point she’d forgotten) — but that’s when the guards woke up.

The brown scaled one leapt up like a rat​-​trap’s bud in the spring, head spinning around to take them in. He nodded very slightly at the head guard as if barely recognizing him — without slowing the spin so he seemed to move in a wave​-​like motion.

Mawla didn’t like the way his frills were already writhing, his jaw set in some kind of anger. She took a step back — and that let her glimpse a clue. The shift in her gaze positioned her so that the lamplight reflected off dark metal that would have gone unnoticed over in the dirt.

Copper sword. A patina dotted the blade and thickened to completeness near the hilt. Even at this distance Mawla was evaluating it. Two footlengths, almost no taper to it. The edges looked dull.

Ffrom stopped his gaze when he saw the sword — was he looking for it? — and lunged to pick it up.

At the same time as all of this, the other guards was getting up. Where Ffrom snapped to wakefulness, the other guard pushed themself up on forelegs to sit on their haunches, then after a beat lifted themselves up.

They caught sight of their partner with the sword and they must have read in the tension of their muscles something even Mawla couldn’t have, because — despite all you would expect — the second guard was at the same time lunging.

They put themselves between the wild guard and a Kinri whose only surprise were those slightly parted lips.

“That’s her! What are you standing in my way for?”

Ffrom didn’t even wait for the answer, he was lunging at Kinri — which meant at the other guard, too.

Mawla had taken a step back, and it meant that the head guard was in her peripheral. She saw that he had looked away from her, focusing on whatever was going out with the other guards.

This is my chance.

She didn’t leap. She backed away slowly, praying her dark cloak took to the shadows nicely. If she were slow, and if she were quiet… and if she were forgotten… She should be able to escape — could her subtle motions really distracted from the guards opposite her, already a few wrong words away from fighting?

Or would it be better to leap quick, put all the distance she could get in a few moments between her and the head guard?

She decide to do it direct. Kick distance in the teeth.

She started the leap without turning around, meaning that it made the most sense to backflip through the air.

When she was atop the banks of the gully, safely away from the gaze of the head guard, she turned. She could run now, dodging behind buttes, stirring up trouble with passersby in her wake — like an encore to her encounter with Bauume.

But I’m forgetting something, she thought.

Her head was pulled back like a sunflower is pulled toward the sun. Kinri was there facing the brownscaled guard barely restrained his partner. Alone.

And she turned around again, and saw that the head guard wasn’t in the gully.

And heard a landing behind her.

“It’s a point in your favor, honestly,” he said. “That you wouldn’t completely abandon her like that.”

Mawla grunted something that wasn’t acknowledgment.

“Of course, you have to reckon in that you considered it at all. You could make even a storybook hero look a villain, if a glance in his head found him weighing every choice against the most selfish cowardice.”

Mawla shook her head and dug her claws in, preparing to take off again. But she didn’t need to.

The partner had lost his hold, and was fighting the wild guard to keep him from Kinri. But he didn’t need to.

Kinri lifted up her head, and called in some ariose — the only word Mawla had for it — high voice, once that carried even to over here.

One word: “Cease.”

The part that had Mawla gaping, though, is that it worked: they complied. First — surprisingly of all — the wild guard, and then his partner as if following his lead. It was like there was some precedent to it all.

Kinri wasn’t that close to any lampposts, so Mawla couldn’t get much of a better look at her, but she wondered where Kinri had grew — or been hiding — this authoritative bone. She’d caught a glimpse of it with her sendoff of Bauume, but obviously there was something deeper to it.

But the main thought in Mawla’s head: she wondered whether Kinri would order her around like that…

She heard the head guard take off before she’d worked up to it, and spitting off to the side, she leapt like he did, over the distance and wings flapping to carry her the dozens of the strides and she landed where the guards were watching the sky​-​dweller princess, her features arch.

“Didn’t think you had clout here, miss Specter.”

Her poised look faltered at that, but Mawla spoke up for her. “But it’s recognized anyway, obviously.”

“With all earned respect, Rhyfel​-​sofran,” the redscaled awoken guard started, and spat out the pink leave he was chewing on, “what in Dwylla’s name is going on?”

Kinri said, “Ffrom mistook me for my sister, and believed we were still under attack.” Mawla watched as she reached up to idly scratch her frills, and how the scaly fans twitched and and wiggled in response.

“He got over it fast,” the head guard observed.

“This uh, this isn’t the first time I’ve used this trick.” But there was a frown and doubt shadowing her face. Like somehow, she didn’t think it would have worked the second time.

Rhyfel was nodded. “I see, I see.” He turned to the drakes. “But I don’t think you two are addin much with your presences, no offense in it. But here: fly back to town hall, would you? Tell Cynfe what went down. Tell her I’ll be back with a full report.”

The red guard nodded and crouched about to take off. Mawla expected Ffrom buck against it, insist he stay to fulfill some wish to exert agency and be helpful. From all Mawla’d seen he was difficulty in the flesh.

But he nodded too, even as that wild look was still in his eyes and his frills quivered. Nothing in Mawla’s read on him predicted this, or even made sense of it.

But they were both off, leaving the three of them.

The head guard turned to Mawla, ignoring Kinri — he’d probably figured out she could hear them either way, and it wasn’t something he really cared about.

“Ah, where were we?” Mawla said.

“You were just avoiding the matter of importance with jokes,” he said. “An admirable course of action, dragging things out when you look anxious to get it over with.”

He wasn’t just talking about the jokes. It was an echo of all his complaints about her… comprehensive storytelling. But there was logic to it — guile, if you had to use his word. If he got tired of her early, she wouldn’t have to deal with all his question. She could get on with her nice, relaxing, exciting night with Kinri.

“So, tell me about Wrang.”