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I stood facing the dragonkin woman and carefully considered my words before answering. I didn’t expect to lose to the dragonkin questioning me, but I didn’t want to fight a woman who was clearly on the same side as me.
An Elder’s masters dwell beyond this world, she had said, and asked me, Is it Heaven’s blessing or Heaven’s disfavor that you are near him?
In other words, where did my loyalty lie? To this very senior royal knight, my answer to this question was critical.
“You are talking about the gods of Atius, who have always been the allies of those who stand against the demons,” I replied, my brow furrowing. “And they have directly assisted me while I carried my sword for His Majesty. I am also King Owen’s sworn knight, Lady Mirna.”
That was the clearest answer I could give her. I couldn’t directly imply that the gods were on Uncle Owen’s side. They’re certainly opposed to the demons, but they don’t play favorites among mortals.
She pursed her lips while reflecting on my answer, but her tension seemed to decrease from my answer.
I couldn’t tell whether she had decided to trust me for now, but she had clearly shifted away from the interrogation mood of a moment ago. Had my answer been what she wanted to hear, or had she based it on something she had observed in me?
Something must have satisfied her, at least for the moment, because she nodded and turned to resume her return to the command group.
As we walked, she told me, “Stick to ‘Miss’, or ‘Lieutenant’, My Lady. My knighthood is a deep secret, since very few can remember my accolade. His Majesty and His Highness do know about it, but not many others.”
“How long ago was it?” I wondered.
She chuckled in the low tone she had used several times already. “My father passed the job of guarding the monarch on to me when the Atians resurrected the Empire. He had protected the Ostish emperor for a millennium when the old Empire fell. The Empress put her stamp of approval on my employment by knighting me.”
“The Emp…” I stopped again and my eyes grew. “You were knighted by Rephale?”
Only the first monarch of Orestania ever took the title of ‘Empress’, although she called herself Empress of Oste. It was her son who chose to make the more modern name ‘Orestania’ official, and name himself a king. All who followed him have also been ‘Kings’ or ‘Queens’, even though Orestania had long since reached the same scale as the old Empire.
So only Rephale could be called ‘Empress’. Imagine if Mirna was telling me she was knighted by Alfred the Great. Actually, Rephale was even farther back.
That chuckle resumed for a bit, then she nodded her head. “I should go ahead and have a kid someday, so I can pass it on to the next generation. I’ve held the job for centuries longer than my father did.”
“So you aren’t actually a survivor from the Elder Age yourself?” I confirmed. “Even though you call me a Xa-Ne?”
“Is ‘Elder Age’ what you call the time before the Ancient Fairy Age?”
I nodded.
Her lips curled up. “We dragonkin inherit our knowledge from our parents. Before birth and in infancy our minds are linked to them. It isn’t quite the same as directly receiving their memories, but we receive something like book knowledge of our ancestor’s experiences. I myself am only a couple thousand years old, but I possess their knowledge of your kind.”
“Does it pass through that many generations?” I asked. Even if those generations took a thousand years each, it would be ten generations, right?
“It’s merely a single generation, My Lady,” she replied, sounding like she might start chuckling again. “My grandfather was born long before the Xa-Ne descended to Huade, and my father was born during their stay.”
Her grandfather had been my contemporary when I was Senhion, in other words. I was a little awed by that.
“How have you stayed hidden all this time?”
“The last time I transformed in front of others was more than three hundred years ago, My Lady” she answered. “Most of the time, I can do my job quite quietly.”
“But…”
“After the demons thought they wiped us out, the survivors learned how to stay hidden. We aren’t that many to begin with, My Lady, and we don’t stand out in human form. Even when someone like a fairy does happen to notice us, they just assume we’re a Fairborn blending in with the mortals.”
I shook my head in wonder, unsure how to respond. That an entire species could stay hidden like that for ten thousand years… it was mind-boggling. Even if events like what I had witnessed a while ago happened only every few hundred years, it would be dozens of events in ten millennia, right?
“Besides, we haven’t stayed completely hidden,” she added with that twinkle returning to her voice. “Consider the flag.”
There was an Orestanian national flag painted on the cover of the supply wagon for Ged’s headquarters unit. I glanced at it and realized she was talking about the silhouette ‘dragon’ in the upper right quadrant. Now that I thought about it, it actually looked more like a dragonkin in beast form.
With another chuckle, she explained, “According to the Empress, that’s me. I question her artistic skill, but I take her word for it.”
We were finally close to entering the hearing range of the mortals. Mirna went through a distinct personality change at this time, reverting to her meek wall-flower image. She took care to fasten more of the cloak’s buttons as well.
It was for modesty’s sake, of course. She was naked beneath the cloak, and I could tell she hadn’t reformed the raiment she wore before. The lower half threatened to come open and expose her with every step, so she needed to take care of it before we got much closer.
Her cloak was the type with shoulder flaps and arm openings, so she would have to be careful about raising her arms as well, lest she show too much from the side.
Puzzled, I wondered, “Why don’t you regrow your raiment?”
She humphed. “My pneuma is badly exhausted after I come back from dragon form. I wouldn’t be able to maintain one for long. Not until I’ve rested a while. That’s why I always carry the cloak.”
She finished fastening the buttons, which continued down to mid-thigh. Her cloak now functioned more-or-less as a dress.
I blinked. “If it’s that inconvenient, perhaps you should just use clothing?”
Her low chuckle was softer now, but it was still the same. “Then I would have to strip in front of everyone when I switch to dragon form. No thank you.”
“Ah…” I nodded understanding. As things stood, all she had to do was cast off the cloak when she began to dragonize. She’d never be able to ditch a full outfit in the brief time her transformation permitted. She wasn’t getting a time-freeze for her costume change like a magical girl, after all.
Then a certain missing object caught my attention. “We need to find your focus.”
She blinked. “My what?”
“The crystal ball? You lost it when you transformed, right?”
Comprehension lit in her eyes. “Oh… No, My Lady. A dragonkin can’t lose her orb.”
“Why not?”
She pressed her lips together, with some humor lighting her eyes, then pressed her hand to her chest. As she pulled her hand away, her orb was in her palm, having emerged from inside her. It didn’t leave a hole. It was materialized mana rather than material, so it had simply passed through her body.
“This is my heart, My Lady,” she said, showing it to me. “If it separates from me, it dematerializes and reappears inside me. I can never lose it.”
My eyes bugged as I looked at the thing. It had a natural shield that disguised it as normal matter, even to fairy eyes, unless I looked close, but in no way did it resemble a heart other than the fact that it was about the right size. To my regular vision, it was clearly a crystal ball.
This was not something in Senhion’s knowledge of dragonkin. At least, it wasn’t in the part I had recovered.
“And your body’s okay with you just pulling it out like that?” I worried.
I could tell she was struggling not to laugh at me. “A dragon’s blood moves on its own, My Lady, and the same is true for the descendents of dragons. My heart is the center of my magic circulation, but it is unrelated to my bloodstream.”
I did know vaguely, from Senhion’s wisdom, that among Magic races only the Elementals and Elders had inner anatomies that mirrored mortal biologies, because Elementals descended from mortals and Elders were modeled after them. The magic beings designed by the old gods tended to be bizarrely different. Like how Fenriruelfr could keep regrowing severed limbs, redistributing his remaining mass to replace them, their bodies didn’t function according to mortal rules.
I hadn’t realized how bizarre ‘bizarre’ could be, though. My fairy sense told me, as I paid attention to Mirna’s physiology in my fairy sense, that her blood was indeed circulating without the assistance of the expected pump.
That chuckle finally came again after she had waited for a while for me to absorb the idea. “Even an Elder might not know this. In your past life, you might not have ever encountered a dragonkin. Father told me that we almost became extinct in Grandfather’s generation, during the Frozen Time. We barely numbered in the hundreds during the time you called the Elder Age.”
I tipped my head. “What about now? How many of you are alive today?”
“That is our most closely guarded secret, My Lady,” was all she would say.
When we arrived, Ged greeted us with, “My deepest thanks to the both of you, and to Lady Aenëe as well.”
But he followed it with a peremptory, “Head to the communication wagon. I’ll join you there shortly.”
He went back to his tense huddle with his staff. They were drawing diagrams in the dirt with their sword points as they calculated the status of the various units of his army, discussing their casualties, their state of organization, their combat readiness, their positions, all those things. The soldiers across the battlefield were in mop-up mode, but the officers were already getting ready for the next stage.
I wanted to hang around there and hear what they were planning, but he had been very clear where he wanted us. Mirna obeyed immediately, and I decided I should, too. I know my big brother. If he only had that much time for me, something was up. I called in spiritual voice asking Aenëe to join us.
The conestoga-style ‘communication wagon’ was the second vehicle in Ged’s wagon train, located between the supply and transport wagons belonging to his security detail. Looking in from behind, we could see various maps and charts pinned to the inside of the wagon cover and communications mages busily gathering information for the benefit of the Prince and his officers. Light magic brightly illuminated the space within, even though it was in the middle of the day, just to make sure they had no difficulty doing their jobs.
The discussion I just left should have been happening here, using these mages to help them organize the brigade, but from what I was hearing as we stood waiting for the Prince, these people were dealing with a farther ranging issue involving other provinces and cities. Ged’s meeting with the officers was an ad-hoc effort to deal with the battle aftermath while the mages that should have been helping them had their hands full with other problems.
We didn’t wait for long. Ged arrived only a few minutes after we did, with his knights, and aides surrounding him. His senior advisor, Colonel Perta, was only moments behind. By the time they appeared, I was becoming very concerned about what I had been overhearing from inside the wagon.
Ged glanced in and hooked his finger with a swift wave of the hand, a gesture to summon the female captain in charge of the wagon. She had a neat, well-pressed manner that should have gone with hair and clothing of the same description, but she had been working hard. Her uniform tie was a little crooked, and some of her carefully-tucked blond hair had escaped her cap.
“Reporting, Your Highness!” she stated briskly, with a salute that Ged returned smoothly.
He then asked, “Captain, before the full report, is there any further word about my father?”
Ged was being his normal calm and collected self, but I could hear worry in his voice. So could the captain, judging from the tinge of sympathy I saw in her eyes.
“I regret that my last report regarding His Majesty is still my latest information, Your Highness.”
Ged’s brow knit, and he gave a tight nod, acknowledging her words.
I was becoming more worried as well. Trisiagga and Durash had both claimed that Uncle Owen was already dead.
The Prince glanced around at the rest of us, then told her, “Proceed with your situation report, Captain.”
