Treasure Ch. 11

Immediately, she went pale.

Lady Kai was sprawled out on the floor near a wall, her delicate features lit softly by the glow of the crystals. Her hair was fanned out in a perfect, blue halo around her body. She was entirely nude, but that didn't surprise Catherine. What did surprise her was the armored figure crouched over her, worshipping her bare skin with gentle kisses and caresses. His lips touched the slight curve of her small breasts, her milky shoulders, her neck, and as they skimmed over her lips, Kai's hands rose to stroke his face. She recognized that black knot of hair, the shimmering medallions that adorned his robes. It was Jiro.

He whirled to face the entrance, and his face grew slack with horror when he spotted her. Languidly, Kai tilted her head to follow his gaze.

"Catherine," she sighed. "How wonderful to see you again."

"I'm so sorry," Catherine blurted out. "I didn't---"

"Where I hail from, it is traditional to prepare our lovers for battle," Kai continued, her dainty limbs tensing in a stretch. Jiro rose slowly to his feet, still looking uncertain. "We wreath them in armor, sheath their weapons, bask in their company. It's a token of our love, to bring them strength and ensure their return. And yet, we still refer to it as the Longest Farewell." She blinked slowly, looking utterly relaxed. "Don't you have such a custom?"

"I-I'm not sure," Catherine admitted, turning her head slightly to hide the heat that had risen to her cheeks. "I'm not very familiar with those sorts of things." Kai stood and shook back her mane of hair, and Catherine watched with faint awe as it rippled over her shoulders. Although she wasn't wearing a stitch of clothing or her glittering gold dust, she wore her nakedness like a fierce suit of armor. She looked heart-wrenchingly beautiful and just as terrible.

Kai's eyes crawled up the length of her body. "You look lovely, child. But surely you don't plan to do battle in such finery?"

Catherine looked at the floor. "I don't plan on doing battle at all, actually," she said softly.

"How disappointing. I hoped to fight beside you."

"As did I," she assured her quickly. When Kai lifted her eyebrows in query, she shook her head. "Adeon worries for me," she said, and Kai crossed the cavern in a slow, graceful stride to stand before her.

"Of course he does. He cares very much for you, just as you care for him." She reached forward to clasp her hands in hers and give them a gentle squeeze. "You seem troubled."

When Catherine spoke again, she addressed the ground. A thick hopelessness was rising into the back of her throat, making her choke. "What if something happens to him?" she asked unsteadily. "What if something happens to him, and I'm not there to stop it? I don't think I could bear it."

"He would be at peace, knowing that you were safe."

Catherine's lips thinned. "I do want him to be happy. But I wouldn't be at peace at all."

Kai was silent for a long time, and Catherine looked up at her face. She was gazing at her and past her, those azure eyes cloudy with thought. After a moment, she turned to look at Jiro, and uttered something in a soft, lilting, foreign tongue. Jiro hesitated, but then inclined his head in a bow and moved to sift through a pile of cloth in the far corner. When he stood again, he was clutching several shining plates of iron that were held together by leather straps.

"Your motives are pure, but that alone won't save you. You should be adequately armoured if you mean to defend him," Kai said, releasing her hands. Jiro crossed the cave and sank onto his knees beside Kai, holding the iron plates high above his head like a priest bestowing offerings upon a goddess, and she took them with a sincere look of gratitude. "This is the finest steel in my land. I hope it will serve you well." She offered the armor to Catherine, and she took it with shaking fingers. It was light, even though the plates were thick. Kai took her face in her hands and tilted it so she was looking right into her eyes. "Do you have a sword, Catherine?" she asked, her voice firm.

"Y-yes, Lady."

"Fetch it, and fetch it quickly. The enemy grows ever nearer." She released Catherine's cheeks, and pearly scales began to ripple over her bare arms, her legs. Thin horns were snaking out from her hairline.

In moments, an impossibly long, serpentine creature was standing in front of her. A thick blue mane snaked down the length of its white, wingless body, and glittering, fierce blue eyes glinted out from a face that was long and covered in white fur, much like a fox's. It stood on four scaly white talons, and two short, pronged horns crowned its head. Catherine stared up at her in awe. It was nothing like any other creature she had seen before; both bizarre and hauntingly beautiful.

"Together, we will end this miserable war. I'm sure of it," said Kai, her voice no less lovely coming from the maw of such a strange beast.

"Thank you, my Lady," Catherine said earnestly, and then, at a loss for words, she dropped into a curtsy. "It will be a pleasure to fight beside you and yours," she added. Kai brought her vulpine face very close, then tilted her head slightly.

"In my land, it is customary for warriors to bow." Catherine paused, but then, feeling ridiculous, curved at the waist into a deep bow. When she rose back up, Kai's eyes were glittering with amusement.

"Be well, child. Be safe. And be strong." And with that, she slunk past Catherine and towards the cavern exit, her long body slithering across the rock floor. Jiro followed her in silence, but as he passed Catherine, he paused just long enough to clap a comforting hand over her shoulder. He didn't look at her while he did it. Catherine wondered if he was still embarrassed, and that thought brought her a strange sort of relief, that there was someone else in the mountains with her who kept the company of dragons and still wasn't used to their brazen displays of nudity.

When their footsteps faded into nothingness, she let out an unsteady exhale. Then, clutching the metal plates, she fell into a sprint through the winding chasms.

She needed her bow.

---

The armor, much to Catherine's surprise, fit rather well. Still, the chestplate strained over her breasts and some straps drooped as she walked, slipping with ease down her narrow shoulders and hanging loose over the curve of her waist. Her sheathed sword knocked painfully against her knee with every step she took.

When she reached the yawning maw of the cave's exit, she was met with perfect silence, broken only by the songs of lonely birds and the low moan of the wind through the riddled cliffs around her. For a horrible moment, she wondered if the battle had somehow ended that quickly. Maybe Sher was right. Maybe once she stuck her head out of the caves, she would be greeted with the sight of charred bodies and blackened suits of armor, all twisted up and warped from the heat of dragonfire. She tried to pretend that the thought brought her comfort.

She came to a sudden halt at the lip of the cliff, gripping the shaft of her bow. Below her, she saw several dozen dragons lying in wait, their spectrum of scales vivid against the rock. They were perched on towering boulders and crouched low to the ground, each of their eyes trained on the landscape in front of them. They had all gone very still. A lake was shining behind the hills in front of them, glimmering brighter than liquid diamonds in the sun, and in the quiet, Catherine could hear the thunder of countless feet approaching. That sound came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. She looked in every possible direction in a frenzy, looking for the source, and finally traced the dragons' gaze to that shimmering pane in the distance.

She heard herself gasp.

A long time ago, her father used to tell her stories about war. It was miserable, he said, and it was brutal, but it was also painstakingly strategic. He taught her that commanders always rode on horseback, but so did a few soldiers who served to draw attention away from them. He taught her that heavy armor will exhaust its ward just as easily as it will protect him from an onslaught of swords. And finally, he taught her that small armies did not march to battle. Small armies approached from all sides in silence, hoping to surprise the men lying in wait. Only the large ones marched in unison, hard and slow and precise so each calculated footstep echoed in the enemy's bones. If they did it right, it sounded like an earthquake was coming for you. They started far, far away so the enemy could hear them advance for hours. It was supposed to terrify them, overwhelm them with anxiety, until the anticipation was too much to bear and a fraction of them retreated.

She wasn't looking at water at all. It was a sheet of bodies clad in polished steel, endless in its size and filed into well-organized rows. And as she stared it down, she realized her father had been right. It was terrifying. It was the most terrifying sound in the world.

Those bodies flooded steadily over the rocks like a single living entity. Their heads vanished beneath the swell of a steep incline and reappeared again, and then they all came to a halt a couple hundred feet away from the dragons. A man in the front of the line shouted something, and all of the soldiers lifted their right legs and brought them down in a crash. They grew still. A few of the dragons began looking around nervously at their kin, but most of them kept their eyes trained straight forward.

One of them, a wizened old dragon with silver scales and whiskers that trailed down to its feet, opened his mouth to speak.

"This is foolishness," he said. His voice came out in a croak, but it was deafening in the silence. "Leave this place now, and we will forgive your transgression. Leave this place now, and we will not pursue you. Leave, now. It is not too late."

The man in the front of the line shouted something else, and the wall of armor rippled as every man fell to one knee and held up a gilded shield. Catherine chewed hard on her lower lip. Something was wrong. Where was the catapult fire, the cloud of arrows, the unified scream of men charging with swords?

The ancient creature looked down at the ground. "So be it," he said. Beside him, a pitch-black dragon lowered himself into an eager crouch.

"Burn them," he hissed. She recognized that honeyed voice, that familiar tone of malice.

The moment the words left his lips, the whole world blazed orange. Catherine raised her arms to shield herself from the glow of countless rivers of fire, all streaming forth from open maws. The heat that erupted in front of her was impossible. Even standing behind the dragons, Catherine worried that her skin would char from its intensity.

For an eternity, there was only heat and blinding brightness and the roar of flames. When it all finally died down, Catherine cautiously lowered her arms from her face. There was a thick cloud of smoke in front of her now, and she squinted hard to look past it. She was beginning to wonder if Sher had been right. Nobody could possibly survive something like that. All of that fire could have leveled three castles, let alone a large army of men.

The smoke was swept away with the wind, and Catherine clapped her hands over her mouth to stifle her scream.

The soldiers were still there. Their shields glowed orange from the river of fire and scorch marks marred the polished metal of their armor, but each and every one of them looked completely unscathed. She saw a couple of feel at their chests and their heads, as if in disbelief, but then they all quickly fell back into position.

A low murmur of panic began to grow among the dragons. They all looked a bit worse for wear, and for the first time, Catherine wondered how much effort it took for a dragon to spew fire. It couldn't have been a negligible amount. A few of them were swaying in place, drooping from exhaustion. A number of them stumbled backwards in horror. Next to the elder, Grindel had gone rigid.

A very unpleasant thought entered her mind. She felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner. All the nearby kingdoms had put a bounty on dragon hearts. She assumed that it had just been an attempt to collect trophies, but now she wondered if she was wrong. Maybe there was another reason. Maybe they needed them to make something, something that would help rid them of dragons once and for all.

And maybe they were looking at that something right now.

The commander shouted one last thing. This time, Catherine could make out what it was.

"FORWARD."

All of the men straightened up and, with a roar of too-many voices and the thundering of countless feet, began to flood towards the dragons. Three dragons took to the air in a panic, two brown and one red, and Catherine heard a command barked from somewhere deep in the mass of bodies. Immediately, the air grew thick with arrows, and she could only look on in horror as many of those arrows struck home and riddled the dragons' wings with holes. Two of them beat their wings hard and soared out of reach, growing into tiny specks in the distance as they retreated, but someone barked out another order and a ballista bolt came whistling through the air. It struck the red one in the belly. The dragon's body jerked, as if in surprise, and it gave a few last frantic beats of its wings before plummeting back to earth.

A couple other dragons began to clamber up side of the mountain in an attempt to escape, but they were quickly swarmed by men who climbed over their bodies like ants taking down a caterpillar. Once they were in place, their swords came out, and Catherine watched helplessly as the men stabbed the points viciously and repetitively into their flesh. In moments, both of them slid back to the ground, their backs and wings reduced to a mangled expanse of gore. The rest of the dragons dived head-first into the fray, teeth bared, claws flashing. They crashed against the wall of men and sent several of them flying, but there were so many more behind them, ready and waiting with their weapons drawn.

Catherine raced along the edge of the cliff, her eyes scanning the crowd for Adeon's familiar acid-green scales. This was all wrong. This wasn't supposed to be happening. She finally saw him below her, backed up against the cliff wall, spitting out enraged snarls as he slashed at a few advancing men. Her heart squeezed in her chest when she noticed his position. He was trying to keep them away from the caves---away from her.

Panting, she reached behind her for three arrows, nocked one, and drew the bowstring tight. They were practically dripping in armor, but their helmets opened in a little "T" around their eyes and nose. She was certain she had hit that same spot before on her father's practice dummy, and probably, she convinced herself, from the same distance. But these practice dummies were moving. That complicated things.

The first arrow hit the ground and bounced before spiraling off into the chaos. The second nicked one of the soldier's shoulder plates. He quickly spun in place to look for the source of the arrow, and when he turned his face toward Catherine, she tried to keep her hands steady. She had a clear shot. She loosed the third arrow, and it shot through the opening in his helmet and into his left eye. Despite her predicament, Catherine felt a surge of pride as he went careening to the ground. The soldiers at his side jerked back when they saw him fall, and when they looked up at Catherine, Adeon brought his claws smashing into them. They toppled down like a line of little toy soldiers. Adeon swiveled his long neck around to look at her, and when he saw her, his eyes grew round with shock and his reptilian features contorted into a terrible expression.

He opened his mouth and belted out a deafening roar, and she quickly scuttled away. There weren't any words in that roar, but there didn't need to be. He wanted her far away from all of this. But she could see dragons being felled from swords and long, wicked axes, and for every man that the dragons defeated, five more seemed to spring up in his place.

It was going to be a bloodbath. The Unseelie Court had ignored their entreaties, and now they were vastly outnumbered and just as outarmed. They were all going to die. And if they died, she would be killed with them---or worse, captured and taken to face the King. Then she would be killed. If she was almost certainly going to die, she might as well die helping.

As she nocked another arrow and trained its point on an axe-bearing soldier running at Sher, she heard the scrape of feet on rock from her right. A soldier had clambered up the cliffside, and he was staring out at her in amazement through his helmet.

"A woman? How in all the Gods' names did you get here?" he demanded. His voice seemed strangely gentle. Catherine stared at him in surprise, but then realized what he must have been thinking. She was a young woman in a dress standing at the mouth of a dragon's cave. Perhaps he assumed she was a captive, which was an odd conclusion to come to, she thought, considering she was also wearing armor and wielding a bow.

"I'm alright," she shouted. "Just leave me alone." He blinked at her in surprise, but then shook his head.

"Come with me. We'll get you somewhere safe," he said and Catherine chewed on her lip as he began to walk towards her. There was a gap in his armor plates just below his ribcage. She kept her eyes trained on that spot, and when he was only a foot away from her, she dropped her bow, drew her sword, and plunged the blade deep into it. It took a bit of force to puncture his leather tunic, but then it slid into him with a horrible lack of resistance.

He lurched backwards and looked up at her in shock. "You---" he began, but Catherine quickly unsheathed the blade from his stomach and he doubled over in agony. She kicked him hard in the stomach and he toppled onto his back, gasping.

She took a careful step forward. The soldier lay at her feet, twitching weakly, and she gritted her teeth before thrusting the point of her sword down into the spot between his chestplate and his helmet. Right into his throat. His flesh was sickeningly pliant beneath the steel, and she suddenly found herself gasping for breath. She twisted the blade, and her stomach lurched when she felt the sword point grind against the rock. He made several gurgling, choking noises but then grew very still, eyes staring off into nothingness. Catherine clapped a hand over her mouth and screwed her eyes shut. Killing someone who was trying to kill her was easy. Killing someone who thought he was helping her...that was much harder.

"Oh, how the brazen warrior falters in the face of death. You don't have much of an appetite for killing your own kind after all, do you?" a voice said in a sticky-sweet tone, like puddles of wine and honey, and Catherine quickly looked over her shoulder. Grindel was perched on a boulder behind her, his black claws scraping against the rock. His enormous maw split into a grin. "I thought I heard that pretty voice of yours. And it appears that I've caught you alone," he said. "Lucky for me. There are things I've been wanting to discuss with you."

Catherine wrenched her sword from the man's neck, and carefully centered the crimson-streaked point between Grindel's eyes. "I don't want to discuss anything with you," she said, ashamed by the tremor in her voice. The blade quivered in place. The sounds of shouting and weapons clanging were a roar in the distance, and she realized for the first time just how far she was from the battle. From anyone.

"It won't take long," he said, slithering down from the rock. Catherine's fingers felt damp, slick against the leather of the sword hilt. Some horrible part of her brain was imagining the ease with which the weapon could just slip through her fingers. "You disobeyed me, Catherine. I told you to stay quiet. I warned you of what would happen if you didn't. And now here we are, fighting alongside humans, speaking of folly like alliances and negotiations, and I can't help but wonder," he continued, treading ever closer until the sword point touched his skin, "how much of it was your fault."