Dragon Fire, Chapter Three

Cur’callim. An alchemist’s ancient mistake. Aggressive beasts that stood at a little less than half the height Vara did herself, with a mangy mix of fur and scales that never failed to make her skin crawl. Their tiny teeth were needle sharp, built for creating puncture wounds designed to bleed their prey dry, and their obscenely long tails--which connected oddly to the membrane of the leathery flaps of skin that stretched along their front legs--were capped with a venomous barb. Despite all that, on their own, they were little more than a nuisance. The problem was that there was never just one of the creatures: they were swarm hunters.

“Can you tell how many?” Jax whispered from the other side of the fire. He was once more gripping his walking stick--no, it was a staff, she could see clearly now--while his eyes flickered uneasily across the shadows between the trees.

Varya glared at him and waved one hand in a shhh motion. He swallowed visibly and nodded, shrinking back a bit toward the fire. Good instincts; cur’callim were night hunters, and tended to avoid bright lights.

Not that the sparking campfire was particularly bright, but it was better than nothing.

Another high call echoed off the mountainside, closer this time, and from slightly further east. Varya clenched her jaw. They were closing in, and the pack was spread out. They were moving into a hunting pattern.

“Can your magic make the fire bigger?”

“What?” Jax stared at her, then blinked and stammered, “Oh, um, yes. Yes, I can do that. Not for very long though, I don’t have the proper components--”

“I will tell you when.”

He nodded, going silent as they both stared out into the dark. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that his knuckles had gone white where he gripped the staff.

“...Just don’t let the tail hit you, and you’ll be fine,” she told him gruffly. Hopefully that was at least in the vicinity of comforting.

Judging by the dry look he gave her in response, it was not.

Well, she’d tried.

“Wait.” She held one hand up toward him, fingers splayed, as her eyes continued to search the gloom. There was a skittering, rustling sound of claws and wings against and over the rocky earth. Closer, closer…closer…

“Now!”

Jax shouted a word that crackled in a way so reminiscent of Drakyn that it nearly made her turn, and she felt the fire at her back flare high with sudden heat and light. The pack of cur’callim was abruptly thrown into sharp relief, their needle teeth glinting dully in the light as they hissed and cowered from the flames. At least a dozen, maybe more in the trees.

Varya fell back toward the fire, ignoring the surge of heat against her spine as she quickly slotted her dagger into place in its sheath above the quiver at her hip, and slung her bow off her back in the next breath. One breath in, arrow to the string, draw, release, breathe out. In, arrow, draw, release, out. In, arrow, draw, release, out.

Five cur’callim fell in quick succession, wailing and screeching as her arrows found their mark. She hardly even bothered to aim, holding her targets in her mind as she fired at the semi-circle that had formed around the edge of Jax’s camp. She didn’t need to kill them all, just prove that they were too costly a meal to be worth pursuing.

She felt movement at her side; she didn’t need to look to know it was the human falling in beside her, murmuring in his magic tongue under his breath as he held his staff out parallel to the ground in front of them, then abruptly spun it back over his head before striking the butt of it sharply against the earth. The handful of cur’callim that had begun to creep around the edges of Varya’s established perimeter were suddenly thrown back as the soil beneath their feet swelled up in a small wave and lashed toward them.

“Fire’s dying down,” Jax panted, falling back a step. Varya spared him a glance, and was surprised to see sweat beading his brow while he blinked furiously as though trying to clear spots from his eyes.

She didn’t have time to question it. About half the pack had fallen back into the further shadows, watching them warily with gleaming eyes, but they hadn’t given up entirely yet. As the flames shrank behind her, taking their heat and light with them, Varya shouldered her bow and drew her knife in the same smooth motion.

The boldest of the cur’callim, a little larger than his fellows, with brownish-green teeth bared, suddenly lunged for her. She spun out of the way, slashing at the creature as his pounce brought him flying past her. She felt the blade dig into flesh, heard the screech, but she didn’t have time to see where he fell before another was leaping for her back. She started to duck, intending to roll away, but as her head dropped a sudden blast of wind whipped her hair back so sharply that it stung, and the cur’callim was thrown back into a tree behind her.

She swung her head around to see Jax leaning heavily on his staff, one arm outstretched in her direction, clothes and hair fluttering in what was left of the wind. He shot her vaguely cocky, albeit tired, grin.

“Magic,” he told her with a shrug.

Varya found herself starting to smile back–just a little–but then movement behind him drew her eyes and she sprang to her feet, throwing herself toward him with a snarl. Jax staggered back, wide-eyed; her shoulder clipped his, knocking him to the side just in time to avoid the cur’callim’s tail that had been lashing toward him

The barb scratched over her arm instead, eliciting another snarl as she whirled and kicked out at the creature. Her foot connected with a solid thump, which was followed by a yelp as the little menace skidded far too close to the fire for comfort and quickly scampered back off into the dark, limping slightly.

She whirled on what was left of the pack, growling in low, crackling Drakyn, “Begone, filthy scavengers!"

Perhaps it was the surprise to hear the dragonish tongue from the mouth of a small, soft-skinned human. Or perhaps the vicious little hunters recognized the sound of it–it wouldn’t surprise her, with the amount of times her family had driven packs from their den–and assumed that where came the dragon tongue, dragons would follow.

The remainder of the pack scattered, yipping and shrieking as they vanished into the night.

Varya’s shoulders slumped and she rocked back one step, then another, panting lightly. She glanced down at her arm and hissed, twisting to try to get the wound from the little bastard’s tail into the light.

The flesh was already greening at the edges of the cut–it was barely more than a scratch, really, but it was enough for the venom to enter her system. “Sky fires blast it,” she muttered, words already starting to slur. Cur’callim venom wasn’t always fatal, but it was fast-acting. She was too far from the den, there was no way she could get to help in time…

“Here, here, easy, you’re alright.”

The voice registered before the feeling of being held upright; it took her several long heartbeats to realize that her knees had buckled, and Jax had evidently managed to steady her before she collapsed entirely.

“Let me look,” he said in a low, calm voice. She was actually a little surprised by the sudden change in his manner; he had been so clearly afraid of the cur’callim, and flagging badly near the end of the fight. But now he seemed collected and in control, despite the lingering sweat on his brow. He guided them both to the ground to kneel facing each other. “It just got your arm, right? The barb didn’t hit you anywhere else?”

Varya nodded blearily and lifted her arm when he took her wrist lightly and guided it a little further into the firelight. Jax hissed under his breath and rolled her sleeve back with a kind of practiced efficiency that made her think this wasn’t his first experience patching up wounds.

But patching won’t do much good against the venom, it doesn’t matter how well–

“Now this is going to tingle a bit, but just for a moment,” he warned her suddenly, then placed his palm lightly over the cut and splayed his fingers along her arm. His eyes narrowed, and for the barest heartbeat she thought the green of them flared brighter–but no, no it must only have been a trick of the firelight and her spinning vision.

He was right. It did tingle, like a hundred tiny insects skittering over the skin around her wound. She growled and flinched back, but Jax didn’t let go, keeping one hand lightly on the cut as he murmured words she had no hope of understanding in a repetitive, rhythmic litany. The skittering, tingling feeling intensified into an unbearable itch--but before she could truly react to that, it stopped.

Jax sat back heavily on his heels and exhaled, eyes closing as he tipped his head back. Varya found herself just staring at her arm in bald amazement.

The wound was gone. All that remained was a thin silver scar from the back of her wrist halfway back to her elbow. And she felt fine: no lingering nausea or vertigo, no blurred vision, no burning in her blood or aching in her flesh from the venom. She was completely healed.

“How–what did you…?”

Jax chuckled tiredly and dropped his head forward again to look at her. “Healing spell. It normally doesn’t take that much out of me, but with the way I was throwing magic at the cur’callim and trying to counteract the venom, it was…strenuous.”

Varya gaped at him. “You can just…do that?”

He laughed breathlessly again and ran a hand through his hair, smearing dust through the coppery curls. “Well…yes. I mean, it isn’t the easiest spell, but I couldn’t just leave you, could I?” His mouth twisted sourly at the corners. “That thing only got you because you were covering me. I owed you.” He paused, exhaled, then amended quietly, “I owe you.”

Varya furrowed her brow at him. “No you don’t,” she said gruffly, rocking gracefully up to her feet.

Jax scrambled up after her. “Yes, I do,” he insisted. “You took that blow for me, and you fought off most of that hoard yourself. Healing you was the literal least I could do.”

That seemed like a bit of an exaggeration to her–Jax’s magic had certainly been useful against the little beasts–but he was looking at her so earnestly, guilt and awe warring in his eyes, that she found her protests dying in her throat.

She shook her head, but she didn’t say anything, glancing away from him. Silence stretched between them, before Jax cleared his throat and offered cautiously, “Do you…need a fire for the night? With that pack gone I doubt there’ll be anything else too dangerous in the area, if you wanted to–”

“No.”

They both went quiet, equally taken aback by the vehemence in her tone. Varya cleared her throat, then tried again a little more gently, “No…thank you. I…should be getting back. But I…appreciate the offer.”

“Getting back?” He frowned. “It’s pitch black out there. Surely it isn’t safe–”

“I’ll manage.” She softened the abrupt words as much as she could with her best attempt at a friendly smile. “Really. Thank you, but I’ll be alright.”

Jax raised his hands in defeat. “Very well, if you insist. I still think you’re mad to be going out there on your own this late.”

Varya chuckled at that, and his mouth twitched at one corner. His expression sobered quickly and he muttered, “I still don’t feel right about this. You quite probably saved my life tonight–are you sure there’s nothing I can…wait a moment.”

His eyes suddenly lit with excitement and he spun to snatch up the small traveler’s pack left flung beside his bedroll. He began hunting through it, then popped back up with a triumphant, “Ha!”

He turned back to her, grinning, and held out…a shell.

“Here, take it.”

Varya stared at it. It looked like a perfectly ordinary shell–lovely in its own way, like so much of her mother’s favored hoard, swirled in pinks and creams with a sandy ripple along its outer edges, but not exactly something she would have expected an apprentice mage to pull from his bag.

“What…is it?”

“A seashell,” he replied, cheerfully unhelpful. When she gave him a very dry look, his grin turned a little sheepish and he elaborated, “It’s part of a set, actually. They’re enchanted–y’know how if you hold a shell up to your ear, you can hear the ocean?”

She nodded slowly. Mam had let her try it once, when she was younger; she’d explained that dragons were far too large, and their ears were set too deep into their skulls, for the trick to work. But Varya was just the right size for the echo of her rushing blood to mimic the sound of waves against a shoreline. She’d loved it, once, just sitting there and holding a shell to her ear, imagining what it would be like to see those waves with her own eyes.

It was a habit she’d grown out of. She eyed Jax’s shell with a combination of confusion and wariness. “Yeessss…?”

He laughed quietly. “Right, so, this is…a little bit like that, but not really. You see, the spell that links this shell with its match means that if you speak into this one, the person who has the other one can hear what you say.” His smile turned a little crooked. “Florianne gave it to me before I left, in case I got myself into the sort of trouble I couldn’t get out of on my own. But since I’ll be heading home in the morning…”

Varya’s eyes widened. She looked from his face to the shell and back several times. “You mean…if I speak into that shell…you will hear me?”

“Yes, but the enchantment only works once,” Jax said quickly. He flourished the shell slightly. “Still, if you ever need a favor…I owe you one. Take it.”

She shouldn’t. She really shouldn’t. It was bad enough that she’d gone after a human’s tracks on her own, that she’d shared a fire with him, that she’d put herself in danger to protect him from cur’callim. This should be the end of it. She needed to go home.

She took the shell. Slowly, with great wariness, but she took it, and tucked it carefully into the folds of her tunic, kept safe cushioned by shed-scale lining against her breastbone.

Jax grinned at her and nodded, sweeping into an elegant half-bow. “It’s been a pleasure, Varya of the Mountains. An odd pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. Safe travels.”

Varya nodded, her own mouth quirking into the barest hint of a smile. “Safe travels, Jaxen of the City.”

Before she could spend another moment thinking about it, she darted away into the trees.

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