Exchange of Iron and Bee

There’s a vaguely plane-shaped hole in the ceiling of the forest, letting in the only large spanse of light in the otherwise gloomy and overgrown forest. A forest that doesn’t see much of human-like beings, only beasts of instinct and shadows of creatures. The air in this forest is humid and sticky, so dense that the trees and their creeping fingers, the lush blankets of moss, even the chaotic mess of downed trees and their magnificent corpses, seem to be the intense overgrowth of millenia.

The plane-shaped hole in the canopy above, and the subsequent monoplane that created it, are distinctly at odds with the somber spirit of the forest. The creaking wreck was a P-51 Mustang, one wing trailing behind its body like a detached limb and the other cracked in half like a dry bone, radio wires cut, sparking, and reaching like lightning; its aircraft canopy shattered around it and glinting in the sunlight shining down from the opening in the treetops.

The monoplane’s aviator is miles away in the darkest depths of the forest, in slightly better shape than her beloved, dead plane. Dark red oozes from her cut forehead and her goggles dangle around her throat where she had yanked them off in a fit of frustration. Her muted green complexion is analogous with the forest, and she fiddles with the ring and small charm attached to one small tusk, abruptly realizing the one thing she’s missing: the dragon.

In any other situation she would make it not her problem, but the air raid that her unit had been fighting along the coast of the Highlands of Scotland had taken down her plane and the unit’s accompaniment dragon had followed the billow of smoke. If the dragon decided to stop following her after miles of walking side by side, that’s his choice and not hers. But air raids have dotted the landscape for the last few months, and if she manages to make it back to her unit’s rendezvous before they leave she’d like to know something about if Oddwin Clawpick got shot out of the sky by an Axis plane.

She picks her way through the undergrowth and spindly branches tugging at her leather pilot’s gear, thinking back to Sarge’s excuse of helping to strap her in to lecture her. Sarge had leaned over and ducked her head to force eye contact, the early morning sunrise reflected orange into her dark eyes and in the highlights of her impressively curling tusks.

“You’re not going to get into any bad business, right Bav? No independent brain childs—you gotta stick to the plan.” Sarge had roughly pushed back strands of her short hair like she was nervous.

“What plan?” she asked, just to be a shit. “All I do is shoot stuff out of the sky in my little air-oh-plane.”

“Bav, please,” Sarge pleaded. Bav couldn’t help but think if it was anyone else’s smart remark, Sarge would’ve huffed a bit of laughter and moved on. “We leave Glasgow in forty-eight hours, London rendezvous at base in sixty. Operation Scarecrow commences twelve hours after that. We need the full unit there to have a sure win.”

Bav grinds her teeth, tightens the aviator cap around her chin, and pushes her red pageboy curls to sit firmly over her shoulder.

“If something goes wrong, radio to Ginger so that we can pinpoint a location,'' Sarge adds needlessly, tucking a tarot card into one of Bav’s forearm bracers. The edge of the card shows the top of a white column and a black column; she feels a spike of frustration go through her chest at Sarge’s usual belief in tarot magic to protect a card’s holder.

“How about you go tell your other subordinates stuff they already fuckin’ know, Sarge. Or are we both going to keep pretending you don’t think I’m just wacky?” she snapped, halfway to ripping the tarot card out of her bracer. Sarge caught her hand, rerouted it to lay on the plane’s control stick, her jaw tense and working in what Bav could see as frustration bleeding through Sarge’s usual mild temperament.

“Everyone else,” Sarge stressed, “does the stuff they already know. So if something goes wrong, send your coordinates. I know you think you don’t need us, not anymore, but we need everyone in sixty hours or a lot of Nazis are going to be really glad when we lose.”

Looks like Sarge had her number. Luck or intuition had Oddwin seeing her crash’s location—likely why he was employed by the US military to accompany aircraft units—not her own actions.

Sixty hours until Operation Scarecrow and thirty-eight were already gone wandering the forest in an effort to find safe, open sky, or a village that wouldn’t see her as a threat, or any type of useful military base. Bav fiddles with her tusk ring, yanks at a branch as she passes and snaps it in frustration.

“Because I haven’t been forced into shitty solo missions enough already,” She fiddles with the amulet’s chain at her waist. “Twenty-two hours until they’re all dead and there goes the entire war.”

Bav trips on something that snags at a boot and throws her against a gnarled tree. Another situation out of her hands and bound to end in her own screaming or someone else’s—the past doomed to run in endless circles, with her at the center of a war that enables bullies to set black sheep into their crosshairs. She was just one black sheep in a herd of many.

–

When she spots the dragon, his gray scales are darker in the gloomy light of the forest compared to what he looks like in the light of day, their normal opalescence turned to dim shadows. The crude depiction of a torpedo that Alphonse had painted on Oddwin’s side scales has rubbed partially off to look more like a deflated balloon. The pack strapped to his lower neck has seen better days.

There is also a young human child holding onto one of his wingtips.

She opens her mouth, uncertain. The child is covered in mud and tear tracks, his woolen clothes bogged down with dark spots of morning condensation, little boots covered in sticking foliage. He has a tuskless, pink face speckled with constellations and a mop of curls that, strangely, are lavender for a few inches at the root and then darken to a deep brown. A chunk of hair at the side of his head is short enough to show no brown, curls choppy to nearly the back of his head, and a short gold chain puts the smallest charm of a bee at the base of the child’s throat.

“What the fuck?” Bav says, slipping past her lips before she’s aware of it. “Do not tell me you just took a child you found in the woods.”

Oddwin looks abashed, the bony ridge that makes up his spiked forehead rising minutely above the thick scales of his eyelids.

“I’m sorry, is there another option? Leave him to be eaten by some fabled creature?” Oddwin asks, sounding less chastised than he looks. Bav uses a tusk to pick underneath her thumbnail. She takes a step back as Oddwin looks affectionately at the child, its little arms swinging as its tear swollen face makes a valiant effort to smile up at the dragon. Oddwin isn’t even looking at Bav as he arches his long neck to huff hot air over the top of the child’s head, ruffling the coiled sprigs of hair.

“Yes,” she emphasized. “If there’s a human lost in the forest that means there’s a village nearby. Do you have any idea how most villagers think of people like me?”

“Bav, not everyone hates Orcs–”

“But enough do,” Bav replies, voice hard. The child wanders closer, Bav takes a guarded step back. He points to the iron amulet hanging from her belt, stands up on the tips of his toes to bat at the air around it. She raises her hands in an effort to not touch the child’s pink skin with her own green hands, thinking about how even tolerant cities would tell rumors that touching an Orc’s skin would spread spots of color like wearing copper jewelry.

The rest of the day consists of Bav walking ahead of the soft-speaking dragon and giggling toddler to avoid contact, but consistently failing when she manages to get caught in spider webs and walls of foliage. Her bad mood turns foul as she fingers the tarot card that had clung to her bracer, feels the hours tick down as she thinks of Operation Scarecrow. Glasgow is miles away and London all but unreachable. She’s never going to make it, and carrying the High Priestess card is a reminder of Sarge and a reminder of her uselessness, her new suspicious nature. She won’t even be able to prove her usefulness by being on this mission.

Bav doesn’t realize she’s cursing under her breath until the child—stomping in Bav’s too big footprints—starts shouting toddler-butchered Orcish and human swear words. Oddwin shouts back at the child names of things he sees, trying to derail him.

“Skoa!”

“Butterfly!”

“Sh-eet!”

“Wych elm!”

“You should definitely just let him say them, might be funny when you find wherever he comes from,” Bav huffs.

“Teaching him songs might be a better social lesson than teaching him how to cuss,” Oddwin replies. The next swear word the boy yells, Oddwin starts singing verses of a made up song about magic boys.

“No shit,” Bav says under her breath.

“No shit!” the boy exclaims.

Bav catches herself smirking at the ridiculousness and abruptly schools her face back into a neutral expression, sticks her jaw back out in Orcish fashion to emphasize her tusks. The easy enjoyment that had been filling her chest at their banter turns to ice and all at once, she’s angry.

This child comes from a people that could persecute her kind, that could make subtle digs at her grandfather, her sisters, that others wouldn’t even blink at. You can’t come into this store, they say. Or Orcs have tough skin, you made it through that, didn’t you? Ones that look at Orc’s attempts at integration as parasitic. Ones that think that her people are barbarians, unfeeling and unafraid. They don’t realize that even their attempts at compliments of the Orc race are just backhanded. If they knew she had magic, too? Well, there was a reason magic users got good at identifying their own and lying low with those that weren’t.

She looks at the child out of the corner of her eye, touches the coiffed curl at her hairline to put it back in place. Bav reaches out. She touches the little boy’s soft cheek, and the sigil tattoo at the base of her throat—hidden behind goggles and jacket—tingles as she allows the magic its nature.

She sees a village with happy flowers and thatched roofs, the seaside crashing a few hills over and the textures of stone houses crawling over with moss. Everything looks tall and big from the child’s perspective, flashing by in big blocks of color as he races around a red telephone booth, chased by other children. There’s a few adults sitting nearby on a patch of grass, knitting and patching a quilt in various floral and plaid patterns.

Feelings of warmth and safety come from deep inside the little boy’s consciousness. The children shriek as they chase each other, and the child runs over to the adults to receive a kiss from what must be his mother. She shares the same curled hair and blue eyes, with a gold necklace that matches her son’s.

“Hamish, you’ve got a little something. . . there!” His mother tweaks his nose with a laugh that sounds like chiming bells.

Another child appears beside the little boy with a gap toothed grin and smacks a dirty hand onto his shoulder.

“You’re it, you’re the Orc!” the child shrieks. “Catch me if you can, savage!”

More laughing ensues, the adults chuckling at the antics of the children as one or two pull out newspapers with bold headlines. Invasion! Axis Spies: Magic Users! and “You’re Under Arrest!” America’s Blue Discharge for Known Magic Users! The adults nudge at each other and laugh at the pictures under the headlines.

Another scene replaces the first, a group of children closer to the edge of the forest with their beloved village peeking out between hills. The feelings of safety the boy had felt before are absent from this scene as the other children push at his shoulders, their laughing unmistakable and wild. Hamish feels his lip quivering and pushes back, causing another child to stumble and then immediately push Hamish again, this time with an edge of anger on her face and in her hands.

“Leave me alone,” Hamish shrieks forcefully, tears at the edge of his vision.

“But look at your hair!” one child giggles.

“It’s different than it used to be. It's not like ours anymore!” an older child exclaims. The boy tucks tendrils of curls behind his ears and remembers what his mother had told him when his hair had started growing funny as he got older.

“My gramma was like this,” Hamish sniffled. The first child pulls roughly at the hair above one of his ears, and he chokes back a wail.

“It’s a bit hackit, Hamish!”

“Hackit! You should cut it, hackit!”

“No,” Hamish shrinks back until his back hits a tree, shying away from the children’s hands pulling at his hair.

“Oh, we can cut it for you, Hamish! You’d be less ugly!”

He doesn’t understand what’s happening, and he’s afraid, and the other children are gripping too-tight fingers into his clothes and pinning him against the tree as someone takes a knife to the curls on the side of his head, tugging and sawing at some near the back. He tries to bend his body against them, tries to scrabble at their wrists to get them off, but he’s so afraid of the knife at his head and he wants to push them off and run far, far away into the woods and—

Bav pulls back, now leaning full body against an oak. Oddwin is staring at her in disbelief, and she stares back with a stony expression as she lets the remnant feelings of safety and home drain out of her like cold suds in a sink.

“Did you just divine him?” Oddwin rumbles, light smoke curling up from spiked nostrils. Bav looks at the child, his wide eyes innocent while all Bav can see is the future of a village that hates her. She was right—like many villages in the countryside, this one has inhabitants that could potentially harm her. Sarge, the unit, they need her in a matter of days. Hours. Is it worth it to miss their need for an Allied country’s village that would condemn her?

“His name is Hamish,” she gives cautiously. The boy’s grin is charming and apple-cheeked. He reaches out to the iron amulet again, this time reaching it to cradle it against his palm. The divination wouldn’t have shown her a scene that reflects the things that have happened to her if it didn’t matter.

She’ll miss the rendezvous for sure now, and Sarge doesn’t know if she’s even alive, and she has no trust that they’ll even survive Operation Scarecrow without their full unit alongside them. A flash of the newspapers, of savage! trill through her mind. Maybe his mother will be grateful. Maybe she won’t throw Bav into the Atlantic when she realizes Bav is part of the US military, at least useful for battle fodder.

–

Oddwin whips his scaled head back to look behind them, green eyes slitted and searching. He flicks his half smoked cigarette to the ground with the fork of his tongue, the last breath of smoke curling around him.

“Heavy footprints and metallic sounds. Something’s not right,” Oddwin rumbles, and then he must hear something else following—he picks up Hamish by the woolen coat collar with the tips of his fangs and shoves Bav forward with a wingtip, pushing her hard enough to stumble, as they start crashing ahead into the overgrowth.

A high pitched whine reaches her own ears. A boom. Rocks flying. Earth imploding. It gets closer with every second. Hamish starts crying fat tears as he grips Oddwin’s muzzle. Bav reaches to grab his waist, tucks him to her chest, hopes the pauldrons on her shoulders and bracers on her forearms will do something to shield Hamish if it gets close enough to fling shrapnel or bullets at them.

“Those are guns, not magic!” Bav yells over the noise, mind flashing back to hints of the village’s anti-magic status. When she looks over her shoulder at Oddwin his horned nostrils are smoking and he’s gulping back flame to prepare for a fight.

“We have to protect Hamish! Give him to me!” Oddwin shouts back.

“I can do it just fine, thanks!”

Hamish’s fingernails clench into the fabric of her leather aviator jacket, brushing against the skin of her throat. Her sigil tattoo pulses like the magic is eager, and Bav clenches her jaw tightly to encourage the sigil to embrace her own autonomy.

The gunshots are getting closer, the sounds of whooping humans and exploding shells take up the air until Bav can feel dirt raining into her hair.

She almost trips and falls, twists her ankle a bit to right herself. Oddwin lets loose a guttural bellow. She looks back just as a shot hits one of his long horns. Bav stares in horror as the pointed tip of the horn explodes in a spray of golden liquid. Oddwin frantically shakes his head as he runs. Bav starts to lose her footing as her momentum propels her forward faster than her feet can keep up.

Then there is only air beneath her. She tucks her body around Hamish as she comes back down. She rolls down a hill, falls far, then lands on her back. She can’t tell which direction is which, at first.

Hamish isn’t moving but she can hear the whistle of his tears and the pounding of his rabbit fast heart against her chest.

Teeth snap next to her ear as Oddwin grabs a buckled pauldron strap and yanks her backward, drawing her deeper into what appears to be a natural trench between two densely forested hills. She exhales the breath that feels like it had been punched out of her minutes ago.

“This is why I just fly planes,” she huffs. Bav’s head thuds back onto the ground, and she looks up at the sky just in time to realize that the make-shift trench might be a good place to hide, but it’s an even better place to be cornered.

She moves Hamish off of her body and he crawls closer to Oddwin’s warmth, a loud snap-like boom echoes and—

A bullet tags her shoulder from above. She drags herself through the leaves. Hamish is wailing. Oddwin grabs Bav’s belt with a talon and she pushes him away, sending a landslide of sharp pressure down her arm as her body pushes out blood and she attempts to stand closer to the overhang of the natural trench.

“We have to get Hamish away from here!” Oddwin rumbles through the sounds of gunshots and yelling voices.

“It’s him they’re trying to get back!”

“We don’t know that!”

“Are you willing to risk my life on it, you asshole?” Bav yells. The pressure deepens as she stands straight. Pain pulses like lights. She can’t see anything, did she close her eyes?

“If we can get through the treetops we could be shot down - the Axis could be anywhere!” Oddwin exclaims. Bav shoves him away again as his muzzle comes closer. The sounds of a dozen shuffling feet crash down the hills and between the trees. Hamish wheezes as he cries.

“The risk of air raids doesn't outweigh the risk of getting shot!”

“We’re still not sure if they’re looking for him to harm or help! He’s just a child, someone needs to protect him!”

“If I escape for you to stay with him, that gives me ten other obstacles to get back to base! Just leave and be done with it, get back to the unit.” She bends at the waist to gag bile into the leaves, warm blood trickling between her fingers. When she looks back up, a hand held tightly against the gush of blood between her collarbone and her armpit, Oddwin’s mouth is downturned. So apt to intuition, Bav has never seen him look unsure.

“Go!” she yells. He turns, spiked tail whipping behind him like a fish in water as he launches himself onto a branch hundreds of feet in the air. She loses sight of his shining scales amongst the foliage after that.

Hamish is huddled against dirt and debris, eyes wide and arms over his head. She feels a surge of rage and launches herself away from the crutch of the trees.

“You’re shooting at your own goddamn kid, you yucks!”

–

They’re dragging her when they break through the forest. The ground goes from thick underbrush tearing at Bav’s face, to grass and dirt crumbling over her ruined curls and face. They had ripped off her bracers and goggles, half-torn the collar of her jacket when they had seen the black lines at her throat. They had turned into a pack of jackals, not just an Orc they had caught but also—at the least—a magic sympathizer.

They drag her with a rope tied to the belted strap of her pauldrons, loathe to touch her with bare hands. The group of villagers stop as the top of her head knocks against something like stone. When Bav looks up and around her, she’s met with a wall of a house at her back and a semicircle of adults and children with wide eyes in front. She spots Hamish at the front of the throng of people, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his brow stubbornly lowered. She also spots his bullies a few feet away, staring at Hamish, his ragged haircut, and then back at Bav—they look almost afraid. They don’t look at all like Hamish.

Bav stares at him as he stares at her. She thinks of his giggles harmonizing with Oddwin’s deep rumbles, his knack for picking out the words in her sentences that he shouldn’t be using and his mischief as if he knew, the way he raised his arms and flapped at the air when he found something interesting like Oddwin’s cigarette smoke or Bav’s amulets. His lavender hair counterpart to Oddwin’s shimmering scales.

Her hand stretches out on the ground towards him, but she aborts the gesture. Hamish’s fists clench in his blanket, and he doesn’t look away.

There’s a man standing at the front, a blue knitted hat crooked on his head and spectacles in a constant slide down his long, rat-like nose. The man rips the unit badge off of her goggles and throws them at the ground, his pitch rising as he speaks in a throaty language that Bav doesn’t understand. He gestures at Bav angrily, crooks his fingers in front of his mouth and makes brutish faces in what Bav assumes is an attempt at mockery.

When a different man with calloused hands steps towards her, she isn’t expecting the punch that lays her flat on her back and splits the skin above her lip. She stares at the sky and can’t hear the ocean crashing anymore or the sound of seagulls. Her ears are ringing. Bav feels a hard, barbed thing drop into the depths of her stomach, feels it swell until it clogs her throat and prick at her eyes and takes her back to a place made of concrete and other’s pure desire for brutality. A softness like cotton settles over her.

Bav remembers this soft feeling, remembers being confined and deprived of food, water, warmth, forced by her captors to relive other prisoner’s worst moments and most brutal tortures. It was a cruel torment just for her, and she remembers the softness in the moments when she didn’t think she could hear one more scream.

She remembers the softness while drinking with the unit, how much better she felt drunk, how the others were too preoccupied to tiptoe around her for once. How Sarge had fallen into a makeshift bed and, between the two of them, it seemed like she could be happy again among the blankets and passion and the softness separating everything else.

Bav hears more adults step closer, feels a boot connect with her ribs and another with her cheekbone. The softness snaps like a rubber band. There is a hand wrapped in the long ends of her hair, stretching her neck back and pulling her body off the ground. Bav gets her knees under her and a foot flat on the ground, but a man kicks at her and she flails. She’s pulled back against a solid body as a gloved hand grabs her jaw, shakes her like the person is still mocking her tusks.

Their laughter is unmistakable. Her face throbs, one eye unable to open and the skin stretched tight and swollen over her cheekbones.

The hand in her hair pulls back harder, her neck muscles straining with the stretch. A woman steps close and Bav recognizes the shining gold around her neck, she can’t look away from Hamish’s mother. Bav can’t see what’s in the woman’s hands, but can feel something around one tusk and the vibrations as she moves it back and forth.

She realizes what’s happening at once, and the numb fear turns to blind panic. Bav bows her back, grips her fingers tight into the wrist holding her hair, shaking her head in any attempt to throw them off. A larger man yanks her arms down and tightens his arms around her midsection, like a vice wrapped around her, an anchor sinking her down.

She’s trapped. Bav can hear the cries leaving her throat, feel the tears streaming down the sides of her face and gathering in the points of her ears.

The snap is louder than the villagers’ laughs and cries of merriment. The tension from the small saw releases as it achieves its goal. The hold on her hair is loosened enough to let her watch as they hold her small tusk up to the crowd like a trophy, and then as they throw it to the ground like a rotten apple. Bav thinks of Hamish watching his own strands of cut hair falling to the ground, discarded.

It’s then that Hamish parts the crowd of villagers, fearful eyes contrasting the obstinate set of his jaw. Bav hears his small voice say something in their language, his small fingers clasping his gold necklace in his fist. By the villagers’ reactions, it seems Hamish has shamed them with the cheekiness of a child.

Hamish walks forward, and behind him Oddwin follows.

The men and women drop Bav like she’s burned them, and she digs her fingers into the earth. Hamish sits and looks up at her through a curtain of lavender and chestnut, his small body between Bav and his village. Oddwin huffs a hot breath against Hamish’s hair as Hamish helps Bav to stand, then shows her the tiny bee charm that glints in his palm. Hamish bats at the air until she places her hand in his, and then gives her the necklace with a look on his face like it’s the greatest treasure. Oddwin manipulates Bav to sit in between the join of his shoulders using his teeth and talons, she feels the dragon’s rumbles under her cheek.

“You are a trustworthy one, Hamish,” Oddwin says. Bav fumbles the amulet off of her belt and drops it the long distance from dragonback to the ground at Hamish’s feet. He stoops to pick it up, and smiles wide enough to crescent his eyes as Oddwin unfurls his great wings. Hamish looks so small on the ground, and yet so much bigger than the community that surrounds him. Bav hopes that the amulet will do as it’s supposed to, and guard Hamish’s sincerity. His true nature.

Trustworthy, she thinks as they lunge into the sky. She doesn’t stop thinking about it as the clouds surround them, coating their skin and scales in fresh air.

–

When the unit returns to the London base after Operation Scarecrow—Sarge with a red notch on her cheekbone, Angus with bloodshot eyes, Manny with smashed fingers—Alphonse exclaims in excited Italian at Oddwin and shouts in it at Bav. Ginger cuffs Bav on the head and sets multiple radio manuals on Bav’s bunk, the sections on sending coordinations over comms underlined. Sarge sets back from the rest of the team and watches the bruises lingering around Bav’s face.

They all eye the flat, sawed off end of Bav’s tusk with varying degrees of alarm and concern.

Next mission, Sarge plans for Bav to join in Manny’s two-seater. They all look at her, waiting for her heated protestations and rude gestures. Bav, at the back of the room, swallows and nods as she fixes her pageboy curls in perfect swoops over her shoulder.

Later, when Sarge has to stitch up the torn up flesh of Bav’s side since Manny’s still fumbling with broken bones, Sarge sighs and holds back swears as she dowses the wound in liquor and wipes a blood covered hand on her forehead. Bav grits her teeth and doesn’t push any of them away. Trustworthy, is what she reminds herself.