the root of the problem
vaska isn’t done fucking up just yet
~
“I’m sorry.”
Vaska’s voice didn’t echo at all in the tiny wooden cell, making her words sound flat and unreal. She pushed herself up into a sitting position, her ears straining. Maybe everyone else was asleep. It was impossible to see them, so for all she knew she could have been completely alone.
Someone stirred to her left. “What for?” Pastore was always the most willing to talk of the group, and Vaska was always grateful for it. Being left in silence for so long could drive one mad.
“For everything,” Vaska said quietly. “It was my fault, all of it.”
“Hm.” Pastore’s hand found her shoulder. “I should think that Commander Rezann was at least partially responsible, if not wholly responsible, for what happened to us.”
“I attracted his attention,” she said bitterly. “He already knew the clan was there, he was going to leave you alone. If not for me.” She’d had days to think it through, during which she’d been stranded on the mountainside with a broken leg and nothing but a tree for shelter. Maybe that was why she wasn’t so put out by her current predicament - at least now she wasn’t alone.
“So you did a foolish thing,” Pastore said. “And you could have thought things through a little better. But did you ask him to march up the mountain with those cannons?”
“Well, no...”
“You can make it up to us,” Pastore said, “by helping us try to find our way back home.”
Vaska glared in his general direction. Why couldn’t he just accept her guilt? She had, though it had taken her a while to come to terms with it.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said quietly. “But honestly? Maybe if we were all in a big clan meeting with everyone still there - still alive - and you admitted to it, we could punish you, maybe confine you to scavenger duty, take away your emissary privilege... but here? What’s the point? All prisoners are equal, love.”
“Okay,” Vaska said, “sure, fine, but after it happened, what did I do? I abandoned you all, after Faolín sacrificed herself to save me, I ran away.” Her voice was getting thick, the lump in her throat forcing her to stop talking.
There was a faint rasp in the darkness. “Vaska, I won’t accept any apology for that,” Faolín said. “Gods, do you think I wanted you to be trapped here with us? Running away was the best thing you could have done and I only wish you could have stayed away.”
“Y’see?” Pastore said. “As they say, Vaska, learn from it and move on.”
Someone cleared their throat. “I’m so sorry,” Tiberius said faintly, “I don’t want to interrupt - this all sounds very important - but can I have the water-skin? Richard needs it.”
“Here.” Something was tossed past Vaska’s face. Tiber caught it - he was the only one able to see perfectly in the dark - and moved back to his corner of the cell. Richard’s shallow breaths were only just audible.
Nirn had promised medical treatment, and sure enough Vaska did now have a spell tag sewn onto her broken leg, but the care was slap-dash and, well, a bit careless. Richard’s fever was gone, but, judging by the sound of him, his lung was still collapsed.
“Is he okay?” Pastore said.
“’m fine,” Rich grunted.
There came a solid knock on the door. One of the traffickers called through the heavy wood; “The spiral girl, if you please.”
Vaska rose to her feet and limped towards the door, careful not to trip over anyone else. Her daily free time had arrived - she’d be able to stretch her legs and walk around, briefly. But, more importantly, she’d be able to see Nirn.
“I’ll mention to him, about Richard,” she said, waiting by the door. “If that’s okay?”
“Please do,” Tiberius said, speaking over Richard’s faint objections.
The door swung open, admitting sunlight so bright that a dragon not from the Sunbeam Ruins would have been blinded. Vaska caught a brief glimpse of Tiberius giving her four thumbs-up before she was dragged out by the collar. The door crashed shut. The guard released his hold on the thick metal band around her neck and pointed her towards one of the other doorways on the wooden fortress; the midden.
Five minutes later, she was being escorted to Nirn’s office. Since the whole construction was on Lúnasa’s back, there was nowhere for her to run, and no way to transform and take wing. Beyond the careful walkways and wooden turrets, Lúnasa’s wings beat the air slowly and lazily. She flew at a very leisurely pace, beating once every few minutes, but that was by necessity. Any faster and no one would have been able to stand upright on her back.
Sunlight lent Vaska strength. She wavered only slightly, gripping the railings set into the sides of the buildings. Clouds scudded through the fortress, giving the impression that they were camped out on top of a very tall mountain.
Nirn’s door swung open before she reached it, bouncing off the adjacent wall. He leant out. “Ah, there’s our girl - come in, come in. Let’s see that leg - good, she can bear weight on it...”
She stepped into the infirmary. It was another wooden box lashed to Lúnasa’s back, but Nirn had the luxury of windows. The walls were shelved and packed with medical supplies, and one end of the room was taken up by a haphazard pile of freshly-chopped wood. She recognised the leaves scattered across the floor; that was her tree. The roots were intact, shoved against the wall and still choked with earth. Feeling weirdly sentimental, she followed Nirn to one of the chairs.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but Richard - the red imperial - needs to see a healer-”
Nirn was busy writing another spell tag, his messy handwriting almost impossible to decipher. Without giving any sign that he’d heard her, he leant down and ripped the old tag off her leg. Pain set in instantly and she broke off, gasping. He took his time with replacing the tag, but as soon as it was on again the pain cut off.
“That’s all for you, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ll send you back n-”
There was a loud shout from outside the door. “Nirn! One of them prisoners has stopped breathing!”
Nirn cursed under his breath and got to his feet. “Wait here,” he said, grabbing a scroll and a bottle of some pungent red substance. He left. She remained sitting, her heart still pounding at the after-echoes of her pain. Well, she thought, at least Richard was being seen to. Mission accomplished.
A faint flash on the edge of her vision caught her attention. She turned.
Sticking out of the gutted tree’s root disk was a hard corner. Cracked leather, golden studs. She frowned. It looked familiar...
When she rose to her feet and limped over, past the stack of wood, she knew why. She’d recognise that fucked-up illuminated emblem anywhere - that was the other paladin’s counterfeit light tome. She struggled in vain to remember their name.
The collar kept her from accessing her own store of magic, but maybe if she read out spells from an actual book they’d work. Technically, the magic power wouldn’t be coming from her, but from the runes on the pages. But did she want to risk the dodgy spells in that book?
Yes, she did. It could be her only hope. She grabbed the edge of the book and pulled it out of the compacted earth. It didn’t come easily - the strap caught something, jolting her. Casting an anxious glance over her shoulder she unhooked the mouldy leather carry-case and extracted the book itself. It was in a bad way, the pages damp and mildewy but still readable.
She stuffed it down her ragged shirt. It made a hard edge, but if she walked hunched over it would soften out slightly, the baggy shirt hiding the book. Or, at least, she hoped. It was a pretty big book.
The door crashed open and Nirn came through, beckoning to the pair of guards that held Richard between them. Without so much as a glance at Vaska they hauled Richard over to the pile of straw in the corner that served as a bed. The imperial was conscious and glaring blearily at all of them, but he didn’t seem to have the strength to fight them off. Vaska waved at him. He didn’t notice.
“Back to your cell,” Nirn said, gesturing vaguely at Vaska, then one of the guards. “Go on - you, escort her.”
Amazingly, Vaska made it back to the cell without being found out. She was tossed back into the darkness, one arm still curled around the book, her heart thundering in her ears.
“Is he okay?” Tiberius demanded, almost immediately.
“They’re seeing him now,” Vaska said, almost tripping over someone’s legs as she felt her way to the back of the cell. “He’ll be okay, I think. But I got this.”
She held up the book. The fake illuminated emblem on the front cover released a very faint, tired glow, only succeeding in making the darkness seem even more absolute. Pastore leant closer, almost blocking out the light, while Tiber reached up to cover his eyes with a hiss of discomfort.
“What is it?” Faolín rasped.
“It’s a book,” Pastore said.
“A spellbook,” Vaska said. She explained that the emblem was a fake, and that the spells in the book itself would likely do more harm than good. “But,” she went on, “it’s still magic. It might help us get out of here.”
Pastore leafed through the book curiously. Several sheets of paper fell to the floor - not pages of the book itself, but spare scraps of paper stuffed between the pages for safekeeping. And they were covered in dense handwriting, genuine illuminated emblems on each tattered sheet.
Vaska snatched one up, holding it against the glow of the book’s cover to read. “These are healing spells,” she said, hardly daring to believe it, “oh - I suppose they were a healer, too...”
“No shit,” Pastore said faintly. “This is Luke’s book. I’ve seen them fix a dragon’s broken neck in a couple of hours with those spells. This is the real thing.”
“Not these,” Vaska said, indicating the inky ring around the runes on one of the sheets. If she had not been extensively trained in the use of written Light magic, she wouldn’t even have noticed, and would have unknowingly killed someone using these healing spells. Because the black ring was an extremely rare modifier on the spell’s intent. The runes were all about healing, but the ring reversed that, which resulted in a spell tag that would break bones when activated.
“Shame,” Faolín said, when Vaska had explained this, “I could really use a bone fixing spell right now.”
“We’ve got some of those, too,” Vaska said, sorting the sheets into two stacks; deadly and helpful. It was a shame that Luke hadn’t thought to label them with actual words, leaving some of it up to pure guesswork. Then again, they had never intended for anyone else to use their spells.
“Tiberius, can you read those?” Vaska said, palming over one of the helpful spells. She didn’t trust her eyesight in the low light.
He read it out, confirming her guess that it was a genuine healing spell. With a gasp of relief she took the page and shuffled over to Faolín.
Mostly unable to move, Faolín lay on her back against one wall. Her broken armour had been removed, leaving her in a blood-stained set of arming gear. Bandages encircled her waist, doing a poor job of immobilising her broken spine. If not for the spell tags tucked into the bandages, she would have died days ago from either blood loss or sepsis.
“Are you sure about this?” Faolín said, eyeing the paper warily.
“It’s legit,” Vaska said. “But if you’re not sure...”
“Do it,” Faolín said, closing her eyes. “It can hardly break me any worse.”
Vaska never got a chance yo set the spell tag on Faolín. Abruptly, the cell tipped, knocking Vaska backwards. She pressed herself to the floor, to the wall, making a grab for the book as it slid past. The cell was rocking like a ship in high water and dragons outside were yelling in alarm. Cebor’s voice rose above the commotion, shouting for silence.
A furious roar made the walls reverberate. Wood splintered - not the cell, unfortunately - and rope snapped. Vaska’s panicked mind threw visions of the cell snapping its moorings and plummeting fatally to the ground at her.
Something thudded onto the roof of the cell. The shivering glow from the book gleamed on the massive, curved claws that had punctured the wood. The wood tore. Wind howled through the gap. Vaska saw the sky, clouds, a dragon - but not any kind of dragon she recognised, even though it was almost guardian-sized. Its side bristled with arrow shafts. It tore off more of the roof, spitting fury the whole time, until suddenly the world inverted.
Lúnasa couldn’t fly with that thing on her back, burdened as she was already. She’d rolled mid-air to rid herself of the other dragon. Suddenly, the floor was gone, and Vaska was falling towards the ceiling, the book flying past beside her. She caught it, and someone’s hands closed tight around her tail. Past the monster, past the clouds, dizzyingly far below, lay the peaceful grasslands to the north of the great plains.
The monster had claws like meat hooks and it couldn’t be shaken off. Lúnasa righted herself, throwing Vaska back to the ground, and then Cebor was there, perched on what remained of the roof, his blank hypnotic stare trained on the creature. Slowly, surely, the monster fell unconscious. It vanished from Vaska’s narrow field of vision, presumably having shifted back into a smaller form. Cebor leapt down, shouting orders. Lúnasa was still losing height, a great spray of dark purple blood rising into the air as she fell.
“Are you all right?” Tiberius shouted over the howl of the wind. Vaska nodded, her chest heaving.
“What was that thing?” Pastore yelled, his eyes still fixed on the gash in the roof. Escape was so tantalisingly close, but ultimately impossible. None of the captives could shift to fly, and even if they managed to climb out, they couldn’t leave Faolín or Richard behind.
Lúnasa regained altitude. Guards were still shouting outside, organising for a new roof to be fixed onto the cell. This one was barred, mercifully letting in the sunlight. And within an hour, the door was wrenched open and two unconscious dragons thrown in with the prisoners.
One was Richard, breathing evenly for the first time in days, though his skin bled in several places from splinters.
The other was Luke.