“What are you doing here?” Lindír said. Not that he didn’t already know the answer.
“Ásgeir asked me to serve as his last line of defense, myself and my followers. But I have fought dragons before, and I know what I am capable of. They have cleared the first court of innocents, so we may fight alone.”
Razan paused. From a distance, Lindír could not read her emotions, or see much of her face at all. He knew that she was within bowshot, though, and crouched low in anticipation of an attack.
“I tried to warn you that your brother was beyond you. All I ever wanted was to warn you.”
Lindír’s head sank low, and her wounds weighed on her. Despite her best efforts, despite all that had taken place, she could not help but slip back into the old familiarity. “Words could not contain it. And besides: this was a matter of the heart, so I doubt any warning would have had much of an effect.”
“I suppose you are like him in that way. Both forces to be reckoned with, and not easily dissuaded from—”
Lindír growled. “Yes, indeed, a force to be reckoned with. A pillar of masculinity, my brother is, a strength which pounds in and out as waves against the shore.”
Another silence fell, interrupted only by the distant sound of cracking wood. Something within the castle was on the brink of collapse, creaking as the accumulated damage from all the fires left burning too long edged closer and closer to the point of no return.
“Would you believe me if I were to tell you that I have not seen his bare face since that day, on Stokvöllur field? He was my commander, Lindír.”
“Commander, yes,” Lindír hissed. “And soon your king. I imagine he will want heirs, assuming he hasn’t issued any already.”
That was the first thing which broke the shell of Razan’s stoicism. “Do not mock my intelligence! I am no more a slave to my passions than you. Do you think I have never regretted what I have done?”
“Yes, write a poem to your regrets, Captain of the Akunian Legion. Sing long and sweet of your misery, while your dulcet tones echo across the dungeon of my childhood and the ashes of Stokvöllur.”
Lindír advanced a step, his anger inflamed. Razan instantaneously drew an arrow from her quiver, placing it against the bowstring, but did not raise her weapon.
“It was a war! One could sooner hold back a sandstorm than restrain an army that has just won a siege, and yet still I had men executed for breaking the sanctity of the temples.”
Another step forward. “You were still at Ásgeir’s side, as you have been for the last seven years.”
“I could not abandon this kingdom,” Razan said. Her bow raised a degree. “I am bound to this kingdom.”
“Just as I am bound to its destruction.”
Lindír made the first move, rushing down the hill in a six-limbed gallop. But Razan’s reflexes were without equal, and before Lindír had taken two steps she had raised her bow to her shoulder, drawn, aimed, and let fly. The arrow went wide, deflecting off the top of Lindír’s skull, but it was not the last that Razan had to offer. Before the arrow even hit home, a whistle and a tap of her heel had sent the courser off at a gallop. Razan turned at the hips, the heave of its back having no effect on the steadiness of her aim, and with the perfected motion of a skilled soldier she drew another arrow. No archery Lindír had ever seen was as quick: it was as though the bow held no resistance at all, but merely followed the will of the archer.
It was the second arrow which reminded Lindír to be afraid. It struck painfully, knocking off one of the malformed scales at the very edge of the flaw at his chest. Razan knew his weak points, and at so close a range it was almost certain that she would eventually strike true. As her steed sprinted away, Lindír swerved to follow.
But the chase was a trap. At full strength, uninjured, racing over entirely open ground, Lindír may have been able to catch up. But in his broken state, and with the countless impediments of the structures populating the first ward, it was a fool’s errand. Razan stayed at a cautious distance, steering with her legs while she fired an arrow, then another, then another, then another. Arrows deflected off Lindír’s jaw and skull, one of them coming so close to striking his mouth that he tasted splinters.
Brain soon caught up to anger, and Lindír ducked to the side, seeking cover behind a low stone smithy. Another arrow shattered against the cobbles. He knew that he needed to catch Razan unawares, trip her up, outwit her. But Lindír’s brain was a fog of hatred and regret, and worse still, the single blow his brother had lain upon him had still left him half-deaf. The thunder of hoofbeats appeared to come from every direction at once.
So swift was Razan upon her black courser, and so befuddled was the dragon, that it seemed that one warrior had transformed into an entire company, striking at her prey as might a pack of wolves. Lindír would hear her approach, spin about, feel the bite of an arrow across his face, and see only a black blur before she had vanished once more into cover. It was almost mocking, the way Razan fought him. Never charging home, only ever stinging at him with her fletched barbs before retreating once again. Lindír dashed from building to building, from shelter to shelter, in search of her, in search of some spot where he could make ambush against her; but always his size proved the ultimate disadvantage. The sound of hoofbeats, distorted by exhaustion, became a mocking ovation.
Until the hoofbeats stopped. While Lindír rested himself against the side of a long warehouse, the first ward fell eerily silent. The silence roused Lindír’s attention. He raised his head cautiously, looked about, saw nothing. Razan would not have given up so easily, and Lindír had given her not a scratch, let alone an injury severe enough to end the fight.
Sight and sound were both rendered useless. But a familiar scent came to Lindír’s nostrils. He remembered, quite unwillingly, that evening in his dungeon, the first time he had ever been able to sit and talk to another speaking creature as an equal. He remembered the desperate flight, the pangs of his first love so cruelly torn apart by fate. All of these things were brought to the fore by the faintest of scents. The thin odor of Razan’s sweat was on the air. She was nearby; and if she was nearby yet could not be seen…
Lindír burst through the wall of the warehouse as though it were dry thatch, and dashed through and over its sparse contents with the agility and fury of a charging bull. When he reached the far wall, his bulk alone exploding it into so many splinters, Razan’s courser was already running from where she had let it rest on the far side. But Lindír, for once, held the advantage of momentum, and the horse could not build speed quickly enough. His draconic instincts, the instincts of the hunt, took over, and with all six limbs Lindír leapt forward, extending his neck in the manner of a striking asp. The courser’s legs were torn out from under it, bones shattered and tendons severed as it was sent toppling end over end. Razan was cast from its back.
But she did not fall. Her momentum hurled her forward as the animal fell out from under her, but her feet did not leave its back for a crucial moment. Using the dying beast as a stepping stone, Al-Khanjar leapt, propelling herself skyward and, with the same motion, imparting onto herself just enough of a rotation to turn about and face the dragon. Lindír’s eye flickered up to follow the movement, that impossible arc, and saw an arrow already nocked and aimed squarely back at it. Even in defeat, dismounted, Razan found victory. She let the arrow fly.
Everything crashed down at once, the horse spilling onto its side and shattering its own neck, Lindír falling onto his belly as a sharp pain radiated from his face, Razan landing in an awkward spinning tumble some several arms ahead of them. Lindír was too far gone even to scream. He could not shut his left eye, and each time he turned it he could feel the rough wood of the arrow’s shaft scraping against its inner surface.
It was Razan who rose first. Groaning with soreness she pulled herself together, standing up more like a marionette controlled by an unskilled puppeteer than a warrior. Her bow had never left her hand. She went to nock another arrow, but found her quiver empty; it was her final shot that had embedded itself in Lindír’s lacrimal gland. Instead, she strode forward, finding still strapped to the corpse of her steed her final resort: a lance.
“Get up, Lindír,” she said. “I know that you are not dead yet.”
Pain. Pain. Pain everywhere. How Lindír was not dead with a shaft sticking out from his eye socket, even he did not know.
“Come on!” Razan shouted with a sergeant’s harshness. “Will you not fight for your freedom?”
No matter how far you fly, how long you look, you will never find the freedom that you seek.
Lindír rocked, planting his wing-claws, pressing his back legs against the grass, and pushing until there was once again cold night air below his belly. The lance which Razan now held level in a middle guard was not Harthbrot, but neither was it like any lance which Lindír had ever known. It was a third again as long as its wielder was tall, with a haft of wood and a blade of steel, but the steel glowed blue with corona discharge.
Head low and limbs spread, Lindír began to circle, and before long Razan followed. This close, he could see her expression properly. Brow furrowed, eyes narrow, it was the focused expression of a warrior; and yet she could not help but keep a deep sadness from spilling into the cast of her lips.
Lindír tested her guard with a languid swipe of his wing. She met it easily, meeting his swing with her own, and despite the enormous mismatch between their strengths and sizes she knocked the blow off-balance. He tested her speed, too, dashing forward and to the right in an attempt to outpace her spear’s ability to track his position. In this, too, he failed; Razan drew the spear in, tossing its length down in her grip until she could whirl it about in the manner of a staff-fighter. She moved in wide arcs like a dance of the sands, commanding space out of proportion to her diminutive size.
It was a slow duel, fought between a dragon with barely the strength to stand and a human woman who could not afford a single error. They tested one another, the knightess leaping forward to rain down rapid stabs which Lindír would slither past, the dragon sweeping his tail in vast arcs which Razan would, inevitably, dance away from.
She fought so beautifully. Strength, speed, agility and skill in perfect concert. Lindír had fought humans before, hundreds of them, and never once had he seen a human whose mastery of the combat art was so complete. It would be a tragedy to kill her, to dig the key from her heart; but he did not have any other choice. She had done the same thing to him, once, after all. And she would not grant him any mercy.
“I never told you how I ended up here, did I?” said Razan.
They circled each other, far enough apart that neither could close the distance quickly.
“When they took us from the desert, when they trained us, we were separated into groups, companies of two score each. The girls separate from the boys. Those companies were our families, from our first sparring matches to the chaos of the battlefield. No loyalties, no families, we had nothing aside from each other, and our sultan.”
Razan was favoring one leg. It was subtle, hard to catch, but there was some injury or flaw in the mobility of her right one. That leg stayed as a pivot, while the left one did the moving. For a moment, Lindír wondered if this had always been the case, but he would have noticed it before. This was new.
“At least,” she went on, “that was the theory. Sometimes, we find other things to inspire us. A few of the girls threw themselves into religion, others mad political aspirations.”
Lindír tested his theory. He advanced on the right, circling all the while, and watched as Razan refused to shift her balance. The spear guarded her adequately, but it was a flawed guard, as her right leg could not keep up. Lindír snapped at her a few times, then fell back.
“She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Lips like the ripest fruit, eyes like sparkling jewels, hips like the rolling hills of the northern shore. A princess, I think, some nobleman’s daughter. But ah, how she could speak her fantasies of a new world into being, how she could paint a picture of what she wanted to create.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?” Lindír growled. She needed to shut up and die, not remind him of why he had fallen for her in the first place.
Razan’s shoulders rolled without dropping her guard, an approximation of a shrug. “To give you better motivation to kill me? Because I am a lonely woman and you are the only being in the world who I know will listen? I do not know.”
She could not have been aware of the way her words stung Lindír’s heart. The only one? Was he truly the only one? His strength faltered, legs nearly buckling before he retreated back a step.
“I gave her my heart, and all she asked for in turn was a favor, here and there. That and my touch.”
Sensing weakness, Razan dropped the wistful, grief-stricken expression for a grimace, then charged. Lindír stumbled away, weaving around thrust after angry thrust of the long spear. His tail brushed up against a building. With nowhere to run, Lindír was forced to make use of what he knew. He ducked a spear-thrust aimed at his face, swiftly rushing low and to the left until he was within range to swipe one of his claws at Razan’s weak side.
Which meant it was Razan’s turn to fumble. She yanked the haft of the spear back, attempting to interpose it between herself and Lindír’s claws, but the weapon was too unwieldy. Moments before what would have been a bone-crushing impact, she found herself with no choice but to dive backwards, falling into an awkward roll. The spear left her hands. Had Lindír any will to push the advantage, he would have won there and then; a disarmed Razan still on one knee would have had no defense. But Lindír’s will to fight was fraying. The old sentimentalism, the hot wet pungent feeling of passion in his heart, was growing more quickly than he could hope to control it.
Razan grimaced down at her right leg, then looked up at Lindír with new understanding. She did not have to speak to acknowledge that she had been had.
“I thought nothing of it when she asked for the key to our camp. The sultan would be angry at my betrayal, but surely he would never know?” She rose to her feet, taking up her weapon once more. “I did not realize what I had done until her soldiers were slitting the throats of my company in their sleep.”
“So you are a traitor, then,” Lindír growled.
Razan nodded. “They call me Al-Khanjar. The dagger. I am best used by being buried in someone else’s back.”
The point of the spear dipped as Razan’s eyes suddenly grew shiny in the moonlight. She squeezed them shut for a moment, a moment during which Lindír could have killed her without a second thought.
“She still loved me, you know. She had her troops spare me, she offered to make me her right hand, while her hands were still soaked in the blood of my sisters. So I ran into the desert and never looked back.”
With a roar of anger, Razan charged once more. This time, Lindír acted on instinct. Without mercy, without any regard for Razan as anything other than the instrument of fatality, he batted the spear aside, cutting his palm for his struggles, then went for the right leg. She tried to evade, but the wound betrayed her. Her leg refused to move, and she took the sweeping butt of his horns directly to her side. She flew, unable to catch herself, and fell to the ground in a crumpled mass of wheezing breath and free-flowing tears.
“They aren’t even soldiers, you know!” she sobbed. “I arrived in the North with an army of deserters, escaped slaves, and bandits! A band of cutthroats and traitors, just like me!”
Lindír stalked forward, snapping the haft of the spear as he stepped over it. She was gone, wounded, possibly even dying. The smell of blood saturated the air, and freedom was so very close at hand. All he would have to do would be to tear through her armor, open up her chest, retrieve the final key, and this sad story would be over. He loomed over Razan’s fallen body, breath misting the air, and opened his jaws around her torso.
No matter how far you fly, how long you look, you will never find the freedom that you seek.
But Lindír did not bite down.
“Do it,” Razan hissed from within the dragon’s jaws. “Kill me. End this. Do it!”
Slowly, with growing certainty, Lindír fell back on her haunches. Dragons cannot cry; they lack the anatomy for tears. But with the arrow-wound slowly trickling blood from the inner corner of her eye socket, warm fluid flowing down her cheek in a steady trickle, Lindír felt that she was crying for the first time.
“There was a man I once knew,” Lindír said. “The only man who had ever loved me enough to call me ‘nephew’. Once, he told me that… that I cannot live my life along another’s principles.”
“Yes! Yes!” Razan grinned tightly. “Do not let yourself become your brother’s slave. Live for yourself!”
“That includes you, Razan,” Lindír said. “I will not satisfy your death wish.”
Razan’s expression fell. “What are you doing?”
“That man,” Lindír continued, falling onto her belly, “was the closest I have ever come to having a father. And I drove him away. Through my own bull-headed foolishness I drove him away. I brought upon the army of Hvalheim a death more brutal than any mind could conceive, and then I abandoned the city of Stokvöllur to its doom. I have won the love of a beautiful dragoness, and cast it away for this impossible revenge.”
She felt as though she would shatter. Every muscle trembled, her vocal cords were primed to snap, her brain to burst from her skull. Lindír’s heart pounded against the warm golden metal of the chain embedded in her chest.
“I have killed my own mother,” she said, barely above a whisper. “My whole life I have done nothing but kill, wound, destroy. I cannot add your corpse to my sins.”
Razan shook her head in mute panic. “You cannot do this. Do not doom yourself for my sake. It is not worth it, not for me!”
Lindír rested her head upon her front claws, shutting one eye and half-shutting the other. “You do not decide that. I don’t want to keep killing any longer. It is done.”
Razan rose, stumbling and unsteady, breath heaving in her chest as her legs struggled to support her weight. She drew a knife from her belt, placed its tip against her chest; but it was no use. She would not live long enough to give Lindír the third key, and Lindír would not take it. Instead she threw the dagger aside and staggered, step by step, until she could fall once more to her knees against the side of Lindír’s head.
“You fool,” she mumbled. “What have you done?”
“Saved both of us,” the dragon rumbled. “Forgiven you.”
Razan could speak no longer. She closed her eyes and let her body go slack, the dragon’s skull keeping her upright. In that half-woken state, by some instinct, she found herself stroking Lindír’s scalp. Her fingers, blunt and calloused, slowly brushed down the scales around his crown of horns, around his eyes, down to the back of his neck. Her slow, deep breaths whispered against the dragon’s ears.
Lindír said nothing. It felt good. Soft. Like what Biorra had given her, but made all the more tender by her countless bruises, and by the weakness and delicacy of a human frame compared to hers.
“Have you earned any names, since last we met?”
Lindír let the words turn and tumble in her brain. Eventually, she gained the strength to open one eye and glance up at the knightess’s face. “No, none at all.”
Razan fell silent for a long while. The castle was coming to life in the distance; feed tramped upon the ground, muffled shouts indicated an attempt being made to repair the fire damage. But out in the first court, silence and stillness yet ruled.
“Lindír Jagged-Mercy. How does that sound to you?”
“An interesting name,” said Lindír. Her wounds did not hurt quite so much, now. She had forgotten, for the shortest window, about everything but the slow movement of Razan’s hand on her head. Even as the distant gates opened with a rumbling of wood, she stayed still and breathed slow.
And then Dromi’s chain began to choke the life from her. One moment, it was dead metal; the next, it writhed, throbbed, flexing around her throat with unbeatable force. In a panic, Lindír rolled away from Razan, thrashing and struggling. Her claws could do nothing against the unbreakable nisken alloy, even as she heaved and writhed and tried to get even a single nail between the chain and her flesh.
“Rise, my brother!” Ásgeir roared, his voice ringing out in triumph. “Rise, Lindír Heimirsson!”
He gave her a moment’s respite, the chain relaxing long enough for Lindír to catch her breath. There was still a great weight on Lindír’s shoulders, both the weight of Dromi and the weight of Ásgeir’s victory; and yet she bore it quietly. She had lost, yes, and before her lay an unknown future of tribulation and terror as her brother’s minion, but bravery suffused her. She had a new enemy, yes, but also a new ally.
Lindír stared squarely down at her brother, refusing to allow her pain and exhaustion to show. Ásgeir stood at the head of a phalanx of knights and courtiers, the survivors of Lindír’s rampage arrayed about him. His shining coat of mail had been replaced, and he held Harthbrot at his side as though it were a walking stick. Atop his head, decorating the massive red braid of his hair, was a golden crown. The grief of his mother’s death had been expunged, and he looked for all the world like the very image of a triumphant conqueror.
Razan, ever ready to improvise, rose onto one knee. “My lord.”
The newly-crowned King of Hvalheim did not acknowledge her at first, instead content to take in the image of his brother chained and defeated before him. When at last he did turn, his expression sank to one of measured interest.
“I am glad to see that I made the right choice in trusting you. A fine match indeed, it must have been, for you to best my brother.”
Razan shook her head. “Hardly my greatest triumph. Indeed, I could not best him; we fought each other to our limits.”
Ásgeir nodded, motioning for one of his knights to help her to her feet. Then he turned back to Lindír, approached a few steps and, with a sage’s squint, said to her: “Do you remember when we were young and I told you I would make a good siege engine of you?”
“Yes,” was all Lindír said. She swallowed the acid anger which threatened to overwhelm her. What point would there be for her to spare Razan, only to then bash her head against the invulnerable brick of her brother? Though her eyes were angled at him, all of her attention was aimed out of the corner of her eye, at Razan. While the knightess was dusting herself off and thanking the man who helped her, her eyes turned upward. For just a moment, the briefest flicker of acknowledgement passed between the two of them.
Ásgeir turned, and his loyal court followed him. It was some seconds before he realized that Lindír was not following him. He looked back and with weariness in his voice began to say, “Come, Lindír.”
But he had not finished speaking her name before he had a moment of revelation, and his posture changed. Whirling around to face her, he thrust out his chest and spread his arms wide, as though in greeting.
“Come, Lindír the Chained! No… Come, Lindír Chained-Flame! Come, and we may discuss the fate of our kingdom. And oh how much there is to discuss!”
