I opened my eyes. An unfamiliar ceiling, stone-carved, swam into focus.
Almost immediately, the bitter taste of disappointment filled my mouth.
I saw. I breathed. My heart beat. I felt pain.
I was alive.
I closed my eyes again, tears welling up behind my eyelids. They trickled down my temples and into my hair.
I had failed to save my family and I had consigned two blameless people to a slow and painful death along the way. I had hoped that my death would free Xanos and Brown and reunite me with my family. Now it seemed that I had even failed to die.
I cried a little, weakly, but exhaustion and pain soon dragged me down again into sleep. I let it take me. I did not much care to be awake.
When I woke again, the light had not changed but I felt more alert.
Details trickled in. I was in a place that felt and smelled like stone. I heard footsteps and voices but the sound so distorted by echoes that I could not tell if they were near or far, only that they were not here. Somewhere, water burbled. Lamplight made shadows play on the wall next to me. Other walls curved away, though not far away. The room was small, with one doorway in the far wall which led to another, darker chamber.
I tried to move my hand and found that I could not. My left arm and shoulder were encased in some kind of stiff plaster. They throbbed in pain. To add insult to injury, they also itched. My chest felt as if needles had been hammered into my ribs. They pricked me sharply each time I inhaled. In several other places I felt the scratchy tug of stitches. Everything else simply ached. I felt as if I had run into a wall, or perhaps had the wall run into me.
Because it seemed to be the only part of me I could readily move, I turned my head.
The first thing I saw was Xanos, sitting against the wall next to my bed, his forearms resting on his bent knees. His head was leaning back against the wall, exposing the column of his throat. His eyes were closed. He was not wearing his robes, only breeches and a plain linen shirt, half-unlaced. There was a brass lamp on the floor next to him. It was the only source of light in the room.
I had not expected to see him again. It hurt to see him again, knowing the ruin I had made of his life. It felt wonderful to see him again and know he, at least, was still alive. "Xanos?" I croaked.
The sorcerer's head jerked away from the wall, and his eyes flew open. "What?" he asked. Even half-asleep, he still managed to sound waspish. Then he blinked and turned his head to stare at me for several heartbeats. The last vestiges of sleep fled his face. "Nadiya?" He scrambled to his knees. "Nine Hells. Nadiya." He crouched over me, reaching out to touch my face and turn it to him. "How long have you been awake? How do you feel?"
His fingers were warm and smooth. They cupped my jaw very lightly, all but his thumb, which rested near the corner of my mouth. I stared up at him, shock-frozen. His expression had fallen open like a book, relief and worry written so clearly on its pages that even I could read it. I wondered if I had not died after all and passed into some strange afterlife where up was down, black was white, and Xanos did not hate me.
The moment was broken by the sound of a voice like a bugle. "Xanos? I heard voices. What's going on? Is Nadiya-" Brown's head appeared through the doorway. On seeing me, he beamed like a miniature sun. "Oh! Nadiya! You're awake! That's wonderful! I'm so happy! How do you feel?" He stretched his neck out anxiously, his tongue flicking out. It seemed he could come no farther into the room, most likely because the rest of him was too wide to fit through the doorway. "Do you need anything? Water? Food? We have your clothes. And your sword. They almost didn't let us keep it, but then Xanos started growling in that way he does sometimes and at that point I think the svirfneblin decided that anything you might do to them with your sword couldn't be nearly as bad as whatever it was that Xanos would surely do to them if they didn't let you keep it."
Xanos had moved away from me as soon as the dragon began speaking. Able to move once more, I sat up slowly, clutching my blankets to me. I felt light-headed, and my cheek still burned where the sorcerer's hand had been, as if his touch had branded me. "Where are we?" I asked. I almost did not recognize my own voice, so rough and hoarse it was. I sounded like an old woman. I coughed to clear my throat. "How…what happened?"
Light flared. It was followed by a sound like shattering glass. Xanos sprang to his feet. "What happened?" he repeated incredulously. He turned and began to pace, ticking off points on his fingers. "You were wrung like a rag by a demonic minion of Baphomet. That is what happened. It broke your left arm in two places. It dislocated your shoulder. It fractured your collarbone. Cracked four ribs. One of your lungs collapsed. You were bleeding so much inside that you were drowning in it. The cleric had to open you like a spigot. Your bones she left to heal on their own. She did not have the power to fix everything. It was all she could do to keep your heart beating." By the end of his recitation, he had lost any pretense to calm and was shouting. "You looked like a corpse. You nearly became one. That is what happened."
I stared past him. "Oh," I said weakly. The lamp had broken. Pieces of twisted brass lay in a heap. Some of them were still red with heat. Oil was slowly spreading out beneath them. It gave an occasional sizzling hiss when it touched still-hot metal. Little fires flickered over it, winking in and out.
Brown interrupted, speaking soothingly. "Please stop yelling, Xanos," he said. He looked quite absurd with only his head and neck through the doorway and the rest of him stuck behind it. "You don't have to be angry. She's all right now. Besides, the more you yell the less the svirfneblin will trust you, and then we'll really be in a pickle." He nodded at the spreading puddle of lamp oil. "And please put the fire out. I might be flameproof, but Nadiya's not."
The sorcerer stared at the wall for a moment longer, drawing deep, irregular breaths in through his nose. Then, still staring at the wall, he nodded curtly. After a moment, the little fires in the lamp oil flickered and vanished. He said nothing.
Brown blinked in satisfaction. He turned his attention back to me. "To answer your other question," he said, as if nothing had happened. "We're in Riftenstone. A svirfneblin city. Their patrol found us and agreed to heal you." He crinkled his snout. "I don't know exactly where the city is, though," he admitted. "They blindfolded us to bring us here, and they've kept us under guard ever since. I tried to talk the guards into telling us more, but they always seem to turn deaf as soon as I raise the subject."
"How-" I had to stop and cough again. My throat hurt, though not as much as my chest. "How did you persuade them to heal me?"
The dragon's teeth showed in what I had come to recognize as a grin. "They liked me," he said smugly. He arched his neck and preened one of his chest scales with a talon. "I mean, of course they liked me. I'm a brass dragon. We're nicer and smarter than most anyone else and smell much better than those nasty blues and everybody knows we just want to get along with everybody and not deal with all of that tiresome fighting nonsense which is a terrible waste of everybody's time and really awfully unfriendly. What's not to like?"
I did not know how to respond to such a question. I looked at Xanos. He was still turned away, apparently staring at nothing. His shirt was not as thick as his robes, and it showed the muscles in his back all corded with tension. "Indeed," I said weakly.
Brown rattled on. "Also, I know a little gnomish from the traders that come to the desert sometimes, and it turns out deep gnomish isn't that different from surface gnomish, so I managed to talk to them and tell them what was happening and Avulsteina - she's a cleric of Segojan, goes along with the patrols to heal them and make sure they don't get lost, you know – offered to heal you, which I thought was awfully nice of her, only the others weren't so happy and they don't trust Xanos at all despite my telling them you were both perfectly nice and it was just unfortunate that they happened to meet Xanos right after he'd gone all orcish on us."
Xanos finally spoke. "Brown." His voice was quelling.
The dragon huffed. "Well, I'm sorry to say it and I can't say I blame you for getting upset, but true's true and if that wasn't a berserker rage then I don't know what is," he said stoutly. He turned back to me. "I told them he normally never acts that way and I'm sure he didn't actually mean those things he was screaming and anyway I don't think there's any way you could do that to someone's skull even if you wanted to so they needn't worry. But they, um." He cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Didn't believe me. Um."
I saw Xanos rubbing his forehead with his fingers. "I cannot imagine why," he muttered.
Brown sulked. "Don't be snide. I tried my best."
The sorcerer sighed. "So you did," he said. The anger had gone out of his voice. Now he only sounded tired.
I blinked woozily and tried to sort through this flood of information. "Does this mean you cannot leave?" I asked.
Brown hesitated. "We can and we can't," he said at last.
My heart sank. "Oh."
"Avulsteina says she's trying to get a group of volunteers together to lead us to the surface. Thulwar – he's one of the artificers, this used to be his workshop, you can see the scorch marks on the walls, he's awfully clever even if he sets more things on fire than even Xanos – he's said he'll help, too. He's been to the surface. He says he likes humans. Once you're healthy again I'm sure they'll let us go. Most of the svirfneblin didn't even want us here in the first place." The dragon blinked nervously. "Only…until you're better we're not allowed to leave these chambers," he admitted in a rush. "Um. I don't think they want any outsiders to see their city. At all. They certainly did all they could to hide it from us. I think I smelled illusion magic when they brought us here, and I could swear they closed some tunnels behind us, and we went through so many gates I almost lost count of them, so I'm not even sure I could find my way out without Avulsteina."
Tears were rising again. I turned my head away so the others could not see them. I had tried to save them, and I had only made matters worse. How was it that everything I touched seemed to go this way? "You should leave," I said, my voice thick. "Both of you."
Brown protested. "We can't go anywhere yet. You're still not well-"
I thought I knew why Xanos had screamed. "Forget me," I snapped. I looked down, letting my hair fall forward to hide my face. With my good hand, the one not trapped in a splint, I tried to scrub wetness from my cheeks. "I told you to save yourselves. Why didn't you l-listen?"
Xanos spoke at last. His voice rasped, slow and slowly gaining in anger. "Do you mean to tell me that you were trying to get yourself killed?"
I shrugged one shoulder, my face still hidden in my hair. I did not answer.
Brown stared at me, wide-eyed. "Surely you weren't." His head swung to Xanos. His voice turned uncertain, pleading. "Surely she wasn't. Was she?"
"Most of my family is most likely dead," I said, my voice dull. Tears were falling freely, although I barely felt them. It seemed as if they were falling from some other woman's eyes. "I should have died with them. I had no business living. I had even less forcing you to help me rescue the dead. You are in danger because of me." Now I felt the tears. They burned me. "Leave. Please. My life is not worth yours."
Xanos jerked as if struck. He rounded on me. "Like Hells," he roared. "I have heard that song before. I will not hear it again."
I twisted away from him. I could not look at his face. All this time I had not been able to see what was there, and now I could, and it was naked pain, and I could not look at it. "It is the truth-"
He crossed to me in a few quick strides and knelt. Lamp oil soaked into the leather of his breeches. He ignored it. "I thought better of you," he hissed at me. "Are you a warrior? Or are you a coward, that you run for your grave as soon as the world throws you a little hardship?
I jerked upright. "A little hardship?" I repeated, disbelieving. "A little hardship?" I struggled for breath. "My entire family is gone! My whole life is gone!"
He laughed. It was a brutal sound, not so much uncaring as despairing. "You think you are the only one who has lost someone? Who has felt alone?" he asked. "Bah! We are born alone. We die alone. If we are lucky, there are a few happy moments in between. That is the way of the world. If Xanos can face it, so can you." He reached out and pulled my blanket up over my shoulders. I had not felt it fall. "Besides," he added. "If you die, I will follow you and make your afterlife so miserable that you will reincarnate as a sea slug just to get away from me."
Brown spoke up. "And I'll be right behind him," he said firmly.
I stared at them. Then I began to cry in earnest.
