What the fuck did I just see? Sherlock said. Did that guy just breathe fire?
Maria couldn’t reply, but it was good to know she had not imagined it. That man had, in fact, breathed fire.
The pipe smoldered, glittering orange and red, and the man stuck it into the corner of his mouth. As he started to turn in their direction, Maria caught the faintest tinge of red in the man’s eyes—but before he could turn all the way around, someone yelled, “Dig! You have to come back in here. We found a straggler!”
The man who had breathed fire, Dig, spun in the opposite direction, his cloak fanning out behind him, and disappeared into the town of Ashbourne.
The gate didn’t close behind him.
Just as the group was beginning to relax and breathe a sigh of relief, Maria took off toward the opening, saying in a harsh whisper, “C’mon!”
She stopped at the gate and peered around. The men, all wearing dark cloaks with the hoods drawn, formed a circle in the middle of the road outside of what looked to Maria to be a blacksmith’s workshop. Iron anvils stood on the small porch, well worn and chipped by the constant forging of steel; steel like the sword Maria held in her hand.
The men were laughing—Can I call them ‘men’? One of them blew fire from his mouth like a dragon. Maria didn’t much care about what they were laughing at in that moment. All she wanted was safe passage beyond the gates.
She stopped and motioned her companions to get inside. Frieda went first, holding Gramps’s hand, guiding him; then went Sherlock, followed last by Maria. She watched the cloaked men out of the corners of her eyes. The laughing increased. It was so loud that she could hardly hear the soft screams and pleas coming from the inside of the circle.
Hardly.
While Gramps, Frieda, and Sherlock kept going, hiding behind the safety of the blacksmith’s building and the darker shadows of the alleyway beyond, Maria stopped near the gate.
She had her sword out in front of her in her patented battle stance.
Through the legs and swirling cloaks, by the light of a nearby fire, she caught glimpses of a man’s anguished face.
Focus.
She heard the blows of the men’s feet, connecting with the defenseless man’s ribs. The crunching. The cracking. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and felt his pain. Then, gripping her sword in both hands, Maria opened her eyes.
“Hey, assholes!” she shouted.
They stopped. The man on the ground moaned and rolled out of the circle. He wore a leather jerkin, and his hair was gray around the sides of his head and absent on the top. Fresh blood dribbled from his nose and mouth. He was dazed, barely hanging on.
The eyes of the cloak-wearers flashed at Maria, and collectively lit up like hungry flames. So many things she had once thought impossible were proving not to be. Below their fiery stares, the men in cloaks bared their fangs, and forked tongues wiggled out from between their jaws.
Maria’s confidence wavered, but she didn’t let that show.
“Yeah, that’s right, assholes. I’m talking to you. Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”
Maria didn’t realize it, because she didn’t care so much when it came to doing the right thing, but they were all bigger than her. Much bigger.
Sherlock whined at Ignatius’s feet. Ignatius could not understand the dog as clearly as Maria, but the whining was self-explanatory: Maria needed their help.
If Sherlock’s point hadn’t registered, Frieda’s reaction would have made sure it did. She gripped Ignatius’s arm tight, causing him to wince out of shock, and said, “We have to help her!”
Ignatius knew from the legends that these five cloaked men were members of the Dragon Tongue, a group of devout worshippers of beasts long-gone from Oriceran. Seeing a dragon was rare these days, it seemed, but one would never see a Rogue Dragon; they were the stuff of legend.
“Ignatius!” Frieda whispered, pulling on his sleeve again.
Sherlock dug his paws into the dirt; his hind legs were shaking, ready to explode forward.
“Sherlock, steady,” Ignatius warned the dog, and the Bloodhound eased up…slightly.
“She’s going to get herself killed,” Frieda whispered in Ignatius’s ear.
He took a deep breath. As much as he wanted to help Maria, he could not. Not only was his magic weak—and ever weakening—if they came forth now, they would ruin their chances of getting the Gnome and saving this town.
“Do not worry, Frieda,” Ignatius said, smiling wide. His teeth—often mistaken for dentures, due to his old age and their sheer brilliance—beamed in the twilight. “Maria can handle herself. Come, we must make haste toward the dungeons. Surely, that is where our friend Gelbus is being kept.”
Frieda looked like she wanted to smack him. He could sense the heat radiating off of her palms.
“Trust me, Frieda. Trust me—” Ignatius was cut off by the sound of Maria’s blade, ringing out against the upraised hands of one of the Dragon Tongue. The blade, Ignatius knew firsthand, was as sharp as it was the day his father gifted it to him, and it cut cleanly through the man’s last attempt at defending himself. He fell to the ground, screaming.
Not good, the screams. They will raise more attention in our direction.
Sherlock yipped softly. It was a hard noise to listen to. Gramps bent low and ruffled the Bloodhound behind his droopy ears. “Come, Sherlock; Maria will be all right. You and I both know that.”
Sherlock looked up to him with watery eyes, and despite the obvious sadness in them, there was trust.
“Come, come. Let’s move.”
They moved down the dark alleyway, navigating between bins of overflowing trash and overturned boxes while the blue glow of Ignatius’s magic ate away at the shadows.
Maria thrust the blade forward and took another one of the cloaked men in the gut with
