CHAPTER NINE
Cima had been bitten by a dragon.
“I didn’t know you were there,” she answered finally. It felt like a supremely inadequate reply, and the dragon appeared to agree, because he hissed in a deeper register that made her grab her left hand with her right and squeeze until the pain faded.
“Congratulations. Now you do. Return what you’ve taken and let me be.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it when no words strung themselves together and emerged. Maybe she and her crew had moved away from active thievery, but at the end of the day, she hadn’t gone far. She was a thief. Stealing from the long dead, sanctioned as a scavenger or not, was slightly safer, but still in the thievery category. Thief-adjacent, perhaps.
Stealing from an imaginary animal explicitly talking to her . . .
That seemed more complicated.
Still, unlike the portrait, this one was very small. Probably she could—what? Outrun it? Ignore it? It had already bit her—had it?
“Did you bite me?” she managed, and it reared back, tucking its front legs close to its chest. As though she’d insulted it.
“Did you shove your nasty human hands in my hoard and wake me up? Then probably.” His voice shook, affronted or enraged, and relics preserve her, it was adorable.
Cima had enough wits left in reach not to say that, however.
“I didn’t—”
“Know I was here. I heard you. I’m not the stupid one here. And now you know, so go on and get everything you took and bring it back. Then I’ll go back to sleep and you can forget I was here all over again.”
“I . . . I can’t.”
He dropped down and stalked forward until he reached the edge of the chest. His glare, if anything, intensified. “I will help. It is very simple, even for you. First, you leave me alone. Second, you use those nasty human hands to go pick up all the things you took. Then, you come back. Return them. Close the lid. Leave forever.”
A growl accompanied the words, and she bit her tongue hard to keep from cooing over it. If one small bite had kept her awake and itching for two days, she’d hate to know what teeth and claws could do.
She didn’t think the tiny dragon would care about the nuances of retrieving items sold to Ky, or fences, or jewelers, so she focused on the one controllable piece she could think of. “I can’t close the trunk.”
“Because you tried?” he said scathingly.
“I did. We did. It wouldn’t close—”
“Did you have some of the treasure outside the chest, maybe?” He reared up, placed his front legs on the lip of the trunk, and cocked his head. Each foot had talons, slightly too long to be truly proportional, as white and gleaming as his teeth and horns. Had she thought he was blues and purples? He seemed darker now, almost black. “Because it won’t close until the hoard is complete.”
“I don’t have access to—”
“You sold it already? Gave it to a hungry wizard?” He made a huffing noise, almost like an angry cat but three tones deeper, and a small spark flickered at the edge of his muzzle.
“I . . . my friends were here, too. We needed the money. They have some, there’s some in the bank.” She considered the roughly thirty pieces they had taken. The ones with Ky would be tricky to get back. “There’s—”
“The details don’t concern me. You are the one who has to bring them back.”
“And how would you like me to find them?” Her thoughts raced. Had Mandiva sold the ruby already? What had they sold to the jewelers? About nine, across three different shops, though she could only picture five at the moment—a gorgeous triple strand of diamonds, an enormous pearl, a color-shifting jewel Ackles had said the jeweler drooled over, Terio’s huge emerald, and an amethyst in perfect points. Would the jewelers hold such valuable pieces on site or ship them out to artisans or do the work themselves? What if Ky had buyers abroad and any of those six were gone? Gaudi still had his fancy dagger and the spear point, but what else had Meesh used to pay for the feast? Where else could that have circulated already?
“With your stupid human face and your stupid human eyes and your stupid human hands. How should I know? You’re the one who lost them, you’re the one who recovers them. It’s your responsibility to bring all the pieces back.” He stalked back, crouched, and beat his wings once to launch himself to the tallest portion of treasure available to him.
“It’ll take some time, I’ll have to—”
He interrupted, as though he knew she were about to lie to him. “It’s the only way to save yourself and those friends who were here, if they’ve touched anything. The hoard is only safe when contained under my protection.”
She blinked again, then leaned forward intently. “Safe? What does that mean? Is it—”
Coins she had yet to sort flew in several directions as he launched at her. “How dare you!” His wings moved so fast they blurred, and while he dove at her, he didn’t come close enough for her to feel more than the barest stir in the basement’s otherwise still air. “This is a precious responsibility, the fate of—it doesn’t matter to you, maybe, but it should. I am charged to keep my hoard. To keep it secret. To keep it safe. To keep it together and ensure it doesn’t—to protect it. Now go and get the rest of it before I eat you, and before it—”
He stopped talking and almost immediately dropped back to the edge of the trunk’s open lid. “Why is your hand glowing?”
“Why is my—” she repeated half his last sentence before her battered thoughts caught up to the abrupt change. She glanced down, and indeed . . . her hand was, in fact, glowing.
Even more than the dragon, that blanked her thoughts, leaving her with only a dull whine in her ears as she tried to understand. Her hand. Glowing.
“You bit me,” she said, the words thick and awkward in her mouth.
“I bit you,” he replied, and his voice sounded much the same. “That . . . I didn’t think it would . . .”
“It would what?” Cima glanced at him, though her weirdly glowing hand inexorably pulled her gaze.
“You . . . you have to replace the hoard. It’s . . .” He sighed, folded his wings neatly against his sides, and sat. His tail curled around his body, covering his front feet, and if anything he appeared . . . regretful? “It really is your job, now. Duty, even.” That delivery carried a different weight, than when he’d snapped “responsibility” at her a moment ago.
“My duty?” She had been smart once, hadn’t she? Able to do more than parrot words and repeat concepts? Able to understand the events unfolding before her? Surely she had been.
“I . . . I bit you too hard. You’re . . . you’re linked to the hoard. For now.”
“Linked.” No matter how she tried, all she could do was vaguely echo him.
“You won’t . . . how have you been feeling, since you found all of this?”
“Tired. Itchy.” The truth of the words leapt past her dulled thoughts.
“Have you slept well?”
“No.” That word burst from her, and he tilted his head.
“Nor will you. Until you replace the missing pieces. You will be unable to rest, as long as the hoard is apart from itself.”
It was certainly an impressively twisted method to protect against thievery. Even empty as her brain was, Cima could recognize that.
“And if I don’t, I’ll just . . . itch and not sleep until I collapse?”
“Among other things.”
“Other things?” Was she hysterical now? Was that alarm, raising her voice? “What other things?”
“Did you friends touch the other pieces? The ones that are gone?”
“Of course they did. We all touched some of them.” A pressure cracked, and her thoughts crowded loud and rapid through her. Abruptly she knew she had to scream, or evict all the contents of her stomach, or both at once, however impractical the combination. Cima couldn’t ask why, no matter how she tried, the competing needs choking even air from emerging from her throat.
“Then the sooner the hoard is safe again, the better for them. Before . . .” His tail lashed, and he snarled again, but silently. Slowly, the glow faded from her skin.
Cima stared at her hand, finally mastered the building rebellion in her body, and managed to ask the burning question. “Before what? Will they itch and be unable to sleep too?”
“The hoard is . . .” He made a guttural noise and huffed another couple of sparks. “I was meant to sleep through this stupid millennia, return once the world was sane again.” His tongue flicked into the air, too fast for her to register if it was forked like a snake’s or not. “I can tell from the thinness in the air it’s too soon.”
“Dragon—”
“Yagen.”
“You’re a . . . yagen?” A different language, maybe, or—before her thoughts raced too far off topic he spat sparks again.
“It’s my name.” A mutter followed, potentially “stupid human” or some related concept. “The hoard is a collected mass of magic. Only my protection keeps it from spilling out, from sparking or flooding or whatever term will make sense to your simple brain. Without a base to build from, it will tear through the unprotected until it is able to build its own equilibrium. Magic sparks magic, but in this . . . lack of it, there will be a maelstrom.”
Cima heard the words. On some level she understood them, and couldn’t say she was terribly surprised. Shocked, maybe, but not surprised. The door that disappeared. The pearls that glowed. The tiny, angry dragon that sat in front of her and spoke with Hiane-worthy condescension.
Magic.
Slowly the words clicked into place, but before she could fully register the weight of them, the entirety of it, the dragon—Yagen—went on, “Out from my reach, and now yours, it will flood or spark or spill into the nearest containers it can find. Without a proper ambient resonance to balance against, it will overwhelm rather than settle.”
“But . . . magic. It was all stamped out.”
“Then I guess you have no problem at all, except that you’re speaking to an empty basement for no apparent reason.” His tail lashed, the scales a darker shade than she was sure they had been. Why was that the part of all of this that snagged her attention?
“But . . . if your magic is from before the end of the world, it can be . . . it can be good, can’t it? Do wonders and all that?”
The noise he made was perhaps close to a laugh. A derisive, perhaps pitying sort of laugh. “With this little for it to build on? No. It would take too long to come to a balance, if it would even be possible, and that never goes well for the containers. Maelstrom, not . . . bonfire.” He snorted, a flurry of sparks illuminating the image.
“Containers?” she asked, every story she ever heard flashing through her brain.
“Anyone who comes into contact with it, outside of my reach. Like your friends. Magic will fill them, and spill over. I doubt they’ll survive it.”