Chapter Text
As the dark comes over the camp, no one else has been sacrificed yet. Graham watches the sky as it turns from shades of gold and pink, to indigo, to purple, and now to a deep black with only the barest hints of starlight past the blaze of the camp-fires.
There is a rattling over his head, and he does not respond. Then a shifting sound, and a barked command in the island tongue.
Graham looks up to see the woman who had captured him. She's holding a dish, and at first he thinks it's his turn to be stripped and painted and fed to a monster, but then she says the same word again, and this time he can parse it through her thick accent.
"Food," she says, and then points to his hands.
"I untie. Eat. No run."
Sure, yes, stay here to be eaten. Except that Graham will do exactly that. Where would he run to? He's not confident in his ability to move faster than a crawl in the first place, and if the dragons don't mind a sacrifice with snapped leg bones, there's an easier way to keep him trapped here than a simple order.
He'll obey the order.
"No run," he rasps, and the woman sets the bowl down on a low stool and leans forward to untie his hands. It hurts—shockingly like the sensation of being kicked in the shoulder blades—to move again, and there are deep lines imprinted in his wrists by the rope, but no fresh blood on his skin. She hands him the bowl, keeping it steady until he's able to curl a hand around it and prop it against his chest. The gesture reminds him strangely of his aunt—how she'd cared for him when he was sick as a child. Too gentle for this place.
The bowl smells strongly of meat and spices, and it's full—a larger portion than he ever got at the officer's mess.
"Fattening me up?" He can't help but ask, even knowing she won't understand.
She's shaking the rope out, wrapping it up in a neat little coil, and she frowns at him, then nods her head over, towards—towards the place where the first prisoner had been painted and fed to the dragon.
"Bad man," she says, disgust clear. "Food. Sleep. Otherwise, bad."
"Bad for…the dragons?" Graham asks, and the woman waggles her hand in the air. Yes and no, maybe.
"You understand more than you speak," he ventures, and she nods.
"Many prisoners, many…" she shakes her hands out, spreading them as if to indicate a large area.
"Time? A long time?" He guesses. The Islanders have been working their way down the coast for at least a decade, now.
"Yes," she says. "A long time."
It's odd, helping her communicate how long she's been killing Graham's own people. Many prisoners, he thinks; many dragon sacrifices. She's learned his language from their pleading, probably. And she speaks less than she knows because she's never found the need to respond with anything but food, sleep, and then feeding them to her dragon.
Graham thinks he should be more horrified than he is. He should be having trouble eating the meal in front of him—should refuse out of some sense of duty to…something. Muster up some fighting spirit to ruin what parts of the sacrifice he can.
He eats a spoonful. It bursts in bright flavor over his tongue, the warmth helping to chase a little of the ache from his limbs.
"I'm an officer," he says, after a few bites, and the woman snorts, shaking her head. She's heard that one too many times, then.
The meal fills his belly shockingly well. He thinks that it should make him sick, after the day he's had. His head should be too full of images of his dead and dying men to stomach the food, but it's just…not. He's hungry, and it feels good to eat, and his belly is warm and full and he wants to sleep. He doesn't want to die in the morning, but he wants even less to suffer whatever pain they'd inflict on him as a deterrent for running away.
"Thank you for the food," he says, and curls up on the ground, eyes already falling shut. Aside from the early horrific death, no one has been bothering the other prisoners. He's fairly certain there will be no Islander Colin equivalent to piss on him in his sleep.
"Hm," the woman says, as he drifts off.
—
Arkosa is tired. She is bone weary, in fact. Has been for a while. She's not sure what has been keeping herself from making that admission, what it is that's changed now, but it seems the admission has driven every scrap of fight from her.
She watches her prisoner sleep. She'd prepared a cot for him inside—for whoever it was that she took, to satisfy her end of the Rider's Bargain. It is dishonorable to do otherwise.
That is what is bothering her, she thinks. Cleve's constant toeing the line of honorable behavior. A Sacrifice is supposed to be just that—once, the dragons would have demanded far more than they do now, someone valued by a home—a favored child, a beloved grandmother, stripped and wept over and given a final meal, a final rest, before being tied and left out for the sky people. When war called for them, of course, there were not enough beloved children in any house to sustain their bargain, but the spirit of the thing was still true. Let a guest into your tent. Feed them, care for them, speak with them if you could. Anything that would make it a true sacrifice when the dragons came in the morning.
Cleve's idiocy is already starting to infect the others, who no longer bring the Sacrifice into their tents, even if they don't engage with the kind of heretical disrespect he does.
Arkosa knows it would have ended far sooner if the dragons had upheld their end of the bargain and actually stuck down Cleve the first time he offered a screaming, injured Sacrifice with sloppy paint, but the dragons do not seem to care at all. They only seem to care about fresh meat.
That last thought is heresy. Pushing it out of her mind is familiar, a well-worn groove, like a saddle cinch with a bad buckle. That's when it's time to replace the leather, she thinks next, and the new thought is harder to shove aside.
Her prisoner is asleep outside her tent, and she does not want to wake him. If she does not wake him, then he will sleep outside the tent, and be an insult to the sky people; but it is an insult they do not seem to care about.
When Arkosa was small, she'd wept and braided her little sister's hair with witch hazel, helped them apply the paint to leave the girl on the mountain. What will it mean, if she never needed to do such a thing? If a passing traveler, a robber from the road, a pig from the stables would have sufficed?
What will it mean if she, knowing that, makes another sacrifice now?
The rest of the camp is asleep. Some of the Sacrifices are outside tent doorways, weeping or asleep or nursing wounds from battle. Arkosa can feel Ilyana, her dragon, in the thrum of the bone ring resting on a cord under her breastplate. Ilyana was a primordial force, at first, the spirit of the sky itself, a storm and a calm and a healing rain at once, a god in physical form. Now the eerie lack of emotion from the ring is a thorn in a wound. If Ilyana is only an animal, doing tricks in exhange for scraps, thirsty for blood, what does that make Arkosa?
What does it make any of them?
—
Graham wakes to a hand on his shoulder, shaking him slightly, and he bolts upright as if he's asleep on his watch, but is swiftly stopped by the horrible raw ache in each one of his muscles. He makes a sound far closer to 'animal with a wounded belly' than he might have liked. The Rider woman, looming over him, shushes him with an abrupt gesture and a hiss through her teeth. Graham obediently shuts up.
She's got something tucked under her arm, and he thinks at first that now is the time she's going to feed him to her dragon—maybe it's more proper to do it in the dead of night, he doesn't fucking know—but wouldn't everyone else be awake, then? And why would it matter if he made noise?
She's stuffing whatever it is into his arms, and it's—a coat. Long, dark brown, he thinks it's some sort of fur. Something he could never afford back home. At market, it would probably cost more than his commission had.
"What?" he finds himself asking, bleary and exhausted. "What's—hey,"
She's pulling him up by his arm, hauling with all her strength and a grip that's sure to leave bruises on his skin for months to come. Still, when she lets go, he stumbles in place and turns back towards her like a slaughterhouse steer crowding the herdsman, looking for refuge in the nearest warm, unlikely body. She's a large black shadow against the red light of the night camp.
"Run," she hisses. It's the last thing Graham expected to hear. The thought of running sets an ache deep into his bones. When he doesn't move, she lashes out for him, a feint that sends hims skittering backwards on shard-of-glass feet.
"Your sacrifice," he says, thinking that if he has to die in the morning, at least he'll be able to lie back down in the meantime.
"Fuck sacrifice," she says. "Run. Or I kill you now."
Graham makes so much noise as he flees that he half-expects an arrow in his back for miles. It never comes.
—
It's a tearful reunion with his aunt. She weeps into his neck and hides him for two days until the news of the armistice comes and he's no longer at acute risk of being brought in to face trial for desertion. When he can finally see the light of day again, the streets are full of chatter.
"They lost their dragons—"
"Just surrendered—"
"We got Castle Steren back, they've held it since the start of the war—"
They keep the Rider's coat. It would sell for a fair fortune, Graham knows, even after they had to wash the mud and burrs from it after his long trek home; but they keep it, wrapped in paper in the basement.
—
On the night she sets her sacrifice free, Arkosa can feel the shattering of the bond like breaking glass inside her chest. She sits back against her tent, hearing the others stir as the breaking bonds tear them from their sleep. The last feeling echoing through the rider ring is…disappointment, Arkosa thinks. No more easy victims. The sky lords don't come to exact revenge, though. They disappear, and no amount of violence against Arkosa is enough to bring them back. As her own people turn against her, she finds herself laughing through the blood in her teeth, seeing a little sister with flowers in her hair, reaching a too-small hand out for Arkosa's bloodied, callused one.
Arkosa reaches back.