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“Hey! Get the hell away from her!”
Gwendolyn has never seen anyone move as fast as The Brand does at that moment. Even with Gwendolyn’s longer legs, The Brand reaches Sophie first, shoving her out of the way of the dragon’s teeth. For a split second, Gwendolyn thinks they’re both clear of danger, but then one of the dragon’s enormous fangs catches The Brand in the side.
If it had been a direct hit, it surely would have impaled her, but from Gwendolyn’s view it only looks like a graze. The force is still enough to throw her against the wall of the cave. She slumps to the ground, motionless.
“NO!”
Gwendolyn charges the dragon, staff already raised to cast lightening. She can feel that it’s a bad cast as soon as she calls the spell. It doesn’t matter. She points the staff at the dragon and directs all of her magic towards it, more than she’s ever summoned before.
The resulting explosion is bigger than anything she’s cast in her life. When she looks back on this moment in the future, the memory is hazy, her vision a blur of red sparks and grey rock.
In this moment, the present, everything is slowly going black.
*
As the dragon retreats, Sophie is torn between The Brand and Gwendolyn, both of whom are – she hopes – unconscious. She chooses The Brand, mostly because she’s closer and because Lying Cat is already pawing at Gwendolyn.
“The Brand? Can you hear me?”
Sophie is fairly confident that she’s still breathing, but there’s a lot of blood. A lot of blood.
She looks around, wondering how she’s going to get both Gwendolyn and The Brand out of the cave before the dragon comes back. Then she remembers why they’re there in the first place.
Right, she tells herself. Get the dragon…stuff, then save The Brand and Miss Gwendolyn. Come on, Sophie.
“Sweet Boy, can you drag Miss Gwendolyn out of the cave?” Sophie thinks she can just about drag The Brand on her own.
Sweet Boy cocks his head and looks from Sophie to The Brand.
“I know,” Sophie says. “Just go. I’ll be right behind you.” Hopefully.
Reluctantly, Sweet Boy trots over to Gwendolyn and grabs part of her cape in his mouth.
Sophie springs up and starts filling the wineskin, nervously watching the entrance of the tunnel in case the dragon decides he isn’t so scared of Gwendolyn anymore.
After an eternity, the wineskin is full. Sophie slings it over her shoulder and tries very hard not to think too much about its contents. Then she runs back to The Brand.
“Sorry, The Brand. This is probably going to hurt.”
Sophie works her arms under The Brand’s and starts to follow Sweet Boy up to the mouth of the cave. She really hopes the dragon doesn’t like the smell of blood, because The Brand is leaving a lot of it behind.
Sophie would prefer to get as far away from the cave as possible, but The Brand is completely dead weight and surprisingly heavy. She puts her down on an acceptably flat rock, glancing again towards the cave. No sign of a gigantic, angry dragon.
But when she moves The Brand’s coat to see how bad the wound is, things take a significant turn for the worse.
It probably doesn’t help that The Brand is wearing a white shirt, but Sophie still panics at the sight of all the blood. The Brand is not a large person. Surely she doesn’t have this much to lose.
And there’s Gwendolyn. Sophie runs over, relieved to see the slight movement of Gwendolyn’s shoulders that mean she’s still breathing as well. On the other hand, the front of her shirt and the exposed skin of her stomach and arms are burned. More immediately, though, Sophie needs a part of her cape. She tries to tear a strip off, but ripping fabric is harder than either Gwendolyn or the Brand makes it look. Sophie opens a few of the pouches on Gwendolyn’s belt before she remembers that The Brand carries a dagger.
Hoping it isn’t too late to save her, Sophie cuts a large swath of the cape and presses it to The Brand’s side. It’s pretty much the only thing she knows how to do – or can do, since she doesn’t have magic or any significant knowledge of first aid – but it feels only slightly better than doing nothing.
“Sweet Boy, can you wake up Gwendolyn? I need her help. Well, The Brand really needs her help.”
Sweet Boy whines and shuffles back to Gwendolyn. He starts licking her face. Gwendolyn hates it when he does that, so Sophie figures that will work as well as anything else.
“Please don’t die,” Sophie tells The Brand. If The Brand dies, it will be because of her. Just like The Will. Sophie blinks back tears, because she’s being a Page right now, and crying is not one of her duties, and anyway, it won’t help.
“Miss Gwendolyn! Now would be a really good time for you to wake up!” In addition to The Brand’s current predicament, the dragon is still on Sophie’s mind as well.
As though reading her mind, Lying Cat walks up to Gwendolyn and yowls urgently in her ear.
“ARGH!” Gwendolyn sits bolt upright, clutching at her side while fending off both Lying Cat and Sweet Boy with her other hand.
“Miss Gwendolyn! Over here!”
Gwendolyn staggers to her feet, wiping dog drool off of her face with what remains of her cloak.
“The Brand,” she says. “Shit.”
“Can you do a healing spell?”
Gwendolyn shakes her head. “They only work on Wreathers,” she says, inspecting The Brand’s wound.
“Hm.” She frowns. “It looks more shallow than deep, but that’s still a lot of blood. Keep doing what you’re doing.”
She stands up, looking unsteady on her feet, but she manages to walk to the supplies they had left outside the cave.
“We’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way,” she mutters, opening the rudimentary first aid kit they cobbled together from supplies on The Will’s ship. For a Freelancer, he was woefully unprepared for dragon attacks.
“Miss Gwendolyn?”
“What?”
“…I don’t think The Brand is breathing anymore.”
Gwendolyn stumbles to her knees on The Brand’s other side, feeling for a pulse point on her neck.
“Fuck.”
“Can you try your spell?”
“It won’t work,” Gwendolyn says. “And we don’t have time. Move back. I need to bandage the wound if she has any chance at all.”
Sophie scrambles back, peering over Gwendolyn’s shoulder anxiously as she cuts The Brand’s shirt open.
“This cloak is hardly clean, but it’ll have to do,” she mutters. “Stupid, arrogant, overconfident Freelancers, thinking they can run halfway across the galaxy without any decent medical supplies.”
Sophie isn’t sure if she’s talking about The Will or The Brand at this point.
With the bandage in place, blood at least stops seeping onto the rock underneath The Brand, but she still shows no sign of life.
“Now can you try the spell?” Sophie asks, but Gwendolyn is already pumping The Brand’s chest, trying to restart her heart.
“Wake! Up! Dammit!” She glances over at her staff. “I can’t call lightening, it’s too much of a risk. Come on!”
Just when Sophie is about to look away, The Brand’s eyes fly open and she sucks in a huge breath.
“Finally!” Gwendolyn says, rocking back on her heels. She sounds more relieved than angry. Sweet Boy barks joyfully.
*
Gwendolyn has possibly never been more relieved in her life. Her heart is pounding in her chest, as if compensating for the time when The Brand’s wasn’t beating.
Later, she tells herself that it’s this mix of relief and sheer adrenaline that causes what happened next.
Surprising everyone present, including herself, she kisses The Brand.
In hindsight, it’s not among her top five kisses. Both of them are covered in sweat and blood, and she doesn’t want to suffocate The Brand right after she comes back from the dead.
Then again, neither resuscitation nor the kiss seem to faze The Brand.
“Was I out that long?”
Gwendolyn’s face flushes with embarrassment.
“I apologize. I shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t apologize. Except maybe for your timing.”
Gwendolyn almost laughs.
The Brand tries to sit up, but Gwendolyn pushes her back gently. Not that she really needs to – The Brand isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“Don’t move, you’ll open the wound again.”
“That explains the splitting pain,” she says dryly.
“I’m so sorry, The Brand,” Sophie says. “It’s my fault you almost got eaten.”
“Don’t worry—it’ll take more than a dragon to kill me. But—” she coughs “—don’t ever do that again.”
“Agreed,” Gwendolyn says. “You put yourself in unnecessary danger.”
Sophie looks down. “But if I hadn’t gone first, The Brand would have gotten eaten instead of me.”
“She has a point,” The Brand says. “At least we all survived. So, what now?”
“You need to rest,” Gwendolyn says firmly.
“I mean after that. I don’t suppose you have a less dangerous elixir recipe?”
“No,” Gwendolyn admits. “I suppose we’ll just have to slay the dragon. What’s the extinction of a whole species when there’s a war on?”
The Brand laughs, then coughs. “That easy, huh?”
“Actually,” Sophie says, remembering the wineskin. “I have what we need.” She holds it out to Gwendolyn, then, on second thought, sets it on the rock.
“Is that—” The Brand begins.
“You actually got it,” Gwendolyn says.
“Just fulfilling my duties as Page,” Sophie says dryly.
“I can’t believe it,” Gwendolyn says. “We actually did it.”