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What a way to die.
It was a stupid way to die, a mundanely tragic one, but it was looking more likely to actually do it than many of the other chances Iorveth had faced.
The injury had been annoying, but not too severe. He’d done his best to clean it, but his best hadn’t been great in these rough conditions. Too deep a puncture, where the arrowhead had lodged; hard to get that sort of thing clean enough to heal from the inside out, so of course it had abscessed.
The infection was moderate to severe, but possibly survivable. He’d done his best there, too. On a long-range patrol like this, away from his comrades, he’d set himself up to sweat it out and care for himself as best he could.
But he’d run out of food and water, hadn’t been able to stockpile enough. He’d known not to hole up next to a stream, for where water flowed, there was traffic, and he could ill-afford a predator, a monster, or worst of all, a dh’oine to find him. But doing as he had, and finding a more secluded safe spot, meant that now that he’d run out of water, he was too weak to go fetch more. He’d tried, when he’d first been running low, but he hadn’t been able to stand for long enough. He’d run out entirely without ever having a period of time where he was strong enough. Now he was two days since his last tiny rationed sip, and even if it rained he had no way to catch any significant amount of water.
He was going to die here, of thirst. And it was a shame, but no one who’d help him was nearby, and now without water he was only growing weaker. How boring.
The old impulses were still there, to appeal to the gods he’d been raised with. But they weren’t his anymore. The name he’d had, the place he’d had, those were gone. Those gods were dead anyway; he’d seen the sacred grove profaned. There was nothing for him to appeal to. No other gods would take him, and his own were dead. He couldn’t appeal to his ancestors, either. After the sacred grove had burned and the clan’s homestead had been pillaged and in his anger he’d resolved to take up arms, the surviving patriarch had cast him out, stripped his name from him, barred him from the sight of the ancestors, and that was that.
So it was only him, and implacable Nature, and the sun in the trees, and his rising fever and growing weakness.
And this dragon. He blinked in some surprise; he hadn’t expected a dragon. Or a-- slyzard or whatever this was. Forktail. It didn’t look like any of the creatures he was used to. It was a pale greenish color, dull and unprepossessing, with big golden eyes, and it was rather large. It had popped its head over the edge of the little nest Iorveth had made himself in the crotch of this tree, and was looking at him with first one of its eyes, then the other.
“Oh,” Iorveth said. “I suppose this might as well happen.”
The dragon sniffed delicately at him. He did not want to be eaten. But, dying of thirst wasn’t very interesting. He might as well nourish some creature on his way out, something larger than the slugs and snails that would eat his body if he died here. Well, probably rats would find him first. Those were all less glamorous than a dragon. Or-- or whatever this was.
“Are you a wyvern?” he asked blearily. “Or maybe a-- what’s the other one called?”
The dragon pulled back somewhat, and then looked at him with its other eye. It hadn’t eaten him yet. Possibly it was figuring out if he were armed.
“I’m just going to tell myself you’re a dragon,” he told it. His voice wasn’t worth much, parched as he was, more a croak than anything else. “That’s much more interesting than any of the other creatures you could be. I’m dying anyway, I might as well tell myself a nice fairy story on the way out.”
The dragon’s head withdrew, and there was an odd flicker of light that didn’t make sense given the position of the sun and the absence of any large reflective surfaces. Iorveth drifted off again. Possibly he’d hallucinated the thing. He looked at the leaves, and then closed his eyes.
“Are you really dying?” a voice asked.
He blinked. “What?” A face popped over the edge of his little nest. It was a-- woman, or girl, or-- a child, possibly, he couldn’t tell how old. A dh’oine, though, blonde and blue-eyed and round-cheeked with youth. Fuck. He’d have been alarmed to see a dh’oine child, if he could feel much alarm.
“You just said you were dying anyway,” she said. Not a little kid, he thought. But then, he didn’t know how dh’oine worked. She hooked her elbows over the edge of the nest. “Are you really?”
“Did I say that?” he wondered. They were speaking dh’oine speech now. Surely he’d been speaking Hen Llinge before, how would a little dh’oinelet have known what he was saying? Had he said that? Who’d he been speaking to? Oh, the dragon. “Wait, was there just--” A dragon there? What a mad thing to ask. “Uh.”
“What’s killing you?” she asked. “That wound? Is it infected?” She looked solemn, biting her lip. “I bet I can help.”
“Water,” he said. “I’m dying of thirst. I ran out of water and I’m too weak to go get more.” He produced his empty drinking gourd, and she took it and investigated it as if she’d never seen such a thing before.
“If I get water will you live?” she asked.
He laughed. “No guarantees, little friend,” he said. “Fever’s pretty bad too, and I ran out of food before I ran out of water.”
She looked up from the gourd. “Out of food,” she said. “Why-- what do you eat?”
“Same things you do,” he said.
“I doubt that,” she said. “But, if you mean what humans eat, I know how to get human food.”
“Are you not?” he asked. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say human.
“You just correctly identified me,” she said. “I’ll be back with water, then I can get the rest.”
She left, and Iorveth sat baffled for a moment, blinking up at the tree canopy. He didn’t know what she was talking about.
By the time she came back he’d faded out of consciousness again, and had forgotten about her, so when she popped up over the edge of the hollow and held out his water gourd, he just blinked at her, not sure whether she were real.
She shook it, and it was too full to slosh. A drop of water fell from it and landed on his arm. He stared at her in complete disbelief. She was a dh’oine girl, possibly teenaged, with gangly wrists, wearing an oversized but well-made tunic and a gold necklace. Her hair was neatly brushed and styled. Someone was caring for her, she wasn’t living feral in the woods by herself.
“Don’t you want the water?” she asked, and he managed to raise his arm and take the gourd from her. It was heavy, full.
“Are you real?” he asked, feeling pathetically out of his depth.
“I am,” she said. “Go on, it’s safe.”
He unfastened the cap and took a careful small mouthful of the water, sloshing it around the parched tissues of his mouth. It sure felt real. It tasted of a forest creek, and he wanted to pour the entire thing down his throat but knew it would give him stomach cramps if he did.
He let the first mouthful trickle down his throat. “It’s real,” he said wonderingly. “It’s-- real? Are you real?”
“I am,” she said again. She climbed up and sat on the edge of the tree hollow, looking critically at him. “You really look terrible. Is this what you’re supposed to look like?”
He had taken another mouthful of water, and it was taking most of his attention to keep from swallowing it immediately, so he focused on that instead of answering her. Finally he let it trickle down his throat and said “Well, I’ve been dying for several days. I don’t know who’d look their best at a time like that.”
“You need medicine,” she said.
“Mm,” he said, “possibly.” He took another mouthful of water. He should stop, after this, for a few minutes, but he didn’t want to. This was a nice hallucination. Not his first, about water, but this was the most plausible of them so far.
“I don’t know much about human medicine,” she said. “If I have to go get help, how long will you live?”
“I’m not human,” he said, annoyed enough to swallow his mouthful of water. “Human medicine won’t do me any-- well all right it probably would be fine except that if you go and get a dh’oine they’ll kill me.” He considered that for a moment. “Wait, why did you say it like that?”
“I’m not a human,” the girl said patiently.
He blinked muzzily at her. “I think we haven’t been properly introduced,” he said.
She tilted her head, bird-like, and he realized she was waiting for him to start. He gestured at his chest with the hand that wasn’t holding the gourd. “I’m Iorveth,” he said. “And you?”
“Saesenthessis,” she said.
“I am Aen Seidhe, formerly of the-- well, of the var Tineldir, but. More lately of the Scoia’tael.” Iorveth hadn’t said his former surname aloud in many years. He wasn’t sure he had, just now; this all might be a hallucination.
“Ah,” she said. “I’m a dragon! Daughter of Myrgtabrakke and Villentrentenmerth. I learned this trick from my father, of shape-shifting. He can adopt several forms but I can only do this one, and my true one.” She beamed.
“Ah,” Iorveth said, “you’re a dragon.” He had just enough self-possession to tie the cap back onto his water gourd before he faded out.
He was aware in brief flashes, a few times. The girl’s face. The dragon, again. (“Dragon,” he said, pleased to have a correct title for it, and it cocked its head and rumbled at him. “Not much of me to eat, is there?” he said ruefully, and the dragon rumbled again, giving the distinct impression of being discontented, or at least unamused.) The girl. Food-- a loaf of bread, some cheese. He was too weak to really eat but he got a bit of the crust down with some more water, managed a morsel of the cheese.
He woke with a cry as someone cut open the abscess so it could drain. It hurt, a lot. He thrashed around a little, and then lay still, trying not to whimper as the pain eased.
After a while more he woke to the sound of rain on a tent roof. He was pleasantly warm, not aching so much with fever, and dry. He had to piss. He blinked up at the tent roof, utterly disoriented, and thought about pushing the blankets back, thought about getting out of bed. He didn’t remember where he was, or whose tent this was, or whose blankets these were. But he was dimly aware that he’d dreamed several times now about pushing the blankets back and getting out of bed to go piss, and he hadn’t done it any of those times yet, and he was going to have a little accident if he did not take care of things directly.
He finally pushed himself up, and he had the startling realization that he’d been in bed for a very long time indeed, to be so weak. He was wearing only a shirt and braies, which he didn’t remember stripping down to. He crawled over to the edge of the-- it wasn’t a tent. He wasn’t in a tent. He was in a fork of a tree, padded out with some strategic branches and moss, with a roof rigged over it. He didn’t remember rigging a roof.
He made it to the edge, and managed to get his braies undone so he could piss off the edge and not get any on himself or in his bed. It hurt; he’d been unwell and his kidneys weren’t feeling particularly great. He clearly hadn’t eaten, as there was, well, no other particular call of nature. Could explain some of the weakness, he supposed. But he managed to get things taken care of, and only as he fixed his garments back up did he look up at the canvas roof and notice that it was not canvas.
It was leather, or-- it was something alive. It was a membrane, or-- light shone through it, showing a delicate tracery of blood vessels. It was-- a wing, something’s wing. “What the fuck,” he said, and fell down into the nest, the unfamiliar blankets and the-- there were several little baskets he didn’t recognize, sitting in the nest with him.
He turned around, and this direction was where the wing was coming from. It was part of-- there was a creature’s face, a-- a dragon, he remembered, he’d had a conversation about a dragon. “What the fuck,” he said again, but, well.
He’d seen this thing before. Pale greenish-gray, with a golden eye intelligently fixed on him. It stared at him intently, and he shrank back a little. It was-- shielding him from the rain with its wing. That wasn’t something a dumb animal would do.
“Are you the girl,” he said, putting several fragments of awareness together.
The dragon blinked, then moved its head. Was it nodding? It made an odd high-pitched noise in the back of its throat and he stared at it in bafflement. Was it trying to talk? Dragons couldn’t-- could dragons talk?
No, he realized; her mouth surely couldn’t form the fine shapes of speech, and her throat wouldn’t have the relevant noise-making parts anyhow. She couldn’t talk, not without lips. So the human form was for talking, and she couldn’t change into it without depriving him of his rain shelter.
He took stock of himself. His fever had broken, that was why he was awake. The arrow wound was-- someone had cut it open, expertly enough, and had packed it correctly with the right kind of moss, which he hadn’t been able to find around here, and the infection was largely drained, though it would heal ugly.
The dragon was staring at him really intently, still making an intermittent high-pitched noise. He leaned on the edge of the next, close to the creature’s head, and reached out hesitantly. She moved her face a little closer, and in a moment he could reach her. He carefully, tentatively traced his fingers along the structure more or less analogous to his own cheekbone, surprised to find that the skin was warm, and the scales smooth.
--hear me, he heard faintly, as if inside his head. Can you-- oh, I still can’t get the hang of this.
“Oh!” he said. “Was that you?”
Me! The dragon blinked. Can you hear me? It was faint, but it was-- the dragon was making the little squeaking noise as it-- was this telepathy? Was she speaking to him from inside her head? It stood to reason she’d have the intellectual capacity to make speech, at least.
“I can,” he said, wonderingly.
The dragon made an excited little rumbling noise. He flattened the palm of his hand against the hinge of her jaw. I went and found a healer and made her show me inside her mind how to help a wound like yours, the dragon said excitedly. He could tell now, the cadence of the little squeaking noise she was making aloud matched her mental speech; it was her really focusing on the words as she tried to project them to him. It was nasty, and scary, but it worked! A lot of really gross stuff came out of you but then you lived!
“That was you,” he said. “I remember that but not very well.”
I think you were almost dying, the dragon said solemnly.
“I was,” he said.
But you’re not, now, she said.
Something in her earnestness finally connected, and he said, “You’re still a kid, aren’t you.” She was huge, her head was nearly as long as his whole body, but there was a gawky quality to her, that matched the human form with its round face and gangly wrists.
I’m old enough to be on my own, she said. As-- as dragons reckon things. After a moment she worked her jaw a little, and continued, Humans don’t seem to agree, people keep wanting to-- adopt me.
He traced his fingers along the edge of her jaw, admiring her. The scales weren’t very strongly colored, ideal for camouflage. Like a fawn, he thought. Not that he knew what color dragons normally were; he’d only read about them in fairy stories, which were not known for their fidelity to real-life detail.
This isn’t my final molt, she said. My mother was green and my father was gold, and nobody knows what color I’ll wind up.
He hadn’t said that out loud. How had she known what he hadn’t said?
Oh, she said, I can-- oh! She sounded pleased. I can read minds, at least a little, and I haven’t ever really succeeded at getting people to hear me talk back in their heads like I’m supposed to be able to but-- I could hear you, just then! Maybe it’s because you could hear me?
“I’d better watch myself,” he said.
Do you like fairy stories? she asked.
He thought about denying it, then remembered she could read minds. “You got me,” he said.
Why would you hide that you do? She sounded puzzled. I like fairy stories too. Doesn’t everyone?
“They’re dh’oine stories,” he admitted. “And I don’t-- like dh’oine. But the stories are-- not like the people.” While he was confessing, he said, “I like a lot of their songs too.”
The dragon made a little noise he was surprised to be able to identify as pleased. When you’re better will you sing to me?
“I will,” he said, surprised to find that he meant it.