Chapter Text
Fingers lace into Graham's hair, crackling the half-dried shell of blood and muck that's formed over it, and pulling painfully at his scalp. Graham can't muster the energy to care. The grip on his hair is firm and steady, radiating the warmth of human skin into his too-cold body. When they pull, tilting his head back to expose his throat, he only looks up at the stranger silhouetted against a roiling, clouded sky. He's too tired to fight any longer. The battle is over. Why make the end more painful than it needs to be?
The woman standing over him is short and stocky, broad shoulders made broader by heavy pauldrons. dragonscale, Graham notes; but instead of the usual Rider carvings of snarling faces or raging flames, hers are decorated with small, flowering crowns encircling a pair of bound hands. The carvings are lovely, he thinks, as the grip on his hair jostles; the woman is pulling something free of her belt. Likely a knife—he should be grateful for the mercy, he thinks, but only feels a sort of awful raking in the depth of his belly. It's a distant, muzzy feeling, but he knows he doesn't want to die. He opens his mouth to plead, but only a gurgling noise comes out. The battlefield smoke is burning in his lungs, the smell of burst intestine and roasting flesh settled firmly into his nostrils, his skin, his mind. It's been hours since his last sip of water.
Instead of slitting his throat, the woman pushes Graham down onto his stomach, pulling his spear arm up and behind his back. The movement drags at something in his neck, some hard knot of pain that makes it feel as if he's being stabbed, and he's unable to do anything but cry out. It's like something a sickly baby might make, that noise. He's shamed by it, even beyond the pain, as if the woman thinking badly of him will make him any less dead in the end. The tension on his arm lets up, though—just enough that the pain is bearable. She wraps rope around his wrists, and it's only as she tightens the knot that he realizes he's being taken prisoner.
Graham has seen the way prisoners are treated. The crowded cages, the food thrown in to be fought over, the stink of unwashed bodies left to rot in their own filth. He's always hated guard duty, and his fellow soldiers often sought to keep him off it. Not out of any kindness, but because he would ruin their fun. The others liked to torment the captured Riders and infantry—ugly, pointless cruelties against an enemy that scared them too badly to meet on the battlefield—and would act with outsized rage when Graham stepped in to stop them, as if he was depriving them of food or water, and not a chance at beating some empty-eyed Islander.
Sometimes Graham didn't stop them. Perhaps whatever happens to him now is judgment from the gods themselves for his failures, his cowardice in the face of injustice.
He wants to weep. Wants to sob, really, his lungs hitching and burning, but he can't manage to cry as the woman hauls him to his feet and starts to push him out in front of her. He stumbles more than once, feeling her hands pull him back upright again. His limbs are trembling with cold as if he's been relegated outdoors in the deepest winter, even though it was a warm spring day, tipping into summer, when the battle began.
It's a long, slow march up towards where the islanders are making camp. By the time the woman drops him, Graham is happy to collapse on the ground, heaving deep breath after deep breath. The air is cleaner up here, and the cook-fires smell more heavily of spices than of blood and meat. The islander's dragons are nowhere in sight, disappeared into the clouds after the battle ended.
Some part of Graham's mind is trying to be insistent. He should tell someone that he's an officer, he thinks; that's important. He might not look the part, and his aunt may not be able to scrape together the ransom for even a lowly lieutenant after pouring her savings into buying him the commission in the first place, but it's a chance, at least.
Lying there with his face pressed into dirt—clean dirt, with some grass still on it, the fighting never got this far up the hill—the thoughts seem idiotic, at best. He needs to go insist that he's got a rank high enough to be worth keeping alive—monetarily, at least—and in the same breath imply that any of his men who suffered capture will be better dead at once. What an ugly thing to do.
He doesn't want to die with them, though. What—be buried in a mass grave with Colin-who-likes-pissing-on-prisoners-for-no-goddamn-reason or Hewitt, who always hit harder than he needed to in training and liked to get in a few hits after the bell rang to end the match, just because he could.
So Graham has to bargain for his life like some noble prat who's never worked a day.
The slumped position is pulling at the fibrous bits of Graham's neck, making him feel faint. The distant throbbing in his head is traveling down his spine and spreading into the rest of his body, an all-consuming ache. As the battle-blood ebbs from him, he can feel each intricacy of pain with increasing clarity. He attempts to relieve it by shifting position, and only succeeds in making his head spin hard enough that he chokes up some raw bile from his stomach, and has to sit there with the burn of it lingering on his lips and in his nostrils.
There are other prisoners being brought into the camp. Not very many—the barbarians, perhaps, do not want to waste supplies on capturing every survivor. Graham expects the prisoners to be brought to him—to the same general area, at least, easier to keep an eye on and to guard. Instead, they're being brought to disparate points across the camp. Some are trussed up, others are too injured to move, all are being brought by barbarians dressed in rider's armor.
Most of the prisoners are left where they're dropped, much as Graham has been, but there's a man with both legs broken who screams in protest nearly the entire trip across the camp. Graham isn't sure who he is—someone from a different company, he expects, though he's no notion how he's still able to make so much noise. Isn't he tired?
The man's captor drops him hard in front of their tent, and immediately takes out a knife. Graham thinks he'll have his throat slit in the next second, but the rider uses the knife to slice away clothes and armor instead, pinning him with a hand on his chest. They get weary of the process as they're stripping his breeches, and yank hard at the cloth that's still wrapped around one ankle, wrenching the broken leg into a very wrong position that, paradoxically, seems to make the captive lose his voice completely, all but arching off the ground in pain, and then slumping back down again in a pile of twitching flesh.
Graham, used to his own guard duty and the things he had to either stop or ignore, expects the rider to open their own leggings next. Instead, they retrieve a small pot and brush, and begin painting their prisoner's skin in thick lines of orange pigment. It's almost decorative, Graham thinks, and at odds with the rough way the rider handles the injured man. They're not even being intentionally cruel, Graham thinks; there's none of the viciousness he'd seen in his own soldiers. Only an immense lack of care, as if the man at their feet is dead already.
When the painting is done, the rider carefully covers the pot again, setting it aside, and then pulls something out from a cord around their neck, putting it to their lips.
The sky darkens, and there's shouting from around the camp—not panicked, as Graham himself is feeling, but irritated, as if everyone has watched a supply cart lose a wheel for the third time in one march.
The scent of ozone becomes stronger than the scent of his own vomit, and the wind picks up as the dragon descends on the camp. They're always smaller than Graham expects, after being victim to the dragon's storm magic and lightning in battle; larger than a horse, but not larger than, say, two horses. Nothing is crushed as the creature alights beside the rider's tent. The rider backs away as the dragon approaches, and Graham understands mere seconds before the dragon's head bends down, its jaws open, and it snaps its maw around the prisoner's torso with a wet popping sound. The man screams again, picked up by the long fangs sunk deep into his hips and belly, and he's still screaming as the dragon takes off again. Two thunderous wing-beats carry his voice further away than Graham, frozen to the ground and straining to listen, can hear. Perhaps dragons like to play with their food, Graham thinks, the thought only barely hiding his own panic.
The sky is clear again, and there are a few shouts from the other warriors and riders of the camp—annoyed. Not horrified. Graham thinks that the other prisoners are realizing their purpose at the same time he is. The rider shrugs in response to the complaints, and that's it. Not the right time to feed their prisoners to their dragons, then, but still something all of the prisoners exist for.
Graham curls up on the ground, no longer feeling the ache in his back, too terrified to care.
His aunt wasted her money, after all.