Page 10 of Among the Burning Flowers
Her shield was snatched from her grasp. Somehow she slipped away once more, but her primal instincts werefailing. If she did not flee now, she would have crawled into her own grave. But she was so tired, and so hungry, the weakness slowing her. Fatally slowing her.
Out of nowhere, a tail whipped into her ribs, slamming her against the cavern wall. Her spectacles broke and fell off her face. She hit the ground, still clutching her rapier, head spinning.
The creature loomed above her, its eyes illuminating its face. For one dreadful moment, Melaugo wanted to give up and let it drag her away. She wanted to stop fighting and sleep.
As she stared into its gullet, she wondered how long she would last in its belly. The thought knocked her apathy loose. Her parents’ faces flashed before her. Liyat appeared like a waking dream, shouting at her to get up, as the lindworm prepared for the kill. That loathsome mouth yawned open, ready to eat Melaugo whole. She waited for it to unhinge its jaw—
—and thrust her blade into the roof of its mouth.
A deafening screech. A shudder of sinew. Thick dark blood splattered her front and seeped along her sleeve. In one desperate movement, Melaugo wrenched her sword back and dived out of reach. A pair of iron fangs clanged down an inch from where her boots had been.
Melaugo smelled victory. More importantly, she smelled food. With the last of her agility, she plunged her rapier into the weak spot. The lindworm thrashed as gouts of its blood spurted out. With a heaving chest, Melaugo took her maul and hacked off its appalling head.
Her lantern flickered out.
She blindly groped out of the cave. Outside, in the daylight, she took off her left vambrace and shoved up hersleeve to check her arm. No sign of a scratch or graze. With a laugh, she dropped to her knees, and then vomited.
****
It took a long time to get back from the lair. Longer still to find the woodcutter. Seeing her alive, he gaped at her as if she were the Saint reborn. He kept his distance, but pointed to her first payment.
By the time Melaugo reached her oak, irritable ram in tow, the sun had almost set.
‘I swear to the Saint,’ she said, ‘you had better be as good as gold, or Iwilleat you, Lord Gastaldo.’
The ram bleated.
‘Yes, that’s your name.’ She lashed the rope around a birch. ‘He’s a miserable old ram, too.’
Leaving the animal to sulk, she ducked into her tree. The hollow was larger than one might think from the outside, with room enough for her weapons and the crude tools she had carved from wood.
The day she found this shelter, she had not eaten for over a week. Though dark and dirty, it had given her protection from the wind and rain.
She set down her mail, which she had already cleaned in the stream. Now to wait and see if she did have the plague.
In Perunta, she had been strong as a packhorse. Now her hip bones pushed out like knuckles on a fist, and she could see all of her ribs. They were bruising from the fight. All that work for the promise of food, which would likely amount to no more than a bowl of stew and a hunk of bread. She sat down to eat the two small fish she had dried the week before.
Out of nowhere, her stomach turned. She barely made it outside before coughing up a gush of bile. A good thing shehadstruck this deal, even if it killed her. She was already on the brink of death.
As a child on the streets of Oryzon, she had feared she would always be alone. She should have hoped for that outcome.
It would have prepared her to die alone, too.
****
Melaugo had not always been a killer of Draconic things; neither had she always been a vagrant. She had been raised on a vineyard near Vazuva, where her parents had made wine, like many in the Groneyso Valley, where the breeze was always clement and the River Gáuria kept the land green.
As soon as she could walk, Melaugo had learned to pick grapes. Her parents had been poor – they were smallholders, carrying out the hard labour of winemaking alone – but even if the work had been endless, Melaugo remembered their love, both for her and for each other.
And then King Sigoso had introduced the temperance duty, apparently to curb overindulgence across Yscalin. When the nobles were exempted from it, her parents had grown bitter. And after a poor harvest, leaving them all with empty bellies, they had grown angry.
At last, they had started to smuggle their wine.
They had been caught and jailed within a year, but Melaugo had only been nine, young enough to be deemed innocent. Wrestled into an orphanage, she had spat upon a statue of the Saint, demanding he return herfamily to her. A sanctarian had beaten her with a knotted belt, one knot for each of the Six Virtues. That same night, she had climbed out of a window and limped away, determined to find her parents.
Some children might have curled up and died. Melaugo was too stubborn. By the time she was eleven, she was a cutpurse in the Port of Oryzon, preying on mariners and drunks, drinking rain and stealing food, sleeping in any rathole she could find.
Thirteen years later, little had changed. The hollow of a tree was only one step from the cobblestones.
