Chapter 652: A Different Knight

Noah lowered the spear slowly.

Not because he had decided Valen was no longer a threat. Because the gesture meant something and he needed it to mean something right now, the way you put down a weapon when the fight has reached the point where continuing it serves neither person in it.

Valen watched the tip come down. His chest was still working from the exertion, the golden glow fading from his frame in gradual stages, and he stood with his hands at his sides and looked at Noah across the torn-up hillside with the expression of a man who had just run a calculation and arrived at an answer he did not entirely know what to do with.

Noah held the spear out handle-first.

Valen took it.

They stood there for a moment, both of them breathing, the red mist still sitting around them in the warm ambient way of something that was present because it chose to be and was not in any hurry about leaving.

"Sit down," Noah said.

Valen looked at him.

"Please," Noah added.

They sat on the hillside in the torn grass, the fallen trees on either side of them, the craters in the earth between them evidence of what the last twenty minutes had been. Below, invisible through the mist, Harrowfield was doing the quiet work of a village that had survived something and was trying to understand what that meant for the morning after.

Noah looked at the mist around them.

’Ares,’ he thought. ’Stay. Please just stay.’

The mist did not move.

He exhaled.

"When I was young," he said, "younger than I am now, I found a dragon."

Valen said nothing. Listening.

"Not the red death Egor’s men saw. Before that. A different one, smaller, already injured. I found it on a hillside not far from where I grew up and instead of running I sat with it." He paused. "I don’t know why I sat with it. I’ve thought about that a lot and I don’t have a clean answer. It just did not occur to me to be afraid."

"And the dragon let you stay," Valen said.

"The dragon let me stay." Noah looked at his hands. "That was the first one. After that it was like something had been unlocked. I found others over the years. Not often, not like I was seeking them out, just the way some people find stray animals and others walk past them without seeing. They’d be there and I would sit with them and eventually they would let me close enough to touch."

’This is close enough to true,’ he thought. ’The shape of it is true. The details are from a different world but the shape is the same.’

"The red death," Valen said. "The one Egor saw."

"Was one of them," Noah said. "Yes."

"You didn’t fight it."

"No."

Valen looked at the mist around them. His jaw moved once. "That story Egor told. The one that got you recruited. About the boy who’d survived a red death encounter."

"He saw what he expected to see," Noah said. "He saw a person standing next to a dragon that was leaving. He filled in the rest."

Valen was quiet for a long stretch. Long enough that a bird somewhere in the trees above the mist line called twice and went quiet.

"Why didn’t you tell us," he said. Not angry. Just asking.

Noah looked at him.

"Because of this," he said. "Because you just spent twenty minutes trying to take my head off on a hillside outside a village in the middle of a war. Imagine if I’d stood up on the first day of training and said I can talk to dragons."

Valen opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Noah watched the recognition move through the instructor’s face, the specific look of a man who has been about to argue a point and has realized mid-breath that the point argues against itself.

"The forbidden technique," Valen said. "The dark chi."

"I don’t know what to tell you about that," Noah said. "I know what I am. I know I’m not the enemy. That’s the truest thing I can give you and I understand if it’s not enough." He met Valen’s eyes. "You can arrest me when we get back. Or you can walk back with me and let me help finish this, and we can have the longer conversation somewhere that isn’t a destroyed hillside in a red mist."

Valen looked at him for a long time.

’The boy is not lying,’ Valen thought. ’Not about the core of it. I have spent twenty years reading people in situations where lying was the natural response and I know what it looks like and this is not it.’ He looked at the mist still sitting around them, warm and red and present. ’He has a red death on this hillside right now that has not moved because he asked it not to move. That is not a trick. That is not a technique you learn. That is something else entirely.’

’And he still dodged the roundhouse. Still took the spear from my hands. Still put the tip in my face without once attacking me with intent to harm.’

’Not the enemy,’ Valen thought. ’But not anything I have a name for either.’

He stood up.

"Come on," he said.

---

They walked back down the hill looking like what they were, two people who had been in a fight that neither of them had finished. Noah had a burn across his cheek from the spear’s discharge and grass stains from the hillside on both knees. Valen had a bruise forming along his forearm from the block and his jacket had lost its left shoulder seam entirely at some point during the exchange.

Sera saw them coming through the village’s north entrance and her eyes moved across the damage with the professional attention of someone assessing triage priority.

"Sit down," she said, to both of them.

"I’m fine," Valen said.

"You have a contusion on your forearm that is going to stiffen by this evening and make holding a spear unpleasant," Sera said, in the tone she used when she was stating facts rather than offering opinions. "Sit down."

Valen sat down.

Pip appeared from around the corner of the nearest building, took one look at both of them, and looked at Noah with the expression he wore when he was filing something extremely large into a folder marked things Burt will explain eventually.

He said nothing. Filed it. Walked away.

The day passed in the way days passed after battles, in small necessary tasks that accumulated into something that looked like order. The captured soldiers were transferred to the custody of the first knight patrol that arrived from the east road by midafternoon, a column of thirty men in the kingdom’s colors who had been riding since they received Valen’s message and looked it. Their commander, a senior knight named Aldous with a grey beard and the weathered face of someone who had ridden hard in difficult news before, listened to Valen’s account of the harbor engagement with the focused attention of a man building a report in his head as the words arrived.

He asked about the aerial assault. The water creatures. The scale of the force.

He did not ask about the dragon at the harbor end of the square, which was either professional discipline or the pragmatic decision of a man who had enough to process already.

By evening the village had settled into something that was not normal but was stable, which was the closest thing to normal available. Mistress Edra had produced another meal from somewhere, the recruits had found their various aches and addressed them with Sera’s help, and the captured soldiers had been moved far enough from the Saltback that they were someone else’s problem for the night.

Gladys found Noah near the harbor wall as the light went flat.

"The commander wants your account tomorrow," she said. "About the ships."

"He’ll have it," Noah said.

She looked at him with the assessment she had been applying to him since they arrived in Harrowfield, the one that had decided something on the first day and had been revising its conclusions steadily since. "You did well," she said. Then she walked away, which was the most Gladys ever said about anything.

---

The night came quiet.

Noah waited until the Saltback had gone to its particular sleeping sounds, the creak and settle of a building containing tired people, and then he was moving through the dark of the upstairs corridor when he nearly walked into Pip.

Pip was standing in the corridor with his boots already on and his chakram on his belt.

Behind him, Nami leaned against the wall with her arms folded and both knives in their sheaths and the look of someone who had been waiting for exactly this.

Noah looked at them.

"The mountain," Pip said quietly. "You’ve been thinking about it all day. And before you say you’re going alone, I want to point out that we have Shade now and Shade can carry two people without any difficulty and neither of us is going to pretend we don’t know what’s up there."

Noah looked at Nami.

"Don’t look at me like that," she said. "I’ve known about Ares for weeks. You think I wouldn’t notice you disappearing and returning without a hollow blizzard and think something’s up?"

They went out through the back of the Saltback and into the dark of the village’s outer edge, and Ares came through the tree line in the red mist with the quiet of something that had been waiting with patience it never seemed to run out of, and Shade dropped from somewhere above in the particular way the black dragon had of appearing from spaces that should not have contained it.

Pip looked at Shade. Looked at Ares. Looked at Noah.

"I have so many questions," Pip said.

"I know," Noah said.

"And you’re not going to answer them tonight."

"I don’t have answers to most of them," Noah said, which was true in ways he could not explain without starting a conversation that would last longer than the night and resolve less than either of them hoped.

Pip absorbed this with the equanimity he applied to things he had decided to accept for now.

They went up into the dark, Pip and Nami on Shade’s back, Noah on Ares, the mountain rising ahead of them against the stars.

---

The meeting in the knight outpost’s back room held four people.

Valen. Ironside. Sareth. And a fifth instructor named Dunmore who had arrived with Aldous’s column and whose presence at this table rather than the main briefing said something about what kind of meeting this was.

The table had no papers on it. This was not that kind of conversation.

Ironside had listened to Valen’s account twice. The full account, not the version given to Commander Aldous, which had covered the harbor engagement and the aerial assault and the water creatures and had been accurate as far as it went. The version Ironside had heard included the walk up the hill, the mist, the fight, the spear in Valen’s face, and the boy who had not once attacked with intent to harm despite having every opportunity and capability to do so.

Ironside was quiet for a long time after the second telling.

The candle on the table burned down a quarter of an inch.

"The dragon at the harbor," Ironside said. "The black one. You are certain it was tamed."

"I am certain," Valen said. "I have been hunting dragons for twenty years. A tamed animal and a wild one do not look the same. That dragon was tamed."

"And the red death on the hill."

"Present. Responsive to his instruction. Did not attack despite the fact that I was actively fighting the boy for twenty minutes."

Another silence.

Sareth, who had not spoken since Valen began, leaned forward with her forearms on the table. "The dark chi," she said. "You’re certain."

"I was told he has used the technique twice now," Valen said. "Once in the gate against Gorrauth, which several recruits reported and I discounted as confused observation from people who had been through an extreme experience. Once tonight, in a controlled context where I was specifically watching for it." He paused. "I am certain."

Ironside looked at the candle.

"The beetle kills," Dunmore said, speaking for the first time. His voice was the kind that arrived already carrying weight. "The dragon scale board. The gate. The wyvern at the harbor. The ships." He looked at Ironside. "And now this."

Ironside nodded once.

"The ability to control dragons," Ironside said slowly, turning the words over as he said them. "It’s not even black knight territory anymore." He looked at each person at the table. "Red, yellow, green, or the exceptionally rare kind. Black. No one. In the entire history of this order, in every account we have from the woman who built the first gates to the knights who walked out of them. No one has been able to do that."

The candle burned.

Nobody said anything for a long time.