A Knight's Calling: the Shackled Verities Prequel Novella: the Shackled Verities, #0 by Tammy Salyer

Author:Tammy Salyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tammy Salyer

CHAPTER NINE

Gwinifeve was kind enough to let him take a few gulps of water before she bound and gagged him like a festival turkey. Did that mean she wasn’t entirely without a moral backbone? He supposed he’d extend her that bit of praise for not letting him die of thirst, but that was the end of any nice things he’d have to say about her.

Halla shone overhead near High Halls, or midday. He wasn’t as hot as he might have been, because she also left him tied in the shade beneath the dragørfly tree with the hatchling. He wasn’t about to give her any acknowledgment for that, though. The hatchling lay at the end of its ten-foot chain. In addition to binding Griggory, she’d also tied a muzzle around the dragør’s jaws, ensuring it couldn’t harm him while she was absent.

Before returning to the city, she’d explained that she was in the process of gathering supplies and hiring the kind of opportunistic help she needed to get them and the hatchling to a lair she’d arranged far from the Weald. There, she planned to raise and tame the beast and bring it to heel completely, so that when the time came, she could use it in the war she said was brewing. When he’d reminded her that the Knights’ duty was not to fight in wars but to protect Vaka Aster’s corporeal vessel, she’d grimaced at him and said, “You’re no Knight, Griggory, but if you were, you’d know that sometimes protection is as much offense as defense, and stopping a single enemy before they can harm you often means first suppressing many.”

He understood her reasoning, as heartless as it was, and couldn’t argue that using the dragør to protect the vessel was anything but her duty. What he could argue was that duty without a care for how it might harm others was a hollow endeavor, a purpose without meaning. Understanding it did not mean he condoned it.

Feeling hollow himself, he realized that night she’d spent with him before he left for Lœdyrrak had not been out of any kind of deep affection for him. She’d merely been soliciting more information about dragørs, and in the meantime treating him like cheap, and infinitely gullible, entertainment. He knew now that she’d likely learned how to identify the celebratory howl of a new dragør parent from him then too, from his blathering on and on. She’d encouraged him to share specifics, such as the different dragør intonations he’d memorized, and for once happy to have an interested audience, he’d complied readily. Now he wondered how he could possibly have carried a torch for someone capable of a deed such as this.

Obviously, he had to escape and then free the hatchling. Shortly after Gwinifeve had bound him and disappeared down the path toward Umborough’s wall, he’d twisted his head and shoved his cheek into the tree’s trunk, running his face up and down along it, trying to push the scrap of cloth covering his mouth away.

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