The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

CHAPTER 2: Find a Town

It took most of the afternoon to walk out of the forest, and by the time Ethan's boots struck mossy cobblestones at the edge of Feya Town the light had gone long and gold. The valley below lay quiet in it. Trees with leaves the blue of old glass moved in a breeze he could feel on his face, and along the ditches clumps of reeds gave off a faint, steady shimmer, as if someone had left them switched on.

The breeze was cold. He kept noticing that. It got in at the gap between his collar and his neck and he let it, and did not move to close the gap.

Celestia walked half a pace behind him with her arms folded. Her posture was easy; her tail was not. It swung in a slow, measured arc, and every time it reached the end of the arc her eyes went to a doorway or the mouth of an alley and came back.

"This isn't a beginner zone," she said, barely above a breath. "Pretty windows are where people keep the knives."

Ethan laughed, and it came out half nerves. Beginner zone. She'd picked that up from him, too.

The armor was heavier here than it had been in the clearing. It had not been heavy at all while he was running for his life; now each plate settled onto his shoulders with its own opinion, and the greatsword across his back knocked a slow rhythm against his spine. People looked. They looked at the runes crawling faintly over the metal, and at the hilt, and then at the woman with horns, and then they found something else to look at in a hurry.

On the main avenue there were stalls and taverns and a noise that rose out of both, and dozens of eyes, and a small hand darting at the pouch on his belt—

Celestia's tail cracked out sideways and caught the hand across the wrist. A scrawny boy yelped and was gone into an alley before Ethan had finished turning around.

She raised one white brow at him. "Keep your coin where your hand is."

"I'm trying." He tugged the strap of his pack and attempted to look like a man who had done this before.

A wooden sign hung over a doorway ahead, creaking, painted with loops and slashes that meant nothing to him. He stopped under it and looked at her, helpless.

She murmured something under her breath. Warmth brushed over his ears like someone cupping them, and the painted marks swam, shifted, and settled in his head as words: Tavern & Lodging.

"Thanks," he said.

She gave a small shrug, elaborately indifferent, and the corners of her mouth betrayed her. "Don't mention it."

They went on through lanes lit by lanterns and by stranger things: sigils hanging in the air outside shopfronts, turning slowly, advertising whatever was inside. Somewhere a machine hummed with a sound like a hive. Vendors sold brooches made of beetle wings, knives that sharpened themselves on the sheath, little drawstring pouches that whispered secrets when you opened them—the stallholder demonstrated, and the pouch said something that made a passing woman slap her husband. Ethan had walked through a hundred market towns on a screen. None of them had smelled of spiced meat and honey and hot tin, or pushed back when he tried to walk through them.

Celestia slowed.

He almost walked on without her. When he turned, she was standing at a jeweler's stall draped in dark silk, looking at a tray of pendants the way she looked at alley mouths—carefully, and not for long, and then again. One in particular: a ruby on a thin silver chain, the stone catching the lamplight and holding on to it like an ember.

"See something you like?"

She looked away from the tray fast enough that it was an answer. A faint flush had come up across the bridge of her nose. "It's a trinket." And then, quieter, before she could stop it: "It would suit me, though. Wouldn't it."

He already had a gold coin between his fingers. The stallholder named a price, Ethan named a lower one because it seemed to be expected, they met at the coin, and the coin went across the silk. He stepped behind her and fumbled the tiny clasp at the back of her neck, twice, and got it on the third try.

The ruby settled against her collarbone, just below the scales.

She lifted it on the tips of her claws and looked at it. Then she weighed it in her palm, closing her hand over it and opening it again to check it was still there. For a moment her face didn't seem to know what to do. She put her arms around him—quick, hard, over almost before he registered it—and said "Thank you" into the side of his neck.

Then she stepped back and cleared her throat. "It's a gift. Don't make it strange."

He bit down on a smile. "Wouldn't dream of it."

Up ahead, a cart went over.

Two men, both drunk, had been shoving each other in the middle of the street; one of them went backward into a fruit cart and took it down with him, and oranges ran everywhere across the cobbles, bumping against boots and doorsteps. People made room. Ethan steered Celestia toward the far side of the street to go around it and walked instead into a wall of a man who smelled like a brewery floor.

The man looked at Ethan's armor slowly, like a man reading a menu. At the sword. At the pouch.

"Fresh faces," he said, and cracked his knuckles, which were scarred across the tops. "This town doesn't care for show-offs."

Celestia was between them without having seemed to move. "We're passing through. We don't want trouble."

More men were drifting out onto the tavern porch behind him. The big man smiled with half his teeth. "Then there's a f*e. For a quiet night. Local hospitality."

It was, Ethan thought, exactly the scene—the thugs, the shakedown, the new player in shiny gear. He'd clicked through it a dozen times. You said no, you got a fight, you won the fight. "We're not paying you anything," he said.

He never saw the bottle. He heard the glass of it scrape a doorframe behind him as it came around at the back of his head, and had just enough time to flinch.

Celestia's hand went past his ear. Her claws closed on a wrist he hadn't known was there, and the broken bottle stopped a finger's width from his skull, and she turned—not hard, it didn't look hard—and the man attached to the wrist left the ground and came down face-first in the gutter water. He didn't get up. The bottle went spinning away into the dark.

The street had gone quiet.

The big man's eyes went to her horns. To her hand, and the scales on the back of it. His face changed.

"Dragonkin," somebody said on the porch, not loudly.

"This isn't over, outsiders." But he was already backing away with his palms up, and jerked his chin at his friends to pick up the one in the gutter, and they melted into the alley in a clump, and the glare he left behind was mostly for show.

Celestia kept herself between Ethan and the alley until the last of them was gone. Then she leaned in until her mouth was close to his ear.

"You said no to a man with six friends," she said, "in a street you've never seen, in a country you've only ever looked at through a screen." Her voice was quite level. "Next time, look behind you before you say it."

He nodded. His throat had closed. He looked down and found that his hands were shaking, and put them under his arms where nobody would see, and she saw.

---

They found an inn at the quieter end of a market street and took a room right under the eaves, so low that Ethan hit his head on the beam twice before he learned it. There was one small window. After dark he climbed out of it onto the slope of the roof because the room was too small to think in, and after a moment Celestia climbed out after him and folded herself down beside him, knees up, arms around them.

All of Feya lay below. Lanterns burned in its windows, and out of the square at its center, one after another, paper lanterns were lifting into the sky—a festival, apparently, each lantern carrying somebody's wish written on its side. He watched one climb until he couldn't tell it from the stars.

"It's nothing like the game," he said. "It's harder. Meaner." The lantern was gone. "I still want to see more of it."

The wind got into Celestia's hair and pulled a few strands loose around her horns. She didn't fix them.

"A great deal has been happening in this world," she said, "since before you came. Elves have been going missing out of their own villages. Beasts are hitting caravans on roads that were safe a year ago. There's talk of something wrong out in the eastern marshes—dark work, the kind people lower their voices for."

He turned to look at her. "Is it connected? To whatever summoned me?"

She was quiet for long enough that he thought she hadn't heard. "Astrael has always had its evils," she said at last, and that was not what he had asked, and she seemed to know it, because she didn't look at him while she said it.

Below them, a crier's voice boomed out of the square, magically swollen so that it bounced off every roof: "Hear ye! Combat Tournament this weekend in the Feya Coliseum! Glory, gold, and the Champion's title to the victor—and to the Champion, from the Count's own vault, a dimensional satchel of the old make!"

Ethan sat up so fast the tiles shifted under him.

An arena. Rounds, rules, a bracket. Somebody at the edge of the floor whose whole job was to heal you afterward. Of everything in this world, it was the first thing that worked the way it was supposed to.

"A chance to fight for prize money," he said, and could hear himself grinning. "Learn how combat actually works here, with a healer on hand. And a storage item—Celestia, do you know how much stuff we'd be able to carry—"

She groaned into her knees. "I know that look." Then, lifting her head: "There's no such thing as a fair fight once money and pride get into it."

"What's life without a little risk?" He dug the folded map the innkeeper had given him out of his belt and flattened it on his knee, tilting it to the moonlight, tracing the lanes with a finger. "Arena's on the west side. Sign-ups'll be tomorrow."

She shook her head, but the smile was there. "If you're set on it, I'll be your second. And your shield." She looked at him properly then. "Promise me you won't get yourself killed on the first day."

He bumped his shoulder against hers. "I promise. I'm planning on sticking around for a while."

She didn't bump back. She looked at him, as if he had said something much larger than he had, and then she looked at the sky, and said, "Good," to it.

When they climbed back in through the window, Ethan glanced down into the street. Someone in a plain traveling coat—the kind of coat nobody's eye ever stops on—was crouched by the inn's front door, doing something low down on the frame. Then the figure straightened, dusted off one hand, and walked away without hurrying.

A drunk, Ethan decided, and pulled the shutter to.