Chapter 16: Gnolls of Buetarn

It was almost dark; the twilight made it hard for Kashira to see. She was good at seeing in the dark and excellent at seeing in the light, but in-between stages of light was harder for her. She landed far back on the hill overlooking the town. It was much closer than she would have normally landed, but with the fading light, she felt she would go unnoticed, especially because many were likely to be indoors. She had stopped for a meal with Goren, but he had barely been able to eat anything. He had fallen asleep after that, so she flexed and clenched her belly, squeezing on him until he pushed back on her. 

"We are here, bunbun. It's dusk. What would you like to do?" She felt him stiffen up, and she felt a thrill of worry for him go through her. 

"Let's get this over with. Are you sure they will see I belong to you?"

"It will work if they try to touch your collar. Even if it does not work, how about I just storm the place if I don't see you in the next forty-five minutes?"

He huffed. "You can hear me though, even far out? I will just call for you if I need you, so you won't need to do any dragon-storming, whatever that is."

She smiled. It was cute to hear the fluster in his tone about her willingness to do things for him. Despite her worries, she wanted to reach a time when he could almost take her protection and support for granted. "I will certainly come if you call," she agreed. "Are you ready?" There was a delay, and she breathed in deep and out slowly as she waited.

"Yes," he said at last. "I would like to do what I can before... more time passes." 

Kashira sat on her back legs, balancing carefully with both her front paws in the air as she flexed muscles to squish him back up. He shivered violently in the dusk breeze as soon as she had him in her paws. "Just a moment," she said gently, pushing her nose against his collar and breathing magic into the tag clipped onto it. Warm air swirled around him, pulling the moisture from his fluff, and then he was dry. She felt the enchantment was flawless as she put her right paw down in the snow with a soft crunch and then perched him atop it. "Your clothes are all in the bag," she reminded him. 

He nodded and took a deep breath in. "I'm... maybe a little scared. What should I say to them when they confront me?" He pulled the drawstring open on her bracelet pack and pulled his clothes out of it.

"Understand that whatever you say, however wild, I will do my best to back you up, so it will be okay. Try starting with just stating the obvious: what you want and who you are looking for. Then, we'll see how they react. As I mentioned earlier, once they realize you belong to me, they might just give your family to us. If they seem hesitant, I will offer to just pay for them. If they give you trouble, you can threaten that I will come with terrible dragon's breath or whatever. If none of that makes sense, you can tell them I am looking to have an appointment with someone in charge, and I will talk to them." She paused to nuzzle him. "So say whatever you think is right in the moment, and I will go along with it, all right?"

He breathed in slowly as he shrugged his shirt and cloak on and out slowly as he settled the fabric on himself. "I will do my best." She was quiet as he tugged his pants on and then sat on her paw to put boots on. Once he was dressed, he looked up at her and whispered a soft, emotional, "Thank you." 

She pressed her nose to him. "It will be all right. Maybe... not today, but eventually. I hope that this makes things a little better, but there is no way to know without also finding out if it gets worse or not."

He hugged her nose and nodded. "I feel a little sick." He cleared his throat. "I am going to do the best I can, though, because I am afraid that I will regret it if something could have been done to help them, and then I didn't do anything at all." 

"Of course." 

There was some hesitance in him, so she was still, her nose near him, waiting to see if he would share what it was that was making his ears all flat like that. In the end, he straightened his shoulders, took another deep breath, held it a moment, and then let it out in a sigh. "All right! Here goes nothing." 

Goren found that his heart clung to the idea that his sisters may have somehow survived. It seemed like a different lifetime now, but there had been a notion to get some of his siblings to come out to him if he ever advanced his career enough to have his own studio. Because things at home... 

He couldn't even remember the place clearly, just a hazy, dark feeling and the color of the wood on the door. There was always a bit of thatch coming down, always evidence of disrepair, and too many people in too small a space. 

The night he had walked back, with no other options, he had been filled with dread. How often had his mother told him that he was going to fail? He was not looking forward to facing the smug disdain about how she had been right all along. 

It was almost funny to him now that he had ever dreaded it; he would happily have experienced it several times over rather than find Buetarn burned by gnolls.

There wasn't a smoky feeling in the air now, and things were no longer quite as horribly quiet. The sounds of carpentry tools and the blacksmith's anvil continued to ring out, pushing through the waning dusk light.

It took only about five minutes of walking before he came over the ridge to look down at the town, the giant lake shining reddish in the fading light at the back of it. Barely a heartbeat passed before someone called out, "Loose jayune!"

He took a deep breath, held it, and stood his ground. His palms tingled, and everything in his chest felt tight. Three large gnolls made a rough ring around him. He couldn't help but seem tiny compared to them. The shortest one was a foot taller than he was. They had awful, big, square jaws and a way of walking that was unsettling. Sharp teeth poked out beneath the bottom edges of their lips; some had snaggle teeth, and several had heterochromia that unbalanced their expressions. He found them ugly, and the strange glowing cracks around their muzzles and throats made it worse.

"Whatcha doin'?" The gnoll that walked up to him was large and brown. The seven-foot-high male towered over Goren. Before he could find an answer, the man reached out and grabbed him by the chin. "What? A collar?"

He shuddered and wished the gnoll would take his paws off him, but he answered quietly, "Yes. I belong to Kashira---"

"Don't matter now," the gnoll said, moving to pull the collar off, but as soon as his claw tips brushed the blue fabric, light enveloped him.  

Goren felt disoriented as the light took on Kashira's color, blocking his vision for a moment. The gnolls yelped and backpedaled away from him. "A dragon?!"

The glow died away, and Goren blinked rapidly to clear his eyes. "Kashira the dragon is my master," he said into the tense silence. "I have come to ge..." The tightness in his chest felt like it squeezed down even harder, and it suddenly seemed impossible to get the words out. He was frozen; he could hear his own heart pounding in his ears. He forced his mouth to move. "Get my family. The Alfons." 

The three gnolls were still just staring at him incredulously. "Someone go and get Karrok." 

One of the three left, and the other two stayed back from him. I guess Kashira was right about the collar, they really don't dare to touch me now. It would have been nice to know it would be a big enveloping light, though, he thought. Somehow he felt rather distant from the thoughts. Fear still filled his senses as he stubbornly stood his ground. There was part of him that wanted to call in Kashira and retreat as the gnolls kept eyeing him. 

Fear gave way to anger. He couldn't help but glare at the ugly beasts who cared so little about what they had done. In the tense silence that followed, Goren demanded, "Do you even know any of their names?" 

The tightness in his chest was beginning to feel unbearable as he struggled to comprehend the cruelty of these creatures. It occurred to him now that after months away studying painting, the last time he had seen his family was before he left. The words that had been exchanged were all that could ever be exchanged and were all that was left. These monsters might have taken everything else from him.

Fortunately, the word that he was owned by a dragon got him results quickly. Karrok was almost a foot taller than these other gnolls, towering over him even more than the rest, and looked down at him, at his collar. "You say you want your family, surname Alfon? And... if we do have any of them still, what? You are taking them?"

He was tempted to say yes, just to see what the man would do. He wished, on some level, that Kashira really would just bring down dragon's breath on them. But... "She said she would buy them." In the end, he didn't want to see anything else horrible happen, even to them.

The large gnoll's demeanor relaxed significantly. "Where is your master? You can call them? Her?"

"Yes. Shall I? We have money now." 

He looked over the clothes that Goren was wearing. "I see that. Your family, though—what colors are they? Brown and white like you?"

"My mother was all white. Her name is Dalphina? I have three siblings."

He nodded. "You heard the little man," he said to one of the two remaining gnolls. "Get looking. Call your dragon; we all want this to be peaceful. Yeah? No trouble here." 

"Kashira..." he said, hoping that would be enough, but she was much closer than he expected. She walked into view of the lights about fifty feet behind him seconds after he said her name. She padded quietly, wings down and tail lowered near the snowy ground, until she was behind him.

Karrok held his ground, looking up at her. "Two jayune like this one are in the keeping of my fiancée; I will have them brought. Someone is looking to see if we have any others and the white one."

There was a lot of awkward silence. Kashira just waited; the gnoll fidgeted, and Goren felt like his heart was going to beat out of his chest. The ends of his ears and his palms had a pulse. Kashira put a paw over him and scooted him onto the top of her left paw, then the waiting continued. Her paw around him helped him to calm and the giddy-rushing sensation from his heart to settle.

A different gnoll than the one that had left him, a female, also in light armor, came up to them and shook her head. "No one answered to Alfon... And, uh, Lukka isn't in her new shop. Her uncle has been looking for her for hours... She probably still has those two spotted jayune, maybe? We just need to find her."

Kashira finally spoke. "Goren, can you think of anyone else...?"

It was difficult to shake off the paralyzing misery he was feeling. "I..." 

Kashira hummed as he trailed off. "We will come back at another time."

Goren wanted to ask her to wait; it was just a hard decision, but the collar brought him a barely breathed-out whisper from her. "I know where they probably are." He practically collapsed onto her shoulders as she lifted him.