It was late afternoon and several hours later by the time Stefan was through; several hours too much time for me to sit and brood. He found me standing on the porch, cold cup of coffee held in one hand while I stared blindly out at the scenery. "What did you find?" I asked brusquely, my eyes not leaving the mountains.
There was a moment's hesitation, then Dithra's agent sighed. "While we were still gathering intelligence on the warehouse, there were several times that I wondered about the amount of information we were getting from Kaa'saht. It crossed my mind that perhaps he had been discovered, perhaps even doubled. I thought not, however; it cross-checked with what my other agents were able to gather, and the information was far too damaging to be the sort one normally receives from a compromised agent." Another pause, another sigh. "I was wrong. Kaa'saht had indeed been doubled, but not by the Council."
"Pasqual."
"Yes, my Lord. She discovered him, he does not know how, and threatened to expose him to the Council if he did not pass along the information she supplied."
I frowned. "You know, awhile back, I got the idea from a certain someone that our people don't respond well to coercion." I turned, gave Stefan an icy look. "Was I lied to?"
Stefan's eyes grew dark at what I was implying. "Lady Dithra did not lie to you, my Lord; we do indeed respond poorly to threats. However, Kaa'saht found himself in a unique situation. First, the information was precisely what we were looking for, and of far higher quality than what he could have gathered alone."
The agent fell silent. After several seconds his silence began to irritate me. "And the second?" I prodded.
Stefan hesitated, his eyes dropping away from mine. "He is in love with Lady Pasqual, my Lord."
I stared at him for a long moment, something churning within my guts. "And does she love him?" I ground out at last.
"That I do not know, my Lord. Only Lady Pasqual can answer that question."
We both fell silent, and I went back to studying the scenery. Abruptly I flung the contents of my coffee cup out into the snow. "So; she doubles our agent, uses us to get herself and the kids away from the Council, then uses our own agent against us to try to pull a fast fade, which would have left both the Council and us empty-handed and looking like fools." I scowled, but then felt one corner of my mouth dragging itself upward into a grim smile. "Seems our little Pasqual is growing up very quickly."
Stefan thought about it for a moment. "There are few things in this world more dangerous than a dragoness out for revenge, my Lord," he allowed.
"I think I just learned that," I replied, then sobered. "My daughter; she's really dead, isn't she?"
A long silence, then, finally "My Lord, there is nothing that I would not give to be able to tell you otherwise, but, yes; she is gone."
I closed my eyes for several seconds, then reopened them to stare at the beautiful, uncaring mountains. "Was it as Pasqual claimed?"
"Yes, my Lord."
I drew in a breath, let it out as a long, shaky sigh. I did not speak again, not until I could be sure my voice would not break. "Could nothing be done?" I asked at last.
". . . . My Lord?"
"I said, couldn't anything be done!" I exploded, whirling to face Dithra's startled agent. "If Pasqual told the truth, then my daughter was sick for months! Why wasn't anything done to help her? Why the hell didn't anyone think to get her to a doctor?"
"Doctor," Stefan echoed blankly, then comprehension dawned. "My Lord," he paused, his expression becoming regretful. "My Lord, those who healed, the Lifeweavers, they are no more. They have been gone . . . for a very long time now." The dragon fell silent for a moment, then made a gesture I had not seen before. "Now, when one of our people becomes injured or ill, they either recover . . . or they do not," he finished quietly.
I stared at him for several long seconds as Stefan's words soaked in, realized that his gesture could quite well have been the one for despair. I felt my teeth trying to grind themselves to splinters. "Our people, our high-and-mighty people, who are so damned sure they're the best damned thing that ever lived. And yet they can't even keep their own children alive. How sad. How fuckin' pathetic!" I snarled, dimly hearing the sound of my coffee mug shattering as both my fists smashed down upon the porch railing, the length of wood shuddering with the impact. Pain shot up my arms but I ignored it as I gripped the rail, my head bowed, my stinging eyes squeezed tightly shut.
". . . . My Lord . . . ."
"Leave me, Stefan," I gritted. "Leave me alone for awhile, or I will not be able to keep myself from killing you."
There was a long silence, then I heard his reluctant footsteps retreating back into the house, leaving me alone on the porch, with only the aching cold and the lonely sighing of a solitary breeze through the forest pines for company.
Dithra and Pasqual eventually emerged from their private conversation in that back room, Pasqual's golden eyes still firmly fixed upon the floor. They said nothing of what happened in there, save for Dithra's assurances that there would be no more trouble from my mate. As for Pasqual, it was several days before she would say a word, preferring to coil protectively beside our children's little nest and feign sleep most of the time. Eventually, though, she began to emerge from her shell a little, occasionally making small-talk with me on inconsequential things. It was an apology of sorts, and I quietly accepted it as such. Still quite wary around my troops, Pasqual treated them much like a human would a room-full of polite cobras, especially Lucifer. Occasionally I wondered just what the hell he said to her in that clearing up on the mountain, but Pasqual would shiver and look away when I asked, and Luce would just smile.
As for Kaa'saht, he quietly vanished. Dithra wouldn't let Stefan kill him, so the former Stasi agent did something that was quite possibly worse; he declared the young dragon an oath-breaker and cast him out from Lady Dithra's employ and protection. It was hardly a severe punishment from most humans' point of view, but for a dragon it's almost as bad as it can get. Outcast, his honor destroyed, Kaa'saht would find few doors open to him, no clan willing to trust him. I felt a tinge of regret as I thought upon it; he had helped me steal back my children after all, and I could understand perfectly how the hapless agent had found himself on the slippery slope into hell.
. . . . But, regret or no, understanding or no, I still would have killed him. I wanted to challenge him in combat, to feel his scales break under my claws, my fangs crushing his throat, to separated his head & swallow it as I had done to that male before….but even cannibalism was even more taboo than being an oath-breaker apparently….
Several weeks passed, during which Pasqual said nothing about Kaa'saht. I began to think (Hope? sneered the wraith) that perhaps Kaa'saht's ardor had been strictly one-way in nature. Deebs and I tinkered with that plastic water tank whenever I could pry him away from that technological terror he was working on in the barn, and eventually we had something I could use to take another look at that flooded Lung base.