The Dragon Games

Parlay

Regan peeled her cheek off the cold stone floor, her head pounding, her surroundings a blur of gray blobs. She blinked, and her vision slowly returned. Rusty cuffs shackled her wrists and ankles, and small metallic rings bound her fingers together, preventing her from using the divine. She was in an underground dungeon, and of the twenty cells, only hers was occupied. She couldn't have been unconscious for long. Looking at her reflection in the muddy puddle by her feet, the rash Drax's Divine left on her neck had not healed much. Neither had the cut on her arm, the surrounding skin still pink and tender.

Suddenly, the door creaked. A knight of fifty some years descended the dungeon steps. His eyes burned into Regan, the dim torches lighting the hollows of his face like a skull. A dragon was carved into his silver breastplate, its wings spread to form the shape of a crown – the king's sigil.

"I'm Leon Bates," he said. "Commander of the Sword Brethren."

"Bates? So the one that put on raider's garb to attack me while my guard was down is your son?" Regan said with a loose smile. "Too bad the raiders are done for. He would have made a great addition."

"Dishonorable people do not deserve honorable combat. Do you know what your friends did the second they were caught? They turned on each other in sorry attempts to save their own skin."

"They're not my friends," Regan said.

"Don't try to lie to me. I know your secret."

Regan stilled, her breath catching in her chest.

"I know you're not truly Nine. 'Nine' is a ruse used to hide your true identity. You're the raider known as'Crenshaw's pet."

Regan relaxed against her cell wall, swallowing the sudden urge to laugh. "All a ruse?" Regan examined the missing finger on her left hand. "I must be really committed to the bit."

"Do you deny that you are Crenshaw's Pet?" Leon said.

"I'm not a dog," Regan muttered. She didn't chose the alias for herself. It had started in rival gangs, then spread to the public and stuck to her like glue. Drax hated the name, viewing it as a slight on his authority. After Sammy disappeared, Drax threatened to cut out the tongue of any raider that used it – the first and last decent call he made as captain. As much as Regan liked Sammy, she never liked being known as the soppy wagtail trailing after his heels.

"Are you Crenshaw's Pet?" Leon snapped.

Regan shot him a sour look. "Obviously." Drax and Sammy were long gone; what other raider could bend metal and levitate multiple guards at once?

"What's your true name?" Leon said.

Regan stared into the darkness of her cell, her face unreadable. She had no weapons, no Divine, no friends to fall back. Her only leverage was information, and she'd be a fool to give it out freely.

"I would be willing to work out a deal with you," Leon said. "In exchange for your cooperation with my questioning, you will not be sentenced to death. Instead, you will be senteced to thirty years of hard labor and The Bind."

The Bind was a procedure that removed someone's ability to acess the Divine. Regan's stomach clenched as she recalled the victims of The Bind wandering the slums, sleeping on the streets and begging for scraps of food.

"So in addition to thirty years of hard labor, you will sever my hands and blind me?" Regan said, wrinkling her nose. "How would I even do hard labor without any eyes or hands?"

Leon afforded her a generous smile. "You may keep either your hand or your eyes. I'll even grant you the ability of deciding which."

"How many of the others agreed?"