Those Who Ride

by Mitch H


Triage

The cheering might have gone to Sunset's head if she wasn't riding the shocky edge of unconsciousness. The trembling in her hooves told her that if she moved the wrong way, she might fall. It was alarming how much of her shoulder just wasn't there - and how much of the rest was a brand of fire in her nerves.

Luckily, the fracas meant that she didn't have to continue whatever lame excuse she'd just begun to her mistress's husband. He was smiling, that was good. And the khaleesi was - looking at her like Sunset was a silly little foal? What did that mean?

The khaleesi gestured for Sunset to come to her side, and as the khal began to extract order out of the shambles which had been his meeting a scant minute before, Daenerys crouched and pressed on Sunset's side until the unicorn understood and sat on her haunches. Then she laid down, as that position woke more of her shoulder to agony.

Zafra appeared from nowhere, poking their heads out of whatever cover they'd found during the brief fight. Daenerys sent one off, and they returned with water and medical supplies. The wound the warlock had inflicted upon Sunset hadn't looked bad in the moment, but as time found its hooves and began moving again, the fur at the impact-site was beginning to look strange, washed-out. Sunset closed her eyes, and tried to feel around the edges of the burn, trying to assess whether it was growing, or - oh, there was another twinge, and another. Was that new bits of her flesh catching the freeze-burn, or stunned parts coming back to life?

Sunset was distracted by her self-triage, she barely registered what was going on around her. The personal attentions of the khaleesi herself was like balm, moreso than the actual balm the zafra the khaleesi had summoned was trying to apply. After a few tentative dabs, Daenerys swatted away the confused slave, and began working the burn-medicine into Sunset's coat with her own hands.

"No! Princess!" Sunset said, her eyes shooting open. "You shouldn't touch that with your naked hooves - er, your fingers! Here, let me see them!"

Sunset almost reached for the khaleesi's hand with her magic, before she remembered that it wasn't her magic, not really. Sunset saw the flickering flame that had become her field, and it winked out as soon as she realized she'd touched her mistress's flesh with living fire.

"Oh, Harmony, I'm sorry, your highness, did that burn you? Did the - let me see your hands?"

Khaleesi Daenerys held up her unblemished, unburnt, unfrozen hands with a half-smile, rotating them for Sunset's benefit.

"Lay down, Sunset Horse, and calm yourself. I haven't hurt myself, and neither have you. What was that? It felt like… a hand in the flames. Is this your magic?"

"Not - not exactly. It's not supposed to flicker like that, or burn. It's just - it used to be just this light, this - this glow. Technically, a deresonant aura effect, one common to all unicorns. Usually - usually one color-keyed to the individual. Like - like a signature. Unique to the unicorn. This new magic, it looks like mine."

Sunset thought the new magic into being, and looked at it, floating in front of her and the khaleesi, burning like fox-fire, or a will o' the wisp. It should have been a light-spell globe, the most basic of foal-cantrips. Instead, it burnt the air, pulsing, flickering.

"It isn't my magic, but it glows like it. I don't understand at all."

A shadow cast itself over the burning ball of fire and light, and Sunset put away the magic as she and the khaleesi looked up, to see the khal's bearded face smiling down at them.

"Moon of my light, Sunset-horse, can you rejoin us? There are others who were hurt. Qotho could use some help figuring out what to do with the- what are these? Burns?"

"Frost-burns, I think," guessed Sunset. She felt around the edges of her own burn, and decided the flesh was awakening, not dying. The unfeeling center of the burn was melting away, pulsing new pain as it did. Her magic flickered on her own hide, little flecks of blue fire dancing on her coat like candle-flames wicking from each hair. She let the magic go, surprised by the effect, and it went away.

"I think I can get up, let me see what I can do."

Sunset struggled to her hooves, and once she was firmly upon them, she looked around, orienting herself. The two Qohorik corpses laid by themselves, the healthy having dragged the wounded away from the heart of the confrontation. They were working on the survivors in a rough ring of groaning Dothraki lying in a semi-circle, wherever they'd been dragged from where they fell, like a human-sloped crater.

There were more of them than Sunset had thought there would be. She limped to the nearest victim, an older lajak with two younger riders crouched over him, one holding him down and trying to put a stick into his teeth, the other grabbing at the trembling, afflicted arm. The copper-skinned Dothraki's hand and lower arm was pale white, and the paleness was creeping up his limb as Sunset watched.

Then it reached the restraining rider's hand on his elder's arm - and the paleness passed to the younger Dothraki. He yelped in alarm.

Sunset's magic sprung to life with a thought, and licked out to brush off the would-be nurse's grip. Instead of gripping and moving the young man's hand, she only managed to cause a little detonation, and there was a slight smell of scorching hair over Sunset, the khaleesi, and the wounded lajak and his attendants.

"Hold that hand up, let me look at it," Sunset commanded, unmindful of her masterful tone of voice.

The whiteness was still creeping away from the rider's affected fingers, taking his palm bit by bit, and threatening the other fingers. Sunset's eyes narrowed.

"Khaleesi, I need to see your hand, the one you were using with that salve - quickly!"

Daenerys held up her hand - her pale, natural-toned hand. Unblemished - that was her natural skin tone. Sunset frowned in perplexity.

"Here, you - what's your name?"

"Geleo, Sunset-maegi. Ah, it stings!"

"Yeah, I know, hold it still, and don't flinch."

Sunset took a wild guess, and hoped she wasn't about to burn the boy's fingers right off his hand. She conjured the fox-fire, and impaled it on the whitened finger, dipping the hand into magical flame.

He yelped in surprise and alarm. More burnt-hair smell, as the hairs on the back of his fingers curled and blackened. But…

The whiteness was going away, healthy if somewhat sun-burnt skin tone displacing the alarming whiteness.

"Your highness, order everyone to stop handling the wounds, they're contagious. Quickly!"

The other retainer of the afflicted lajak looked down, alarmed, at his sweating, twitching patron, around whom his arms still wrapped.

"No, don't let him go, you. I think it's direct contact. Just don't touch the whiteness. I need to try something…"

The impromptu flame-cure seemed like it worked, given a light enough hoof. She burnt the first two or three victims more than she'd intended, and her fix left them with actual burns in the place of their frost-burns, but Sunset's burning touch didn't spread, wasn't catching.

Sunset was aware vaguely that the khal was sitting nearby, on his camp-stool, watching her, but she was too busy fixing the mess, stopping what might have been a - she wasn't sure, exactly. A contagion? A magical epidemic? Had this been a patient-zero sort of deal?

Sunset hadn't really spent much time in medical magic under Celestia's tutelage. It wasn't her strong suit, and medicine was the sort of thing you spent years learning in the post-graduate medical college attached to the School. She'd observed a few times in the medical school's surgery, and listened to a few lectures, but healing had never really appealed to Sunset Shimmer, student of the Princess and prodigy of evocation, abjuration, and enchantment. It just hadn't been flashy enough to satisfy her - her what? Ego, she supposed.

The fire poured out of the reservoir she'd cut into, and it showed no signs of slowing down, or running out. She'd been wrong - this wasn't a low-magic world. There was - almost more than she could control. The improvised cauterization cantrip she'd come up with kept threatening to run away from her, threatened to turn from a frog-sized ball of flame into an out-of-control pillar of fiery fury. Sunset could almost hear it whispering to her, asking to be let into the world.

She hoped that was just her exhaustion messing with her.

Sunset only lost one patient, a young lajak she'd met once before, the entire side of his body frosted from boot to braid. He was already shivering when she got to him, and she saw the light of life passing out of his eyes as she began burning the contagion from the side of his whitened head.

Then his eyes turned blue.

Sunset jerked back, and fired off a blast of pure flame into the face of that suddenly unfamiliar gaze. The whitened arm reached out for her, the nails blackened. The rest of the copper-skinned lajak's body lay prone, dead - but that arm, those eyes -

Sunset didn't stop until the body was burning, wicking its own fat reserves. As she kept pouring on the magical fire, she raised her voice to whomever was standing behind her, the rest having scrambled away once the 'patient' had started thrashing about.

"That's it, burn the bodies! Anything dead needs to go on a bonfire, now!"

The Dothraki around her were shouting in outrage and alarm. Several were edging forward and reaching out with blankets they'd been bringing for the wounded. They were trying to put out the burning, thrashing dead thing!

"No, no, stop that! It's infectious! Damn it, you're going to-" Sunset's fire flared, and drove back the two idiots with their now-smoldering fist-fulls of rags. "STAND BACK!"

Sunset bent her head low, liquid flame dripping off of her horn and pooling on the forest loam under her hooves. "That's not a living man, that's a corpse, you fools. I'd tell you to feel the cooling flesh, but I'm afraid you'd catch the contagion yourselves, and then I'd have to burn you. I've never seen this before, but I've seen things like it, and read of worse. At least, I think there's worse. I don't want to know if they start breathing contagion next. Do you?"

"BURN THE DEAD! NOW!" shouted Sunset.

And then suddenly there was a figure between her and the riders, as the Qohorik officer strode into the middle of the confrontation. He spoke calmly to the crowd, in perfect if somewhat eccentric Dothraki.

"I say, rather, the horned lady has the right notion, what? I know it sounds a bit extreme, but the Sons of the Buck have been making a right pest of themselves, a proper name, don't you know. And the dead walkin' is the second syllable of that name, if you would. Smashing, the lot of them, aside from the murderin' and th' abominations. Infectious abominations, what? Last year, the town council had to burn the whole of the Lyseni ghetto, with everybody locked inside."

He looked down at Sunset, and grimaced at her horrified look. "Oh, what, you were just arguin' for it, weren't you? And the Lyseni ghetto was only about two and a half blocks. Not many Lyseni in Qohor, what? A lot less after one of ‘em got the wind up a Ramson sorcerer, though, never a great idea, tweaking the Ramsons. Damn good show of cleaning the mess the priests made of it, though. Let's hear it for walled quarters!"

He stuck out his hand, as if they were at a luncheon at the Palace. Sunset stared at his hand. "Oh, right, no hands. Hello, there, Ruper Volk. I'd say it were nice to meet you, Miss Horse, but I'd rather never have laid eyes on you. Oh, by the way, your revenant is trying to get away."

Sunset spun around, and returned her attention to burning the twitching dead thing. Behind her, she heard Volk's voice raised in argument with the dubious riders around them, but Sunset was determined to finish the job before some other idiot interrupted her again. She didn't take her eyes off the burning corpse until the flame turned natural and orange. She looked at the burning body, and tried to remember what its name had been. Ylao? Kitho? No, Yathro.

Sunset looked up from her failure, and recalled there were more victims. Time to get on with it. Luckily, that had been the worst afflicted Dothraki, and she got to the rest before anyone else - before the contagion got as far as it had in that one lajak. Arguments swirled around her, but she kept her head down, and her mind on her magic.


It was dark before Sunset was satisfied that she'd killed every bit of witchcraft the Qohorik warlocks had gifted their victims. The zafra had set up torch-stands all around her triage, and between those lights and the bonfires now merrily consuming the victims and the perpetrators, the night's accidental camp was a blaze of fire-light under the high-boughed forest.

Sunset had plenty of time to think over what had happened while watching over the row of weakened patients wrapped up in blankets and hides, carefully bundled to ward against shock and opportunistic infections. She thought she'd gotten all of it, but the cure was only slightly better than the affliction, and it was all too easy, she thought, for something like that to lurk, hidden under a nail, around the bottom of a foot, in an arm-pit…

What had they been planning? Why had they let themselves be captured? It was clear they could have escaped at any time. They were powerful, those warlocks. They had access to something dangerous, deadly. Was it possible that they only had that one thing? That it only worked with blood and death?

Magic, that only was birthed in murder. Sunset couldn't even imagine it. What use could it be, outside of - well, murder? An assassin's tool, but worthless for any other task. It was, when she thought about it, very much murder-ape magic. Damnable predatory monkeys.

Sunset heard her mistress walk up behind her, the khaleesi's graceful stride distinctive in this horde full of lumpy zafra and brutish riders.

"Sunset Horse, they've been interrogating the surviving Qohorik."

"What survivor? Oh, the officer. You really think he had anything to do with it?"

"Well, he lived, there is that. And no-one else knows anything about the dead Qohorik."

"Knowledge is magic, this is true. What about his sergeant, the Unsullied man - no, gelding?"

"Burning on one of the bonfires. Don't you remember? You looked at his body."

"Did I? I'm getting tired, princess. Are they going to put me on the bonfires, too?"

"What? No! Why would you ask that?" The khaleesi put her hand on Sunset's shoulder, the unwounded one, not that the other was doing more than sting, now. Whatever it had held, whatever the curse had been, it was burnt away now. She'd be fine. If only -

"Witchcraft. That one rider called me maegi. Again. These sav-" Sunset stopped herself, shut her overtired mouth. She started again. "The Dothraki hate witches, remember?"

"Sunset, it isn't as if we didn't know. You've been lighting up the night in your sleep. Remember? Do you think that Irri and Doreah could resist gossiping?" The khaleesi was leaning against Sunset now, her platinum-tressed head laying across the unicorn's withers, her hands stroking Sunset like an oversized cat.

Sunset closed her eyes for a moment, disappointed in herself. Of course they knew.

"Handmaidens can gossip," Sunset said, finally, leaning into the khaleesi's touch. "But did the khal know?"

"As far as my husband is concerned, you saved the moon of his light, twice, and shielded him from dark magics, then… this. This is good, Sunset Horse. You did well today."

"Thank you, princess."

Sunset listened to the quiet, and the faint groaning of her charges, her eyes half-lidded from the khaleesi's attentions. She'd never touched Sunset before like this. It was really quite distracting, Sunset was trying to stay awake and alert, not -

Someone had to watch over them, in the darkness, to listen for the sharp cries that might come if the ice-contagion broke out again in one of them. The khaleesi seemed disinclined to go find her husband, or the handmaidens. She just kept… what was this? Petting?

Then Sunset felt her mistress's hands twine in her mane, and blinked, confused, as Daenerys began - playing with her mane?

"Princess, wh-what are you doing?"

"Braiding your hair, Sunset Horse. You fought a battle today. Two, actually, perhaps three if you count this, which I think I do."

The khaleesi's clever fingers picked apart the not-especially-long hairs of Sunset's yellow and red mane as she leaned against her handmaiden as one might against a divan. Daenerys began to weave the strands of mane together in a horsey approximation of a Dothraki braid, interleaving red and yellow in a deliberate interlacing pattern.

"A victorious rider ought to have a proper braid. And my husband says that the zafra should have a bell or two, when you're ready for them. When you're ready to leave my husband's men, here.

"My husband and his advisers," continued the khaleesi, "would like to talk to you about all of this, what you've done, and what's to be done next. Very much so, Sunset Horse. I think that, even for the Dothraki, we're in uncharted territory tonight."