Chapter 10: The Wing in the Dirt

They buried Dagaric on a hill above the manor, where the pines gave way to open sky and the badlands could be seen in the distance but not felt. The grave was dug deep and lined with stone, and the priest — Father Oswin, who had kept Elara's secret with the ferocity of a man who knew exactly what that secret was worth — spoke the words over the body while the morning sun climbed above the limestone hills and the wind came dry out of the east.

Leopold stood at the graveside with his father at his left hand and Burchard at his right, and the four knights — Wentworth with his dislocated shoulder still bound, Gararic with his blistered hands, Drustan still pale and unsteady from the cracked skull, Morcant with his arm in a sling — formed a line behind him. The Rangers stood at attention along the hill's edge. The Earl's household filled the slope below. Even the wizards had come — Chert in his brown-grey robes, Wynstan in the grey cloak he had named himself for, Nightvane at the rear with his thieves and his black wool cloak and an expression that was not quite grief but was not indifference either.

They had all come to bury a boy. A squire who had not yet earned his spurs. A fourteen-year-old who had talked to his pony in the stables and dreamed of being Sir Dagaric and his war-pony. He had been dead for three days, and the county was still learning how to mourn him.

Leopold stepped forward when the priest finished. He stood at the edge of the grave with his hands at his sides and his jaw set in the line that had not softened since he found the body on the mill road, and when he spoke his voice was steady in a way it had not been a week ago.

"I sent him on an errand," he said. "I told him to stay on the road. I told him he would be back before dark. I told myself it was safe because we had killed the troll and arrested a suspect and done everything a lord's son is supposed to do when his father's lands are threatened. I was wrong. I was wrong about the troll, and I was wrong about the suspect, and I was wrong about the road. And Dagaric paid for my mistakes with his life." He paused. The wind stirred the pines. No one spoke. "I will carry that for the rest of my life. I will carry the weight of every mistake I made, and I will learn from every one of them, and I will be a better lord than I was a week ago, because Dagaric deserves at least that."

He knelt and picked up a handful of earth and let it fall into the grave. The soil struck the stone lining with a sound like rain on a roof.

"Rest well," he said. "You would have been a good knight."

---

The excavation began at midday, when the sun was high and the badlands were white with heat.

The crown had sent riders from the capital — four men in the King's colors with a writ authorizing the survey of the site and a healthy skepticism about anything that smelled of dragon bone. They stood at the edge of the sinkhole with their arms crossed and their faces careful, watching the wizards work.

Chert had taken charge of the digging. His earth magic — the quiet, deniable power that the Obsidian Tower had sent him to Eastdell to wield — could shift stone and soil with a precision that shovels could not match, and he used it now with the grim efficiency of a man who had fought beside Rangers and buried a boy and was no longer pretending that this was just another quiet job. The badlands clay peeled back in layers. The sinkhole deepened. And the bones began to emerge.

They were exactly what Aion had described — long and thin and curved, the delicate architecture of a wing. No skull. No vertebrae. No ribs. No body mass. Just the fragile, elongated bones that had once spread against the sky and caught the wind beneath a dragon's weight. They were scattered through the erosion zone in a pattern that told a story to anyone who knew how to read it.

"Impact scatter," Nightvane said. He was crouched at the edge of the pit with a fragment in his hand, turning it over in the sunlight. His thieves flanked him, still silent, still watchful, but their hands were not near their belts anymore. "These bones weren't buried. They were thrown. High-velocity impact — something hit the ground hard enough to shatter on contact and scatter the pieces across half a mile of badlands." He met Chert's eyes. "This isn't a grave. This is a crash site."

Chert nodded slowly. His face was stone, but his eyes were bright with the rapid calculation of a man who grasped exactly what he was looking at and exactly what it meant. "Wings get torn off in battle. Aerial combat, between dragons — the wing is the vulnerable point. A dragon takes a bite to the wing joint, the wing comes off, the dragon falls. Or flies on, maimed, and the wing buries itself in the badlands while the body goes elsewhere." He straightened and looked at the crown riders. "What we have here is a single wing. The rest of the dragon — the skull, the ribs, the body mass, the hoard-value of the bones — is somewhere else. Somewhere under Eastdell, or beyond it, or beneath the sea. And every fragment we've found so far tells us it's out there, waiting."

The crown riders exchanged glances. One of them — a thin man with a clerk's ink-stained fingers and a soldier's bearing — stepped forward and looked into the pit. "How much bone are we talking about?"

"Enough to fund a palace for a decade. Enough to buy a kingdom's worth of magical artifacts. Enough to make whoever finds it very, very powerful — or very, very dead." Chert met the rider's eyes. "The Earthen Palace will want a survey of the entire badlands. Every sinkhole, every erosion zone, every place the clay might have shifted in the last thousand years. We'll share our findings with the crown, of course."

"Of course," the rider said, in a tone that suggested he believed exactly none of it.

Nightvane stood and dusted the clay from his hands. His thieves moved closer, and the three of them exchanged a look that Erlich recognized — the look of men who were memorizing coordinates and calculating travel times. Duskborn would have a map of this site before the week was out. Nightvane might not be a real wizard, but he was a very good thief, and the information he carried now was worth more than any bone fragment he could have stolen from Wynstan's cottage.

Wynstan himself stood at the edge of the pit with his grey cloak wrapped around him and his hands clasped in front of him and his face white with the accumulated shame of two years of silence and greed. He had bought dragon bone from farmers for coppers. He had known what it was and told no one. He had not killed anyone, but his silence had left the door open for a steward who had, and the weight of that was settling on him now like a stone on a grave.

"I'll cooperate," he said quietly. "With whoever wants to search. I know the badlands better than anyone. I've been mapping the erosion patterns for years." His gaze found Erlich. "It won't bring back the dead. But it's what I can do."

Erlich nodded once. "Do it."

---

The Rangers formed up in the manor yard at dusk, sixteen men where there had been twenty. The four who had died in the bailey were buried on the same hill as Dagaric, their graves marked with Ranger-steel driven into the earth. The five who were too wounded to ride would stay at the manor until they healed, and then they would follow. The rest were ready to move.

Leofric had a new spear — plain ash and iron, nothing like the one the beast had shattered, but it would serve. He was whistling something tuneless through his teeth again, and his face had recovered some of its old humor, though the edges were sharper now. Godwin had his bow across his back and his quiver full, and he was checking the fletching on each arrow with the methodical care of a man who had learned, in the bailey, exactly how much an arrow could be worth.

Aion stood beside her grey mare with her elven tack and her too-bright eyes and the faint smile of someone who had found something unexpected in the human world and was not yet ready to leave it. "I've decided to travel with you," she said. "For a time. The roads are dangerous, and I'm curious to see where the Rangers go when they're not hunting demon-gifted beasts."

"You're welcome," Erlich said. "Though I should warn you — we're not always this interesting."

"I was hoping for a little less interesting, actually." She swung into the saddle with the unthinking ease of centuries. "Your kind packs a great deal of catastrophe into a very short span. I'd like to see what you do with the quiet parts."

Leopold came down the manor steps as the column was forming. He walked past the Rangers and past Aion and past the knights who still flanked the yard, and he stopped in front of Erlich with his hand extended.

"Thank you," he said. "For the beast. For the steward. For not letting my father hang the wrong man." He paused. "For not letting me be the wrong man forever."

Erlich clasped his forearm in the old style. "You weren't wrong. You were young. There's a difference."

"I was both." Leopold's grip was firm — the grip of a man who had learned, in a single week, that strength was not the same as wisdom and courage was not the same as patience. "When you come back to Eastdell — if you come back — the manor will be here. And I'll be a better host than I was a week ago."

"I don't doubt it."

Leopold released his arm and stepped back. "Captain. The widow Elara — I've spoken to my father. Her holding will not be reassigned. She'll have the land as long as she wants it, and the priest will have whatever he needs to keep her safe." He paused. "It's not enough. But it's something."

"It's more than most lords would do," Erlich said.

"Most lords didn't just learn that their steward was a murderer." Leopold's voice was steady, but the weight was still there — the boy's grave on the hill, the steward's body on the badlands altar, the four Rangers buried beside Dagaric. "I have a lot to make up for. This is the beginning."

He released his arm and stepped back. The column began to move — the Rangers filing out through the gate, the horses' hooves beating a slow rhythm on the hard-packed road, the pennant of the King's Rangers snapping in the dry wind off the badlands.

The excavation pit was a small scar in the vast eroded landscape — a wound in the white stone that would heal slowly, filled by windblown clay and the patient work of seasons. Around it, the hoodoos stood in their ancient shapes against the darkening sky. The sinkholes opened their mouths to nothing. The badlands stretched east toward the sea and west toward the manor and north and south toward whatever else lay buried under the scrub and limestone of Eastdell.

Somewhere under that ground, a dragon's body waited. A skull the size of a cart. Ribs like the beams of a great hall. Bones dense with enough mana to power a wizard's lifetime of spells. And every faction in the kingdom now held a piece of the puzzle that would lead them to it. The Earthen Palace had Chert's survey and the auction-house bone that had started the hunt. Duskborn had Nightvane's map and the names of every sinkhole in the badlands. The crown had the site and a writ of survey and four riders who would report everything they had seen. The Earl had the land itself — twenty square miles of scrub and pine, and somewhere beneath it, a fortune that would draw wizards and thieves and kings for years to come.

The murders were solved. The steward was dead. The beast was a cooling carcass in a pit of shattered stone. But the thing that had started it all — the dragon wing buried in the badlands, the bone that was worth more than every life it had cost — was only the beginning. There was more under that ground. Much more. And every man and woman and wizard and thief who had touched a fragment of it knew it now.

The Dragonbone Feud had only just begun.

Erlich rode at the head of the column as the sun dropped toward the pine ridges and the light went amber and then gold. Behind him, the badlands sat silent and full of holes, holding their secret in eroded stone and scattered bone. Ahead of him, the road ran west into the wide Matorral sky, and the Rangers rode toward it with their dead behind them and their duty ahead, and the quiet parts waiting.