Page 10 of Devil’s Doom (Jaga and the Devil #2)

Chapter ten

Punishment

By the time we reach a large, open square situated on the flattest piece of the city I’ve seen yet, my entire body hurts from being on my feet all day. The sun has just set, and a beautiful autumn twilight colors the sky. Three large bonfires burn on the sides of the square, seasoning the air with the warm scent of smoke.

There are tiers of low benches arranged in a rough rectangle around a fenced off area in the middle. The square is packed, people standing on the benches or milling around them. A fat, bare chested man with tusks has a sack of wine skins that he sells to people in the crowd.

“Only one soft egg! One soft egg for the best mamuna wine!”

I suddenly wonder if he’s a mamuna male. Not much is said about them since they don’t seduce or kidnap mortals like the females do, but I know they exist—just like wila men, who are said to be extremely rare.

“It looks like a cage,” I murmur to Lech as he drags me to the front of the crowd, using his elbows.

“I’m sorry, darling… I apologize… Oh, thank you…” He jabs left and right, and when someone gives him an angry look, he smiles charmingly and offers an apology. It works shockingly well and no one questions us as we take the best places in the very front row, giving us an unobstructed view of the area in the center.

“It is a cage,” he confirms, his smirk quite small as he glances jerkily around, as if looking for someone. “The bars are made of the purest iron and infused with curses that make it impossible for anyone locked inside to attack the crowd. Ever since they added this precaution, the trials became much more popular.”

“The trials?” I ask.

Lech huffs softly, still craning his neck. He raises his hand a few times in greeting, calling out to some friends.

“You’ll see,” he answers my question. “All I can tell you is that trials are considered prime entertainment. No bard can sing stories more captivating than what happens here every evening. Do you have a soft-boiled egg in you for the wine, or would you rather keep your strength?”

“I don’t want wine.”

After Lech’s accusation of flaunting my magic, I am determined not to spend it publicly. I’ll do just as he said: fill some eggs in private so people can’t tell how much magic I have. It’s already bad enough the upir knows so much about my abilities. He proved very useful, but Lech is too good at deceit and charm to be trustworthy. I need to find out what he hides—from me and from the world.

A roar of eager shouts fills the square, and I jerk, looking around. Two dragons come out of a large building ahead, their forms utterly strange—they walk on two legs, but they are as big as two mortal men each, their skin covered in scales, long tails swinging behind their thighs. It’s like they are half-human, half-dragon.

With a jolt of gut-melting fury, I recognize the rust-colored rapist from before. But my anger dissipates, replaced by confusion when I notice what they carry.

Each dragon handles a heavy metal cage, and inside—a child. I narrow me eyes, trying to make out details through the metal mesh. One is a boy, the other a girl, both around three years old. They smile with delight, showing off cute dimples in their round cheeks. The children are so pretty, I don’t understand for a moment why someone locked them up in cages.

But then I remember another cute, dimply child that I met in the woods.

“Don’t be deceived by those adorable looks,” Lech murmurs in my ear when the crowd settles. “These sweet creatures are not what they seem.”

“I know what a poroniec is. But I don’t understand what they are doing here.”

“You’ll see.”

The dragons set the cages down on either side of the fenced-in area and stand guard. The crowd goes quiet, intense anticipation filling the air. Low murmurs mix with urgent whispers. To my right, I notice a trembling woman with a smattering of feathers in her hair, her face birdlike with a small beak. Her brown skin under the feathers on her arms looks ashen.

Her fingers are tipped with short talons, and she grips the hand of a similar-looking man standing next to her. They look tense and terrified.

When another dragon comes out, pushing before him a young man with a small beak and downy brown skin, I finally understand what’s happening. The boy isn’t even a fully grown adult yet, and his birdlike eyes are wet with tears as he shakes. His hands are bound with heavy chains, and he stumbles under their weight, crying out when his legs almost buckle under him.

His palms are bloody, fingers swollen. I realize most of them are broken.

When a cold hand settles around my waist, I gasp, looking at Lech with wide eyes. His expression is pleasant, but his eyes are hard. He leans in until his cool breath envelopes my ear.

“Don’t try to stop it or you’ll be next,” he murmurs, his chilly lips brushing my skin. “This is what happens to people stupid enough to defy the dragons and the gods. It’s a lesson, Alina. Learn it well.”

I shiver when he pulls away, though his arm stays firmly around my waist. As more dragons pour out of the building, leading three more prisoners, I have to admit Lech is right. I cannot fight so many beasts, all equipped with talons and sharp teeth set in huge, bone-crushing maws.

I can only watch.

“He didn’t do anything! Let him fucking go!” someone screams in the crowd behind me, raw and desperate.

A dozen dragons in their half-human form now surround the large cage. Two of them exchange quick nods, and a green-hued dragon marches off into the crowd, coming out with a scruffy girl in tattered clothes. She’s beautiful in the ephemeral wila way, but her cheekbones and bare arms are marked with scales—rust-colored scales.

The green dragon throws her on the ground in front of the rust-colored one, who spits on the girl.

“Bastard scum,” he hisses. “This is your last warning. Shut your mouth.”

The girl is on the ground at his feet, but she doesn’t cower. The look she gives him is one of pure, deadly hate.

“ Fuck you ,” she mouths, completely silent, but I bet everyone understands the words from the exaggerated movement of her lips.

The dragon huffs, tendrils of smoke exploding out of his nostrils, and picks her up by the hair. She cries out in pain, and he backhands her hard. Her cheek splits, gushing blood.

Lech’s arm around me tightens. “Don’t fucking move. Don’t speak. She got off lightly. See? He let her go. Don’t make it worse now.”

I haven’t even noticed the way my body tensed, bracing to charge in defense of the girl. But Lech is right. It’s over, and nothing I do right now will help anyone.

The girl scurries off to the cover of the crowd. I crane my head to check on her, but she’s gone, her frame so small, she easily vanishes in the fray.

“Is she his daughter?” I murmur, leaning toward Lech.

“Mhm. He’s the captain’s second in command, you know. Men in power are so virile.”

When I glance at the upir, his grin seems forced, the skin around his eyes revealing tension. His frown spoils his effort to look amused, so I press my fingertip to the tense line between his eyebrows.

He nods, smoothing his face, and we turn back to the spectacle. Lech’s fingers dig into my waist, but I’m grateful for his touch. Seeing the extent of the dragons’ cruelty finally makes me realize they aren’t like the opponents I’ve fought until now.

The werewolf and the poludnica I managed to slay were stupid and mindless, driven by beastly instincts. The dragons are different. They are monsters, too—but thinking, plotting monsters who apparently have a strict hierarchy and follow orders.

A red-scaled dragon that’s visibly bigger and somehow even more menacing than the others steps forward. The murmuring crowd goes quiet. In the tense silence, his sonorous voice carries easily into every corner of the square.

“Let’s begin the trial of chochol Kazimir, who is guilty of the heinous crime of heresy. He spreads vicious lies, undermining the peace in our prosperous city. Bring him forward.”

Two dragons push the beak-nosed young man toward the red dragon. The chochol shakes, but he doesn’t beg for mercy. His chains clink with every shiver of his lean form.

“What did he lie about?” I ask Lech, my shoulders prickling with tension. Whatever will happen, it can’t be good.

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t repeat his words,” Lech says with a scoff. “It might have been anything, from complaining about the quality of his beer to praying to the wrong god.”

I flinch at the obvious irony in his voice and shoot him an alarmed look. Won’t somebody think his words are too dismissive? Lech doesn’t pay me any mind. His eyes are on the chained chochol, the crease between his eyebrows back.

My heart hammers sickly, and I look up, too. The red dragon raises his clawed palm, the inside of it blackened. I squint, trying to make out the shape. It looks like a tree with a strong trunk and symmetrical branches winding together.

As he brings it slowly to the chochol’s forehead, the black shape pulses with red light. I gasp, and Lech gives a weak, humorless laugh.

“Perun’s sigil,” he explains in an undertone. “It allows the captain of the dragon guard to suck magic out of anyone. Watch.”

The red dragon presses his enormous palm to the chochol’s forehead. The boy shudders. The guard captain tilts his head back, smoke curling out of his nostrils, and the prisoner suddenly screams, arching away. Two guards step in, holding him in place. He brings his chained hands up to his chest, the broken fingers twitching right over his sternum—exactly where it hurts me when my magic is depleted.

The captain steps back, and as soon as his palm falls off the boy’s forehead, he slumps with a whimper of pain, still pressing his hands to his sternum, even though his arms shake under the weight of the chains.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I whisper, my lips bloodless. I’m not even sure Lech hears me, but then he squeezes my waist as if to comfort me.

My gut burns with the need to stop it, but I feel utterly helpless. I barely have any magic left, and besides, there are hundreds of people here—the prisoner’s parents among them, if my guess is correct. And no one does anything. No one but the rape-born girl who challenged her father and got a slap for her trouble.

One guard removes a chain from a portion of the large metal cage in the middle of the square and drags a crude gate open. The chochol is pushed inside, his chains still on. He’s in so much pain, he falls to the ground, dry-heaving. His broken fingers still clutch at his chest, as if he hopes to somehow put his magic back where it was and ease his suffering.

The cages containing the poroniec children are moved next. I swallow nausea when the green dragon stacks one cage on top of the other just inside the door, effectively blocking the way out. He fumbles with the cages until both fall open, the children rolling out. The dragon slams the big cage shut, and the crowd erupts with screams.

I listen and can’t believe it. They don’t scream for the guards to let the boy out or for him to somehow save himself. No, they call out to the small beasts with directions on how to attack first.

“Tear off his ears! I bet two eggs on the ears!”

“Start with his legs! Chochol feet are yummy, do his legs!”

“Bite ‘is ‘ead off!”

When I slowly turn my face up to Lech, he’s already watching me, a sardonic smile curving his lips.

“As you can see, it’s fine entertainment, just as I promised. We should bet something next time,” he says with an easy smile, though his eyes are still hard.

“We can bet your head. It must be worth something,” I try to quip, but my voice sounds hollow. I taste acid in my throat.

The small monsters come out of their cages and swipe at each other playfully, still in their childish forms. The scene would be endearing if I didn’t know what they were.

Kazimir cowers in the furthest corner of the cage, his broken, bleeding fingers uselessly sliding against the bars. I have no illusions he’ll be able to come out, and even if he does, the dozen dragons guarding the square will throw him right back in.

The girl poroniec suddenly strikes at the boy with a clawed hand, tearing the skin on his cheek into bloody ribbons. The boy shrieks like a wounded cat, and she laughs a tinkling, childish laughter that sounds utterly eerie.

When the boy lunges at her, his clawed hands outstretched, she turns on the spot like a little dancer and leaps at Kazimir, her perfectly white milk teeth bared in a wide grin. He whines when he sees her, then squeezes his eyes shut and curls into a ball. I realize he’s given up.

“Stand up, boy! Fight for your life!” A man’s loud, charismatic voice booms over the noise. I prick my ears at what I feel is a compassionate response, but then the man adds, “I bet they will start with your hands, so give them a reason! Come on, use those fists!”

I want to say this can’t be real, that it’s too horrible to comprehend, that I need to go home and never see this again, but my throat is tight, my tongue frozen.

The girl sits on top of Kazimir and pets his feathery hair with childish curiosity. Her small fingers are wet with the boy’s blood. Kazimir shakes, sobbing, and the boy jumps over in pursuit of the girl, pausing when Kazimir catches his eye. The boy cocks his head to the side, watching the chochol, and then crouches. His hand snaps for the chochol’s face, as fast as a viper.

People around us scream, some in triumph, but most in disappointment. I realize with a sickly feeling that the poroniec holds something in his pudgy fist.

He raises it higher, as if to examine it better in the light. It’s an eye, perfectly round and wet, dangling from the optical nerve pinched between the boy’s bloodied fingers.

“Ouch. I’m so sorry, Alina. I had no idea he would do that,” Lech says, his voice grave, but when I look at him, he grins.

It takes me a moment to understand he’s mocking my single eye. It fails to irritate me, since my entire attention is focused on keeping my food down.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” I say, fighting nausea.

“You sure?” Lech asks with amusement. “It’s only just started. There are a few more prisoners to be tried, you know. I’m sure whatever crimes they committed must be as heinous as they are riveting.”

Screams of utter agony pour out of the cage. Both boy and girl have shed their childish disguises. They hack, claw, and bite at the bloody mess of their victim, tearing him to shreds in a torturously slow display of beastly cruelty. Brown feathers sticky with blood float out of the cage, and a small being covered in dark fur runs closer, ducking between two dragons, and grabs a few feathers with deft fingers.

The dragon next to them turns, leaning low to grab the creature, but the being is already gone, vanishing in the crowd.

“A token from the trial,” Lech says mockingly. “It should fetch a soft-boiled egg, at least.”

But I don’t hear him. The dragon straightens, and I am frozen, not even able to draw a breath. By gods, I recognize him. Those silver scales. The red eyes. A trace of white hair at the temples.

But no. Surely, I must be mistaken. I swallow convulsively, my heart beating faster and faster, until he turns for a moment and I see his muzzle clearly.

My body grows rigid, tremors of panic coursing through my limbs. I know this dragon. I’ve met him before. And if his eyes land on me, he will see right through my weak disguise, because he knows exactly what I look like.

It’s Foss, the dragon who came with Woland to Kupala Night.