It seemed she had barely closed her eyes when Aaron knocked softly on the door. She pulled herself up. “I forgot to tell you I need food too,” she said. “I’m still not going to be up to my full strength. It’s not just the magic, it’s that I’m so tired.”

He came and sat next to her on the bed. “I’m sorry that you got hurt and I haven’t had time to heal you yet.”

He shook his head. “It’s fine. I wasn’t hurt that bad. I can still get around.”

“But it’s my fault that you were in danger in the first place. You could have been home, could have been safe. You didn’t have to get mixed up with this.”

“Hailey, don’t apologize for that. It’s what I always wanted. You somehow managed to give me what I wanted, when everyone else in the world would have told me I was crazy, would have told me that no one would have wanted a one armed soldier.”

It hurt to hear him call himself that and she told him so. “I saw you sitting on the bench and the way they treated you. I never meant for any of this to happen.”

“But it did, and I’m glad. Derrick wants me to go with you. He said that I was the only one fool enough to charge into the spell and he needs those kind of men. I think I finally have a real shot at this Hailey, and it’s because of you. Don’t tell me you’re sorry and that you messed up because I don’t see it that way.”

“But Barinon…” her voice broke. Tears streamed down her face again. “He should be the one. He was better at everything than I am.”

He put his good arm around he shoulders. “I still think you’re amazing. You stood against the dragon, you fought hard and you did the most damage to it. It flew away because of what you did with that massive sword thing.”

She shook her head, wiping at her eyes. “That was him too. He was giving me the last bit of his magic so I could cast that spell. He died like all of the other mages, giving all the magic they had and killing themselves in the process.”

“It doesn’t matter. You were the one who wielded it, who charged a beast twenty times your size.”

She sniffed. “You did too.”

“Well, I’m a lot bigger than you are.”

She laughed at that. Tears spilled over. It was too many emotions all together.

“I have wasted so much time,” she said. “I could have learned from Barinon a lot earlier. Look at this room. I spent months painting these walls. That’s a skill I will probably never use again. It just seems like I have wasted so much time.”

“But you and I could never have been so close if you didn’t stay in the spell.”

She smiled up at him. “That’s true. If I wasted my life, at least I did it getting to know you. You’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had.”

Aaron was silent then for a long moment.

She looked at him in the late afternoon sunlight. “Are you ok?”

He just nodded. “We better go,” he said. “Derrick will be waiting for us.”

It was only about twenty men that came with them to attack the dragon. One of them was that big farmer she had seen practicing with the sword. Derrick and Aaron held the only two dragon swords that they had managed to find. Archers had come with arrows ready to be set alight. She hoped that those would do more damage than the regular arrows had. Getting through the silvery scales seemed the Mose difficult part of fighting the creature.

Derrick was giving last minute instructions to his men. Finally he nodded to her. He treated her like someone he had to bring along. Sure, she would do the most damage to the creature, and none of them could get there without her portal, but that didn’t matter in his eyes. She was glad that Aaron didn’t feel the same way she did about the captain. It would have made his job impossible.

She turned her back on the arrogant man and prepared to create the portal. He had been right about needing to attack now, but he acted like she should know exactly how to deal with a battle when she had never been in one before. She was only days into learning to be a mage. She had to stop obsessing over what he thought about her. It doesn’t matter what he thinks. After this, you can ignore him for the most part, she thought to herself.

She moved her arms and a shimmering sphere with an image of the well appeared before her. It was ringed in clouds.

“Woah,” one of the men said, but none of them were willing to step through. Aaron walked forward and stepped right through the portal as if he had done it a hundred times. The others followed more reluctantly, eyeing her as if she was planning on letting it drop. Derrick followed his men, not saying a word to her.

She was the last to step through. She didn’t think you could hold a portal opened after you were on the other side. The portal just slipped out of her grasp and closed itself once she was on the other side.

“What is this place?” one of the soldiers asked, looking around with wide eyes. The others were looking around as well.

Hailey paused for a moment, trying to decide if this was something Barinon would have wanted her to share. Then she said, “this is the remains of a kingdom who lost their heir. This is why we must protect the heir at all costs.”

The soldiers glanced at each other. “Creeps me out,” one muttered under his breath.

Hailey wished she had created a glyph to the mouth of the cave, but then she didn’t thinks would be coming back here. The hike back up the hill wasn’t as difficult as it was the first time. Maybe that nap actually did some good, she thought.

They reached the mouth of the cave and Hailey moved forward, a cluster of soldiers at her back. The archers prepared themselves just in case, lighting a torch for every two of them. The arrows themselves were covered in pitch and cloth. They would light quickly and be able to be thrown. Each one of the archers also carried a sword.

The mouth of the cave was small, but it opened up into a much larger cave. Derrick was right behind her.

She cast a ball of light. “Fulgario,” she said. Then she threw it as far as she could manage. She wasn’t very good at throwing, but the light revealed a huge room just beyond the opening with branching paths. She had never been in a cave before and it was colder than she had thought it would be. It felt good after the hike, but the darkness was going to be a problem.

“It’s a small cave, is it?” Derrick’s voice echoed off the walls of the cave and she shushed him.

“I didn’t know it was this big. I might point out that there was a freaking dragon in the middle of the mouth of the cave. I was trying to survive. Besides, I’d never seen a dragon before today. I didn’t know they were real.”

“Ya, well pay attention to your surroundings. We need you to be alive and stupid things like getting yourself killed because you didn’t notice the biggest cave in the kingdom is just idoitic.”

Hailey clenched her hands into fists. “I might remind you that you can’t leave this place without my help. You’ll get lost and die, so maybe you should be nice to me for a change.”

Instead of conceding the point to her, he just said, “Don’t waste any more magic on light,”