They made good soup.
It was a little tangy, with lots of cabbage in it. The salt was perfect. Or maybe it was only because Rudra was hungry and he could practically eat anything... anything... if it was cooked thoroughly.
The bread was sour, with a hard crust. Rudra softened it by dipping it in the soup. The porridge was nutty, with an unhealthy amount of butter, and he ate it with a side of pickled cucumbers. They offered him a spoon, but he didn't take it.
Since the childhood trauma with Saroth, Rudra had always been extra sensitive about spoons.
So he ate the porridge with his right hand (after washing it, of course; he was a dragon, not a barbarian) and licked the grains off his fingers. Both the Benevian soldiers and the Kroskoslavs watched him with a mixture of mild fascination and disgust, which Rudra was not concerned about at all. He had bigger concerns.
Concerns about things he started noticing the more he ate Kroskoslav dishes.
The entire menu didn't have a single ounce of meat or fish. It offended him, like many other things in this strange place, about which he could do absolutely nothing.
To make it worse, he soon realised there was something stranger than the lack of protein in the meal. He could still smell meat. Not in the soup or the porridge, but in the bowl in his hands.
Rudra lifted it to his nose and sniffed. Faint, but not so faint that a dragon could miss it. Old fat, soaked deep into the clay. He frowned, then licked the last grains of porridge off the rim, slowly this time, and let it sit on his tongue.
There it was again, a thin, greasy coating beneath the nutty butter. Not a trick of his nose. Meat. Someone had scrubbed the bowl, but not well enough to fool a dragon.
And then he noticed the vegetables, which were chopped into precise cubes. That struck Rudra as alarming in a town full of people with shaky hands. It was something he would have loved to bring to the attention of the Benevian soldiers, but he found them distracted.
Percival Leonhart had finally arrived.
The man walked in on his own two feet through the gate. He didn't even have a horse. Which meant he had put on full armour, leather and steel covering every bit of his skin from the base of his neck to the tip of his toes, and walked across miles of forest tracking down the Benevian army. He looked paler and skinnier than the last time Rudra had seen him, but it made him no less imposing.
Of course Tish had to make a spectacle of it. As Rudra sat on a log by a bonfire, he watched the Saintess run dramatically across the square, shouting, "Percy? Percy! You came!"
The man froze for a second and then extended his arm, catching Her Holiness. It looked almost comical, like a scene from a badly written sappy novel. Except then their eyes met across the town square. And he just glared over Tish's head.
What the fuck?
Why was he staring daggers at Rudra when he was the one who had stabbed Rudra in another life?
Percival looked at the statue, of course he did, then glared back at Rudra as if he had commissioned it to be built.
Tish seemed to have noticed. She pulled back to observe Percival Leonhart's face before she looked back at Rudra, eyes suspicious and guarded.
It seemed these two ducklings had officially teamed up against Rudra for reasons he didn't understand. And people still treated *him* as the bad guy.
Rudra maintained eye contact with the pair while continuing to lick his bowl to assert dominance.
Everything felt shitty.
But hey, at least Konstantin was back!
Nayan had spotted the goat right outside, behind the Kroskoslav kitchen (why Nayan was lurking around the kitchen, Rudra didn't want to know), and had escorted the animal back to Rudra.
"Konstantin!" Rudra greeted the goat rather cheerfully, as it was one of the very few living beings in Benevia that wasn't actively trying to kill him. "Boy, you do know how to give me a scare."
He knelt and conducted his usual sniffing examination. The goat still smelled like goat, which was the only good news he had received in the past twenty-four hours. "We need to have him escorted back to the capital," Rudra said to Nayan. "He's been away from home far longer than necessary."
"Then go. Leave. Nobody wants you here anyway."
Rudra turned to see the Benevian Prince sauntering toward him with dull, bored eyes and a hand on his waist. "Between me and Percival, the Saintess is safe."
Before Rudra could speak, he stepped closer and grabbed Rudra's collar with an enthusiasm balanced right between bravery and stupidity. "The townsfolk are asking questions about who you are. You should be glad they couldn't join the Benevian army when you burned the walls a month back," he sneered. "Otherwise they would be cutting you up instead of letting their precious food get wasted on the likes of you."
That was it. Rudra's willpower to cooperate with the Benevian soldiers burned out of his system. "Very well," he said flatly. "You've got this covered? You think you can fend off the townsfolk if things go sideways?"
Mamon narrowed his eyes. "I've fifty soldiers."
"There are at least five hundred of them," countered Rudra.
Mamon laughed, incredulous. "We are trained—"
"They are desperate!" Rudra stepped closer until he was hovering over the Benevian Prince, who was a foot shorter than he was. "And desperate people don't fight to win," he said slowly. "They fight because they can't afford to lose."
"Quit it, you two!"
It was Tish. She walked over with Percival trailing behind her like her own shadow, his eyes pointedly fixed on Rudra. "There is not going to be a fight," insisted Tish. "They just wish to be healed! And that is exactly my speciality."
"You don't know your limits," Rudra said dismissively. "You don't even know what you are dealing with here."
"Oh," Tish raised her eyebrows. "And do you? Then enlighten us, great Dragon Prince!" Her voice was sickly sweet, and it made something crawl under Rudra's skin. He clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached.
Gods, it would be so easy to just burn down everything, grab the Saintess and fly away.
But he didn't do it. Because burning the town now meant risking Nayan's life. And also Konstantin's life (yes, the goat had started growing on him).
He walked to the wooden table where he had left his finished bowl of porridge a few minutes ago, washed his hands, and picked the bowl up. "This," he said, waving it. Tish and the Prince wrinkled their noses and stepped away. "It smells like meat."
"And? Is eating meat a crime now? You're a carnivorous lizard—" Tish started.
"There was no meat in the dish!" Rudra threw his hands up, along with the bowl. Tish and the Prince pulled back. "Why didn't they serve us the meat even if they have it?"
"I don't think they have the kind of meat we eat."
The voice was so quiet that Rudra at first thought it was his inner voice speaking. It was actually Percival.
He was looking at the bowl. "It's not chicken," he said, sniffing the air. "Maybe beef? No, something else." He wrinkled his nose. "What the hell is that smell?"
Rudra froze. Even Nayan was trying hard not to look unimpressed. "You can smell it," Rudra said, like a fact. "Normal humans can't smell it. It's too faint for an ordinary nose to catch on."
Percival Leonhart stiffened for a second before his cool demeanor snapped back. "Perhaps I'm not as ordinary as you thought me to be."
The wind shifted.
Rudra stood frozen as the air hit his face. And he saw Percival's eyes widen. In that second, Percival knew that Rudra knew. That Rudra could smell it on him.
Layered over his usual scent of leather and smoke, there was something sharp and distinct coating Percival Leonhart. It was sweet, and it was rot, but not the rot of a shapeshifter. There was a chemical tint to it, as if something artificial were holding the decay at bay and keeping it from spoiling all the way through. Familiar and unfamiliar at once. Something not quite like a shapeshifter, and not quite like a human either.
Rudra had smelled it a long time ago, in the lab of the Parthan Royal Physician. Saroth.
"You," Rudra uttered, and even in his own ears his voice sounded hollow. "You have met him, haven't you?"
Percival took a step back. "I don't know what you mean."
Rudra didn't take his denial into consideration. He couldn't, when he could smell the lie on him.
"What have you let him do to you?" he asked. "What have you done to yourself?"