Dragonshadow

Muffle raised his brows and looked away in a fashion that said, The boy’s got a point.

“Mother uses them.”

“You’re twelve years old, Ian.” John swallowed hard, hoping by all the gods that his own fear didn’t show. “Leavin’ out the fact that certain spells can be too strong for an inexperienced mage to wield—”

“I’m not inexperienced.”

“—you haven’t learned near all there is to know about Limitations, and I for one don’t want to end up havin’ one of me feet fall off from leprosy in the middle of the fight because you got a word wrong.”

Surprised into laughter, Ian looked quickly aside, mouth pursed to prevent it. Like many boys he had the disapproving air of one who feels that laughter is not the appropriate response to facing death, especially not for one’s father. John had suspected for some time that both his sons regarded him as frivolous.

“Now, get back to stirring,” he ordered. “Is that stuff settin’ up at all like it’s supposed to? Adric, as long as you’re down here you might as well stir that other cauldron, but for God’s sake put gloves on … We’ve got a long night.” He stripped off his old red doublet and his shirt and hung both on pegs on the work shed wall. The smell of summer hay from the fields beyond the Hold filled the night. Though midnight lay only a few hours off, the sky still glowed with light. As he pulled on his gloves, John watched them all in the firelit court: his sons, his brother—his aunts, Jane and Rowe and Hol, and Cousin Dilly, coming down with gingerwater and trying to tell Adric it was time for him to go to bed. Seeing them as Jenny would be seeing them, wherever the hell she was, gazing into her crystal. Rowe with her long untidy braids of graying red and Dilly peering shortsightedly at Muffle, and all of them chatting like a nest of magpies—the real rulers, if the truth be told, of Alyn Hold.

She has to know what all this means. He closed his eyes, desperately willing that Jenny be on her way. I’m sorry. I waited as long as I could.

Teltrevir, heliotrope … His mind echoed the fragments of the old dragon-list. Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold. Nymr blue violet-crowned, Glammring Gold-Horns bright as emeralds … Scraps of information and old learning:

Maggots from meat, weevils from rye,

Dragons from stars in an empty sky.

And, Save a dragon, slave a dragon.

Secondhand accounts, most of them a mash of broken half-volumes; notes of legends and granny rhymes; jumbled ballads that Gareth collected and sent copies of. Everything left of learning in the Winterlands, after the King’s armies had abandoned them to bandits, Iceriders, cold, and plague. He’d gathered them painfully from ruins, collated them in those few moments between fighting for his own life and the lives of those who depended on him … Secondhand accounts and the speculations of scholars who’d never come closer to a dragon than the sites of old slayings, or a nervously cursory inspection of torn-up, blood-soaked, acid-burned ground.

Something in there might save his life, but he didn’t know what.

Antara Warlady was supposed to have gotten right up next to the Worm of Wevir by wrapping herself in a fresh-flayed pig hide, according to the oldest Drymarch version of her tale; Grimonious Grimblade had supposedly put out live lambs as bait.

Alkmar the Godborn had been killed by the third dragon he fought.

Selkythar of golden curls and sword of sunlight flashing,

Seeking meed of glory through the dragon’s talons lashing.

Cried he, “Strike again, foul worm, my bloody blade is slashing …”

John shook his head. He’d never sought a meed of glory in his life, and if he ever decided to start, it wouldn’t be by riding smack up a long hill in open daylight as Selkythar had reportedly done, armed with only a sword—well, a shield, too, as if a shield ever did any good against a thirty-foot hellstorm of spitting acid and whirling spikes.

“The boy may be right.” Muffle’s voice pulled him out of his memories of the Dragon of Wyr, of Morkeleb’s black talons sweeping down at him from darkness …

John dipped the harpoon he held into the cauldron and watched the liquid drip off the iron, thin as water.

“Stuff ain’t thickenin’ up,” he sighed. “Maybe I should get Auntie Jane back here. Her gravies always set.”

Muffle caught his arm. “Be serious, son.”

“Why?” John rested the harpoon’s spines on the vat’s edge and coughed in the smoke. “I may be dead twenty-four hours from now.”

“So you may,” replied the blacksmith softly, and glanced across at Ian in the amber glare. “And what then? Four years ago you bargained with the King to send garrisons. Well, they’ve been gie helpful, but you know there’s a price. If you die, d’you think your boys are going to be let to inherit? In the south they’ve laws against wizards holding property or power, and Adric’s but eight. You think the King’s council’s going to let a witch be Regent of Wyr? Especially if they think they can get tax money by ruling here themselves?”

“I’m the King’s subject.” John stepped back from the fire, hell-mouth hot on his bare arms. “And the King’s servant, and the Regent’s me friend. What’re you askin’? That I not fight this drake?”

“I’m asking that you let Ian do what he’s asked to do.”

“No.”

Muffle pursed his lips, which made him look astoundingly like their father. Except, thought John, that their father had never let things stop with pursed lips, nor would he have reacted to No with that simple grimace. The last time John had said a flat-out No to old Lord Aver, at the age of twelve, he’d been lucky his collarbone had set straight.

“In the village they say the boy’s good. He goes over those magic-books in your library like you go over the ones on steam and smokes and old machines. He knows enough …”

“No,” said John. And then, seeing the doubt, the fear for him in the fat man’s small brown eyes, he said, “There’s things a boy his years shouldn’t know about. Not so soon.”

“Things you’d put your life at risk—your people at risk—to spare him?”

John thought about them, those things Jenny had told him lay in old Caerdinn’s crumbling books. Things he’d read in the books that had been part of his bargain with Prince Gareth to fight the Dragon of Nast Wall. Things he read in Jenny’s silence when he surprised her sometimes in her own small study, studying in the deep of night.

He said, “Aye.” And saw the shift in Muffle’s eyes.

“People hereabouts know the magic Jen does for them.” John picked up the harpoon and turned the shaft in his hands. “Or what old Caerdinn did. Birthin’ babies, and keepin’ the mice out of the barns in a bad year, or maybe buyin’ an hour on the harvest when a storm’s coming in. Those that remember me mother are mostly dead.” He glanced up at Muffle over the rims of his spectacles. “And anyway, by what I hear from our aunties, me mother never did the worst she could have done.”

Except maybe only once or twice, he thought, and pushed those barely coherent recollections from his mind.

“People here don’t know what magic really is,” John went on. “They haven’t seen what it can do, and they haven’t seen what it can do to those that do it. You always pay for it somehow, and sometimes other people besides you do the payin’. Gaw,” he added, turning back to the cauldron and dipping the harpoon once more, “this’s blashier than Cousin Rowanberry’s tea. Let’s put some flour in it, see if we can get it thick enough to do us some good.”

Ian’s heart beat hard as he kicked his scrubby pony to a gallop up Toadback Hill.

Death-spells.

And the dragon.

He’d always hated the harpoons with which his father had killed the Dragon of Wyr, two years before he was born. He had instinctively avoided the cupboard in his father’s cluttered study in which they were locked. If he touched the wood he could feel them, even before he realized that he had magic in him. Sometimes he dreamed about them, each barbed and pronged shaft of iron its own ugly entity, whispering in the darkness about pain and cold and giving up.

His mother had wrought well.

Ian shivered.

For the first eight years of Ian’s life he had only seen her now and then, for she’d lived alone with her cats on the Fell, coming to be with his father at the Hold for a few days together. She had told him later—when his own powers had crossed through that wall from dreaming to daytime reality—that in those days her powers were small. She had kept herself apart to study and meditate, to work on what little she had. There was only so much time in her life to give.

And then had come the Dragon of Nast Wall.

His parents had gone away to the south together to fight it, along with the messenger who’d fetched them, a gawky nearsighted boy in spectacles. That boy had turned out to be Prince Gareth, later Regent for the ailing King Uriens of Belmarie. At that time Ian had accepted without question that his father could easily slay a dragon and hadn’t been particularly concerned. As if to confirm him in this opinion, his parents had returned more or less unharmed, and he didn’t learn until much later how close both had come to not returning at all.

After that, Jenny had lived at the Hold. But she still went sometimes to meditate in the stone house on Frost Fell, and it was there that she’d begun to teach Ian, away from the Hold’s distractions. In that quiet house he did not need to be a brother or a nephew or a father’s firstborn son.

Even had Ian not been mageborn and able to see easily in the clear blue darkness, he could have followed the path that led away from the village fields over Toadback Hill. Ruins dotted the far slope, one of the many vanished towns that spoke of what the Winterlands had been and had become. Shattered walls, slumped puddles where wells had been, all were nearly drowned now in the mists that rose from the cranberry bog.

From the hill crest he looked back and saw his father and his uncle by the village gates, talking with Peg the Gatekeeper. The gates were squat and solid, built up of rubble filched from the broken town. Lanterns burned over them, but Ian did not need those dim yellow smudges to see how his father turned in Battlehammer’s saddle, searching the formless swell of the hills, gesturing as he spoke.