Dragons and Mages: A Limited Edition Anthology

by Pauline Creeden

  Dizzy and exhausted, Dyrfinna clambered to her feet, dripping from her sodden clothes, and walked to the steering oar for a spell. Skeggi was at the steering oar, and she wanted to talk to him—wanted to have him all to herself for a little while.

  She climbed up on the raised deck in the stern of the ship, where he sat with the oar. Many of her friends, as well as strangers, slept on the raised portion of the deck, out of the water. Everybody was drenched. Dyrfinna could hear snores and shivers both from the sleepers.

  Vikings snored from underneath the canopy in the middle of the boat as well. Dyrfinna had dry clothes in a wooden case onboard ship—at least, she hoped they were dry. She’d get to find out how waterproof her case was in the morning.

  Skeggi nodded a greeting, holding the steering oar steady. “I think we should be fine. The sea’s much calmer now, so we can hold her in one direction, and she’ll go where we ask.”

  “That’s a blessing. Would you like me to help hold the oar so you can get some rest?”

  Skeggi shook his head. “It’s fine.”

  Dyrfinna eyed him a moment. “Are you all right? Do you want company to keep you awake?”

  “If you need to sleep, I don’t mind.”

  “I don’t need to sleep.” It was true. Sitting here with him, alone, there was no way she could have slept. Now the thin clouds were clearing away, allowing small patches of stars to shine through. A mild breeze blew over the waves, but that was not the reason she shivered. It was from the starlight on Skeggi’s face, and how deep his eyes looked when he cast them toward the heavens.

  The problem with love, she thought, is that it softens you. It doesn’t matter how much of a warrior you are, because when you look at the eyes of the man you love, you are instantly undone, and there’s no help in the world for it.

  She glanced behind them, trying to get her mind off that particular subject. “Hey, look at that,” she said, pointing atop the stern, which was shaped as the end of the dragon’s tail.

  Skeggi looked behind him where Dyrfinna pointed. A seagull slept while standing on the dragon’s tail. He opened an eye partly at them, then shut it again.

  “I miss my owl,” he said.

  “I miss him, too,” Dyrfinna said, and flopped down beside him. “I haven’t been through a storm on a longboat before.”

  “I’ve been through a few,” he said. “Don’t worry. Every storm is different. You figure things out as you go, mostly.”

  Generally she hated small talk, wanting only to discuss deep subjects of the heart. But at the same time, it was so nice to talk to him, to hear the sweet rumble of his voice, to meet his dark eyes as they flicked to hers, to return his smile.

  “Yeah, unless you happen to sink the boat,” she said.

  He nodded musingly. “That would put an end to figuring things out.”

  “May it never be,” she said, flicking her fingers so fate wouldn’t decide to carry out her words. “Were you on other military excursions? I didn’t think you had been.”

  “No. Just fishing with my grandpa and his crew.”

  She nodded, remembering how his grandma would take orders for the fish, and they’d both deliver. “So you’ve got a lot of experience on the sea. Do you like it?”

  Skeggi laughed. “I do. I do. Not so much the storms … though they offer a kind of wild glory, when you’re standing on a deck awash with water, holding on to the mast, and the power of the storm is breaking around you. It’s scary. But you also feel alive. Alive!” His eyes lit, looking at her, and she thrilled with it. “There’s nothing like it.

  “I like the mundane things, too. I always liked looking at the different kinds of fish that Grandpa would pull out of the sea, and helping him throw back the ones that he wouldn’t be able to sell. You get such a variety of creatures from out of the deep. Little fish like jewels. Strange shrimps and jellyfish of incredible shapes. Huge fish, the size of dogs that would just look at you with these eyes. You can’t imagine all the animals living in the sea, and every time we went out, we’d find something new and exciting we’d never seen before. The seas are so alive, Dyrfinna. I wish there was some way we could go into the water and explore the deeps. There are worlds down there we’ve never dreamed of.”

  She listened in fascination. “Have you ever seen any selkies?”

  Skeggi’s eyes went wide. “I think I did, once. It was floating in the water like a seal. You know how they bob out there, when they’re standing up out of the water and looking around? But this one was the wrong shape to be a seal. And … it was singing.” He looked at her. “I swear by Odin she was singing. I was just ten years old and went to the rail of the ship to listen. Grandpa came running across the deck and grabbed me and hauled me away. He ordered his crew to tack away from the selkie, though we hadn’t the wind for it. He was so mad at me.”

  “What was she singing?” Dyrfinna wondered if maybe Gefjun could use a selkie song with her song magic somehow.

  Skeggi grinned. “Here’s the thing. You know how selkies are supposed to have beautiful voices and lure you to your doom? This one had an awful voice. Awful! The only reason I went to the rail to listen was that I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She sounded like she was hooting.”

  “Are you serious?” Dyrfinna laughed.

  “Yes! It sounded like a little owl with hiccups.”

  They laughed.

  Dyrfinna said, “I hope the selkie isn’t out there right now, listening to us.”

  “Ooh,” said Skeggi, covering his mouth.

  “Sorry, selkie,” Dyrfinna called out to the ocean. “You sing beautifully. Maybe you just had a cold that day.”

  Somebody who was lying on the deck grumbled, “The selkie won’t curse you, if you stop talking so she can go back to sleep.”

  Dyrfinna and Skeggi looked at each other, stifling their laughter. “Oops. Sorry, fair selkie,” Dyrfinna whispered in a carrying voice.

  “The fair selkie says, kiss my arse,” said the sleeper, who then subsided into a grumble. Then a little snore.

  All was peaceful again.

  They were quiet for a moment. Dyrfinna liked how pleasant their silences were, how natural. She didn’t have to rush to come up with something to say. They’d always been like that, from back in the days when they were neighbors and played together with their friends under the plum tree in her yard. As they got older, they’d gone from chess matches and her battle strategy game, which she always trounced him in, to swordfights.

  She rolled her shoulder, trying to take the stiffness out of the injury. It hurt, but not as bad as she’d have expected. “This morning seems forever ago.”

  “Doesn’t it?” he asked. “You go from killing a wolf and rescuing your sister to getting lost in a storm on the high seas. Apparently you love more adventure than I can take.”

  She snorted. “I’m sure you’d save your brothers from a wolf, if it happened to you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I don’t know that I’d succeed quite as well as you did. My gift just isn’t in sword fighting as yours is.”

  “I know you’d do it for Rjupa,” she said. She wasn’t being jealous, because it was the truth. He was a big-hearted man, and she loved him for it.

  He smiled and shrugged a little. “You’ve got it backwards. She’d be the one saving my hide.”

  They laughed. Dyrfinna really did like Rjupa. She kind of wished she were here now, even when she wished Skeggi could be wholly hers. Dyrfinna kept wanting to ask him if he and Rjupa were going to be betrothed, but that thought did make her jealous. She didn’t like the feeling. It made her squirm. She had to be better than that.

  Dyrfinna’s eyelids grew heavy. All of a sudden, the exhaustion of the whole day sank its weight on her, and her body pulled her to lie down in blissful sleep. Her head drooped.

  “Why don’t you sleep here?” Skeggi said.

  “No … ” she mumbled. “I’ll just …. ” She tried to get up, but it wasn’t happe
ning.

  “You can stay,” he said. “It’s all right. Get some rest. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  She smiled at him, her heart filled with love, and she lay down on the deck with the other Vikings in the little space next to him. She felt him arrange her sea cloak over her to cover her better.

  She longed so much to tell him what he meant to her. How deeply she loved him.

  But he was not hers.

  She was soon asleep.

  The Burned Isle

  Just a little before dawn—long enough for Dyrfinna to get a little bit of sleep, but not an adequate amount—the captain called them to announce what to expect for the day. Groggy Vikings, both men and women, dragged themselves to their feet and joined the captain on the foredeck.

  “Friends, we’ve found a hole in the side of the ship that we’ve got to fill,” the captain said. “During the storm we met a submerged iceberg or some debris. We need to stop and fix it, because the bottom of the boat keeps taking on water, despite our valiant bailers. I don’t think it’ll take more than a day and a night, and maybe part of another day, to fix it.”

  “That means we’ll be late to the meeting point for the ambush,” someone behind Dyrfinna cried.

  Everyone groaned. Dyrfinna couldn’t help but feel bitter. She wanted so much to be part of that ambush.

  The captain held up a hand. “Now, wait, just wait. If our dragons find us and bring us news of the rest of the fleet, we might be able to arrange a different scheme to attack King Varinn’s crew. Storms are inevitable and unpredictable.”

  A Viking grumbled, “The problem with storms is that we never get any good plunder.”

  “You’ll get your share soon enough,” the captain said. “If that same storm passed over King Varinn’s fleet, they’re in the same pickle. It’s possible that some of his great ships were blown off course, just as we have been. We’ll run into each other eventually if we keep our eyes peeled. Then we’ll have some fun.”

  Everybody cheered.

  In the morning sun, mountains appeared out of the mist. The captain pointed to them. “Ah! We are actually well on our way toward King Varinn,” he said. “As you can see from the placement of that central peak, we are near the town of Bjorn.” The old Viking captains had a encyclopedic knowledge of how every chain of mountains and every landmark looked from the ocean, so even if they were blown off course, they could look at the mountains around them and how far away they were, and instantly triangulate their location.

  “That means we have traveled well up the coast,” the captain continued. “Last night’s wind flung us a long way—and I’ll wager that this same wind has blown King Varinn’s fleet backwards. It may have even blown them back home! So don’t give in to despair. Row to land. We’ll patch the hole and then we’ll go after that scalawag.”

  The crew cheered. They went to their rowing places, the oars came rattling out, and the ship flew through the water to the foot of a nearby mountain, where they ran the longboat up onto the beach. Everybody splashed out and pushed the old boat high up on the sand, well out of the water, exposing the hole that had caused so much trouble. Some quick-thinking person had plugged it with an old boot and a quantity of moss.

  The captain assigned some people to gather supplies, while the blacksmith and some craftsmen prepared a fire and began to mix some tar. Everybody else was released to clean up and get shipshape. “Be back here early tomorrow morning,” the captain said, frowning at the hole. “By Odin, that is an enormous boot. God bless the foot that wore it!”

  “Amen!” cried the Christian Vikings, and even some of the non-Christian Vikings, and everybody scattered from the ship. Many people wanted a chance to kill some meat and make a hot fire and eat. Others wanted to wash the brine from their skin and hair.

  Dyrfinna and her friends came down from the ship all together. She carried some clothes from her chest, which had turned out to be waterproof after all.

  “I’ll shoot some game,” Ostryg said, putting his bow over his shoulder.

  “I’m setting out some rabbit snares,” Dyrfinna said.

  “I’m sitting with whoever catches enough food for tonight,” Skeggi said, waggling his eyebrows at Dyrfinna.

  “I’m sitting with my loverboy,” said Gefjun.

  “We could all share a fire while we’re eating.” Though Dyrfinna wanted to be alone with Skeggi, and was definitely going to put out a few extra rabbit snares for his sake, she wanted Gefjun nearby. Being in love with somebody who was absolutely unavailable was hard enough to deal with on her own. And, she was tired, and her arm ached, which made everything even worse.

  Ostryg gave her a hard stare. “If you want to be her lovergirl, you have to go through me first.”

  Freyja, give me strength!

  Dyrfinna glowered. “I’m not going through you. I was extending the invitation to all of you. Even the impossible ones, heaven knows why.”

  Gefjun nudged Ostryg with her elbow. “Knock it off, loverboy. You can’t stop Dyrfinna from being my friend. I still want to sit with her. Besides, you get me all the rest of the time.”

  Ostryg turned his head aside. “That’s fine. I’m going to go hunting,” he snapped, and turned his back and bumbled off.

  Skeggi raised one hand to Ostryg. “Slow down, I’ll go with you.”

  “You’re not going to let him get to you, are you?” asked Gefjun, a little accusatory.

  “No,” Dyrfinna snapped, needled by her saying that. “Hey, it isn’t my fault that your loverboy is being a total jerk here. I’m going to put out some rabbit snares, because I want to eat. Obviously.”

  And just like that, Gefjun was mad too. “Fine! Be that way. I’ll go with Ostryg,” she said. “I think we could all stand to eat.” And off she went, following them.

  Freyja! They can all have each other.

  Dyrfinna set quite a few snares, because she could always share a rabbit or two if she actually caught that many, but she was in a mood not to share them with her so-called friends. The snares set, she headed to the stream to wash off, and see what the land had to offer.

  She’d seen a large stream nearby when they’d landed the boat. Of course everybody else had seen it too, because there were a couple of hairy Vikings scrubbing off brine in the water and showing off their gleaming muscles.

  “Don’t forget to wash your beards,” she called as she went by.

  “Is this clean?” one of the men standing in the water shouted and mooned her.

  She found a flat stone and flung it. It skipped across the water and dinged him right in the rump. He jumped with a holler and fell in the water, and the others had a fine laugh, cheering Dyrfinna.

  “Don’t cross her!” one of the men said. “She killed a wolf with one arm, and now she’s knocked the moon out of the sky.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, amused. “You’re kind of reaching with that one.” She headed upstream where it was quieter and there weren’t so many moony Vikings.

  She found a secluded place upstream, stripped off her briny clothes, and washed up. She was nearly finished when a couple of men came wandering upstream after her, as she’d expected. But she had gathered a good stack of stones before she’d even gotten into the water, and she started firing off stone after stone at their heads. The stones were small enough to fling easily but big enough to hurt ... and she had good aim.

  The men howled and ran back downstream. “Geez, we were just taking a walk!”

  “And I was just throwing rocks for fun,” she replied.

  Once they were gone, she got dressed in fresh clothing, washed her old clothes, hung them in a tree to dry, and braided her hair back.

  Now she was ready to explore the island. She wanted to take a walk to the top of the island, to some prominent crag, and look out over the world and see where they were.

  Suddenly a shouting came from down below. Dyrfinna’s hand instantly went to her sword as she crouched in a defensive position, looking all around for
the danger.

  Then a dragon flew low overhead.

  A wild dragon!

  Brilliant as an ember blown to orange flame, shining like a topaz, it shot over Dyrfinna. She crouched on the bank of the stream, praying it didn’t see her, ready to plunge back into the water if it decided to lay down a line of fire. Wild dragons were quick and mean. No human could approach them. These dragons would just as soon whip around and burn you to a crisp—like constantly mad hornets, they didn’t care what they hurt.

  The dragon flew on, clearing the top of the mountain and vanishing from view.

  Dyrfinna pulled on her boots, checked for landmarks—because she wanted to find her clothes and get back to the ships later—then rushed for the top of the mountain. She aimed her steps toward a tall group of rocks standing in the direction the dragon had flown.

  She left the shelter of the low trees around the stream, hurrying through the tall grass growing from the rocky soil. The mountain wasn’t extraordinarily high, but it took a while to climb through the grass, then across the rocks and moss where the grass couldn’t grow. She started puffing as the air thinned. When she finally reached the top, her legs felt like jelly, and she had to stop and rest.

  Shading her eyes from the bright sun, she could see their longship at the base of the mountain and barely make out a tiny stirring from the people around the ship. Her clothes in the forest were too far below to spy, but the glint of the creek where she’d been washing caught her eye.

  The other side of the mountain was immense. She’d never been so high in her life, and breathing the thin air gave her a pins-and-needles feeling in her poor, tired-out lungs. But the view was stunning. Far across the ocean sat other mountains, other lands, clearly visible. She wished the old captain could see this—he probably could have told her what each landform was, and who lived there, and where the ports were.