The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “You’re a busy guy,” my cousin observed when Utrachet had gone.

  “This is relatively quiet. It becomes hectic in midwinter, when people have time to think of reasons to petition me. I sit in the Chair every other day sometimes, especially after New Year’s.”

  “I can see why you dumped the negotiations on your grandfather, though. I was surprised that you weren’t doing it yourself, like Freia used to. As the place gets bigger, it gets busier.”

  We went to my office and settled into the comfortable tapestried armchairs. The tiled stove was warming the room so cozily that we could sit by the bookcases and not be cold. Though there was no wind, the remote sun’s light had the edge of winter on it.

  “Now to business,” I said, meeting his acute eyes. “This has nothing to do with the Compact. I understand that you ran into a dragon once.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “I heard a rumor that you have one in the neighborhood …”

  Damn! So much for security. What else might he hear? I covered my dismay by saying, “Yes, there have been rumors to that effect.”

  “You want to hear all about my dragon, I take it.” He grinned humorlessly.

  “Yes.”

  Ottaviano nodded, dropping his grin. “I’m here to do some trading, so I’ll make a trade with you now. I’ll tell you my dragon story, and you’ll tell me one.”

  “I know no dragon stories,” I said stiffly. It would figure. Ottaviano wasn’t one to give anything away.

  He studied his fingers. “Not a dragon story. What I’d like, Gwydion, is the straight story about your mother’s death. Almost nothing was reported in Landuc: simply that she was dead. We didn’t get so much as an invitation for the Emperor to the funeral.”

  “We prefer to keep it to ourselves,” I said, getting up and walking away from him. I stood at one of the windows, arms folded. A cold draft poured down its thick small-paned glass.

  “I’d consider it a confidential matter, and I wouldn’t repeat a word of it,” Ottaviano said softly to my back. “I understand … how things are with Argylle, particularly as regards Landuc. But I knew your mother, and I’ve wanted to better understand how she died since the news hit. With Gaston, her brother, and her father in town, too: three mean guys, any of whom would cut his own throat to keep her alive. It just doesn’t add up.”

  “It was an accident,” I said to the window.

  “What kind? Gwydion, I’ll gladly tell you everything I know about dragons. I’m sure you think I’m true mercenary Landuc scum for charging. But I know there’s no other way I’ll ever hear the story, and I know that you’d tell me the unglossed truth. In a way you force me to act this way, you see? I sincerely want to know, not for anyone else or for any reason other than … it was a terrible shock, and I still can’t quite believe it.”

  The fact that Ottaviano was here at all ought, I thought, to go a long way toward persuading him that it was true, that Mother was gone. I stared out without seeing a thing beyond the glass and thought about his offer. If he would swear to keep it to himself, then … there could be no harm in it. His curiosity was natural. Were Dewar around, he surely would have told Ottaviano himself, anyway, years ago.

  On the other hand, I do not like to think about that day.

  However, I did need to hear how he beat the dragon.

  My realm was endangered by this dragon on Longview. Personal privacy was all very well, but quite a few people here knew what had happened to Mother and, really, it wasn’t as if we had intentionally kept it wholly to ourselves, as part of some plot—we had simply not wanted to discuss it. If Otto could keep it to himself, so that we would not begin hearing hideously distorted versions of the truth with equally hideous interpretations, then there was no reason he should not know.

  “All right,” I said aloud. “You must swear to hold it in strictest confidence; if it were for general public distribution in Landuc, it would have been aired there. It’s open to misinterpretation, and they always put the worst light on things.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Ottaviano admitted. “I will not repeat it ever, to anyone, by the blood in my body and the breath of my soul.”

  I nodded and turned away from the glass. After a moment, I sat down at my desk. “You first,” I said.

  He took out a pipe, shot me an inquiring look to see if I minded, and then packed it and lit it. The smoke had a fruity, ripe scent; I couldn’t identify it. After a few minutes of quiet puffing and thinking, he started.

  Way back when your Uncle Dewar and I were young and reckless—now we’re older and reckless—we were talking one night about dragons. It was not long after I’d settled things between me and Landuc peaceably, and Dewar and I were spending a fair amount of time exercising our bodies by day and by night going on sort of celebratory pub crawls, chasing women, and generally living it up the way one is supposed to when one is young and reckless and well-heeled. By the time he knocked off and went to see his father and sister and I went back to Ascolet, we had a reputation as savorous as Josquin’s was then.

  We crawled back up to the Palace after a particularly good one and had a few nightcaps in the small library with that nice bar. There’s a tapestry of a dragon in there, or there was, and Dewar started pointing out the anatomical inaccuracies.

  I suggested that it was probably an imaginary dragon, and he got all snotty and said that in Landuc, it ought to be a picture of a real dragon.

  “What do you mean, a real dragon,” I asked.

  “A real one,” he said. “You know. You don’t know. Intelligent and Elemental and more dangerous than anything spawned by the worlds you know. There are a few who domicile in Noroison and Morven. I suppose it’s too tedious here for their tastes.”

  “Or maybe Uncle Gaston and Herne killed them all off,” I suggested.

  “No,” Dewar said; “I think there probably haven’t been any around here. If there had been, if Gaston and Herne had killed them, wouldn’t we have a few heads and hides around the Palace?”

  His reasoning made a sort of drunken sense. The trophy rooms were devoid of such. There were no, say, dragon-hide chairs or divans about. And he became even more, well, arrogant and said he’d show me a real dragon someday. Implied that he’d run into them before and they were no big deal for somebody as hot as he was.

  Dewar and I, you have to understand, had been jockeying for the upper hand for a while. We had been competing lately in all the sports you can imagine, in spending money, in drinking, in, uh, um, the amorous arts, and a lot of other things I’m not going to describe. The funny thing about that was that no matter how much money changed hands on our bets, neither of us came out ahead for long.

  So this put me into a competitive frame of mind. He was being damned cocky and I wanted to kick him down a peg or six. I started asking questions about dragons. When he told me that yes, they really do hoard stuff, I said “Enough, Dewar. Put it where your mouth is. We both go off and find a dragon and steal something from him.”

  “A capital idea!” he said. “Are we going to have a deadline?”

  “Yes,” I said, “let’s make it interesting and give ourselves a one-month time limit. I’m sure I can find one of these big guys by then, and if you’re so smart you know right where to look.”

  “Are we betting something?” he wondered.

  I wasn’t sure. We decided yes, we’d bet something, and we couldn’t decide what to bet, so we figured the one who got back last with his trophy had to buy drinks for the other for a Landuc year including holidays—one year of rounds total, no matter how fragmented it was—and the winner got to keep both trophies.

  Just to be safe, we wrote it all down, and although the next morning I’m sure he was thinking, as I was, that this was one of the dumber bets we’d ever made, neither of us dared suggest dropping it. We didn’t tell anyone about it, because we were sure our elders would not like us roving off down the Road to pick a fight with something large, smart, and dangerous. For a cover we
put out a story about a scenery trip to Musrie Gorge and took the Road that day from the Noon-stone. When we were clear of Landuc, Dewar slowed his horse and looked at me.

  “You’re sure you want to go through with this,” he said.

  “Hell yes,” I replied.

  “Otto, I know I can do this, and I’d feel bad if you got killed.”

  “I can take care of myself,” I said. “Any pointers?”

  “They like to talk,” he said. “They are suspicious, and paranoid, and very quick. They’re attracted to sorcery and powerful locales. They can use the Road and Leys just as we can, or better. They like to eat you when you’re most scared. Don’t look one in the eyes or you’ll be his next meal.”

  “Great,” I said. “How’d you find all this out?”

  “I learned it when I was a child.” He shrugged. “It’s part of the standard curriculum. Summon me if you get into too much trouble, Otto.”

  There was no way I’d Summon him to bail me out, but at least he was on record as making the offer. Slippery as a fish, Dewar … sometimes. I recall wondering if Avril or Gaston hadn’t put him up to it somehow, as a good way of getting rid of me—though I’d been officially forgiven for my various trespasses, my relatives were not entirely happy about me. Prospero in particular appeared to have it in for me, and I knew Dewar was responsible for keeping him from simply cutting my throat and crying revenge for poor Miranda of Valgalant’s death and other transgressions.

  Dewar went on to tell me that I should get the name of the dragon I was stealing from. “They all have names, long ones, made up of various bits and pieces. Usually they have a few preferred syllables that they use.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  In the tone of someone addressing a two-year-old, he started, “The names in their entirety can take a day to—”

  I cut him off. “I mean why get the name?”

  “Oh. So we know who he is. Then if I hear of him looking for you later I can warn you.” He grinned.

  We split up after more good-luck-mate chitchat. He stopped at a crossroad and went off somewhere after elaborate preliminaries—I suppose across the Limen to Noroison—and I headed there the hard way, not knowing the route in anything but theory and consulting my Ephemeris often. What I knew about dragons was entirely theoretical too; I was sure Dewar knew more, and I was sure he’d told me enough for me to be able to find one. So I wandered along the Road through every little pocket-universe world I passed, into the cul-de-sacs and out of them, favoring mountains and sparsely-populated areas, looking for caves and abandoned castles and places like that.

  I asked people, too, if they’d heard of or seen a dragon in their area. I ran across a few small dragons that way, but nothing really big—none of the great dragons. I did kill one of the small ones, for practice, but its hoard was tacky trash and it had given its name as Neddy, so I figured it didn’t count.

  I kept track of the time in Landuc. Two weeks after leaving I knew that I was going to be in trouble if I didn’t do better. I pushed myself into wilder places and hunted about there. After a few days, I ran across rumors of a dragon, and a day and a half later I found authentic dragon-created destruction in the form of a fire-levelled village by a lake. A few chewed-up corpses made me extra-cautious as I prowled around, hunting for someone who might be able to give me the latest news on the beast. Finding no one, I headed up into the hills for the night, where I encountered an old man who ran from me.

  “Wait a minute!” I yelled. “I’m looking for the dragon!”

  He just ran faster. I figured he knew something, so I followed him to his home—a cave, as it turned out. The steep, green hills were an extinct family of volcanoes, and they were riddled with unexpected openings here and there. He lived in the cave with a little old lady about as substantial as a dried-up leaf, and neither of them was pleased to see me. They barricaded themselves in their hole, peeking out through a triangular window in the door, which was made of bits and pieces of mismatched wood.

  “Look, I don’t want to harass you,” I said, “but I’m looking for a dragon, a big one, and I’m wondering if he’s somewhere in the area.”

  “Go away,” the old lady yelled at me, and she threw a rock. “We paid our taxes. You go away. Brigand.” And similar abuse.

  I got off my horse and told them I wasn’t leaving until they came out. And, figuring that bribery works where courtesy doesn’t, I chucked a couple of gold coins into the cave at them.

  “What do you want?” the old man asked after they’d had a moment to recover from this.

  “I told you. I want that dragon.” I’d considered asking to sleep in the cave, but the smell of the place put me off.

  “He’s gone,” the man said.

  “No he’s not,” she disagreed. “He’s not gone. He’s waiting. Mark my words, he’s waiting.”

  “He’s gone, you foolish old woman,” the man insisted in a quavery voice.

  “When was he here?” I asked.

  “Weeks ago,” the man said.

  “One week ago,” she corrected him. “Eight days exactly. He ate the King’s tax collector. Good riddance to him.”

  “Too fat to run,” the old man said. “It was weeks ago, weeks ago. Months.”

  She seemed more coherent than he, so I figured I’d trust her word. “What did he do?”

  “He ate the King’s tax collector,” she said.

  “Did he wreck that village?” I asked.

  “No, the King’s tax collector did that,” she said. “You’re a nice young man. Go away. Leave that dragon for the King.”

  “Shut up, you silly goose,” the man muttered tremulously. “We warned him once, we did.”

  “King’s job is killing dragons,” she went on over his objections. “You let him get to it. Nobody ever thanked a volunteer.”

  “Where was the dragon living?” I asked.

  “You never mind,” she said. “You run along home now. He’ll eat you up same as he ate the tax collector.”

  “I bet he’s up in these hills,” I said, looking around. “How long has he been around?”

  “Long gone,” muttered the old man, “long—oof!” He disappeared from the window and, though his mumbled complaints were a continuo to the rest of the conversation, didn’t speak again.

  “Oh, ages!” the old lady said. “Trust that fool of a tax collector to go stirring him up, trying to collect taxes from a dragon. Fat old idiot. He smelled like a rose, though.”

  “So the dragon was quiet until the tax collector tried to collect taxes from him,” I said, “and has he attacked anyone since then?”

  “He always claimed he was a vegetarian, too,” the woman said. “The dreadful hypocrite. Heaven knows what he was doing with all that fish.”

  “Fish?”

  “From the village.”

  I blinked. “The dragon was getting fish from the village?”

  “Of course. Where else? Is he going to catch it himself?” She cackled.

  “He’s been quiet since he ate the tax collector, though?”

  “I dare say. He’s going to be wanting his fish, unless that tax collector choked him, and he’s going to be fashed about the village being gone.”

  I recalled the state of the village. Maybe dogs or wolves had been at the corpses. “Does the dragon have a name?”

  “Of course he’s got a name. What are we going to do, yell ‘Hey, you,’ at him? What do you want with him anyway?” She squinted at me through the little window, suspicious.

  “Just to talk to him.”

  She eyed my leather armor, lance, shield, and sword. “Hmph. You’re pretty well set up for a talk.”

  “It pays to be prepared. What’s he called?”

  “Hunnondáligi,” she said. “And you be respectful.”

  “I will, believe me.”

  “You go up to the Bowl Peak there,” she said. “You’ll find him.”

  The old man began arguing with her. I left them to wrangle it
out and mounted my horse, Tango, and rode up toward a blunt-topped mountain that had to be the Bowl Peak.

  It grew dark before I’d gotten more than a couple of miles from the village, so I camped for the night in the thick forest that covered the uncultivated part of the mountains. I decided against a fire, although it was chilly, and I slept with my sword under my hand. Tango was agitated when the wind blew from the mountain; I sniffed too but didn’t pick up anything unusual. My night was quiet, if unrestful. A couple of times I started, hearing animals moving around in the undergrowth nearby, and once an owl went by.

  I rose with the sun and Tango and I headed on up the mountain. I made my way to a sharp ridge and went along that to get to the bowl-shaped crater. Must have been a hell of an explosion that took that one off; it was like a miniature mountain range in itself, maybe three or four hundred years old—still visibly a crater.

  There was nothing to indicate where a dragon might have his lair.

  I spent the day going slowly around the edge of the crater, studying the other sides through binoculars I’d brought with me. I didn’t spot any signs of dragon inhabitation and made a fireless camp that night in a saddle between a couple of the lesser peaks. That night, as I lay unsleeping, a dark shape passed across the stars, blotting them out as it went over and down toward the village. I scrambled up one of the peaks, but I didn’t see anything, though I watched for hours.

  The next day I continued on my surveying circuit and found a dirt road that went into the crater on one side and down toward the village on the other by way of a modest saddle. I hit myself on the head. Fish. The woman had said he got fish from the village. Could they possibly be delivering it? There were wagon ruts in the road. How had I missed it on my way up?