Again, Ellis had to think of how to say it, and settled for, “A person can dream, yeah?”
Not just Milo having supper with strangers this time, or Milo playing the violin Ellis hadn’t known he could play. No, this last Dream had been soundless, as they sometimes were, and fuzzed out in places that probably mattered. But Ellis had seen clearly when Milo had set his hand to a chain as thick as a giant’s thighbone, shoved a pulse of power through it. And though Ellis saw very little of anything else, the broken chain and the dragon leaping into the sky, Milo grinning as he watched, had been sharp and well-defined.
He’s freeing dragons, he wanted to tell Dilys. He’s doing the one thing I think he would’ve left me for, the one thing he’d willingly die to accomplish.
He couldn’t say any of it. Not over the radio.
Dilys was silent for quite a while this time before she ventured, “We’re going to have a very long talk next time I see you.”
Ellis shut his eyes, smile soft and wide. “Wildfire…” He paused, shook his head, and kept his eyes shut tight because the knot in his throat was making them burn. “I honestly can’t wait.”
“AH.” LILIBET stopped pushing the bath chair up the walk, looked Ellis up and down from over the top of her tad’s head, then wrinkled her nose in disapproval. “That’s not the tie I saw you wearing.”
Ellis barely kept himself from adjusting his tie, though he did manage to withhold his growl as he signaled for Bella and Bumble to calm the deuce down and sit.
“Mam, if you don’t stop doing that, I’m going to forbid you from Dreaming for me. Ever.”
Not an idle threat. He’d nearly demanded it when he’d shown up at Rhediad Afon after he got back from Whitpool, and she’d taken one look at him and said, “Ah. So that’s today, then.” And he’d known—seen it all over her—that she’d Dreamed what Milo was going to do. It hadn’t occurred to Ellis, though, not until she volunteered the information—guilty, maybe, but still unapologetic—that it had been her who’d told Milo that if he went, he needed to make sure Ellis stayed. Ellis had only just started speaking to her again a few days ago when he’d decided how he wanted to go about fixing Wellech, and that only because she was part of the plan.
Bamps smiled up at Ellis from his bath chair. “Fy machgen!” He held out his arms.
Ellis returned the endearment with one of his own—“Haia, hen ddwylo”—and bent to give his bamps a kiss on his wrinkled cheek and a quick embrace. Quick because Ellis was nudged out of the way by Bella a second later, paws gentle on Bamps’s lap. “It’s good to see you out,” Ellis said as he straightened.
He was thinner than the last time he’d been out of his rooms, but Bamps remembered who Ellis was this time, so that was an improvement.
“It’s good to be out on a fine day like this.” Bamps stroked Bella’s silky head and gestured at Bumble, parked against Ellis’s leg. “That one was stuck to me like a burr until ten seconds ago.”
“Well, he’s always been a been of a barmcake.” Ellis scratched Bumble’s ears. “Will you stay up for tea? I’ve some business that needs doing, but after, I can come up to your rooms.”
Bamps hooked a thumb at Lilibet over his shoulder. “The General says it’s the solarium for me.”
Lilibet rolled her eyes but she was smiling. “The General is a title I’m thinking is about to be handed down.” She shot her glance behind Ellis, eyebrow lifting. “And there are your troops.”
Ellis looked toward the ornate little gate that separated Rhediad Afon’s private grounds from the formal gardens that flanked the main road to the Reescartref Bridge. Petra was letting herself through, speaking low and serious to Andras, who was anxiously twisting his hat in his hands as she stopped him and waited for a signal from Ellis to approach.
“Are you sure about that one?” Lilibet was eyeing Andras openly, making him squirm.
Ellis didn’t chide her. “Not entirely, considering the last time I spoke to him for more than giving him orders now and then was a few years ago when I gave him a formal reprimand.”
Both Andras and Bethan—not only for accosting Milo the way they’d done, but for potentially embarrassing Wellech. If Milo had followed through on his threat to make a report to Kymbrygh’s MP, which by rights he probably should have done, it would’ve been a bloody circus. But Ellis had been watching both Bethan and Andras closely since then, and if he could make Andras into someone useful to what Ellis wanted to happen next…
He looked at his mam. “If I can convince someone like him to take up my cause, I’ve a chance with the rest of them. We need everyone.”
Lilibet merely gave Ellis a fond look and started pushing Bamps’s chair toward the house again. “I’ll tell Grwn to set up the private dining room for lunch for six, shall I?”
Because Dyfan from the miners’ union and Wynny from the farmsteaders should be arriving any moment now, and Ellis had forgot to mention them when he’d told Lilibet of his plan.
Ellis rolled his eyes. “We both know you already have done.”
Bamps twisted in his chair to smirk at Ellis over his shoulder. “If I had a copper for every time I’ve said as much to her over the years…” He turned back around, cackling.
Ellis watched them, smiling, until they rounded the curve toward the service door. He turned back toward Petra and Andras, and gestured them over.
“Come inside. We’ll have some sherry while we wait for the others.”
ELLIS HAD chosen to have this meeting here at Rhediad Afon partially because Lilibet was part of his plan and it was just easier to come to her. But mostly because he’d never hired household staff for the Croft, and he couldn’t be bothered with organizing an impressive lunch. The staff at Rhediad Afon was little changed from even before Ellis had come along, and they ran the place with both love and military precision. Lilibet often accused Ellis of visiting as often as he did because of Martyn’s skill in the kitchens. She wasn’t entirely wrong.
The cawl was enough to stop Andras gawping and start him using his mouth for more savory purposes. The leek and bacon tart sent Wynny into paroxysms of ecstatic delight. Dyfan, always reserved and generally cynical by nature, knew exactly what Ellis was up to but still quietly allowed that the sewin and steamed samphire with watercress sauce was better than his nain’s. Petra merely inhaled everything in front of her while cutting amused glances at Ellis.
The red ale and scrumpy served alongside the courses probably wasn’t hurting. The cream liqueur served after would hopefully do the rest of the job of loosening postures and reserves and, more importantly, tongues.
Lilibet, because Ellis was her son and she loved him, had helped to put everyone at ease and keep the small talk going while Ellis went over in his head what he wanted to accomplish with all this. So when Grwn emerged from the dining room’s service door with the honey cakes and tea, Lilibet waited for everyone to be served and for Grwn to make his way back out before she sat back and gave the gathering one of her most brilliant, charming smiles.
“It’s so good of you all to make the time to join us. We know you’ve all got important matters to attend, and not enough daylight to attend them.” She tipped no more than a dewdrop of milk into her tea and stirred with a delicate tink tink tink of silver on porcelain. “But we know that all of you, especially, would understand the even more urgent matters your new Pennaeth has brought you here to discuss.”
Feed them—check
Charm them to within an inch of their lives—check
Acknowledge their importance—check
Point out your own—check
Imply they’re already informed enough to know why they’re here—check
Suggest you need help they’re uniquely qualified to give—check
It was all Ellis could do not to grin at his mam. Instead he sat back, stuck the tip of his spoon in the cream atop his honey cake, and proceeded to dig a small channel. Thought about Alton and his bogeys. About how alarmingly effortless it had been to make one out
of Folant.
About Milo saying fear was easier to catch than pox. How he’d left his life, his dragons, Ellis, to walk into things at which Ellis was only getting worrisome glimpses because it was what was right and necessary. How he’d understood Ellis down to bone and left behind just enough of a map to show him where he could go, where he should go, stopping short of making all but one of Ellis’s choices for him.
How Ellis missed him with a soul-deep ache that didn’t get easier as time went on. In fact it got worse every time he caught a hazy glance of things he was pretty sure he wasn’t meant to be seeing.
It solidified things, though. Ellis didn’t use his Dreams the way Lilibet did. He couldn’t. It wasn’t the same for him. But he could learn from the lessons of them. Take vague, ephemeral ideas and outline them in the reds of Dreams that meant this is important. Shut his eyes, watch the possible steps a person could take, follow each trail, then decide which was the one that might be most useful.
He’d thought very carefully about what each person here had to offer. What their connections were and how influential they might be when it came to it. What might be eked out of them if given the proper motivation. How all of them together might cultivate the nascent little seeds Ellis had been carefully sowing since even before that fateful council meeting, and coax them to grow and propagate as wild as… well, as hawkweed.
“Right. So.” He looked up, peered around the table, and dropped his spoon. “Let’s talk about propaganda.”
THE THING about loving Milo was that it was so easy. Ellis had been doing it in one form or another his whole life. There’d been gaps, of course, when Milo hadn’t really been in Ellis’s life and it had all settled into an unconscious background hum. But Ellis didn’t think it had ever really gone away. If it had, running into Milo on that bridge a few years ago wouldn’t have felt like slipping on a favorite old coat made new and better with polished buttons and stronger, more sophisticated stitching.
They’d met as infants, or so Ellis had been told, played together as toddlers, but he didn’t have any memories of that. The first real memory he had of Milo was of a rainy summer day when they’d been… five, maybe, or—no, four, because Ceri had been there, and she’d stopped staying at Rhediad Afon with Milo when he’d turned five and started his lessons with Lilibet in earnest. So yes, Ellis and Milo had been four that sticky-hot wet day when Milo had informed Ellis that time was the color blue and that Ellis’s normal silver turned to gold when he laughed. Ellis had only just managed to look at his hands to assure himself he was still brown and not gold, Milo, do you not know your colors yet? before Ceri swept Milo up and away—clearly angry; clearly at Milo—and Lilibet sat Ellis down for a Very Serious Talk.
It had probably been unnecessary, looking back. Ellis wouldn’t have said anything, because he hadn’t known there was anything to say before the adults had made such a colossal fuss over it. He likely would’ve forgot it. But because there had been a fuss made, and because Lilibet had been so grave about it all—You mustn’t speak of it, he could get in trouble, he could be in danger—it all burned into Ellis’s brain alongside things like “Don’t suck on peach stones” and “Never touch a hot cooktop.”
Don’t ever tell anyone that Milo could See because… something.
No one ever told Ellis why, exactly, not for a long time. It hadn’t seemed important back then to define the formless but vaguely understood risk, only to appreciate that it existed.
So when a few years later the risk did become defined for Ellis, he had to wonder why Milo had blurted his secret like that. Milo merely shrugged, said, “Because you’re all silvers and golds, and you’re my friend,” and showed Ellis the dragonstone.
Things with Milo were simple like that. When he was happy, he smiled. When he was hurt, he cried. When he didn’t know how he felt, he got quiet and cross until he figured it out, and when he did, it all but poured from him.
And when he loved someone or something, he did it with everything in him.
Maybe it was only that he’d been young and hadn’t yet been taught that love could be a weapon, something to withhold when you didn’t quite live up to what the one you loved wanted you to be. For Ellis, love was a mam who literally made him into a Dream come true and a tad who hated her for it. And because he hated her, he’d never quite love Ellis. It took years for Ellis to stop letting that ache and fester, and to just move on, for pity’s sake.
But for Milo, love was a mam who defied contracts and the Sisters and her own government for him; a nain who coddled and adored him and showed him his place with his beloved dragons; an “Auntie Lilibet” who taught him and loved him like a second son. And though Milo would later grow up and see it all as halfway choking and restraining, Ellis knew it made Milo into someone who trusted others when he shouldn’t, thought better of them than they deserved.
It made Ellis love Milo fiercely, probably a bit too protectively, because Milo could absolutely protect himself should he need to. It was only that, as had been too clearly pointed out just recently, Milo didn’t always know when he needed to.
It took a bit of trial and error over the next several months for Ellis to figure out that the Dreams of Milo only came when Ellis had the dragonstone somewhere in his possession while he slept. He still couldn’t call the Dreams, and he still couldn’t command them to show him what he wanted to see. But he could watch scenes around Milo play out as he slept, and while there was nothing he could do to have an effect on whatever Milo was up to, Ellis could at least know Milo was alive out there somewhere.
On the night he inducted a too-young Dewin from Ostlich-Sztym into the Wardens and assigned her fellowship to Andras, Ellis watched Milo skulk the burnt-out hull of what might once have been a local government office; rifle through singed and scattered papers; unearth a too-recognizable map all but bleeding red with possibilities. After spending a particularly exhausting day cruising the northern leg of the Aled, trying to narrow down where the radio transmissions directed out to sea were coming from, Ellis watched Milo stand beneath the stars in a muddy field in the middle of nowhere; play something sweet and sad on his violin; smile at the black silhouettes of four dragons drifting in easy circles above him.
It made Ellis treasure the dragonstone even more, and not only for what it had meant when Milo had dropped it into Ellis’s hand. He’d remembered only vaguely what Milo had told him about it, how his nain said Milo’s heart was inside it, and bound to the dragons’. But Ellis had looked it up since then, pored through the little information he could find on it.
Clan, of course, but he’d known that already. Protection too, but only minimal, and that was implied in clan anyway.
He was grateful for it in an entirely new way, though, when he found himself standing on the edge of a ridge just south of Caeryngryf, looking down into a meadow where what he was pretty sure was a massive horned redcrest crouched, watching him back.
“And you…” Ellis gave himself a moment to swallow his surprise and clear his throat. “You say it’s been here since…?”
“Three days ago,” Olwyn said. Her weathered face was barely visible beneath the brim of her wide floppy hat, but since she was pale as milk and bald as an egg, Ellis figured it was for the best. The summer had turned out to be one of the more intense Kymbrygh had seen, and autumn wasn’t offering much relief so far; today it seemed the sun was actually trying to blind them first then roast them. “Ate up nine of my flock and at least three of Arawn’s, but he hasn’t managed to get a proper count yet.”
The sheep had since wisely fled the scene, and from what Olwyn had told Ellis, Arawn was still out trying to catch them all. Or what was left of them.
It was luck Ellis even happened to be in the area. He’d had reports from some of the Wardens that folk were gathering on the bluffs overlooking Caeryngryf. Setting out camp chairs and picnic rugs and settling in with their field glasses to watch the Verdish ships try to take on the Preidynīg Navy’s blockade several
leagues off the coast. Ellis had been moved to break it up and warn the looky-loos off. Those battles were getting closer and closer, after all, more worrying, and one stray shot…
“Why hasn’t the dragon followed the flock, I wonder?” Ellis shook his head. There was nothing here for it to eat now, after all. “And what’s it doing here in the first place?”
Wellech got the very occasional flyover, certainly, with Caeryngryf getting the greater part of the few, it being the largest port town. Sat on the northeast tip of Kymbrygh, a sort of corridor on the very edge of the western migration path, it had good whaling in the warmer months if a dragon was so inclined. So spotting one in the sky or skimming the sea now and then wasn’t unprecedented. But Ellis had never heard of a dragon actually landing anywhere east of Whitpool. Dragons knew very well where their safe havens were, and Wellech had never been one of them. And redcrests—if that was what this one was; he’d have to look it up later—redcrests weren’t supposed to be in these parts at all. They flew the central migration paths, and as far as Ellis knew, didn’t venture this far west of the continent. Ever.
“That’s what I want t’ know.” Olwyn squinted up at Ellis. “Think yer cariad’d fancy a trip out?” She waved down to the meadow and the bulk of the wary dragon hunkered among the ragwort and thistle. “Don’t know how we’re t’ shoo it, else. It won’t move.”
Ellis ignored the pang at “yer cariad” and focused on the amusing mental picture of Olwyn trying to “shoo” a dragon. And she would do. Might have done already, though the fact she was standing here probably said otherwise. Dragons were unpredictable at best; it was unwise to approach one in any circumstance, and this one looked… angry.
…No.
“Sick,” Ellis muttered. “It’s… I think it’s sick.”
There was a bare patch where scales should be riding the shoulder of its right foreleg, and another that circled its neck. A wide swath of what looked like moss clung to the spiky ridges on its knotty spine and all the way down its tail. Its massive wings looked intact but they were splayed out and drooping around its body like mastless sails instead of tucked tight to its back. As though they’d simply collapsed and the dragon didn’t have the strength to collect them. Its sides were heaving, as if breathing was a chore. Most telling of all, the dragon was just sitting there, watching them—cagey, of course, and clearly ready to defend if it had to, but dragons tended to retreat in the face of anyone but dragonkin. They were skivers, rather than provokers. Like prizefighters walking away from a scuffle because they knew they had nothing to prove and could hurt someone if they participated.
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