Chester gaped at me.
“What, do you want to get him killed?” Radburn asked with a hesitant laugh. “After that fight he had with Minda and her parents about “Duchess Minda”?”
“No,” Guy said. “He’s got it, I think. What better topic for Chester? It’s a good, patriotic post-Revolutionary topic, something his family won’t take poorly to, or at least not publicly... who could possibly admit otherwise? And most will assume it will have been on his mind because of the fad among the young and useless. It’s logical. As long as you could fake a dissertation on it...?”
“I can help,” I said. “I’m already brushing across the folkloric aspects. Between the two of us we can write it.”
“Then it’s settled,” Guy said. “Unless you have an objection, Chester?”
“How could I possibly say no?” Chester said, looking at the page on the desk.
They left—thank God, they left—in time for me to bow over my chamber pot and empty my stomach into it. Very little; had I forgotten to eat all day? The poppy stung on the way back up. When I was done I sat with my back to the wall and stared up at nothing in particular.
They were good to me to be making such an effort on my behalf, better than I expected. Perhaps better than I deserved. But I was sour-mouthed and headache-ridden and feeling cruelly used by reality and the poppy’s aching aftermath, and in this mood could only view their efforts as useless. I wasn’t normal, I would never be normal, and the chances that I’d be crippled completely by this... this whatever it was... well, I wouldn’t bet against those odds anymore.
I crawled to my desk. Tomorrow I would have to brave my capricious body to deliver my Notification of Intent to Retreat to Eyre. Perhaps if I read about his elves I could distract him from asking me why I was choosing to retreat now with the paper’s due date so far in the future. Perhaps this time, reading, I would remember the words instead of losing them to hallucination and hyper-sensitivity. I tasked myself to concentration and bent over the folio.
The historian of this particular account did me the favor of being so obviously biased I did not have to search for its evidence to weigh against his scholarship. He disliked elves. Viciously. The manuscript was littered with his stinging observations: “This race, often hailed as so patently favored by nature and God... and yet, where they went demons followed. Perhaps it was not nature and God that endowed them with their supernal beauty.” Deviations from the history were frequent: “...magic, they claimed, which was born of the world, and yet for some reason this magic was never conveniently available to those outside the race. The elves perhaps had cause to reserve these powers to themselves, in contravention to all the laws of God and justice.”
The more of this vitriol I read, the more perplexed I became. I flipped to the paintings and studied them. The artist had rendered these same wicked creatures with such beauty, such tender attention to detail. I couldn’t imagine him sharing the historian’s views. It made me wonder if the two had been commissioned simultaneously, or if they had been intended as a single folio at all.
If ever I’d needed a demonstration of how differently history could be interpreted based on the bias of the observer, this folio was it. For the first time in days, I laughed.
“So,” I said to the lilac-eyed woman recumbent by a willow, “Which is it? Were you terrible sorcerers, demon-summoners and kingdom-destroyers, doomed to your dark fall after your betrayal of humanity? Or are you idyllic, heaven-sculpted nature-tenders, innocent prey of black forces drawn by your purity of purpose?”
She didn’t answer, and since silence from inanimate objects was no longer a given I was relieved. But posing the question was answer enough. It was a rare, rare event that survived the crush of ages without the taint of horror, catastrophe or treachery. If someone had written a history about the elves, no doubt they’d earned it.
I fell asleep praying for an easier day, and it had become a measure of my life that dealing only with nausea, clumsiness and a surge of the brassy hypersensitivity had become an answer to that prayer. For a long time I sat on my chair, warring with myself over whether to make the trip to Leigh—what if I fell again? In front of Eyre, who was already affronted that I had hid my affliction from him! And my illness had become so capricious... that I might no longer be capable of scheduling my life around it was mortifying, and made me want to lock my door and not emerge again. But between me and the privacy of my retreat was one interview, and surely I could manage that. Accordingly, and with fresh resolve, I dressed and arranged passage to school and spent the ride there huddled in the back, hiding from the too-intimate caress of the warm spring breeze and bruising beneath the weight of my clothing and the air.
On arrival, I found my limbs reluctant to answer me, and so I stood there, swaying and feeling ridiculous. Forcing my legs to move was an act of will equivalent to running a tournament. It raised a riptide of anger so strong I had drowned in it by the time I’d wobbled my way to the stairwell leading to the library’s offices, and it was only on the wave of that anger that I was able to drag myself, step by agonizing step, to the second floor and from there to Eyre’s office. My first knock was so weak it didn’t penetrate his single-minded focus. I restrained the wild urge to bang my head against the door-frame instead.
“Master Professor.”
He looked up, then vaulted from behind his chair. “God, Morgan! What carriage ran you over?”
My smile was decidedly wan. “Why thank you, sir. A pleasant morning to you as well.”
“This is no joke,” Eyre said, advancing on me. “You look half-dead.”
“A little too much fun with my cohorts last night,” I said. Before he could accuse me of lying, I continued. “I’ve come to give my formal notice of intent to retreat.”
“Your what?” Eyre said, halting. I’d succeeded in knocking whatever thought he’d had completely off his tongue. “Already?”
“It’s not a bad time for it,” I said. “The lectures this season are irrelevant to my studies, save yours... and I’ve already heard much of your syllabus from you personally. I want to put the work into it now, while the ideas are fresh.”
“But what if there are more folios from Vigil?” he asked.
My heart skipped. “Will there be?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I’d be shocked if not. And... I was hoping to introduce you to more of the true histories.”
“The true histories,” I repeated. “Which you know.”
“Of which I know rumors, theories,” he said. “I would welcome the opportunity to debate their probable truth with you. A fresh perspective is always valuable.”
“There are several theories?” I asked, distracted. “How many? The folio was rather dichotomous in viewpoint. I admit it puzzled me.”
“You are not the only one it’s puzzled,” he said. “The entire history is so clouded that our entourage at Vigil has been there decades in the hopes of unraveling it.”
“Unraveling... an entire secret history of Troth.” I laughed. “Soon you’ll be telling me there are demons and dragons in the world.”
Eyre shrugged. “There were.”
I lost a breath to that, a breath and all thought: my mind grew blank as new paper. Recovering, I said, “This revelation could easily turn my dissertation into a library of dissertations. I have to confine my focus somehow.”
Eyre studied me. “And there’s no other reason you’ve chosen this particular time to vanish.”
The morning had made me churlish... churlish and too proud to listen to veiled suggestions that I was too weak for what others did as a matter of course. “If I had another reason,” I said, “I would surely not bruit it to others in casual discussion. I would hope my betters would not either.”
Eyre’s eyes narrowed, but I refused to look away. When he turned I read frustration in how much energy bled into the motion. Papers darted from his jerky excavation of his desk until he found a single sheet and handed it to me. “Sign,
then.”
—And be damned, I heard. I leaned past the precarious stacks of books and papers to set it on the nearest flat surface and used his pen to put my name to the letter of intent. I did not look away when I handed it to him, the ink still glistening.
“I expect this to be the best damned dissertation that’s ever crossed my desk,” Eyre said.
“If it’s not,” I said, “you have permission to throw me out on my coat-tails.”
Eyre eyed me and sighed. “See me in a month with a partial draft.”
“Yes,” I said and turned to go.
“Morgan,” he said.
I paused.
“You’re one of the best students I’ve had.”
I cocked a brow at him. “Don’t go writing my epitaph. I’ll only be gone a few months.”
He snorted and I left and wonder of ages I was actually smiling.
On my return home I went to work on my patchwork notes. I’d been assembling pieces of this work for most of a year; the bulk of the scholarship had already been done, leaving me with the task of bridging my observations more gracefully and seeing if I could mine a few more conclusions from the material. The folio’s revelations would make it into the dissertation, but the main body of the work would remain unchanged. It had to be so; otherwise I’d have to begin again from nothing and build an entirely new thesis, and who would publish something so outlandish when even Eyre had admitted few people knew of elves?
Sitting back in my chair, pen forgotten in hand, I wondered if perhaps I had no choice. The existence of an actual other race—how could I drop such a reference into the document as if it were widely known?
Come to that, how had they managed to keep such a secret? Or perhaps it wasn’t a secret. Was not folklore a form of racial memory? What if the only safe harbor from the biases and controversies of historians was legend?
And yet... demons and dragons. Surely not. I remembered the look on Eyre’s face, so grave. There had been no hint of merriment in his voice.
“Surely not,” I murmured aloud, setting my head in my arms. The table felt uncommonly hard. “Surely not.”
A whisper of the skin-sensitivity tickled my sides, my arms, raising gooseflesh in its wake... but died before it could bloom into its poisonous promise. Grateful, I sat up, resettled my glasses on my nose and returned to work.
It was early evening when a knock on the door brought Chester in from the spring rain, leaving the mud off his boots on the outside mat. He hung his coat on the coat-rack; even the sword came off and was hung alongside, revealing a matching knife on the other side of the belt. In the hours since I’d come home I’d devoted the occasional tired thought to having to entertain him, but his demeanor disabused me of any such fear. He came with folio and pen case under his arm and settled across from me at the table. A few minutes later he’d arranged his materials to his satisfaction, taken one of the pages from the Vigil folio, and gone to it with only a nod in greeting.
It still galled me that my friends felt I needed supervision—and that they were probably correct—when I wanted nothing more than to be hale. But if I was to have that supervision, I had trusted Chester to be the most sensitive to my pride. This evidence that I’d been correct was a relief, and I returned to my own notes more conciliated to the necessity. We worked in companionable silence until I had to light a second lamp and rebuild the fire; the air had grown damp and familiar.
The embers looked like eyes. I found myself staring at them, mesmerized. I could doubt the existence of dragons but if they were to have eyes I imagined them burning just so... like luminous coals.
If you can doubt us, the embers asked, how then the shiver that grips your gut?
“Because obviously there are no dragons, or we would have seen them by now,” I said.
The embers developed pupils, long slivers of ash-black. They blinked and focused on me with a malice made grotesquely arresting by the lack of a face to give them context. Perhaps if you had not killed us all, there would be more of us to see.
“Well, then,” I said, “I am perfectly correct in disbelieving, yes? You’re all gone.”
Chunks of fire-scorched wood flexed, became feet that reached from the hearth and gripped the floor with sooty claws. I watched these scythes score the wood next to my foot and realized I was hallucinating again, because I could smell the char and something alien and musky beneath it... feel the breath that gusted from a mouth revealed by the edges of teeth sharp as obsidian shards. And I was lying. I now believed in dragons. Wholeheartedly. I backed from the hearth and hit the low table facing it, spilling myself onto the ground as a sinuous shape unwound from the detritus in the fireplace and arched over me.
Killers! the ashen thing hissed, its snout lunging for me. I threw my hands in front of my face in time to be stung by its forge-hot breath. You may have slain us all but I swear to you we will have our revenge!
“If we did kill you, it was so long ago that you can’t possibly blame me for it,” I said, surprising myself with asperity despite the fear that petrified me.
From very far away I heard Chester’s quizzical voice, but I couldn’t distinguish the words. Nor did it feel very important with this serpent coiled over me, regarding me with its molten metal eyes.
You are young, it said. But not so young as that. We all know how long you live. Only we once had lives to rival yours. The bones of my brothers and sisters adorn your people’s halls, are used as playthings to make your magical travesties. You think we do not know? But so long as a single artifact of our living remains, we will curse you... will find a way to maim you to your own deaths, your oh so difficult deaths. We will find every last one of you... and eradicate you.
“Bones?” I said as the thing bent closer. I couldn’t break my gaze away and beneath its armored weight I felt very fragile, very soft... and very breathless. Was it crushing me? God! “I don’t know of a single person with a dragon bone on their mantle!”
You have no idea, it whispered, how much we hate your kind. You pitied yourselves in your exile. You thought if magic should be barred to you, then someone else must furnish it. So you killed us all so you could drink of the rivers of fire in our blood, and even then it was not enough. The demons cursed you with their claws but you could have kept them sheathed. And you didn’t. For that there is no forgiveness. None.
Speechless, I stared into the creature’s eyes.
“Locke!” A warm hand clasped my shoulder, shook. “Locke?” But the dragon didn’t let go either. I knew that Chester was hovering over me, but I couldn’t feel him, and I knew that should terrify me far more than this ephemera created by my own mind. But it didn’t. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think.
And then the dragon looked over my shoulder and narrowed those burning eyes. And you brought a human? As if his paltry magic will enable you to save yourself. I will kill him first.
“No!” I cried, discovering a new level of panic. “Don’t!”
It set a clawed hand on my arm and leaned on it, adding more and more of its weight. I would bruise. No, more than that. The joint began to protest. You dare? it hissed. You think yourself my equal with your power knotted up in your body so?
“Leave him alone!” I said.
How will you stop me?
“Morgan! God, wake up!”
“I am awake!” I said. “Get away, damn it all! Before he eats you!”
You cannot stop me, the dragon said.
“Watch me,” I said and grabbed for its neck with my free hand. That fanged gape twitched toward me, intercepting my hold. I discovered that dozens of wounds cut by obsidian teeth didn’t hurt until those teeth ground into bone and that the insides of the mouths of dragons are more inimical than alchemical spills. Then I screamed.
“Morgan!”
“Get out!” I yelled. “God Almighty, GET OUT!”
Somewhere far away I heard the door bounce against its hinges. That was before the dragon bent close to me, lappi
ng sensually at my broken hand with its acid-laved tongue.
Now, it said, I will begin the long, slow process of killing one of your kind.
My head dropped back against the floor and I closed my eyes. The agony had become my world, so blinding I couldn’t even object.
And then, suddenly, I felt a rain of ashes on my body, soft and papery, tickling. And in its wake, the caresses of tiny fingers.
“Is he sick?” A high, sweet soprano.
“Of course he’s sick.” An alto this time, exasperated. Both female. “Look at him. He stinks of it.”
“I can’t smell anything past the... the... oooh.”
A pause, then a gruff, “I know. Me too.”
“How are we going to get him back? Can he hear us?”
“I think he’s swooning.”
I was not swooning, I thought. I was hallucinating. And these naive angels whom pain had deprived me the ability to apprehend could kindly stop petting me. It made an absurd contrast to the throbbing misery of my mangled hand and crushed elbow.
“Well at least we’ve found him.”
“Yes,” the growly one said. “Except look at him! What will she say when we bring back this?”
“She’ll understand.”
“She’ll beat us, is what she’ll understand. Are you sure he’s it?”
“Yes! He smells right. It’s the right blood.” A delicate tongue-tip now, flitting at my bleeding knuckles. I shuddered. “Yes, it’s right.”
“Then we’ll have to tell him when—”
Tell me what? And when? I wondered, but they were gone as if they’d never been there, which of course they hadn’t. Except I had believed in them just as firmly as I’d believed in the dragon. I blinked, trying to clear my eyes... and found Chester crouched in front of me with James Stirley in worried attendance.
“Can you see us?” Chester asked.
An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 6