Steal the Dragon

by Patricia Briggs

  Tris got to his feet. "You're not going to be capable of anything unless your leg is ready to hold you, so let me take a look under the bandage."

  He drew a knife from a boot sheath, and pushed the blankets to one side. With a brisk efficiency that said much for the sharpness of his knife, Tris cut away the bandage on her leg.

  From the looks of the wound, a spike had hit just above her knee and ripped through muscle almost to her hip. The flesh around the wound was mottled with bruises. There was a poultice over the torn area, a green mass that made the slice look even nastier than it felt, but what caught Rialla's attention was the smell.

  She grabbed her nose quickly. "What is that stuff?"

  Tris looked up momentarily from his perusal of the injury, unperturbed by the foul odor. "I'm not sure exactly what kind of poison the spirit-eater uses. This dressing should have drawn out most of it. Most of the odor is the poison, though the leaves have a strong scent of their own. I'm going to put the same dressing back on until it quits smelling, then I can start your healing."

  He separated an oil-treated cloth from the rest of his pile and lay it out on the bed, then taking a small pair of pincers from the bag on the floor, he began pulling the large green leaves off her leg. Once he had most of the big pieces off, he carefully picked out the bits and pieces of greenery that remained. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and Rialla bit her lip as the gentle probing induced the pain she had expected earlier.

  Tris gathered up the mess and left the room, returning shortly with two pans of steaming water which he set on the floor. He dipped a clean cloth in the water, then wrung it out and set it on her leg; he repeated his action several times as the cloth cooled down. When he was finished, the wound was clean and Rialla was trembling.

  He took a carefully wrapped bundle out of the bag and unwrapped it, revealing dried leaves as long as Rialla's forearm and twice as broad. He took five or six and lay them in the clean pan of water to soak.

  "Here now," he said, and his normally slight accent was thicker with sympathy. "I'm going to put a bit of this powder on the cut. It should help the pain in a bit." As he spoke, he sprinkled a yellow powder lightly on the wound, holding the torn skin open with one hand. "It's an anesthetic made from a plant I caught some local youngsters chewing on."

  He started to put the softened leaves on her leg and chose to distract her with his story. "One of them had a bit too much, and I had a time keeping him from cutting off his hand. He thought that a maggot had gotten into it and was eating its way to his heart.

  "I gave the whole village a lecture on the weed. In case that doesn't work, whenever I run into a patch of the stuff I make sure that the taste keeps anything with a tongue in its mouth from eating it. I've found and treated enough of the plants that most of the village young ones steer clear of it; but as a topical anesthetic it has few equals."

  "You're a magician?" Rialla questioned, hesitantly. Darran was not a place where anyone admitted to being a wizard, but Tris's words had invited the question.

  "Magic-user," he said as if he were correcting her, but as far as Rialla knew the two were the same thing. "Does that bother you? You are not Darranian."

  She shook her head. "No."

  He pulled the remnants of the old bandages out from under her leg, where they were keeping the sheets clean, and began strapping her leg with new wraps. "There, almost finished."

  A bell rang stridently in the other room, and he called out, "Coming. No need to ruin my ears." He finished what he was doing, gathered up the mess and headed toward the other room. "You might try to rest up. I'll be back in to check on you when I am through."

  Rialla shut her eyes and endured the throbbing of her leg for a few minutes before the pain started to lessen. As soon as the powder numbed the wound, she fell asleep again.

  When she woke up, the small table had been pulled up beside her bed. The surface of the table was inlaid with light and dark wooden squares, forming a game board. The squares were occupied by small wooden game pieces carved in the shapes of animals, real and imaginary.

  The pieces lined up on her side of the board had been darkened by oil until they were nearly black. On the other side of the table, seated on a stool he must have pulled from another room, Tris was carefully lining up similar game pieces that were fashioned from a blond wood.

  Without looking at her, Tris said, ' "This is a game that my father taught me, and now I am going to teach you. You would call it 'Steal the Dragon,' and," he held up a winged lizard carved with loving detail, "the object of the game is to steal the other person's dragon."

  He explained to her in careful detail how to develop strategies, and the importance of stealth and deceit, following his lecture by saying, "Of course, you realize all I have just imparted to you won't help you at all. The only way to learn to play is by playing."

  Rialla had noticed earlier that she was unable to stay wary around the healer; he simply wouldn't allow it. He ignored her silences and treated her as if they'd known each other for years.

  After the first twenty moves of the game, Tris gave her bland face a piercing look under his heavy eyebrows and said in a menacing rumble, "Woman, who taught you how to play?"

  In stunned disbelief, Rialla heard herself giggle. She had never heard such a ridiculous sound come out of her mouth, and she pulled the quilt up to her face to keep the silly sound from coming out again.

  When she was sure that she had it under control, though laughter still pulled at the corners of her mouth, she said, "There is a woman in Sianim who has taught that game to everyone she can con into it. She hosts a tournament at least once a week. She says that it keeps the rabble off the streets and trains them to be devious, an important skill for a mercenary."

  Tris growled at her and made his move. As the play progressed, the healer's face grew darker, and it took him longer to move his pieces. Rialla decided that he was playacting more than anything else, because his shoulders were loose and his movements easy.

  She took one of his pieces. He glowered at her beneath his heavy brows, leaving her fighting the urge to laugh.

  Darkness fell, and with an impatient wave of his hand the oil lamps on the walls lit themselves, and Tris returned his attention to the game, ignoring Rialla's start at the casual way he used magic. All the magicians she'd ever seen tended to use it sparingly.

  Watching the healer, Rialla wondered why the thought of his anger didn't make her afraid the way other men did. If any other man, even Laeth, had growled at her the way Tris had, she would have been bristling with defensiveness, despite knowing he was only teasing. Why was it that when this total stranger glared at her, she laughed?

  Experimentally she lifted her shields and stretched out the fingers of her talent. She'd already discovered she couldn't read him outright, but maybe she could learn something if she were focused on him. She reached out and touched—then drew back startled.

  She had felt him before. He was the fascinating presence that she'd sensed when she woke up in the healer's cottage. The being so different that she hadn't even realized he was human.

  "Your move," he said.

  She closed her talent off again, reluctantly. Almost absently she moved a piece and went back to her thoughts. With Winterseine and the few other magicians that she'd tried to read, she'd been able to discern no more than their presence unless she was touching them. She'd concluded that the discipline required to control magic gave magicians involuntary shields against her talent. She wondered why Tris was different.

  "Your move." There was a hint of satisfaction in his tone that caused her to turn her attention back to the game.

  The last move she'd made had undone the strategy she had been working on for the past several hours. Any move that she made would leave her dragon for Tris to steal, and if she didn't move (also an option), he could steal her dragon anyway.

  "Give up?" he asked, a little more eagerly than he should have, and she closed her mouth and returned her attention
to the board.

  "Not yet," she answered. There was something that she was missing; she stared intently at the board. There was nothing she could do to protect her dragon, but maybe there was something that she could do to get his. With a triumphant smile she took her rat and moved it to the same space that was occupied by his dragon. "Theft!" she claimed triumphantly.

  "Thief," he acknowledged with a betrayed look at the board. He gathered the pieces and put them in the drawer of the little table with the same manner that a mother would use to put her children to bed. By the time he was finished, he had a broad smile on his face. "That's the first good game I've had since I came here. Rematch tomorrow. Now, you get some sleep."

  She slid down the bed and pulled up the covers, and Tris waved at the lamps. Compliantly, the small flames extinguished themselves.

  "If you need anything, just ask," said the healer. "I'll be on the other side of the door. Good dreams."

  "And to you," Rialla replied with a yawn.

  The next morning the dressing on Rialla's leg still smelled like rotten onions, so Tris replaced the old leaves with fresh ones and covered her thigh with a new bandage. When he was finished, he brought in two bowls of thick porridge and chatted lightly while they ate breakfast; then he left to go collect some herbs he needed.

  Rialla waited until he was gone before experimenting with her newly recovered empathy. If she were going to use it to rescue Laeth, she needed to know how well it was working.

  Releasing her shielding made her feel exposed. She shifted uncomfortably and pulled the bedcovers up under her chin, as if physical covering would make up for her lack of mental protection; but she didn't reestablish her barriers.

  By the time she felt the healer near the cottage, she was sweating and exhausted—but she knew that she was almost as strong as she had been before Winterseine captured her. If she couldn't work as effortlessly, at least her shields were stronger.

  When Tris came into the room to check on her, he frowned and felt her forehead. "How do you feel?"

  Rialla shrugged carefully; the work that she'd been doing gave her a nasty headache. "Not too rough."

  Tris grunted in acknowledgment and then said, "Lunch first, then a nap."

  Rialla fell asleep before he got back with lunch.

  Rialla opened her eyes sometime later to find the oil lamps on and Tris muttering at the game board, apparently playing a game of Dragon against himself.

  She watched for a while and then said, "Black wins. If you move the black sparrow to the left three spaces, then the black stag can take the white dragon in two moves."

  Tris tilted his head at the board, then got up from his stool. He moved around the table to stand by the bed and look from Rialla's point of view. He rubbed his beard and slanted an assessing glance at Rialla over his shoulder.

  He began to reorganize the board for a fresh game. "Are you ready for a rematch?" he asked.

  Rialla gifted him with a lazy smile and sat up. "Ready to lose again?"

  He raised an eyebrow, and with laughing eyes he bared his teeth at her and made his first move. "Enjoy yourself now, sweetheart. You won't feel like it later."

  The room was silent and all but humming with intensity—Tris was as competitive as Rialla. After twelve moves Tris had it won. He sat back and relaxed while Rialla stared furiously at the board, looking for a way out.

  "Tell me about Laeth," asked Tris while he waited for Rialla to move.

  Rialla looked at him warily. But after another glance at the board, she decided that he wasn't trying to distract her. With a shrug, she moved one of her mushrooms and killed his rat, knocking the piece lightly off the board as she set the mushroom in its place. "What do you want to know?"

  Tris moved a frog and said, "It takes an unusual Darranian to make a successful mercenary."

  Rialla frowned at the game, still unwilling to concede. She poisoned his frog with her other mushroom before she spoke. "Laeth is… I suppose 'unusual' works as well as anything else. He's a genuinely nice person who takes great pleasure in shocking people, especially people he doesn't like.

  "He's a decent fighter in practice, and I understand that he's better when the fighting is real—I stay out of the real battles. I'm a horse trainer, not a soldier… or a spy either, for that matter." Rialla paused to think, and then smiled. "He's also a diabolically clever practical joker." She shrugged, uncertain how to proceed.

  Tris had waited for her to finish talking before he moved an owl to eat the mushroom that had killed his frog. Without looking up as he took her piece off the board, he said, "I take it that you are friends as well as associates."

  Rialla gave him a keen glance and asked, "Why are you so interested in Laeth?"

  Again a heavy, mobile eyebrow crept up toward Tris's hairline. "I only met him twice. Both times were under less than ideal circumstances. If I'm going to help you get him out of Westhold, as it looks like we'll have to, I'd like to make sure that I'm risking my skin for someone other than the arrogant aristocrat that I met when Karsten was poisoned. So, how well do you know him? Is he a lover, a friend, an acquaintance…"

  "He's a friend, a good one," Rialla answered. She looked back at the board, and missed the subtle relaxation of the healer's shoulders that would have told her that her answer was far more important to him than he'd indicated. "He wouldn't make a good lover—he's too much in love with Marri."

  "Karsten's wife?"

  Rialla shifted her wolf an extra square since Tris wasn't paying attention to what she was doing. She nodded her head in response to his question and then explained, "Not that he'd do anything about it. He was in love with her before she was betrothed to Karsten. When he found out that she was to marry his brother, Laeth left Darran and turned up in Sianim. Marri came to Laeth's room to warn him that someone was trying to blame him for the attempted poisoning."

  Tris nodded, took Rialla's wolf off the board and replaced it with his fox. Rialla objected hotly to the implicit accusation that she would try and take advantage of his inattention and move extra spaces, a practice that was legal only if your opponent didn't notice what you'd done.

  Tris crossed his arms and held his position. Pouting, Rialla killed his fox with her remaining mushroom. The rest of the game was mercifully short; Rialla didn't enjoy losing.

  Rialla awoke sometime in the middle of the night to the sound of violent pounding on the cottage door. She sat up and waited, unable to leave the bed.

  She heard a woman's voice. The words didn't penetrate the door, but the tone was frantic. It was answered by a lower rumble that she assumed was Tris's. A moment later the healer entered the room, followed closely by the small, cloaked figure of the Lady of the Hold.

  This time Tris lit the room more conventionally, by lighting a candle with flint and steel and using it to kindle the lamps.

  Marri took off her cloak and looked around for somewhere to set it. Finally she simply dropped it to the floor. She looked as though she hadn't slept for several days. Her complexion was gray, and dark circles surrounded her eyes.

  "Rialla," Marri said, her voice hoarsely urgent. "Laeth told me that I should come to you if I needed assistance. I don't know who you really are, or what you are doing with Laeth, but I need…" She stammered a little. "He needs help, and I don't have anyone else to go to. Lord Jarroh wants revenge, and he's convinced that Laeth killed my husband."

  Rialla nodded and patted the side of her bed. "Sit down," she said briskly. Marri perched on the edge, as far from Rialla as she could.

  Tris pulled up his stool and tried to appear innocuous.

  "It doesn't sound like Laeth had much of a chance to tell you anything." commented Rialla. "Laeth is a good friend of mine"—she looked pointedly at the distance that Marri had left between them—"nothing more. We were sent from Sianim to prevent the murder of his brother. You can judge our success for yourself." Rialla shrugged and ran a weary hand through her hair. "I hope I'm more successful at preventing Laeth's hang
ing."

  "They're not going to hang him; they're going to draw and quarter him," said Marri in a small, shaky voice, "tomorrow morning."

  "What?" exclaimed Rialla, throwing her blankets back and jumping to her feet. Tris's hand was there to catch her when her leg failed. "Whatever happened to a 'fair and deliberate trial'?"

  "Lord Jarroh has declared that there isn't any doubt of his guilt. Lord Winterseine will swear he saw Laeth stab my husband," she replied, shrugging hopelessly. "So I came to you."

  "Scorch it," said Rialla in frustration, "how in the name of Temris am I going to be able to help him with this plaguing leg?"

  Tris abandoned his mild demeanor and pushed Rialla back down on the bed, saying, "Stay there. Now, miss." he turned to look at Marri, "can I trust you to keep your tongue to yourself?"

  Marri nodded mutely.

  "Well enough, I suppose," Tris said, turning to Rialla.

  He reached down, pulled his knife and sliced the fresh bandage off her leg. The leaves smelled as bad as the last set he'd removed. The healer's face was grim as he peeled the dressing away.

  "I can heal your leg enough that you can walk on it, but you're chancing your life. If that poison isn't out of your system, it could still kill you," he said.

  "If it's my time to die, this is a good night for it. Better that than sit idle while Laeth is killed," replied Rialla briskly.

  "Your choice, lady," acknowledged the healer in formal tones, as if this were a ritual of some kind.

  He placed his hands over her leg and closed his eyes. Rialla's leg tingled and went numb, so she could no longer feel the touch of his skin against hers. Her heart rate picked up until her pulse raced as if she were running in terror and she gasped for breath.

  His hands glowed orange in the shadows of the night, as if lit by some inner fire. She could hear Marri's gasp but was too distracted to take notice. If he could heal her like this, Tris was definitely not a common magician; everyone knew healing was difficult for wizards.