The Dragoneer Trilogy

by Vickie Knestaut

  "Centuries?" Caron asked.

  "That's what he said. Or at least I'm pretty sure that's what he said."

  "You're not certain?" Mardoc asked.

  "I am. But I was so surprised by his appearance. He was sitting in my chair in the den. And then..." She shook her head. "I don't know. It was such an odd, disorienting experience."

  She looked up to her mother. "Does any of that make sense to you? Is there anything Grandmother said that would explain it? How could I have known him centuries ago?"

  Caron looked down to her knife and appeared to be momentarily surprised to find that she had already chopped all of the onion. She reached for another one, then stopped and instead reached for the plate of fish. She shook her head.

  "I'm sorry, Little Heart," she said as she looked up to her daughter. "I don't have anything more to tell you. Your grandmother left when I wasn't old enough to know better, to appreciate her and what she was."

  Trysten sat back on her stool and nodded. "I understand. I just needed to ask. Anything would help. I have to find out what the Originals are up to. Because we are thinking about this army as if it is nothing more than an army intent on destroying the village. But it's not. They aren't here to do that. They didn't come to conquer."

  "They came to bargain," Mardoc said. His hand squeezed into a fist on the tabletop.

  Trysten nodded. "That's what I think. If they destroy the village, there is no way that I am going to give the Originals what they want. I am convinced that they are responsible for this. They have to be."

  "Why are you so sure of that?" Caron asked.

  Trysten's head shifted back on her neck in surprise. "How could they not be? The one in my den told me that he'd turn back the army if I went away with him. They are using the army to pressure me."

  Caron lifted a questioning eyebrow. "Or they are taking advantage of the opportunity presented by an army they didn't send. As I understand the thinking of your father and Galelin, The Second Horde was sent to find the one who could destroy their dragoneer. Anyone able to do so would possess a special connection to the dragons that would indicate something the Originals were searching for."

  Trysten nodded. "And when they didn't return, that was supposed to be the message that they had found me."

  "Except that apparently..." Caron looked to the table as if she might find the appropriate words among the diced vegetables and dishes of spice, "they rose from the grave."

  Trysten reached up and rubbed her hands over her arms. Her back curled a bit with a sudden chill.

  "We thought they were the messengers," Mardoc said, "but it turns out they were the gateways. They passed from their world into ours with the pendants. Talismans."

  Caron looked at her daughter. "Which begs the question of what would happen to you if you fall tomorrow."

  "Nothing will happen to me," Trysten said. "I told you."

  "Think, dear. I raised you to be a smart woman. I'm no military mind like that imperious prince, still it would seem to me that to move an army that size up the western side of the Cadwaller mountains, through the pass, down into The Wilds where they apparently then built some marvelous and deadly contraptions, would take a lot longer than the time that has passed between your encounter with The Second Horde and the day you and Kaylar discovered them. In fact—"

  Mardoc gasped and thumped a palm against the table top. "For all the blessed sky! Why didn't I think of that?"

  A shiver ran over Trysten, and she clutched her biceps in her cold fingers, the chill permeating the sleeves of her tunic. Suddenly the pendant felt much heavier.

  "I thought as much," Trysten said as her gaze drifted down to the tabletop. "I brought it up to Galelin the other day, but then the bell rang. I thought for sure that there is no way they could have done that this season. Even if the pass opened up early."

  Caron picked up the dish of fish and stood. "I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who has come to that conclusion."

  Trysten turned to her father. Her jaw dropped, but she couldn't find the words.

  Mardoc leaned closer and wrapped his hand around his daughter's once again. "You be careful, Little Heart. If the army has been here since the end of the last fighting season, then their presence may not be related to the Originals at all. But then there is the coincidence of how the army's approach coincided with your bonding."

  "That is quite the coincidence," Caron said as she hung the spit of fish over the fire. "It's enough to make one think that the dragons knew what was coming."

  "What?" Mardoc asked. "Surely you're not suggesting Aeronwind broke her leg on purpose."

  Caron stood from her crouch and held the empty platter before her. "I don't think I can believe that either. If Aeronwind wanted your daughter to become the Dragoneer this season, then surely she could have found a less painful way to make it happen. All I am saying is that perhaps we should trust in their wisdom, and not our own cleverness."

  She looked at Trysten. "I understand you have to go into battle tomorrow, but you will go into it fully expecting that every soldier out there is aiming to kill you because you are the Dragoneer. And you will count on Elevera to keep you safe, rather than counting on some stupid pendant," Caron's voice broke. She pushed her hand to her mouth and squinted her eyes against tears.

  Trysten hopped off her stool, rushed around the table, and pulled her mother close, wishing she had thought to take the pendant off, to toss it aside so that it wasn't between them, reminding each of what bound them, and what threatened to tear them apart.

  Chapter 40

  After a quiet dinner and a small bit of wine shared with her parents, Trysten went to bed and slept soundly until she woke with a start. She sat up in bed, listened, and felt for the dragons.

  They were fine. Most of them slept. But there was something else among them. Something different. Like finding ice among the embers of a fire.

  Trysten gasped. She threw back the covers and dressed in a flash. She grabbed the dragonslayer sword and buckled it to her side, then hurried out into the dark.

  As she crept into the weyr yard, she stopped. She stared at the center of the yard at something... wrong. Something that shouldn’t be. She blinked, squinted, and tried to make it out.

  To her left, a royal hordesman sat on his stool before a fire, his chin resting on his chest, eyes closed.

  Trysten turned to the watchtower above the weyr. She couldn’t see her own night watchman among the shadows, and the bell remained silent.

  She took several steps toward the center of the yard. She squinted and peered at the space before her, then focused on the ground. Something wasn’t right about it. Something...

  She gasped and looked up as she realized what she was staring at.

  A lick of light from the campfire glinted in the eye of a dragon. A dragon so dark that it was hardly distinguishable from the night sky. It was easier to see where the dragon's presence blotted out the stars along the horizon than it was to see the dragon.

  Trysten's hand flashed to the hilt of her sword.

  “You!” Trysten spat.

  The dragon stood in the yard, motionless.

  She opened herself up to the dragons around her. Her own horde and Avice’s were both calm. The dragons weren't disturbed by the Original standing in the middle of the weyr yard. Trysten couldn't tell if they were even aware of it. Elevera's dragons breathed in unison, and Avice and her dragons breathed together as well, at a slightly different pace. And the Original, standing before her, breathed in a rhythm between those of Elevera and Avice.

  “What do you want?” Trysten asked, her voice quiet, but still hard and sharp as the blade at her hip. She began to circle the dragon in slow, careful steps, never looking away from... him. He was a male Original. He was the size of a courier, not a great deal bigger than a large horse.

  The dragon twisted his head and followed Trysten with his blank gaze as she moved around him.

  Courier. Messenger. The male dragons we
re ill-equipped for battle. Though they tended to be nimble and sprightly in flight, they lacked the endurance and power of the females. Their firebreath was not formidable, petering out shortly after it left their jaws.

  So the males were couriers. They ferried messengers across the kingdom, between the villages and cities.

  They brought messages.

  “Is that it?” Trysten asked as if the dragon could hear her thoughts. But then he probably couldn't, if she couldn't hear his. “Did you bring me a message? Are you the messenger?”

  As she stepped around the back of the dragon, he whipped his head around to begin watching her from his right side as she continued on in a circle.

  “I’m listening,” Trysten said. “You have my attention. What is the message?” Her grip tightened on the hilt of the sword.

  You may bring your dragons. Half of them.

  The words flashed in her mind, chanted by a thousand voices, and carried across vast distances by tumbling gusts of wind. A million women speaking the words all at once. The power of it nearly dropped her to her knees.

  Trysten gritted her teeth and tightened her grip on the sword once more as if it were a brace to keep her standing.

  “Half?” Trysten asked. The word left her lips as if she'd been rendered breathless. Her mind floated up from the confusion, like silt clearing from the waters of the river. “I can bring half of my dragons. To the end of the world, right?”

  The Original dipped his head as if to nod in agreement.

  Realization struck her. “Because of the food. Forty dragons. I can bring forty dragons and leave forty behind so there will be enough food. That’s what you’re saying.”

  The Original dipped his dark head again. There was something in his movement that was off, that didn’t belong to anything that should exist in this world.

  “And you’ll still turn back the army,” Trysten said, her voice nearly a whisper as her lips threatened to curl into a sneer.

  The Original dipped his head in placation again.

  Trysten drew a deep breath. Then she drew her sword.

  The Original lifted his head, and though she couldn’t see him clearly, she had a flash of his alarm.

  “What do you want from me? You want my cooperation, then you can tell me that. What do you want?”

  The dragon shuffled his weight. Trysten felt dizzy watching the stars behind it disappear on one side and reappear on the other as the dragon moved.

  She shook her head. “No. No deal. I can’t trust you. If you want something from me, then you tell me what it is. Explain yourself!”

  The last left her mouth in a bark. She stopped.

  “Who goes there?” Aymon’s guard called out. “Trysten?”

  Trysten gripped the hilt of the sword with both hands and held it before herself, elbows flexed.

  “You are responsible for this, aren’t you? You are the reason the Westerners keep attacking us. That is what you are afraid of. You want the children of the gods to be undone. You want your revenge. You want chaos.” And in a whisper, she added, “You are afraid of what I will unite.”

  “Your Highness! But...” the watchman called.

  “Leave,” Trysten said, her voice colder than the distant stars that crowded them. “Leave.”

  The dragon stood his ground and stared. Firelight flickered in the black glass of his eyes.

  “Leave!” Trysten shouted and raised the sword as if to strike.

  The wind moaned as the dragon spread his black wings wide. But instead of taking to the air, he draped his wings along the ground, eclipsing in blackness what bits of grass and straw were visible in the dwindling campfire. Then he laid his dark head low, his neck, long and thin, extended out to Trysten. Motionless. Unguarded and vulnerable.

  Sweat broke out on Trysten’s palms. The sword and the pendant both felt heavy, but not burdensome. In her grip, the sword felt as if it would pass through the dragon’s neck as easily as a fork through the soft flesh of last night’s roasted fish.

  "Trysten?" Aymon called out from behind her.

  Trysten's grip tightened on the hilt. She shifted her grip and lifted the sword an inch higher above her shoulder, quivering with restraint. “I said, leave.”

  Rather than rear up on his hind legs as most dragons would, the dark dragon simply pushed his wings down. His entire body lifted at once as if levitating. As he raised his wings to take another swipe at the air, he disappeared with a gust that blew dust into Trysten's eyes and nearly knocked her to the ground. The stars shouldered through the darkness where the dragon had been until there was nothing to stare at except the sharp points of light trekking to dawn.

  Chapter 41

  Trysten lowered the dragonslayer sword. She craned her neck back searching the night sky for any sign of the courier dragon, any indication of his slight form blotting out the stars. But there was nothing to see except the familiar spray of late spring constellations and nothing to hear but the tiny mud frogs churring along the river's edge.

  She turned in a slow circle, examining the sky and the ground until she found herself facing Prince Aymon.

  “Well?” the Prince asked.

  "Well, what?"

  “What did it look like to you?"

  “What?” Trysten asked, her voice flat and not amused in the least.

  “Don’t be coy with me, Trysten,” Prince Aymon said. “I saw you speak to that dragon. It was unlike any dragon in your horde, and although it was too dark to be certain, I’m willing to bet that it was the exact color of the scale that you showed me the other day.”

  Trysten returned the sword to its scabbard. “We're on the same side, are we not?"

  Prince Aymon stiffened. "Of course."

  A shower of sparks surged up from the campfire as the watchman added wood. Trysten’s eyes traced the orange sparks, expecting them to disappear behind a shadow on the night.

  “Trysten? What did it say to you?" Aymon asked.

  Trysten returned her attention to the Prince. She couldn’t see his face while his back was to the tents, the growing light of the flames throwing him in shadow. For a moment she was struck by the thought that she might still be talking to one of the Originals, standing right before her in the shape of the Prince. She pushed the idea from her mind, and as she did so, she caught a sense from the dragons. They were agitated now, responding to her.

  “You have to start sharing with me, Aymon. You can't keep all of your information to yourself. You have to tell me everything you know about the Originals," she said.

  “Why? What did he say to you?" he asked, sounding slightly alarmed.

  Trysten didn’t respond right away. She shifted her weight from foot to foot.

  "Listen to me, Aymon. We have a common enemy, right?"

  The Prince nodded. The light cupped his temple, sliding along his pale skin as his head bobbed slightly.

  "Then we can't be hiding information from each other. We have to share what we know," Trysten said.

  "I'm afraid I don't know what you're getting at."

  "Don't you? When did the army leave the Western kingdom?" she asked.

  Prince Aymon took a moment to respond. Trysten couldn't see his expression to tell if he was trying to come up with a date or craft another lie.

  "I don't know," he finally said.

  "Was it this year? Did they come through the pass at the start of this fighting season?" she pressed.

  He was silent for a few seconds again. "I don't know when they came through, but it does seem unlikely that they came through at the beginning of this season."

  Trysten threw her hands out, palms up. "Why? Why didn't you tell me that before?"

  "It's not important."

  "Of course it's important! What you really mean is that you didn't think it was important that I knew it." She glared at him in the darkness. Surely the fire in her eyes must match the one in the royal camp.

  "I don't think it's appropriate for you to be putting words in my mouth,"
the Prince began.

  "Stop. Just stop." Trysten interrupted him with a shake of her head. "We're not doing this anymore. There is too much at stake. Here’s what it comes down to, Aymon. The Originals are up to something. They need me to go with them somewhere, and in all probability, they need me to go so that Elevera will follow. This is why they aren't coming for me like you suggested the day we discovered the graves. They're not coming for me like that."

  "They are sending an army, however," he said, almost snorting.

  Trysten shook her head. "Are they? If that army spent the winter in The Wilds, preparing to march on Aerona, then how was it that the Originals knew about me back then, when Aeronwind was healthy, and my father was Dragoneer?"

  She didn't give him a chance to answer. "We believed that The Second Hordesmen were sent out to find me. That it wasn't until they discovered me that the Originals even knew I was here, that Elevera was the alpha."

  "They could have known you were coming, that your time was drawing near, but they didn't know precisely when or where you would appear. The army could have been in waiting, knowing that it would be needed soon, but not knowing when," he offered.

  Trysten shook her head. "See, that doesn't make sense to me. What made you reach that conclusion? Tell me."

  Prince Aymon glanced back at the night watchman perched upon his stool before the fire. He held his palms out to the flames despite the balmy night. Shadows danced about his face, turned to the Prince and Trysten, watching and listening.

  Prince Aymon stepped closer to Trysten. "All right," he began in a hushed voice. "What I am about to tell you is to be treated with complete secrecy. Understand? You are under royal orders not to share this information with anyone. Not even your commander."

  Trysten nearly snapped that it was his habit of hiding information that was causing the problems for them, but she held her tongue.

  She nodded. "I understand."

  Chapter 42

  Prince Aymon took a deep breath as if to collect himself or to clear the slate. "I am my father's fifth son. Needless to say, my chances of knowing the throne are practically nonexistent. Regardless, my father and mentors drilled into me a sense of duty and purpose to preserve the kingdom. Being the youngest son, I was frequently the target of much of my brothers' teasing. I grew up fighting. It seemed only natural then that I would assume command of my father's forces while my brothers concerned themselves with politics and the ladies of the court."