Raegar flung the hostage into his fellow, knocking both men to the ground, then dashed toward Skylan. “Run for it, fool!” he shouted. “Run!”
Skylan was tempted. He longed to run and never look back. He heard Draya’s terrified cries. He saw rabbits watching from the shadows. He heard a raven jeering at him.
Draya was his wife. He had vowed to Torval to protect her.
“I have broken so many vows,” Skylan muttered. “At least I will not break this one.”
He looked up at the sword. “Torval, grant me the strength to reach it!” He crouched and then hurled himself into the air, his arm extended as far as it would reach. He struck the hilt with his hand, knocking the sword loose. The blade twisted in the air as it fell, flashing orange and silver, and landed on the grass at Skylan’s feet. He picked it up.
“Are you coming?” Raegar cried from the shadows.
“After I have rescued Draya,” said Skylan.
“Then I’ll see you in the Hall of Heroes,” Raegar cried. He vanished among the trees.
The man in white was handing the wooden spike to the druid, who placed it against Draya’s midriff. The man in white lifted the hammer.
Skylan roared a challenge, brandishing his sword, and broke into a run. Again he shouted for them to stop, and he told them what he would do to them if they harmed her, how he would cut off their heads and slice open their guts and feast on their livers. He raved and yelled as he ran.
No one even looked at him. They were all watching the sacrifice.
The man in white swung the mallet back and forth, testing his aim, preparing to hit the spike a blow that would drive it through Draya’s body. Skylan, howling like one of Freilis’s daemons, leaped at the man, who was rearing back, prepared to make the killing strike.
One of the trunks from the strangler fig suddenly shifted, moved to block Skylan’s way. He dodged around it, only to find himself blocked by another. The strangler fig tree vented its rage on him. The trunks danced around him, snaking down from the limbs of the tree, plunging into the ground, surrounding him. Skylan swore in fury and slashed at a slender trunk with his sword. The trunk recoiled like a whip and lashed him across the face.
He staggered, half-stunned, tasting blood. The hammer, illuminated in the moonlight, was swinging slowly, slowly through the air. Just two steps and he could stop it.
The tree flung down another trunk, right in front of him. Skylan struck the tree with his sword, and the trunk struck him back, slamming into his head. Pain burst in Skylan’s skull. He stumbled, almost fell. Force of will and Draya’s pleas for him to save her kept him on his feet. He tried to go around the trunk, and it bashed him across the throat.
Skylan went down. Landing heavily on his back, he struck his head on a rock. He was slipping into a pain-filled darkness when a scream, a terrible scream, a scream he knew he would hear until merciful death stopped his ears, roused him. He raised his throbbing head to see the hammer drive the stake deep into Draya’s body. Blood blossomed, a horrible flower, drenching her robes. Draya moaned and writhed in agony.
Skylan tried to stand. Pain cleaved his skull. Lights burst behind his eyes. The tree bashed him and he fell forward, landing on his stomach. He had to reach her, his wife. Cursing in pain and in rage, he crawled on his knees. His hands slipped on the blood-soaked ground beneath the stake. He looked up at her. Her face was white with the death that was coming, and it contorted in agony.
“Forgive me, Draya!” he begged. “I never meant for this to happen!”
She gave a shuddering gasp, and he hoped she was going to speak words of forgiveness that would free him from the guilt of her death.
She opened her mouth, but no words came out. Black blood, warm from her body, spewed from her mouth and splashed into Skylan’s upturned face.
Horror overcame him, and choking on the blood of his murdered wife, Skylan collapsed.
CHAPTER
12
From his vantage point in the woods, the boy had witnessed everything. In the morning there had been the landing of the wondrous dragonship. Then the riotous departure of the band of warriors, and after that, the frightening arrival of the druids. (The boy had been afraid his teachers had come looking for him. He’d been vastly relieved to see the druids had instead come for the woman.)
The druids had gone off without taking any notice of him, which was not surprising. The boy was adept at blending in with his surroundings.
He remained in the woods all that day, unable to take his gaze off the beautiful ship, which was now empty, resting on the sandy bottom, with waves rolling in around it. The boy longed to move closer to the ship, but he was afraid the druids might come back, and so he remained in hiding, trying to work up his courage.
The boy was eleven years old, and he was odd-looking, with his yellow lupine eyes and shaggy, unkempt, gray-brown hair. He was thin and wiry, and he wore the green robes of an ovate—one who studies to become a druidic priest.
The sun sank. Night came. And still the boy crouched in the woods. He’d made a couple of forays in the direction of the ship, but he’d always taken fright and returned to his hiding place.
“They’re not coming back, Wulfe,” she said.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“My sisters told me.”
A graceful young woman, naked except for a smattering of leaves that twined around her lithe body, slipped out of the tree under which Wulfe was hiding. “You can hear the limbs creak with their news.”
Wulfe nodded. He was familiar with the way dryads communicated. Each dryad lived within the tree she guarded and could not leave it. Intensely curious—particularly in regard to the affairs of the Ugly Ones—each dryad avidly watched everything happening around her and gleefully communicated it to her sisters.
“What do they say?” Wulfe asked.
The dryad happily related the news. “My sisters of the sacred grove tell that the priestess drank poison and fell down dead and then the Dragon Goddess entered her body. And my sisters of the strangler fig tree turned bad men into rabbits.”
The dryad giggled at this, and so did Wulfe.
“I wish I had seen that,” he said.
“So do I,” said the dryad. “But you and me—we have seen the great dragonship. Go ahead, Wulfe! You can sneak aboard it while everyone’s gone.”
Wulfe looked longingly at the ship. “I will get into trouble with the elders. . . .”
“Not if they don’t find out,” said the dryad. She had bright green eyes and a pert, sly face with a pointed chin, an upturned nose, and wild russet curls that fell into her eyes. “You don’t have to stay long. Just go on board, look around, and then come back to tell me what it is like. Please! My sisters will be wild with envy!”
“I don’t know. . . .” Wulfe continued to hesitate.
“The elders won’t be back until dawn,” urged the dryad. Her voice was high-pitched and piping, but she could make it soft and wheedling when she wanted. “They are performing some sort of ceremony. You have time.”
Wulfe knew perfectly well he should not trust the dryad. She would do or say anything to satisfy her curiosity. But he had never seen anything so wonderful as this dragonship, and so he let the dryad’s argument persuade him. He crept out of hiding and then halted, not because he was afraid, but to wrestle with his inner daemons, a battle he’d been fighting since the druids had found the four-year-old child running wild in the woods and taken him to live among them.
Wulfe’s inner daemons were continually making the boy do things that landed him in trouble. His battles against them were hard-fought, especially when the daemons urged the boy to do things he didn’t want to do.
This wasn’t so bad. His daemons were urging him to board the dragonship even though he knew he should not. The druids would be angry with him. Well, not angry. The druids were never angry. But they would be disappointed. The druid elder who had raised the boy would look at him sadly and shake his head in sorrow
. And that was worse than anger, for Wulfe truly loved the druid, who had been a father to him for seven years now.
The boy was always striving to please the elder, to do things that brought a look of pride and pleasure to the aged face instead of the look of sorrow. Wulfe tried to learn to read, though that was proving impossible. The words seemed to crawl around like bugs and made no sense. He tried to sit still with the other ovates in their classroom among the trees, but unlike the other ovates, who could hear only the voice of the teacher, the boy could hear nymphs dancing in the woods, calling to him to come join them, or the giggling gossip of the dryads, or the lewd jokes of a satyr. Small wonder he couldn’t pay attention.
The worst were the nights, when the daemons sometimes made the boy do terrible things. Horrible things. Things he didn’t like to think about, and so he didn’t. Ever.
The druids thought they understood the boy’s struggles. They had once been confident they could teach him to find the strength to turn a deaf ear to the songs of the nymphs and the whispers of the daemons. The druids still hoped he would outgrow it, for they took an optimistic view of life. But Wulfe was eleven now, and their hopes were growing a little ragged.
In the end, the daemons won as they almost always did. Wulfe bolted out of the woods. Running across the narrow strip of sand, he came to a halt before the dragonship. He gazed up in awe at the carved figurehead, which was not, in his eyes, a thing made of wood. He saw scales glittering in the moonlight and a gilded mane and fiery red eyes.
“Please, Mighty Dragon, may I come aboard your ship?” Wulfe asked politely.
He had been taught that when speaking to great personages, such as dragons, it was important to be polite.
The Dragon Kahg stared down at the boy in astonishment. The dragon didn’t know how to respond, for such a thing had never happened in all the years of his existence. The boy had done what no mortal could do. He could apparently see the dragon’s spirit. That was impossible, and therefore the Dragon Kahg decided it wasn’t happening. The child must be playing a game of make-believe.
The Dragon Kahg chose to ignore the boy.
The boy chose to take the dragon’s silence for approval.
Wulfe happily splashed out into the moonlit water and ran up the gangplank and boarded the dragonship. He wandered around the deck, standing on the chests and investigating the single large rudder that steered the ship. He climbed down the ladder to discover that someone had built a house inside the ship, or so it seemed to the delighted boy.
The hold was dark, but he could see well in darkness, and he gazed around at the furs that made a bed, plates and bowls for eating, and a lovely carved wooden chest. He would have opened the chest to see what was inside, but it was locked with an iron lock, and the boy hated iron. He hated the feel of it. He couldn’t even stand the smell.
Wulfe wandered back up on deck and walked over to the prow with the dragon’s curved neck and fierce head and the spiritbone, hanging from the nail. Wulfe could sense the spiritbone’s powerful magic, and though his inner daemons urged him to touch it, he was daunted by the majesty of the dragon, and for once he was able to ignore the daemons. He gazed at the spiritbone from a respectful distance and left it alone.
Wulfe climbed up the dragon’s neck, his bare, nimble feet finding easy purchase, and, clinging to the head, he stared out at the beauty of the vast moonlit sea, marveling that it looked so different from this vantage point than it did from the shore.
He wondered what it would be like to sail over the shining waves, and when he returned to the deck again, he sat on one of the chests, enjoying the feel of the ship sliding up and down gently with the waves. He was afraid the druids would be coming any moment, and he told himself he should leave. But the sight of the moon forming a silver path over the dark waves was so entrancing, the boy could only sit and gaze in silent enjoyment.
The moon rose higher, and still Wulfe lingered on the ship. Then he saw the lights—torchlights, coming across the bridge over the marshland. He froze like a rabbit did when it saw the fox. He could make a run for the woods, but the moonlight was bright on the white sand beach, and the druids had very good eyesight. They would spot him instantly, and they would know it was him, for all good children were in their beds.
Wulfe couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing the elder. He’d done something very wrong, and this time the punishment might be more severe than usual. He decided he would wait until the druids did whatever it was they had come to the beach to do, and then he would sneak off the ship and race back to his dwelling. He would climb in through the window while the elder slept. Wulfe hunkered down on the deck among the sea chests.
He couldn’t see from his vantage point, but he could hear, and he sucked in a dismayed breath when he heard water splashing.
The druids were boarding the ship!
He looked about frantically for a better place to hide, and there was the ladder that led to the dwelling place below. He scrambled across the deck, tumbled down the ladder, and dived into the pile of furs, pulling them over his head.
He heard footsteps on the deck above him. He could hear people talking, and he recognized the voices of the elder and some of the men of the settlement.
“Carry the young man belowdeck,” said the elder. “He is badly injured. I will tend his wounds.”
Wulfe heard another voice, one he did not recognize, a woman’s voice, low and rich.
“Bah! Let him bleed a little,” said the woman. “He deserves to suffer. Pain will do him good.”
“Death, on the other hand, will not,” the druid said mildly.
Wulfe heard feet coming his way, and he snuggled deep among the furs. The young man they were carrying must have been heavy, for they had difficulty negotiating the ladder. They managed, or so he assumed, for he could hear them deposit their burden on the deck. Then they clomped back up the ladder and reported to the druid that they had laid the young man on his bed.
The boy peeped out cautiously from the furs.
“Skylan did show courage. He tried to rescue her,” the elder remarked. “The older man basely fled.”
“That is true,” the woman said. “Skylan did try to save Draya, at the risk of his own life. I must admit I did not expect him to do that.”
“He is lucky,” the druid said, sighing. “The spirits of the woods were extremely angry.”
“Skylan has Torval to thank for his survival,” the woman replied. “Though I doubt he will find much cause to be grateful.”
“You have entered the body of Draya in order to hide from your enemies, Vindrash,” the elder remarked. “Do you also plan to torment this young man with guilt?” He sounded disapproving.
“Skylan is a weapon in Torval’s hand. The god demands the finest steel, and this young Skylan is of poor quality, brittle and liable to break. He must prove himself or Torval will throw him on the scrap heap.”
Feet walked across the deck. Wulfe heard splashes in the water. The men were leaving the ship. He was about to slip out of his hiding place, when he heard the woman’s voice and he realized she and the elder were still on board.
“We will honor Draya’s memory,” the druid was saying. “Her spirit now dwells in peace with her gods. She will hear our hymns of praise, and when you have no more need of her mortal form, Blessed Vindrash, we will return her body to her people.”
“I thank you for everything you have done, Elder.” The woman’s voice was soft, no longer grim and harsh. “I know acting out the sacrifice was not an easy thing for you or your people.”
“We do not believe in human sacrifice,” the druid said severely. “I had to keep reminding myself that we were slaying a goddess, one who could not be slain. Even then I found it horrible to witness. I fear the dreadful sight will scar my people.”
“Your people saw the moonlight shining down on a glade and a foolish young man battling a tree,” said Vindrash. “Nothing more.”
“Yet I see you,” the druid ret
urned doubtfully. “I see you now as the Kai Priestess, Draya.”
“That is because I permit you to see me in the human form. The evil Gods of Raj and Aelon, Lord of the New Dawn, look at me, and they see only a human, one ant in the anthill of humanity. Mortal minds see a goddess, and they cannot bear the sight and so they blot it out. Only Skylan will be able to see me. I will be his worst nightmare.”
“Poor young man,” murmured the druid. “He believes he saw his wife murdered before his eyes and that it was his fault. He will live with that forever.”
“Guilt is a powerful force,” said Vindrash. “As any mother will tell you.”
“And what of the dragon?” the druid asked.
“The Dragon Kahg is my loyal servant. He has sworn an oath that he will tell no one where I am hiding, not even the others of his own kind. I trust him as I trust you, my dear friend.”
“Our enemies are strong, and they grow stronger with every passing day,” the druid said. “I look into the future and I see flames and bitter smoke and a city built on the bones of our dead.”
“That is why we fight,” said Vindrash. “And why we keep on fighting when it would be far easier to sink into oblivion.”
Wulfe had no idea what the two were talking about. He generally found most of what adults said to each other either boring or confusing or both, and he quit paying attention. He was more concerned over what his stomach was saying, which was that it was past time to eat. Wulfe was relieved when the druid and the woman finally quit talking. He heard them walking across the deck and the sound of their feet going down the gangplank.
Wulfe didn’t stir. Not yet. He would give the druid and the woman plenty of time to return to the settlement so he wouldn’t meet them on the trail. The elder had an uncanny way of knowing just by looking at the boy that Wulfe had been up to mischief. To while away the time, Wulfe crept over to stare curiously at the young man.
He smelled disgustingly of iron.
At first Wulfe thought the young man was a corpse, for he was covered in blood. The boy studied the young man’s battered and bloodied face. “Ugly Ones” was his mother’s term for humans. Wulfe thought it fitting. He had watched this Ugly One strutting about in his iron shirt, brandishing the horrible sword, which now lay on the deck at his side. Wulfe eyed the weapon with disgust and gave it a wide berth as he hurried to the ladder. Unless some god loved him, the young man would likely die.
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