In the Time of Dragon Moon

by Janet Lee Carey

  At last I resorted to crushing the purple gyocana seeds I had used before to help Her Majesty sleep. A small amount would make her drowsy. I wasn’t sure it would calm her tempest, but it was all I had.

  It was another hour before Lady Olivia sent a message for me to bring the sweetmeats. I took only two with me, leaving the rest for later. Lady Olivia met me at the end of the long hallway outside the open aviary door. She eyed the queen inside as she quickly placed the sweetmeats on the enamel tray. There was a scratch on her cheek. The queen had long nails.

  “I am afraid it’s bad news,” she whispered. Her face was a reservoir of worry. “Prepare yourself,” she added. “I’m sorry. I did what I could to—”

  “Come here, Uma,” Queen Adela called in a chilled voice. I noted Her Majesty’s puffy eyes and clammy-looking skin as I hurried into the room filled with chattering, tweeting, and singing. The birds didn’t seem to know they were trapped. Had they ever been free? I glanced at the goldfinch, Mother’s favorite bird, and called out to her in my mind, wanting her strong arm around me. Holding me up.

  The queen put out her hand. I fell on my knees, kissing her ring.

  “Your Majesty, I am sorry.” I meant it for both my failure and her sore disappointment.

  “Sorry?” She wrenched her hand back so speedily, her ruby scraped the tip of my nose.

  She plucked a sweetmeat from Lady Olivia’s tray, ate half, then broke the rest in tiny bits and tossed them to the birds in the large floor-to-ceiling cage. I jumped to my feet and exchanged a nervous look with Lady Olivia. Neither of us could say a thing as the bluebirds, goldfinches, and larks all fluttered down, taking the crumbs in their tiny beaks. Their bodies were so small. Would the sleeping powder kill them? Please no, I thought, watching them dance about on their tiny clawed feet as they ate every crumb.

  “You are no better than the other physicians who have forced their sickening potions on me, Uma,” Queen Adela snapped. “How many gallons of the Kuyawhat have I drunk these past two months?”

  Kuyawan, not Kuyawhat. “It’s hard to say, Your Majesty.”

  “Enough to sink a ship!” She took a second sweetmeat and ate it all. “Should we throw her to the dogs, Lady Olivia? Drop her in a bear pit? Behead her?”

  “Your Majesty,” Lady Olivia said with alarm, “please—”

  “No, wait, I remember now,” the queen said, raising her hand. “I have already chosen burning. This physician stinks like spoiled meat. We should cook her and start with a fresh physician.”

  I fell on my knees again. “Your Majesty, you promised to try my father’s cure three more months. It has been only two. Give me one more month. Remember—”

  “Remember? I remember everything. It’s you who have forgotten your promise to me, mistress physician. Guards!”

  “Wait, Your Majesty, please. Let me keep trying.”

  Four men marched in. Two yanked me to my feet.

  “Take the blade she hides under her sleeve,” said Queen Adela.

  “It’s an herbing knife, Your Majesty, not a weapon. I need it for my work.” Too late; one of the men already pulled it from its sheath. He held it up, admiring the blade in the latticed window light.

  “Another month, Your Majesty, please!”

  “Throw her in a cell.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Dungeon, Pendragon Castle

  Wolf Moon

  Late September 1210

  THEY LOCKED ME in a cell not much bigger than a rowboat. The single barred window high above me on the wall disgorged a pale gray light. I kicked the stinking rushes and crouched against the wall, clutching my stomach, the smell of rat piss in my nose.

  The next day a guard wrapped a chain around my middle and tied my hands behind my back with a rope. Two men led me from my cell, one holding the end of the chain as if I were a leashed dog. Outside, a great mob filled the castle green from one side to the other. Common folk shoved past the well-dressed courtiers to jeer and hurl dirt clumps at me as I was led along.

  Clods smacked me from all sides, but that was nothing to the dreadful sight of the great wood stack up ahead prepared for a burning. On the viewing stage, Lady Olivia and Bianca stood next to the queen. And on the left, seated between the bishop and King Arden, was Jackrun.

  What in the name of the Holy Ones was he doing up there?

  My heart cinched. I had let myself trust him . . . There must be a reason he sat with the king, but why wouldn’t he face me?

  The king’s men positioned me below the stage, an arm’s length from a filthy, middle-aged man dressed in brown sacking.

  The queen ordered, “Bring Master Ridolfi up.” It was the queen’s previous physician.

  Two guards brought the poor man up the stage steps and put him front and center, where he knelt on one knee to Her Majesty, head bowed.

  Queen Adela said, “Master Ridolfi, you pricked me, leeched me, and lied to me. You sickened me with potions. You knowingly harmed your sovereign queen. For these crimes you will burn.”

  The crowd raised a cheer. Queen Adela held up her hand to silence them. “Do you have any last words to say before this crowd of witnesses and before God?” she asked.

  “Your Majesty, have mercy,” he begged. “As God is my witness, I used my cures to help you and heal you. I swear I meant you no harm. Reduce me to ruin. Exile me if Your Majesty sees fit. I will leave Wilde Island shunned and bereft and never return. But please have pity. Don’t burn me.”

  The crowd booed. They’d come here to see a burning.

  “Bishop, give him his rightful service,” Queen Adela said flatly. The bishop was in full regalia, the golden stitching adorning his creamy robes matching the glittering threads in his tall hat. He stepped to the kneeling, trembling man, said a prayer in Latin, and crossed the man’s filthy forehead with holy oil.

  “Bring Mistress Uma up,” Queen Adela called. My legs lost their bones. The guards hoisted me up the stairs. My head buzzed with screaming whispers like an aroused beehive. I have another month. A month. I have until October’s end. She promised me. She promised! My tongue felt thick as a slug. Jackrun still wouldn’t lift his eyes. He studied the stage as if it were a book.

  Queen Adela’s fey eye glinted as she appraised me. “You have disappointed me, Uma Quarteney. For that you will watch this condemned physician burn. Remember, this is your future, and your burning day will come upon you fast if you fail me again.

  “Bring my physician down as close as you dare to the pyre,” she told the guards. “And stake her in place so she feels the heat. Lady Olivia, you have been in charge of her. You may go and stand with her and keep her company. Bianca, accompany your mother,” she added with a sly smile.

  The guards dragged me ten paces from the base of the pyre, drove a stake in the grassy ground, and chained me to it, smashing my bound wrists against the post so I could not move or run. Looking over my shoulder for Jackrun, neck straining to find him, to read his face again, to understand, I was crushed to find I could only see the far corner of the viewing stage, the king’s ornate shoes and colorful hose, the base of his carved chair. The crowd surged on my left as people jostled closer to the pyre. The sweet scent of hyacinth perfume filled the air as Lady Olivia joined me with Bianca. A guard shoved them closer, but did not tie them to my post.

  Bianca clutched her mother’s sleeve, driving her fingers into the folds. “I don’t want to watch,” she said in a small voice. The large droplets of sweat on the edge of her upper lip quavered as she spoke.

  Lady Olivia patted her hand. “I know, my darling. Be strong.”

  I could not think why Queen Adela ordered Bianca to stand this close to the pyre unless she somehow learned about the sapphire bracelet King Arden gave her and was punishing her for it.

  Master Ridolfi gripped the ladder with his bony hands and was creeping spiderlike rung to
rung. The guard prodded his backside with a pike until he reached the platform. He tied the man firmly to the stake with a long chain before climbing down and removing the ladder.

  “There must be something you can do,” Bianca pleaded. “Ask Queen Adela to call us back to the stage, she—”

  “Hush, Bianca. It will all be over soon.”

  But it wasn’t over soon. The king’s men surrounded the pyre, jamming torches under the base where the wood had been blackened with pitch to assure a hotter blaze. The acrid odor of burning pitch filled my nose as the wood caught. Bright flames leaped up. The crowd roared their approval, hungry for the burning as if it were a fine bit of entertainment after a day’s work.

  Thick smoke tumbled toward me. I swallowed and coughed, praying in my own language, asking for mercy, for the man to die quickly, for his soul to go where Christian souls went, a heaven I’d heard the priest describe that was as peaceful as Nushtuen, the place my father journeyed to after he left his body. The flames at the base of the stacked wood were the color of new-mown hay. They turned the darker yellow of wild iris as they rose higher, licking the wood, the platform, swarming in to the man’s bare feet.

  “God have mercy!” he wailed. The crowd cheered.

  Lady Olivia gripped my arm. “Oh God,” she cried as the fire rose up the screaming man’s legs. “No one should have to die this way!” She hunched over, groaning. Bianca clung to her, sputtered and cried.

  A sob wrenched up my throat. The searing heat coming off the pyre tightened the skin on my face, dried the tears that ran down my cheeks. Flames swept up and caught the man’s sacking. Save him. Someone save him. I thought of the dragon who’d flown in to save Tanya, but this was no half-fey girl. No dragon would rescue him.

  Bianca fainted in the heat and misery. Her mother bent over her, too weak to help her up, and I could do nothing to help either one of them with my hands tied behind my back. Bianca lay a long while at our feet like a cut flower as the inferno heated my body. I baked in my clothes. The pattern of my stitched bodice pressed against my skin like the hot wires Father used to burn the fox mark on my chest.

  Master Ridolfi let out his last pitiful shriek and died.

  The crowd roared with triumph. Lady Olivia leaned her head against my shoulder. The smoky smell of cooking flesh brought bile up my throat. His pain is over. It’s over. But there were more insults to come. Small bits of burned sacking sent by a hot wind floated down over us where we stood close to the blaze. Lady Olivia weakly tried to brush off the falling smuts. Every wipe left a trail of black smears on her face, her sleeves, the gown she always kept so impeccably clean. I could do nothing to brush away the smuts landing on me. The soot settled like black snow on Bianca’s pale blue gown, her face and outspread hair.

  The inferno still raged. I sucked in ashes, choked. “Please unchain me,” I begged. “It’s over now. The man is dead.”

  Three men came out to aid Lady Olivia and Bianca, carrying the girl away. But they left me in place by the blazing pyre, letting me bake in hellfire until the queen allowed them to release me, and drag me seared and broken back up to the Crow’s Nest.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Crow’s Nest, Wilde Island

  Wolf Moon

  Late September 1210

  I HATE HER. I hate her. I hate her.” I’d been crouched against this wall in the Crow’s Nest, choking out the words with my head bent, my hands over the back of my sweaty neck since they’d hauled me up the stairs and shut me in.

  “I hate her. Hate her. Hate her.” She hadn’t changed since her witch-hunting days when she’d burned women up and down the countryside. She was a ruthless monarch who executed people when they did not give her what she wanted. I’d believed her when she’d threatened to burn me after three months, but believing it was one thing, witnessing it another. The cruelty of Ridolfi’s burning, the sight and sound and smell of it shook me to my core. I knew now what it meant to burn.

  Someone was knocking at the door. I raised my head, blinking in the shadowy room lit only by the dusky light from the open window. I hadn’t lit a candle, revolted at the look and feel of fire, wanting nothing to do with it ever again.

  “Uma?” Jackrun called.

  Stiff from crouching, I went, slid the bolt aside, and opened the door to him. He flew in with a flurry of sudden storm, set a tray of food on the table, swept me in his arms, held me tight. “Uma, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  His body was too warm after Ridolfi’s burning. I wanted cold. I hated him and his fire. He’d sat on the stage with Her. I pushed him away. “How could you do it?” I choked.

  “It was all I could do to convince her to let you live,” he said, drawing me close and holding me again. I was stiff in his arms, still not sure if I could trust him.

  “I found out what was happening when the men left the weapons yard to build the pyre.” He rocked me in his arms. “I went straight to my aunt. She was determined to tie two physicians to the stake. I had to use all the negotiation skills I’ve learned over the years to talk her out of burning you. She was fixed, mad. I talked ceaselessly yesterday and again with her last night, Uma.” He passed his hand down my hair, my back. “I moved you step by step from the fire. She finally agreed not to burn you today on two conditions: that you must be staked down perilously close to the fire, and that I sit on the royal viewing stage to show my support of the Pendragon family, say nothing, not even give you a look.”

  He put his hands to my head, lifting it, kissing the tears from my cheeks, kissing my ears, my neck, all the places the smuts still blackened. Through the open window I heard the sea crashing against the distant cliffs as he kissed me. He was the night and the sea and I melted, kissing him back, pulling him closer, wanting him closer still. The fire had nearly ended me. Now I wanted life, wanted him, admitted to myself how much I had wanted him and for how long. I wanted his flesh pressed against mine, no clothes between us.

  I tugged his leather surcoat. He removed it and peeled off his shirt. I ran my hands along his warm chest and back, feeling the muscles underneath.

  “Come away with me,” he said, tugging the lacings on my gown and kissing my neck, my shoulder. “You have to come away with me tonight.”

  I slid my hand down the scale patch on his forearm, my breath catching. The overlapping scales were softer and cooler than I expected. “I can’t run.”

  “I won’t let her hurt you. She’ll burn you if you stay.” He kissed the tip of my ear, my throat. “Why didn’t you tell me before that she’d threatened to burn you by October’s end?”

  “Quiet now.” I didn’t want to talk about that. I didn’t want to talk at all, only hold him and kiss him, but he drew back a little, putting his hands on my waist.

  “You will come away with me, Uma. We’ll use the escape passage. I left two horses tied up near my family tomb so we could ride out tonight. That’s what I was doing just before I came up here.” He held out his hand. I didn’t take it.

  “I’ll hide you in Dragonswood where she can’t find you. Later we can board a ship and sail anywhere in the world, away from her, away from the fairies’ plans for me. Away from all of this.”

  “I have to stay.”

  “Why?” he asked, frowning, shaking me a little as if to shake sense into me.

  “She has my village surrounded, Jackrun. If I run away now, they will never be free. If I stay and she conceives a child, she has promised to bring the army home, so I can’t run. I won’t.”

  “What chance is there when the fey folk have her hexed?”

  “You’re only guessing that’s so. My father’s medicines are powerful. I still might give her a child, an heir. I have another month, Jackrun. I have until the end of Dragon Moon.”

  “For God’s sake, Uma, she’ll burn you! She would have done it today if I hadn’t stopped her. She’s mad. She doesn’t care at all for
you. She’ll kill you and move on to the next physician who promises her what she wants. You have to get out now.” He pushed his arm through his sleeve, fighting into his clothes.

  “Would you go if you were me? If your people were counting on you? My mother’s down there, surrounded by soldiers!”

  Jackrun put his fist against his forehead and turned his back to me. “This is the only way. You have to come.”

  “I won’t.”

  His whole body shook. Then he swung around, smoke pouring from his nose.

  “Are you going to roar fire now?” I said. “After what I just went through outside?”

  He slid a knife from his belt. I leaped back. He gripped the blade and slapped the handle into my hand. My skin stung. He walked out, slamming the door behind him. When I looked down I saw my own herbing knife, the one the guard had taken.

  My body hurt all over. Every joint ached with anger and passion and horror and need. It felt like I’d been thrown down the stairs.

  • • •

  I HAD TO stop crying, but I couldn’t for a long while. I curled up and wept until my throat was raw. At last I struck the flints, lit a candle, and stared down at the food Jackrun had brought me. I hadn’t eaten since yestereve. I was too sickened to touch it, too starving not to. I drank the small ale, tore at the bread, stuffing handfuls in my mouth, chewing with bloated cheeks.

  The cut of beef sat untouched on the pewter tray, the smell of the roasted meat too much like the pyre. I pinched the revolting thing and threw it out the window.

  Knocking again. My heart did a little flip in my chest. Jackrun? I ran to the door.

  “Message for you, mistress physician!” said a boyish voice from the other side. I sighed, opening the door to the page, who handed me a note. I was used to a verbal summons. This was my first note. He rocked back on his feet as I opened the wax seal, glad Mother had taught me how to read English from her small prayer book. It was from Lady Olivia. I saw at once why she’d chosen to write the private message.