by Alison Adare
If I die here, will I too forever listen in that long sleep for sounds that never come?
Janet shivered at the thought, and firmly turned her eyes to the garden before her.
It was in two parts, separated from each other by another stone wall. One part took up most of the space, long rows of green sprouts that were already taking on the familiar shape of leeks, carrots, cabbages, onions. The other, much smaller, section, when she went over to see it, was filled with herbs. Some she recognized — sage and chamomile, thyme and rosemary.
Others were completely unfamiliar.
She let herself in through the gate for a closer look, careful not to touch anything she couldn’t identify. There were wildflowers, too, among the herbs, long climbing strands of white bryony already in bloom, poppies not yet unfurled.
A child’s piping voice behind her made her turn. A little girl of — how old, given that people are smaller here? Eight? Ten? — was leaning over the fence, her dark hair a tangle about her head. The child cocked her head to one side, and repeated the same liquid slur of words.
Janet shook her head. “Slow,” she said. “Sorry.”
“I said,” the girl said very slowly, but, Janet was surprised to realize, not in the local language but in her own, if heavily and oddly accented, “Mam says never to touch her medicine. Are you deaf?”
It was said in a tone of genuine curiosity, and Janet smiled. “No,” she said. Realizing she probably sounded as strange to the girl as the girl did to her, she made her own speech slow and clear. “You sound strange to me, that’s all.”
“Father Donnic says I sound very well,” the girl said.
“He’s teaching you?”
She nodded. “So when I go to seek my fortune I can speak to people.”
“That’s important,” Janet said gravely. “I’m Jack.”
“I know. I’m Emlyn.” She climbed onto the wall and sat astride it, her skirt tucked into her belt to reveal bare, muddy legs.
“And Braelyn’s your mother? Mam?”
“She is, then. This is her garden. You shouldn’t be in it.”
“I was wondering what she grew here.”
Emlyn hopped down from the wall. “That’ll empty you if you et something bad,” said, pointing to the bryony. “That one’s for fever, that’ll make you sleep.”
“You know all this already?” Janet said, impressed.
“Of course, I’m not an idiot,” Emlyn said scornfully. “It’s no good going to seek your fortune if you don’t know what’s safe to eat or what to do if you’re sick.”
Janet wanted to smile, but she suspected the girl would never forgive her for it. She made her face as grave as she could. “That’s very true. You have all the important things covered.”
“Not all of them,” Emlyn admitted. “I can’t ride yet, so it will be hard to steal a horse.”
“I thought you knew who I am?” Jack said.
“I do! You’re Jack Cooper, the steward.”
“So it might not be such a good idea to tell me about your plans to break the law?”
“Well, not one of the horses here. Lew wouldn’t like it. So it doesn’t matter if you know.” She tugged Janet’s arm. “Come out, then, before Mam comes, and we’re both for it.”
Janet let the girl tow her toward the gate. “Does your mother grow flowers, as well?”
“Just medicine ones. Why?”
“I just wondered,” Janet said. She latched the gate behind them.
Emlyn stood on one foot, head cocked. “If you want flowers, I know where they grow.”
“I do,” Janet said.
Without further ado Emlyn turned on her heel and raced off toward the fort. She outdistanced Janet easily, despite her shorter legs, and when Janet reached the gates Emlyn was waiting impatiently. She waved for Janet to follow again, and darted off around the corner of the walls.
Janet jogged after her, rounded the corner and stopped. She’d seen the steep side of the hill below Brinday’s tower from the walls, but only to note that it was almost sheer enough to count as a cliff, and that the tangle of trees that covered it should be cut down or burned to avoid giving shelter to the sappers of any besiegers. Up close, the trees were taller than she’d thought, twisted and gnarled, with dense undergrowth tangling around their trunks. Despite the warmth of the early morning sun, the shadows within the woods were dark and thick, and Janet found herself shivering.
Emlyn popped back into sight from the bushes, startling Janet enough to make her hand drop to the hilt of her sword. “This way!” the girl said, and vanished again.
Janet followed more cautiously. The ground was steep, and a layer of last year’s rotting leaves made the footing treacherous. She slithered and slid from trunk to trunk, having to stop periodically to untangle her sword from the underbrush. It was not long before she’d completely lost sight of the fort behind her, and the crowns of the trees above her shut out all but the smallest glimpses of the sky.
“Emlyn?” she called, pausing. There was a weird half-echo in the hush beneath the trees, as if they’d whispered Emlyn back to her mockingly. Janet rubbed her arms to try and make the hair on them lie down. This is no good place.
She suppressed the urge to clamber back up the hill. If there was real danger, the girl would know.
If there’s real danger, I can’t leave her here alone.
Another few steps, fetching up with a rush against a solid tree. “Emlyn?”
“Down here!” the girl called, though Janet couldn’t see her.
Janet took a step in the direction of Emlyn’s voice, another, and felt her heel slip on the leaves. She flung herself backwards with an effort that wrenched her back, but couldn’t stop herself as she slid faster and then faster still down the steep slope, grasping futilely at branches and bushes to try and stop herself, plunging through a tangle of brambles whose thorns tore her clothes and skin.
Then empty air beneath her, falling for a heart-stopping second —
She landed hard.
Chapter 6
Janet saw stars and tasted blood. For a moment she was so stunned and winded she could do nothing but lie on her back and breathe, and then she recovered her wits enough to cautiously move her limbs. Arms and legs moved and bent as they should, without any sharp stabs of pain. Nothing broken. She rolled over, groaning at what would be truly spectacular bruises in a few days, and pulled free one of the brambles stuck in her sleeve. It was covered in clusters of white buds. Not brambles. Wild roses.
That’s one way to pick flowers, I suppose.
“Jack?”
Looking up, Janet saw Emlyn peering wide-eyed down over the lip of rock she’d tumbled past. “I’m all right,” she called up.
“You have to get out of there!” Emlyn whispered.
Sitting up, Janet saw that she had landed on an outcropping ledge of rock, the hill falling steeply away on three sides. The fourth was the entrance to a cave. She couldn’t see how far into the hill it went, for the daylight penetrated only a few feet, showing her dead leaves that must have been blown in by the wind, black stone walls, nothing else.
“Jump!” Emlyn said. “Jump, before the dragon wakes up!”
There’s a dragon. Of course there’s a dragon. Carefully, Janet backed away from the cave, not taking her eyes from it. Why didn’t Donnic mention it, pox-rot him? Was that movement she saw in the shadow within? Her heel went over the edge of the ledge and she turned to peer down, seeing an almost sheer drop before the slope eased. How far? Twenty feet?
This was the worst idea ever.
Something rustled in the depths of the cave, like a whisper on the edge of hearing — or like the dry scrape of dusty scales. Janet spun back, staring. Was that a glint she saw inside the cave? A giant reptilian eye, or the glimmer of a scale catching the light?
Leaves. Dead leaves in the breeze. That’s all it is. Dead leaves in the breeze.
Her pounding heart was not convinced. She edged along the le
dge to the side where the hill seemed to be less steep and carefully leaned out to take hold of the branch of a tree that had managed to seed itself among the rock. A cautious tug failed to dislodge it, nor did a more energetic one. Hoping it would hold her weight, Janet took one foot off the ledge, then the next, and scrambled for a foothold on the stone. For a moment her boots slipped futilely, and she felt the tree begin to bend.
With a frantic effort she managed to wedge the toes of her right foot in a crack in the rock, used it as leverage to lunge forward and fling her arms around a more sturdy trunk. For a moment she could only cling, panting, and then the thought of something emerging from the cave behind her back, silently uncoiling its scaly length, gave strength to her arms.
She hauled herself around the trunk. Slowly, inch by inch, she crawled and scrabbled her way upwards. It felt like forever until she had her hands and feet firmly on the more navigable slope over the cave, where Emlyn still stood, but glancing at the sky Janet saw the sun had barely moved.
Janet scrambled to her feet. “Come on!” she said to Emlyn, and when the girl didn’t move, put a hand on her shoulder, turned her around and shoved her toward the top of the hill.
“But don’t you want flowers?” Emlyn asked, hanging back.
Janet glanced behind her, relieved not to see an enormous head, fire trickling from a huge mouth. “I don’t want to be eaten by a dragon picking them.”
“Oh, it doesn’t come out of the cave,” Emlyn said, entirely too casually for Janet’s liking. “You don’t get burnt unless you go into the cave. That’s what happened to my Da. The flowers are this way.”
“Emlyn — ”
“This way!” Emlyn said, and raced off.
It was, at least, away from the cave, and Janet had no idea of the quickest way back to the fort from here, so she followed Emlyn as the girl eeled her way effortlessly through the bushes. “Your Da?”
“He was out hunting,” Emlyn said over her shoulder. “He was the huntsmaster here, before Lew, and came back too late to get in the gate. It was bad weather, that’d be why he was late, and he went looking for somewhere to get out of the rain. He went into the cave. They heard him screaming all over the castle and when they went looking the next morning they found him on the ledge there, all burnt, dead as dead.”
There was something chilling in the child’s matter-of-fact retelling, especially coupled with Janet’s own very clear memories of the winter night a poorly-watched campfire had sparked onto one of the tents, of men screaming and screaming as they burned. Still, she would have been too young to remember any of it. It’s just a story to her, like telling tales of giant wolves was to me, in the army. Before I’d seen them. “And no-one’s tried to kill it?”
Emlyn stopped dead and stared at her, eyes round. “You can’t kill the dragon! It’s the luck of Brinday!”
“Not very lucky for the people it eats,” Janet pointed out.
“Only one, every seven years,” Emlyn said, starting forward again. “Then it goes back to sleep. But that’s why you have to be careful, around there. It’s been seven years. It’ll wake up soon, and you don’t want to be the first person it sees. See! Flowers!”
She’d led them to a small clearing in the tangle of trees, where one great trunk had come down and brought others with it. In the sunlight that gap had allowed to reach the ground, a mass of white and blue flowers sprang from the ground in clumps.
Janet knelt and began snapping stems off at the ground. “No, I suppose you don’t want to be that, no. How is it the luck of Brinday?”
Emlyn crouched beside her and started picking flowers as well. “It protects us from bad people. Who are you picking them for, then?”
“Sir Thomas.”
Emlyn cocked her head to one side. “Are you sweet on him, then?”
“They’re not for him, they’re to be from him. To Lady Modron. He doesn’t have time to pick them himself.”
“Does Lady Modron like flowers?”
“All ladies like flowers.”
“It’s just, she never has any. Or picks any.”
Janet sat back on her heels, and eyed the steep hill they’d have to climb to get back to the fort. “If this is where they grow, I’m not surprised. I don’t think a noble lady would find it very easy to get down here, or back.”
“You did.”
“I’m not noble, or a lady.”
“I did.”
“Well,” Janet said, tucking her handful of flowers securely inside her doublet to free her hands for the climb, “you’re obviously very brave and nimble, what with getting ready to go and seek your fortune.”
“That’s true,” Emlyn said complacently, and led the way back up the hill.
When they reached the wall, and then the gates, Janet thanked Emlyn gravely, and went to find Tom.
She found him in the stables, carrying on a conversation with Lew by means of intermediaries and gestures — something about Nightfoot needing more exercise. Janet considered the flowers in her doublet. Definitely not the moment. “Sir Thomas, a word?”
He turned, eyes widening a little when he saw her. Janet realized that a headlong tumble down the hill and the scramble up again had done her clothes no favors. She brushed at her sleeves ineffectually, dislodged another spray of wild rose, and jerked her head towards the door.
Tom followed her out into the courtyard. “Gog’s hat, Jack, you look like you’ve been dragged through every bush between here and the lowlands.”
“I pretty much was,” Janet said. “But that’s not important. Did you know there’s a dragon?”
“A dragon?” Tom said, and heads turned at the volume of his voice.
“Keep your voice down!” Janet hissed. “They think it’s lucky!”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “A lucky dragon? And they can’t understand us, anyway.”
That’s true. Donnic was no-where in sight, and Owen ap Davith was still inside the stables with Lew. The intent stares they were getting were due to the disheveled state of Brinday’s steward and the tone, not the content, of Tom’s exclamation. Still, she took his arm and towed him a little further away from the onlookers. “It lives in a cave down the hill and comes out to eat someone every seven years. It’s due this year.”
“It must be a very small dragon,” Tom said, “to make one man last seven years. Who told you about it?”
“Emlyn, one of the girls here. Her father was its last victim.” Although now Janet thought about it, seven years did seem an awfully long time between meals, even for a magical creature. “Perhaps it eats sheep the rest of the time. Or sleeps, like bears do in winter.” Tom’s eyebrows climbed. “I heard it, in the cave,” Janet insisted. “And seven years makes sense, I mean, dragons are magical, and seven is a witches’ number. Seventh sons, and all that.”
“I’m a seventh son,” Tom said. “So was my father, for that matter. All it means is a lot of brothers ahead of you, no money, and an urgent need to make your own fortune.” He paused. “Did Emlyn see her father eaten by the dragon?”
Janet shook her head. “No-one did, they heard him screaming. And she would have been too young to remember, anyway.”
“Ah,” Tom said. “So, one of the girls here, as in, one of the children?”
“Yes,” Janet said, and the twitch at the corner of his mouth turned into a half-smile.
“There’s no dragons, Jack,” he said. “Not here, anyway. They live very far away. Where it’s hot all year round, even in winter.”
“How can it be hot all year round?”
Tom shrugged. “Maybe the dragons make it hot, breathing all that fire.”
“Anyway, they can fly, can’t they?” Janet pointed out. “One could have flown here. Others did, after all, aren’t there stories about dragons in this part of the country? Didn’t the King’s mother marry a man who killed a dragon, after the old King died?”
Tom, she could see, was now trying very hard not to laugh. “I’ve heard that in hi
s cups he’s claimed the right to have a dragon as his badge,” he said. “Do you think every man with a lion on his shield has slain one?”
“No,” Janet admitted. “But the stories?”
“Are stories. Perhaps they happened, but if they did, it was so long ago that even the oldest books talk about them as something in the distant past. You have to stop believing every tale someone tells you, Jack.”
“Fine,” Janet said. “But when it comes flapping over the tree-line at us and I say, here’s a trebuchet I prepared for just this eventuality, don’t be surprised if I also say I told you so.”
“If we’re attacked by a dragon, I shall certainly admit that you predicted it,” Thomas said gravely. “A cave down the hill, you say? I’ll look into it.”
He started to turn away and Janet grabbed his arm without thinking about it. “No! I mean — it’s a dangerous climb. I only found it by more-or-less falling off the edge of a cliff.” As clearly as she could see him standing in front of her, she saw him disappearing into the darkness of that cave, the shadows dimming the bright gilt of his hair, and the image filled her with a nameless dread. “Those woods are dangerous, the footing’s treacherous, you can’t afford to take a tumble and break your leg — ” Aware she was babbling, she stopped herself, took a deep breath, and took her hand off his arm. “You’re probably right. I just heard the wind, that was all. Spooked myself.”
“Did you hurt yourself? Falling?” Tom asked, frowning a little.
Janet shook her head. “Not worse than training. Just knocked the breath out of myself, and got a Christly shock.”
“As good a reason to hear things in the wind as any,” Tom said. Janet remembered a door slamming in the wind in her parents’ house and her heart racing in her chest until it was fit to burst. She nodded. “And you’ve been working hard. Lew tells me I need to take Nightfoot out more often, and the weather’s fine for once. Ride with me. This place will manage without you for a few hours.”