by Tim Stead
“More than you know,” Kirrith said. The dragon opened its mouth, a cavern full of teeth, each thick as a man’s thigh at its base, and white as snow. The avatar reached within and drew out two blades. They seemed black at first, but on closer inspection they were the same absence of colour that characterised the dragon’s scales. The avatar drove the blades into the rock floor of the chamber, and they went in as easily as if the rock had been butter.
Then a most surprising thing – the avatar climbed up between the bars of the teeth and into Kirrith’s mouth. The mouth closed. It was a simple way of reuniting dragon and avatar, Narak supposed, but it looked a little grim. He stepped forward and studied the swords.
“The blades are yours,” Kirrith said. “They are pure dragon steel. They will cut through rock, iron, common steel, and they will never blunt or break.”
“Why?” He was puzzled by the gift.
“The second boon is driven by the first. You are no longer Benetheon god, nor Farheim. You are dragon kin.”
“But why?” Narak asked.
Kirrith’s head moved until it was less that a foot from Narak, the huge head hanging over him. “Because I am a fool who knows better, yet acts not.” His voice was less than a whisper, a distant rumble in the back of his cavernous throat. “Because I see the folly and do not turn my head away. Because I hear the lie and yet believe.”
He rose up again, and now the voice became a roar that shook the mountain.
“I believe!”
The single shimmering scale spread its light like a contagion down the dragon’s back in an explosion of rainbow light. It was bright, too. Just for a moment Narak could see the roof of the chamber in which he stood, etched high above him by the lurid light. For that moment he knew how large the chamber was, how vast Kirrith was, and then the light was gone, fading as quickly as it had come, and when his eyes had recovered from the bright assault he could see no mark at all on Kirrith’s back. It was as though he had never been touched.
Even here within the mountain he could hear the roaring of dragons waiting in the frozen waste outside.
Nine, as Torgaris would doubtless say, was better than eight.
Fifty Six – Tilian
The world was turning green again. Everywhere the trees were awakening from the long sleep of winter, small flowers speckled the roadside with colour, and birds were putting on their courting finery. Each day was longer than the one before.
Spring.
For Tilian it was a time of mixed feelings. He had always liked spring. Even in the city where it found only a muted expression he had enjoyed the season. It was the promise of summer, the lengthening days, the brightening sky. He liked the greening fields, and especially the first berry fruits in the markets, which reminded him of his boyhood.
But now spring meant war. Tilian was a soldier, and he would soon be fighting again.
It had been exciting at first: those heady days at Henfray, and then the long march and the heroics at Fal Verdan. He had been proud, and prouder still to be in the service of Lord Skal Hebberd, the hero of the wall. He was still proud, but he was weary, too. He had killed a lot of men. He had shot them with arrows, burned them with fire, crushed them with stones, and even gutted a man with his own blade. Each death weighed heavily upon him.
He could not say that he regretted killing them. Each time there had been a good reason, and this was war. He had seen what Seth Yarra had done in the villages before Henfray, and he knew his cause was just. All the same he was tired of fighting, and it seemed the odds were stacking against him. He was young, and he wanted to live a full life, but word had reached Bas Erinor of yet another great Seth Yarra army gathering in Telas.
In each battle more men died. Eventually his turn would come.
He pushed such gloomy thoughts away and looked about him. He was on the road with four companions, riding the king’s highway north to Latter Fetch. The sun was shining, the air was fresh, and a westerly breeze was carrying welcome scents from the trees and fields all about.
Latter Fetch had briefly been his home, but it was no longer.
Duke Quinnial had ennobled him, and one lord could not truly serve another, and so his service to Skal has been stolen from him and been replaced by another. They had made him Lord Tilian Henn of Low Kenrish. It was a place that he had never seen. It was his intention to stop at Latter Fetch for a last time on his way there. There were things that he had left there, he told himself, things that he would need for his new life, and he had a letter to deliver.
The four men that rode with him were from his unit, his ghosts. The house and grounds would be staffed, but the staff would all be strangers, and he had seen how badly things might go wrong when Skal had gone to Latter Fetch for the first time. Low Kenrish would not be the same. The men he had with him were veterans. There was nothing he did not believe they could cope with.
But first there was Latter Fetch.
They crossed the boundary, marked by a lime washed stone on the side of the road, after a hard day’s ride as evening drew in. The fields seemed tended, but there was nobody working there, which he had expected. He thought it must be the planting season for many crops, but then he was not a country man. He did not know their ways.
The southern village transformed his unease into alarm. Almost every building was burned. He and his men searched the ruins quickly, but they found no bodies. The place brought back echoes of his road to Henfray, the destroyed villages, the piles of corpses, but here he could not even find a single grave.
So it was with a mixture of hope and apprehension that he galloped the last mile to Latter Fetch, looking ahead all the time until at last the house came into view around a bend in the road.
There were people here. There was damage. He could see the tell tale marks of smoke above a few of the windows, but to his relief he could see people working on the gravel before the house. Ranks of saw horses had been set up and logs were being planed and shaped for building. Horses were dragging timber from the pine forest, which looked much the worse for wear. He was not surprised when Brodan stepped out of the forest, bow slung over one shoulder.
“Captain Henn,” he said. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“What happened?” he asked, gesturing at the house. “Was anyone killed?”
“Some Seth Yarra boys came up the road,” Brodan said. “We lost a man at the village, but apart from that it went well, though I think Lady Sara lost a few books to the smoke.”
“Books?” He remembered that she had been appointed librarian. Was she taking that seriously, then? It seemed so. He dismounted.
“Aye, books,” Brodan grinned. “We had news of you, captain. They said you’d been fighting down on the coast with the first regiment.”
They swapped stories, though Tilian was keen to get inside the house. Now that he was here and could see the place he was in no particular hurry to leave. Perhaps he would stay a few days among friends, help out a little with the building. It seemed that Sara was carrying through Skal’s plan to build new houses, a new village for the estate staff in among the woods.
Jackan, who had chosen to come with Tilian, echoed his thoughts. “How long will we be staying, my lord?” he asked.
Brodan didn’t miss the title. “My lord?”
Tilian smiled a wry smile. He was almost embarrassed to admit to his elevation, but proud as well. “Aye, Duke Quinnial did me after Cain broke the siege on Bas Erinor. They gave me a place called Low Kenrish, about two days east of here. Do you know it?”
“I’ve heard the name,” Brodan said.
“It means you’ll be captain here,” Tilian said.
“Me?”
“Can you think of another? You certainly have my voice if that carries any weight.”
Now it was Brodan’s turn to smile. “Me,” he said. “Captain of my lord’s guard. Well, why not? If this war goes on much longer there’ll be none but lords and captains in Avilian.”
“Or none at
all,” Tilian muttered.
“Come, my lord,” Brodan said, and there was not a trace of mockery in his use of the title. “We have wine and food, and the fires will be lit, and I am sure that the Lady Sara will be pleased to see you.”
Tilian had been keeping thoughts of Lady Sara at bay. Like spring she was the source of mixed feelings. He had been away from Latter Fetch for so long that she might have forgotten her interest in him, but part of him hoped that she had not. He wondered if she was still as pretty, still as unruly as he remembered.
Brodan led him straight to the library where they found Sara and a maid busily restoring books to their shelves. The table was stacked with volumes of all shapes and sizes and Sara was half way up a ladder with a soft cloth, carefully wiping each volume as she restored it to its rightful place.
“The Lives of the Elder Gods,” she said. “On the fourth pile, there,” she pointed. Her back was to the door and she had not heard them enter over the noise of the working men outside, so Tilian had a moment to inspect her.
Sara was wearing a long grey dress, trimmed in white. It emphasised how slender she was, perched on the ladder, leaning carefully to one side as she read the spines of books. Her hair was tied back, constrained in a queue that fell heavily between her shoulder blades all the way down to her waist. It swung like a pendulum as she leaned across, and the dark hair and cloth contrasted with her pale neck and hands.
The maid saw Brodan and Tilian and stopped, book in hand, mouth open.
“My lady, Captain Henn is here,” she said.
Sara almost dropped the book she was holding. She almost slipped off the ladder as her head twisted around to see. Somehow she did neither, gathered herself, and climbed carefully back down to the floor before turning.
Tilian’s memory had not played him false. Dark eyes, perfect, pale skin, straight nose, a mouth that even now smiled at him.
“Captain, you should have sent ahead,” she said.
Brodan butted in. “No longer captain, my Lady. You have the honour to address Lord Tilian of Low Kenrish.”
It was an awkward moment. Socially Tilian was now above her in the traditional pecking order. She was blood kin to Skal, who was, in theory, Tilian’s equal. But Sara seemed to come to terms with the change quite quickly. She smiled again, bowed the polite bow of a near equal.
“I am indeed honoured, Lord Tilian,” she said. “Will you stay and dine with us tonight?”
“I will,” he replied. “If you would be so kind as to quarter my men – there are only four of them.”
“Of course,” she replied. Sara walked around the table until she was no more than two paces from him. She looked into his eyes, boldly, as though searching for something. He could not tell if she found it because he looked away. “Will you stay and talk with me, my lord?” she asked. “Tell me your tale?”
“A soldier’s stories,” he said. “Not fit for delicate ears.”
“You forget where I came from, Tilian.”
“You forget where I have been,” he replied.
She looked at him, then nodded. “Perhaps,” she said. “But I have stories of my own. We have not been entirely free of the war here.”
“So I saw,” Tilian said. “You are not rebuilding the southern village?”
“No. It is a little more labour, but it seems a perfect opportunity to execute Lord Skal’s plan.”
Tilian remembered.
“I have a letter for you,” he announced. He expected her to be surprised. He had never received a letter himself, had never delivered one before, but Sara did not seem at all amazed.
“Oh, who is it from?” she asked.
“I do not know,” he replied. It had been given to him by a man who had found him at the Seventh Friend. He had been quite relaxed at the time, and not asked the man’s name. Perhaps he should have. He pulled the paper out from within his tunic. It was a little crumpled, but the wax seal was intact. It was quite plain on the outside; good quality parchment with the three words written in a fair hand: Lady Sara Bruff. He held it out and she took it.
“It is Manoc’s hand” she said. “So the message will be from Nesser.” The names meant nothing to Tilian, and he began to wonder what she had been up to all the months that he had been away. She popped the seal with her thumb and unfolded the letter. He watched her face as she scanned the words. First he saw curiosity, then a small frown, quickly followed by delight – a grin that made her look almost childlike.
“Yes!” she said.
“Yes?”
Sara smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It is book business. There have been scholars here to study the books, and this is from one of them. He asked me if I would welcome formal recognition from the Royal College in Golt, and this is it.”
“The Royal College?” Tilian knew that he was out of his depth here.
Sara put a hand on his arm. “I will explain it all to you at dinner, Lord Tilian,” she said. Tilian nodded. Now he understood. He had left a tanner’s widow here at Latter Fetch, a girl, struggling to understand the world into which she had been cast. Now he had come back to find a lady, confident, and to some degree accomplished in her work. Tilian was a soldier, and before that he had been less. His education was poor, and he knew nothing outside the grim business of killing people.
“I will leave you to your work,” he said. Sara seemed about to say something, but he withdrew, walked back down the corridor that led to the outside. Here there were horses, men, weapons. These he understood.
He had barely regained the open air when Brodan caught up with him.
“My lord?”
“What is it?”
“Have we offended you?” Brodan asked.
“Offended? No, of course not.”
“I feel that we must have,” Brodan said.
“Nonsense. Why would you say such a thing?”
“Well, frankly, my lord, you stamped out of the library like an angry child.”
It was impertinent, no doubt of it. Not only was Brodan a lieutenant speaking to a lord, but a soldier speaking to his commanding officer. Yet what he said was true. Tilian was young, but he had watched his lord learning from an older man, and he had learned the same lessons. He had never seen General Arbak snap at a man who told him the truth, and it was an example he intended to follow, as difficult as that seemed just at this moment.
He looked at the ground, then at the horses and men that had travelled with him. Brodan was probably as close a thing to a friend that he had – he certainly felt closer in station to the man than he did to Sara at this moment.
“I am sorry if I seemed angry,” he said.
“I do not need your kind words, my lord,” Brodan said.
“Lady Sara?”
“She does not understand, my lord,” he said.
Tilian did not answer at once, but walked away from the house in the direction of the forest. Brodan followed. “She had changed so much,” he said eventually.
“As have you, my lord,” Brodan said. “But neither of you as much as the other thinks.”
“You are suddenly wise, lieutenant,” Tilian said. He had to bite back the words or they would have come out as a rebuke. “And I hardly think that I have changed at all.”
“You left here a boy, a servant. You come back with your name known the length of Avilian, famous in Berash, and I’ll wager it is cursed among the Seth Yarra. You are no longer just Tilian Henn. You are the Tilian Henn.”
“But not here,” Tilian said. “If I’m known anywhere it is here.”
“She has followed your career,” Brodan said. “She has friends in Golt and Bas Erinor. She knows that you fought in the north, that you were knighted, that you had victories in the south and met the king himself. She knows that you were chosen by the Wolf. She asks for news of you from all she meets.”
“They are just stories,” Tilian said.
“For a clever man you are quite stupid,” Brodan said. “She asks because she worries, not
because she wants to hear of your victories.”
“She worries? About me?”
“Aye, she does. I tell her that no Seth Yarra ever sees you, that you sneak around in the bushes and pick them off with arrows, but still she worries.”
Tilian almost managed to grin at Brodan’s description of his war. “Well, if she worries, then it means something, does it not?” he asked.
“It does,” Brodan said.
“But she is so clever…”
“You are no fool, my lord.”
“Sometimes it does not feel that way, Brodan.”