It was true that he must have been almost four times my age, but I had something that he didn’t. I had the friendship of dragons.
“Blood Baron, you are charged with treason, murder, looting, robbery, theft, and taking up arms against your sworn lord,” I said.
The Blood Baron spat on the floor. “Treason? Taking up arms?” he said with a stubborn snarl. “Against whom? We all here can see what is going to happen next. The Middle Kingdom has become a battlefield with Prince Vincent too busy fighting his northern border war with his own brother, and with Warden of the Eastern Marches dying in his sickbed not a day from here. It’s every village for itself, now, kid. You think that the Prince Vincent cares about this place? About what happens out here?”
The horrible man was right, of course, only he wasn’t right about one thing. He’d forgotten that I was the one standing before him, with a collection of very large, and very angry dragons at his throat.
“I care,” I said, finding what I said to be true. “I care what happens to this place, and these dragons care. So, Baron, you are going to subject yourself to justice.”
“Under whose authority?” the Baron snarled back. I’ll say this about him—he was certainly brave (if perhaps more than a little stubborn and foolhardy at the same time).
It was Char who answered him, calling out over my head. “Under the authority of the Dragon Order.”
The Blood Baron blinked, then his face collapsed into a scowl once more. Even he could not deny the obvious authority that we had, I saw as his eyes flickered from the snarling dragons to the woman behind me sitting up on the saddle on Paxala’s neck. Grumbling, he sat back down, and I felt a surge of savage joy.
“Neill!” It was Lila, waving her arm at me from where the two dragons stood, half in the waters of the lake. I had just left Char and Paxala in charge of the warrior and made my way around the edge of the ruined town to check on the others. They were helping out the survivors, the dragons using their tails or paws to create waves to lap their boats easily ashore, farther away from their smoking homes.
Lila and Terence’s Sinuous Blue dragon, Morax, was even wading out to gently grasp one of the largest of the Sheerlake refugee rafts with the tip of its teeth, pulling it gently back into land under the terrified, awe-struck eyes of the refugees within. From where they sat atop Morax’s back, both Lila and Terence were grinning wildly– they were just as smitten with their dragon as the refugees seemed to be.
Sigrid, on her Vicious Green Socolia, however, appeared to be having problems. She was now clambering half up the neck of the Green as it decided to wallow in the cooling waters of the lake, and the human girl was angrily pulling at Socolia’s horns to try and turn her back towards shore.
I started to laugh, but Sigrid shot me a murderous look.
“It’s not funny!” she called out. “She never listens to me! Ever!”
“Maybe you’re not asking the right questions!” I called back, before she glared at me. Socolia, the Green, was stocky and was definitely going to do her own thing it seemed, as she settled into the mud of the lake’s edge and kept only her head, back ridge and wings above the waters. Sigrid Fenn was stuck, at least until the Green had cooled down. It was hilarious, of course, watching Sigrid huff and plead with her dragon before sitting back down on top of the dragon’s head, her arms crossed petulantly over her chest.
But it was still going to be annoying, though. If Sigrid and Socolia cannot perform the tasks that we need them to, then they might have to fly on different, less urgent missions? I sighed, as I walked over to welcome the first of the refugees to shore.
Still too many questions, I thought. Too many questions about what out ‘new’ Dragon Order could do, and what the dragons would do, and whether any of it would work at all!
“You – you’re the boy who rides dragons?” said an elder woman, her hair black but not streaked with grey, and her skin smeared and dusted with soot and ash from her burning home.
“I am,” I nodded, as I helped a woman carrying a baby from the raft and up onto the shore. There were more survivors than I had first thought—thankfully— as it seems that the people of Sheerlake had a solid tactic of fleeing out to the center of the lake when threatened, and so a sizeable community of boats, rafts, and platforms had managed to get away before the Blood Baron had set their tower ablaze.
“I am sorry for all that you have lost,” I said sincerely, “and I only wish that I could have gotten here sooner.” And I’m glad that our dragons didn’t finish off the job of destroying your village, I mentally added.
“No, I am only pleased that you got here at all,” the elder woman said, encouraging agreement from the others around here. “Sheerlake is ruined, but we can rebuild, and we have each other,” she said with a grim smile, before turning her attention to the dragons above us. “They are…” she searched for the words to describe Morax. I saw a handful of expressions flicker across the old woman’s face; from surprise to fear, caution, anxiety, joy.
“I had never thought to see one this close,” the woman whispered, and all I could think to do was to nod. I didn’t want to steal this moment from her and the rest of the refugees by talking. This is their first encounter up close with a dragon, I thought with a sense of pride at how the elder woman stepped towards Morax and gently patted her large scales on her blue legs.
“Reeyar.” Morax bent her head down very gently, making a purring growl in her throat as she snuffed at the elder woman, before blinking her eyes and carrying on her way. Although, I knew that to the dragon it was little more than a ‘hello, what are you?’ to the elder woman it appeared to be like having a spiritual encounter.
“They are so gentle!” the elder woman said in shock.
“When they want to be,” I said wryly. Thank goodness she didn’t see what the riderless Green was doing to her village walls before!
“And they are strong. Yes.” The elder woman nodded, before frowning as she looked at me. “But you are not wearing the black. None of you are. You do not seem like Draconis Order monks.”
“We’re not,” I said, feeling oddly fluttery in my chest, as if I were about to lie – but I could find no falsehood in what I was saying. It’s because this is new. You don’t know what you are yet, either. “We’re new.” I confided in her. “The Draconis Order, as was, has fallen. The old Abbot has gone, but all of us here have had training at the monastery…”
I saw a shadow cross the woman’s face; a look of calculation, and worry. The Draconis Order had never really had the best of reputations, and even despite the many of us noble’s children who were sent there to train, I rather fear that it had just widened the gulf between the Order and the common folk of the Three Kingdoms. A place full of haughty, arrogant monks who sucked taxes out of the Middle Kingdom treasury for no good reason. The healers and the scribes that it supplied the country were just as corrupt and as self-serving as the Order itself seemed to be, demanding money from their lords for their supplies and their upkeep, and all in the name of ‘tradition.’
“But we’re not like them,” I said quickly. “We…” I searched for a description of what it was that we did. “We are finding ways to work with the dragons,” I added lamely.
“Hm.” The elder woman nodded slowly, frowning a bit at me, before looking up at the bulk of Morax as she ambled up the beach. This time, her look was one of barely-constrained wonder.
“Well, thank you all the same, Master Monk,” the elder said.
“Oh, I am no Master Monk at all!” I said quickly, a blush rising to my cheeks. “I am just Neill, Neill of Torvald,” I said, before a second later, the woman’s face fell.
“Oh, I am so sorry for your loss,” she said to me. “None of this would have happened in his day, of course…” she added, although I didn’t know precisely how that was meant to be congratulatory.
His day? I wondered. My loss. “I’m sorry, I don’t quite know that I follow you. Whose loss?” I asked with a distra
cted, bemused grin on my face.
“Your father, of course,” the elder woman said. “You’re Neill of Torvald, you said, so I suppose that you must be the same Neill Torvald who was sent off to train at the Draconis Order, right?” Sheerlake was, still, technically under my father’s protection and counted among the lands of Clan Torvald. Many people here would know the story of the mighty Malos Torvald, Clan Chief and Chief Warden, and his three sons Rubin, Rik, and Neill.
“I am,” I said a little uneasily.
“Then I am sorry for the loss of your father,” the elder woman intoned sadly. “A messenger reached us just last night, a few hours before the attack by the Blood Baron himself. Your father was a good man.”
Was he? I thought, reeling. My father was dead, I kept on thinking, the words rolling around and around in my head in an endless loop. My father was dead.
Chapter 6
Neill, Mourning
“My father is dead.” It was strange, to think those words, and even stranger to say them out loud. I stood in front of the small camp we had set up (with the help of the people of Sheerlake), as the sun started to set, casting the water into a sea of burnt rose and bronze.
“Oh Neill,” Char said, standing up from the fire to rush over to me, flinging her arms around my shoulders and hugging me. I didn’t move. I didn’t know what to do in response to that.
I felt weird. Hollow, in a way. Like this was news that had happened to someone else, not me, and not my father. How distant had I grown from him over the last few years? He was a man who I respected, I admired, and yes, and I had to admit that I loved him – but he was always a distant figure. Someone at the far end of a council hall, someone stalking away from me and calling for his spurs and his shield, someone at the other end of a letter.
“It’s going to be okay…” Char said as she pulled away from me, but I could see she didn’t believe it any more than I did. Char’s own relationship with her father was complicated as well. Just a few months ago he had tried to marry her off to secure a coveted tribal alliance with the mountain people of her Northern Kingdom, and from what she had told me, her father, the Prince Lander, had done little more than regard her as an asset for his royal strategies.
Malos Torvald wasn’t as bad as all that, of course. I knew he had thought well of me, at least, but just like Prince Lander, he had been too involved in his strategies, tactics, skirmishes, and politics to ever give me anything greater than essential training.
So, why was I upset? I thought, before realizing, with the next breath, I wasn’t. I felt numb and oddly floating in mid-air, like the world beneath me had grown insubstantial.
“I’ve already tasked Lila and Terence with watching over the prisoners, and a team from the Sheerlake refugees are going to be leading them to your father’s fort,” Char said. “We don’t have to get back too early to the monastery, do we? We have time…”
“Time for what?” I asked, confused.
“Time to fly to your father’s fort!” Char looked surprised. “To bury your father, of course.”
“Oh,” I nodded. The idea hadn’t even occurred to me that it was something that I should be doing at all. Ever since my brothers had attacked the Dragon Monastery last year (or tried to, anyway, before being repelled by the Abbot Ansall’s dark magics, and indeed by me on Paxala’s back), I had thought less and less of myself even as a Torvald at all. I had switched allegiances to the dragons of the crater, to my friends Dorf, and Maxal, Sigrid, Jodreth—and of course Char.
I sat by the fire, dumbly accepting the pot of fish stew that was pushed into my hands. It was garlicky and rich, tangy with pepper, salty-creamy with the fish, and filled with delicate new potatoes. It was simple fare, and it should have been delicious. Then why couldn’t I eat it? I thought, taking a few slurps before putting the cup of stew down by the fire. Char sighed from beside me.
“You have to go, Neill. He was your father, after all,” she said.
“I know. It’s just…. We were so different. And my brothers declared me a traitor, and my father did nothing to stop them…” All of a sudden, my hot anger returned at the betrayal I felt from my family. Rubin and Rik had hated me all of my life, for being born of a Gypsy mother after my father’s first wife (their mother) had died. We were all motherless sons, but it seemed that Rubin and Rik deemed that I was less of a ‘true Torvald’ than they obviously were. “My brothers, Rubin and Rik, had beaten me on regular occasions when they had thought that father wasn’t looking. But surely father must have known...” I tried to explain some of my complicated thoughts and feelings to Char. “He must have seen what was going on,” I said, as the same old knot of ugly thoughts that I always had whenever I thought of my family welled up inside of me.
“Could he have stopped them, though?” Char said at my side as she sat on the rock beside me. “You told me yourself he had been shot in some skirmish or another. That he was ill.”
“And poisoned,” I added. Clan Torvald’s Healer Garrett had been one of Abbot Ansall’s spies. The Abbot himself had told me that I had to work for him or else the healer wouldn’t reverse whatever horrible poison he was giving him. I shuddered. “I think that my brothers killed Garrett in the end.” I remember Rubin saying something about it, but even back then I had blanked out the grisly details.
“So, there you go…” Char tried to reassure me, setting the delicious and bland cup of fish stew back into my hands. “Your father might even have been too ill to understand what was going on. Certainly, he wasn’t well enough to stop them when they rode to attack the monastery.”
“Great,” I said, but now there was a terrible image in my head of my father wasting away on his sickbed, whilst I ignored him. My anger at my family turned into the hot shame and guilt of being a terrible son.
There is no way that I could lead the Dragon Order, not now, I thought to myself. I cannot. I can’t even look after my own father – how can I have Char and Paxala and the others relying on me to make the right decision?
“Neill,” Char said sharply, once again putting the cup of fish stew in my hands after I had unconsciously set it on the floor just a moment ago. “Listen to me, Neill. You are my friend, and I know you. You are a good man, Neill, son of Torvald, and I am willing to bet that your father saw that in you as well. You have saved my life more than once, as well as Paxala’s, our friends’… You are not defined by whatever madness your brothers decided to commit.”
“Yeah.” I nodded wearily. I knew that, I had to admit. I knew that there was so much more to me now than just being a ‘son of Malos Torvald’ – but what I was having trouble asking myself was what I should be, and what I could be. Before I could even pursue that line of thought, however, Char stood up and tapped the top of the cup of fish stew, still warm in my hands.
“Now, eat that, or I swear to the stars I will force it down your throat. And tomorrow, we are going to get up bright and early, and you are going to take me and Paxala to the Fort of Torvald, where we will pay our last respects. Understood?”
“Uh, yeah.” I nodded, not really sure what I was agreeing to – but right now it just seemed easier to take orders than to give them.
Chapter 7
Neill, Returning
The Fort, as we still called my family’s ancestral home and town, stood on a broad hill overlooking a wide valley. It was a good, strong, defensible position, as apparently my great-grandfather had said when he’d raised the Fort’s walls. It was dominated by a broad, sprawling hall that had reinforced ramparts, which were really wooden balconies underneath the broad eaves. Over the years, adjoining halls had been added to form wings – each with their own collection of hearths, sleeping quarters, and training areas.
It rose on the horizon in dawn’s grey light, looking not so much as the expansive home that I had once imagined it to be, but instead like a slouching, snarling dog.
It’s so small, I thought as we flew down towards it, raising up flocks of crows and magpies from t
he nearby coppices of the valley, and warning bleats of the flocks of the sheep and goats that the Torvald clanspeople kept. And so…simple, I couldn’t help seeing. The outer walls were still the same old tree-trunk palisades, sharpened to spikes, with internal balcony walkways from which the guards were gesturing and shouting at us. The Fort had very few stone buildings like the sort that Prince Lander had in his town, or that I had seen elsewhere on our aerial journeys.
The Fort’s wooden walls contained open pens for the animals and about the thatched roofs hung a haze of rising smokes from morning cook fires, smokehouses, and the baths. The purple and green pennants and banners of Torvald colors fluttered in the morning light, but they looked tired, tattered, washed and re-dyed, patched and re-sown with care but without access to the fine silks and rare dying powders that the monastery had. Our Torvald austerity was self-imposed, I knew. Even though we were one of the most powerful clans in all of the Middle Kingdom, my father was adamant that the money returned to the defenses of the Eastern Marches, to building wells and maintaining bridges, for raising work teams to build more walls, more guard towers. Few if any luxuries were permitted inside the Fort. It was one of the many reasons why my father hated – had hated, I corrected myself – Prince Vincent with all of his love for spending the people’s taxes on lavish parties, balls, and architectural wonders.
I didn’t want to admit it, but I felt a little disappointed as we flew towards home. Its spartan demeanor, its overt militarism made me feel more than I ever had like the Torvald Clan was mean and small-minded. Could they not raise a few more statues, or even parks, for the good of the people?
Dragon Mage (The First Dragon Rider Book 3) Page 4