Dragon Heart

by Cecelia Holland

  Broga’s jaw dropped and his face turned bright red. Luka said, “Nobody fights in this hall.”

  “Of course, my lord. But, see, nothing really happened.” Oto spread his hands. “Let us have peace.”

  Mervaly was leaning forward, her head turning from one side to the other. She cocked an eyebrow at Jeon, who hunched down into his shoulders and directed his attention to his meat. A servant brought the jug with the ale. Mervaly said, “What did happen, Jeon?”

  “Stay out of this, Mervaly,” Luka said.

  Casea said, “Which would be a shock.” With a frown she lifted her hand with the needle, trailing purple thread.

  Jeon met Mervaly’s eyes, shiny with questions, and gave a little shake of his head. Somehow, he thought, he had let Luka down.

  Abruptly Jeon realized all of this was a kind of giant chess game. He was young, as his brother said, and all this while he had seen this much too small. He put his arms on the table, staring off across the room, while everything he knew overturned itself and settled into another order.

  * * *

  Later he met Luka on the stair into the King’s Tower and he pushed Jeon against the wall and spoke into his face.

  “If you can’t master yourself you can go where you’ll do no damage. Take off. Sign on to a ship. Get a quest. Go on a pilgrimage. Grow up.”

  Jeon said, “Let me kill him. It will save us a lot of trouble.”

  “Why do you think you could?” Luka took a step backward. His stare drilled into Jeon’s. “Stay away from them.” He punched Jeon lightly in the chest. “Obey me.” Two steps at a time he went up the stair.

  * * *

  “What is this?” Oto said, looking into the new chapel.

  Broga grunted. “It’s that damned boy.” On the wall the sword hung skewed, and the table he had brought in for an altar was pushed up against the wall under it; the lamps were broken. The oil had spilled down into the little wells on the altar. “Help me.”

  Oto came in after him and one at each end they tried to move the table, but it would not budge. Broga swore under his breath and signed himself. “I have guards on it, but somehow he comes in here and tosses things around.”

  Oto doubted Jeon tossed this table around, which was as heavy as if it had grown roots into the floor. He watched Broga straighten the sword and wipe it bright again with his sleeve. “I’ll put more guards on it,” Broga said. “The wretched brat. I need more lamps.”

  The pieces of the old lamps lay on the floor. Oto had thought at first it was the spilled oil that glistened on top of the table and filled the depression at this end. It did not look like oil. He dipped his finger into the well and touched it to his tongue.

  It was salt. It was seawater. He turned to Broga, to ask him about this, but he was kneeling, was going into the locked room of his prayers. No talking to him in this state. Oto went out the door, where a guard leaned against the wall, half-asleep. He needed to think this all out, and he went up to his room at the top of the tower, and shut the door.

  * * *

  “I had hoped to see Prince Jeon,” Oto said, looking around the hall. “To make amends between us.”

  Luka picked up his cup. “I sent him away.” He had been passing judgments all morning; the most recent supplicant was just going out the door. Luka wondered what Oto had in mind here. Someone else already waited, out there; they had been a long while without a King.

  “My lord,” the Imperial man said, “my brother has admitted he was as much at fault as Prince Jeon, who is young, and untried in men’s ways.” Oto glanced back over his shoulder at Broga, standing stiffly behind him, for once keeping his mouth shut. “I pray you not to punish him. But we surely must separate them; my brother is rash also, and intemperate at times. Broga will take it on himself to go. He can carry messages, such as we discussed on our ride here. To Santomalo, maybe even on to the Holy City.”

  Luka said, “I don’t think that’s necessary.” He gave Broga a sharp look. Oto moved, getting in his way, urgent with something else.

  “My lord, in the messages, let me say that I may marry the Princess Mervaly.”

  Luka laughed at that. “Go ask her. That’s hers to say, not mine.”

  “My lord.”

  “Ask her, not me.”

  “But I have your permission,” Oto said doggedly.

  “Yes, of course. Ask her all you wish.” Luka pointed over to the doorway, where two townsmen loitered, waiting for his attention. “Now, if you will, get out of here. I have work to do.”

  * * *

  Outside, in the room where all the stairs began, Broga got up in front of Oto, angry. “What is this? I have no interest in going anywhere.”

  Oto pulled him into a corner. “Shut up and listen. You are not going to Santomalo. Listen to me. Here’s where you will go, and this is what you will do.”

  * * *

  “No,” Mervaly said, and laughed, as if he had said something funny.

  They were alone in the room, except for the shuffling, squawking birds. She stood in the middle of the floor, her hair fiery with the sunlight spilling through the window, more beautiful than he had ever seen her. His body rushed with furious heat. His hands groped in the air.

  “Lady, consider the advantages. The King will thus be the Emperor’s kinsman. He can stay here unchallenged as master of Castle Ocean.”

  She said, “He is King of Castle Ocean now.”

  “But if we married, we would guarantee that.”

  “Leave,” she said. She was no longer laughing. “This will never happen.”

  “I beg you to reconsider.”

  “No.”

  “Then just keep your mind open to it.” Her luscious flesh, veiled but not hidden by her clothes. As if she read his mind she lifted her hands and smoothed the front of the gown over her breasts.

  “No,” she said. “Leave. Please.”

  He turned and went out like a whipped dog. His heart thrashed in his chest. He would kill her. First he would slake his lust with her; then he would kill her. In his own chamber, he sank into a chair, ignoring the other men around, and locked his hands together and stared at the floor.

  He was of the golden blood, heir in some degree to the crown of the world; she was a country girl, and yet she spurned him. Like everything else here, there was no order.

  * * *

  At low tide, the sea pooled in the black rocks off the very tip of Cape of the Winds, where her mother had fallen. There, with the sea constantly slapping and splashing in and out, a thousand little creatures lived, starfish bright as flowers stuck to the rocks, barnacles and limpets. Tirza sat on a flat rock watching the anemones sift the water through their delicate fingers. The sun on the water made wobbling arcs of light on the bottom. A long, dying wave rolled up, babbled into the pool at her feet, and dribbled away.

  Behind, it left a tiny octopus, which scooted at once into a hole. Her mother had gathered those, and milked them for their poisons. With such a poison she had killed the first Imperial suitor. Tirza wrapped her arms around her knees, watching the constant surge and ebb. At a sound behind her she turned, and saw Jeon coming toward her.

  She leapt up, glad, but he had such a long face she lost her smile and stood puzzled. He came down beside her on the rock and sat. He looked up at her. “Well, now both of us are exiled.”

  She sat down beside him, her knees drawn up, and he told her what had happened. He said, “And then I realized I had made a mistake. A stupid mistake.”

  She wrapped her arms around her knees, alarmed. Sometimes the mistake was in thinking too much. “Be careful,” she said, a meaningless growl.

  “Luka was right. I couldn’t kill him; I have no power. I have no force.” He said, “All this time I’ve been thinking that this with the Empire was so wrong, it could not be really happening, and it would go away, if I only hated it enough. But it won’t go away. It’s just getting worse. There’s a lot more in this than I knew.”

  His face
was taut. His eyebrows closed down over his nose. Through his pale eyes she saw the shifting in his mind. He said, “Luka knows.”

  She opened her mouth and shut it. She remembered Luka coming out here and talking to her, giving up his deepest thoughts to her, because she listened and said nothing. That was why Jeon was talking to her now, because she would say nothing, ever, to anybody. She was the Princess in the tower, locked away. A wave slopped into the tide pool, and carried off the little octopus.

  “He told me to go away,” Jeon said. “I’m not going anywhere. This is where I belong. If I belong anywhere it’s Castle Ocean.”

  The tremble in his voice startled her; she saw he was crying. His grief flowed into her like a tide. She leaned toward him, put her arms around him, her head on his shoulder, the salt of the sea in her eyes.

  * * *

  She wandered through the castle, and in a lower chamber, in air rich from the surf, she finally found her mother.

  Marioza was lying on her back on her ledge in the wall, bedded in seaweed, crowned with shells. She was smiling, like all the other dead, as if she knew something now that made everything Tirza knew unimportant. Marioza’s eyes were open. Tirza leaned over her mother, to get in the way of her gaze, and her eyes met her daughter’s a moment, and then looked somewhere else.

  “Mama,” Tirza said. “Tell me what to do.”

  On her mother’s face the smile broadened, but Marioza said nothing. Tirza thought again, They know what to do, and I am what they are doing. I and Luka and all of us. That did not console her. She sat down on the floor, her arms around her knees. She thought a curse should lift when the one who laid it died. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She remembered that other place, the sunlit cove, the dragon, who spoke to her, who listened and understood her, and a warm wash of longing broke over her, and she had to remind herself over and over why she had run away.

  * * *

  Broga rode out by himself the next morning. Jeon watched him go from the top of the cliff and, when he was sure he was gone, went down the path into Undercastle.

  Everything had turned over in Jeon’s mind. He saw what a child he had been, but he could not see the man he might become. Even the town suddenly looked strange to him, as if he saw it all new, and not as the one thing he always assumed it to be but as a million different pieces. As if for the first time he saw the rooms in the cliff face, how they bloomed into porches and doorways, the people going in and out. On the beach he had to tell himself to take each step as if he learned to walk all over again. In front of the domes of the bakery ovens two girls stooped to shovel in the wood. This should have been Leanara and he remembered why it was not and it was as if the whole world shook under him for the death of one old woman. In the sailmaker’s shop the old man and his son were arguing, as usual, and Jeon felt that like some bedrock under his feet. All around him, the only world he knew, a boil of weightless incidentals. He walked on blindly through the town, enduring this.

  * * *

  Luka had collected a little pack of dogs from Undercastle, and Oto got one of his men to handle them. Luka intended to go back out to Terreon and pick up the trail there, but before this happened word came of the boar, only a day’s ride away.

  Luka had known this would happen. He thought, It is coming after me.

  Oto’s men were still out on patrol, and Jeon and Broga were gone; so only the two of them went off, with the handler leading the dogs on leashes. They rode steadily east, toward the vine country. The dogs tangled in the leashes, and went yortling off on every trail they crossed; Luka thought they were fairly useless.

  He had brought half a dozen boar spears; remembering how the crossbar had stopped his thrust into the boar, the first time, he reset the crossbars on these much higher on the shafts. Oto was eager, this time, riding along beside Luka, his face intent. Once, Luka glanced at him and Oto gave him a huge, companionable smile.

  They crossed the broad meadows. In a wood, well short of the vineyards, the dogs suddenly bunched together, nosed the ground, and began to bell. The soldier struggled with the leashes, and Oto said, “Sir, we should let them go.”

  “It’s a hare,” Luka said, but he nodded.

  The soldier slipped the leashes and the dogs plunged away into the trees. Luka galloped after them down a short, steep slope. The thick wood hid the dogs from him, but ahead their savage bellowing rose to howls. They were on something, certainly. Oto had fallen behind him. The ground flattened out, the trees wider apart, old oaks, the space between them choked with brambles and vines, and he cut a game trail and followed that.

  Ahead, the dogs suddenly began to yelp, rejoicing. They had cornered something. Luka took one of the boar spears in his left hand, and spurred the horse out into a clearing in the trees.

  He skidded his horse to a stop. No boar, but a dozen men waited there, in a circle that now surrounded him. Leading them was Broga, a bow in his hands. Beyond, in the trees, Luka saw the dogs tearing at the carcass of a pig, which they had dragged to lead him here.

  He yelled. He wrenched his horse around, and the horse went down like a rock, an arrow through its neck. Luka leapt to the ground, in their midst, and Oto galloped in behind him.

  Broga said between his teeth, “I should make you eat sand,” and nocked another arrow.

  “Don’t shoot him!” Oto cried. “They’ll know an arrow hole. Kill him with your knives—”

  Luka made no sound but launched himself straight at Oto. Oto’s horse reared up, but he got both hands on Oto and dragged him down off the saddle and to the ground. The others closed on him. He ignored them. They would kill him, but he would kill Oto. Luka pounded down at the writhing body under him, smashing his fist into Oto’s body, driving Oto’s head against the ground. The others wrenched at him. Broga’s voice was screaming, “Get him! Get him!” Their knives bit into him. He could hear nothing but an oceanic roar in his ears. He drove his knee into Oto, his elbows. A blade tore across Luka’s face. His arm wouldn’t work. His sight was dimming. He sobbed in a breath. His strength was gone, and he slumped down, the blood flowing out from him in a tide, Oto sprawled under him, and he gave up his last breath and was gone.

  * * *

  Oto lay there, sobbing with pain, and somebody pulled Luka’s body off him. Broga said, “He’s dead, now. You can get up.”

  Oto pushed himself up with his arms. His whole body ached and his nose pulsed a fiery throb. His doublet was drenched in blood. His hair dripped. The body sprawled beside him was slashed and ripped to shreds, even Luka’s cheeks and nose and forehead. Still, Oto watched a moment, to make sure Luka was really dead.

  “Not so big now,” Oto said loudly, and locked his teeth against the pain, and wished he could kick the sprawled corpse beside him. “Help me rise.”

  * * *

  Casea lifted her head suddenly and screamed. Tirza, sitting on the bed, leapt up, and Mervaly rushed across the room and flung her arms around her. “What is it? What is it?”

  “Something has happened. Something awful has happened.” Casea clung tight to Mervaly, panting. Tirza leaned together with her, sobbing.

  “Tell us—tell us—”

  “I don’t know. Something.” Casea leaned her head against Mervaly’s soft comfort; the fit had emptied her out. She never knew what it meant. She said, “We have to be together. Call Jeon. Find Jeon.” She shut her eyes.

  * * *

  So they were ready when the men came back, carrying Oto on a stretcher and Luka across a saddle. They stood in the gate yard, all four of them, all who were left, and they gathered together into one another’s warmth and watched their brother come home.

  Oto, on his stretcher, was babbling at the sight of them. A swelling bruise covered half his face. His nose was broken. “We caught the boar. He would go first, always—” Oto’s bruised face worked into a grimace of pain. “I tried to help him and the beast turned on me—”

  Broga stood beside him. “Thanks be to God we happe
ned on them when we did.”

  Mervaly went up to the led horse, and laid her hand on Luka’s hair. The voices of the brothers went on around her, like the chirping of birds.

  “Luka died in my arms. I swear I will avenge him.” Oto fell back on the litter, panting.

  They laid Luka’s body on the table in the great hall, where every King of Castle Ocean save Reymarro had lain. Tirza brought seawater in a basin and Casea held the towels and Jeon washed Luka’s body, and Mervaly combed his hair.

  The basin was heavy; the greenish water turned smoky with the blood. Tirza felt her hands shake. The body lay on the slab, white now, the wounds clean, and the wounds moved, and they whispered, Murder. Murder.

  Casea whispered, “What do you think happened?”

  Jeon stood back, dropping the last towel to the floor. “You saw their hurts. Luka’s were all teeth. Oto’s were all blows.” He said, “And then there’s Broga. How did he get there? They didn’t even bother to cook up a good story.”

  Jeon was trembling. His face was rigid. Casea laid her hand on his arm, and he gave a violent shudder. Mervaly brought out a long green shirt, and they turned Luka faceup on the slab and dressed him. They drew the dark hose up over his legs and body, and Tirza cleaned his boots and put them on. They crossed his torn hands over his chest. All his blood was gone, and his face was white as the inside of a shell. One by one, they bent and kissed him.

  Mervaly said, “Sleep, my brother. Sleep well.”

  Casea said, “Poor Luka, I shall miss you so much.”

  Tirza growled.

  Jeon said nothing.

  * * *

  Oto was in his chamber, covered with bruises, unable to walk. Out in the gate yard, in the gathering dark, the Imperials gathered in a clutch and Broga stood up before them and talked about the horrors of hell and the door of death, which once entered they could not come back from, and so they should consider their sins now, while they could still change their evil into goodness. Tirza stood just inside the wall, where she could listen to this, but her sisters went up into their tower.

  * * *