And quite aside from all that, how had this person found him?
She was an apprentice witch, of course, but he hadn't known that witches could do that.
Somehow, though, she had found him. Maybe that spriggan he had seen run under the sofa had had something to do with it, if that was the same one he had seen back at the Inn at the Bridge—after all, he knew even less about spriggans than he did about witches.
Just how it was done didn't really matter, though, since it had been done.
So now what?
What did this do to his plans?
It pretty much knocked them to pieces, he realized, unless he could either get rid of this Teneria, or get her over on his side, somehow. He had intended to take his leave of the farm, then sneak back at night and steal two hatchlings, as breeding stock for his own farm. If he were in a witch's care he couldn't very well carry out his scheme without her knowing about it.
Getting her over to his side—well, that would be ideal, certainly. A witch would be extremely useful.
However, he couldn't imagine any way it could be done. Getting rid of her should be far easier.
Just now, though, he wasn't sure how to do that, either.
It would require further thought.
Teneria, even as she committed the names of all the children to memory, was listening as best she could to Dumery's thoughts.
She couldn't get them exactly, but she knew he wasn't happy with her presence. He had been planning something, and he didn't think she would approve.
This was something she would want to discuss with him. In private.
She smiled at Pancha and complimented her, in awkward Sardironese, on her fine collection of offspring. The mistress of the house smiled back.
She invited Teneria to stay for dinner, and for the night, and with an eye on Dumery, Teneria accepted.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Upon consideration, Teneria realized that effective privacy would not actually be all that hard to obtain, since the children spoke no Ethsharitic—only the adults had to be avoided. When Kensher and the older children were out checking on the livestock after dinner, and the younger children were playing with the spriggan, and Pancha was in the kitchen putting away dishes, a little judicious witchcraft allowed Teneria to get Dumery away from Kinner and Seldis.
Dumery hadn't really noticed yet that the two of them were alone in the front room until Teneria demanded, “All right, Dumery, what are you up to?”
Startled, Dumery said, “I don't know what you mean.” He eyed the young woman he was beginning to think of as his captor and wondered how much she knew. The stories he had heard were vague on whether witches could read one's thoughts, or merely sense moods.
“I know you're up to something," she said. “I'm a witch, remember? Now, suppose you tell me all about it.”
“All about what?" Dumery persisted, still unsure of his best course of action.
Teneria put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “You know what.”
“No, I don't,” Dumery said, trying to look puzzled.
Teneria let out an exasperated sigh. “All right, then,” she said, “let's take it a step at a time. What are you doing up here in the mountains of Aldagmor, instead of safe at home on with your parents?”
That was no secret any more, so there was no harm in telling the truth. “I followed Kensher,” Dumery said. “I wanted to arrange an apprenticeship with him. I saw him selling dragon's blood to Thetheran the Mage back in Ethshar, and I decided I wanted to get into the dragon's blood business, too. So I followed him here, and asked him.”
“And he turned you down,” Teneria said. She could see that from Dumery's attitude, and she could even see the reason—Kensher had eleven children of his own.
“That's right,” Dumery agreed. “He turned me down.”
“So now you're just going to go quietly home with me, I suppose,” Teneria said sarcastically.
Dumery ignored the sarcasm and nodded, trying to look innocent.
Teneria was disgusted. “Right,” she said. “You know perfectly well that that wasn't what you were planning at all.”
“Well...”
“So what were you planning?”
Dumery stood obstinately silent.
Teneria sighed again. “Suppose,” she said, “that your parents had instructed me to do whatever I can to see that you get what you came after, be it an apprenticeship or whatever. Would you still be standing there like that?”
“They didn't, did they?” He sounded very doubtful indeed.
“Not exactly,” Teneria admitted. “But they do want you to be happy, Dumery, and to find a career you'll enjoy. I don't think they'd object to dragon-farming. Now, did you have some scheme for getting an apprenticeship dragon-farming, after all?”
“No,” Dumery said. “There isn't any way. Kensher won't listen to me, and there aren't any other dragon-farmers.”
Teneria was glad to see that Dumery was telling the truth. “So it's not that,” she said. She eyed him carefully.
He was tall for his age, but very thin, with a very stubborn set to his jaw. His mind was not easily pried at—she could see at a glance that he was very closed and self-contained, and could never have become a witch.
A thought struck her. The boy had been desperate to become a magician, and here he was in Aldagmor, where, she now knew, the source of one kind of magic was to be found. “Is it something to do with the Warlock Stone?” she asked.
“The what?” Dumery answered, baffled.
No, it wasn't that; Teneria could see that the boy had never heard the term before.
Back to other matters, then. “Something to do with dragons?” she asked.
He didn't answer, but he didn't have to.
“Dragons,” she said. “Something to do with dragons.” She considered him carefully.
“Not hunting them, I hope?” She had a rough idea how dangerous dragon-hunting might be; she could hardly say she'd fulfilled her task of seeing that Dumery was safe if she let him go off hunting the great beasts.
“No,” he said, and she knew that he was telling the truth.
“It's something you feel guilty about, though,” she said. That much was obvious. “Something dangerous?”
He shook his head.
Teneria frowned. That was a half-truth. Dumery thought it might be risky, somehow, but he didn't think it should be really dangerous. That didn't tell her much.
This was all very tiresome. He obviously wasn't going to tell her if he could possibly avoid doing so, and she couldn't read it from him, and it might take hours, or days, to guess it. She glowered at him for a moment, then changed her approach.
“Is there anything you wanted to ask me?" she asked.
Startled, Dumery studied her carefully and considered his response.
She was a witch, but he had only a vague idea of what sort of magic witches used—he had mostly heard of healings and divinations, and didn't know much about how those worked. He had always been more interested in wizardry and the other, more prestigious varieties of magic, not the rather plebian witchcraft. And she was a girl, almost a woman—he wasn't sure whether to consider her a grown-up or not.
She was working for his parents, so he had been thinking of her as being on their side, on the side of rules and regulations and authority, but might that be a mistake?
He couldn't very well ask her straight out, “Are you going to stop me from committing a robbery?”
Maybe he could sort of feel her out, though. And there was something that he wondered about.
“What's the Warlock Stone?” he asked.
Teneria was caught off-guard, and hesitated for a moment.
Well, why not? What harm could it do?
“It's the source for all the warlocks’ magic. It's somewhere in Aldagmor, to the southeast of here.”
“Really?”
Teneria could clearly see the boy's sudden interest in this news, which was not at all
what she had wanted. She sighed again.
“Listen, Dumery, forget it,” she told him. “You can't get near it. No one can. It kills anyone who gets too close. I don't dare get much closer than I am right here and now—magicians are more susceptible.”
“Oh,” Dumery said. He thought that over.
He wasn't sure he believed her, but on the other hand, if it really were approachable, and if people knew where it was, and if it was really any use, then someone else would have gone there by now, and it would all be in the hands of others. After all, warlocks had been around since before he was born.
So that was out, and he was back to his former scheme.
“You're a witch, right?” he asked.
Teneria nodded. “An apprentice, anyway.”
“Have you ever put a curse on anyone?” Maybe she wasn't a total goody-goody. Maybe she'd go along with a little adventure.
“No,” she said, dashing his hopes. “Witches don't do curses.”
“They do in the stories...” Dumery began.
“All right,” Teneria said, exasperated, "I don't do curses. And I never met a witch who did, either, but maybe there are some.”
“Oh.” Dumery shut up. It was clear to him that a person who wouldn't deal in curses was not the sort to go along with a burglary scheme.
Teneria glared at him. The boy was infuriating! And it appeared that she wasn't going to learn anything else useful from him.
“All right, look,” she said, “whatever you've got in mind, just forget it, all right? Tomorrow morning we're starting back down the mountain, taking you home to Ethshar. You can find an apprenticeship of some kind there.”
Dumery didn't answer.
They glowered at one another for a moment, then marched away in opposite directions.
Later that night, as the household began to settle down, Dumery considered the situation.
He had intended to take his leave, go down the mountain until he was out of sight, then slip back up at night.
He couldn't do that while in Teneria's care, though. He would have to make his move that very night, while everyone was asleep, before he and Teneria were thrown together for good.
He had also planned to flee down the trail to the river, the same way he had come, but now he decided against it. If he did that, Teneria would come after him and find him, almost certainly. She was a witch, after all, and had found him way up here in the mountains of Aldagmor.
He could escape her, though. He saw exactly how he could escape her. If he headed south or southeast, toward the Warlock Stone she had spoken of, she wouldn't dare follow. The thing would kill her.
It wouldn't kill him, though, because he wasn't a magician. Or at least, it wouldn't kill him unless he got really close, which he would try not to do.
And the possibility that he might stumble on the Stone by accident—well, that was a chance he'd take.
And if he did, who knew? Maybe Teneria was wrong and he would wind up a warlock after all.
It didn't seem very likely, though.
He hadn't really planned everything out yet, but there was no time to spare, with Teneria here. He would just have to improvise, deal with problems as they arose.
As soon as he was sure everyone was asleep, he would go.
He lay back and waited.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Dumery crept down the stairs with his pack on his arm, walking to one side to lessen the chance of creaking, and listening intently for any sign that someone else was still awake—someone like Teneria, for example.
He heard nothing but the wind outside. Apparently witches slept just as soundly as anybody else.
Cautiously, he made his way down the hall and through the rear storage room to the back door, the one that led out to the dragon pens.
It was barred, with three heavy bars—Dumery assumed that that was just to keep dragons out, should one escape from its cage. He looked the bars over carefully.
They were padlocked in place, and the keys were nowhere in sight.
He had half-expected that. With a shrug, he turned and made his way, slowly and cautiously, back through the house to the front door.
That had an ordinary bolt and a hook latch; he threw the bolt, lifted the latch, and then, very slowly, eased the door open and slipped out.
Both moons were high overhead, the lesser just passing the greater, and between them they gave enough light that Dumery could see where he was going. He made his way up the path between the flowerbeds and through the garden, back over the rocky shoulder of the mountain, until he could see the forest spread out below, black in the moonslight.
The weather had finally warmed somewhat in the last day or so, and the winds were relatively calm, for once. Moonslight sparkled eerily from snowcaps on distant peaks, and the moons’ two colors edged shadows with pink and orange. It was a beautiful night. Dumery could easily have made his way downslope and into the woods without fear of stumbling or losing his way.
That was if he were heading downslope, though, and in point of fact he had no intention of doing so.
Rather, he intended to circle around the house so as to get at the dragon pens.
Accordingly, as soon as he was certain he was out of sight, should someone wake and glance out an upstairs windows, he turned left off the path and began cutting cross-country, through the pastures where the cattle that the dragons ate grazed.
At first he had intended to simply circle around to the back of the house by the shortest possible route, but he encountered an obstacle he hadn't known about—a fissure, separating the pasture from the dragon pens. The house appeared to have been built directly atop it.
He studied it for a moment. It was deep, and wide, and the plank bridge that the people and cattle presumably used to cross it was drawn up on the other side. One end ran right up to the foundations of the farmhouse.
He supposed it kept the dragons and cattle from approaching each other too closely, and he wished he had noticed it before.
It was too wide to leap, in the dark, and the lower end was impassable because of the farmhouse. He would have to go around the upper end.
That took him up out of the pasture, over the fence, and into the wilderness beyond.
There was no trail at all this way, and the terrain was rough; stretches of bare, jagged stone were interspersed with moss, lichen, gravel, and a few struggling pines. Dumery had to pick his footing carefully, and every so often a rock or chunk of moss would slide out from underneath him and send him sprawling. He cut his chin, bruised and scraped the palms of both hands, and twisted his left wrist painfully, but he made steady progress.
His biggest worry wasn't falling into the fissure—he kept a healthy distance between him and that—nor falling off the mountain—for the most part the slopes were not so steep as to make that a real danger—but the possibility of encountering an escaped dragon. Despite what Kensher had said, Dumery suspected that there were probably quite a number of them in the vicinity, gone wild.
He couldn't decide whether they would be more likely to leave the area completely and avoid the place where they had suffered in captivity, or whether they would hang around the only home they had ever known.
He tended toward the former theory, not just because it was reassuring, but because he remembered those pitiful broken wings hanging down across the hatchlings’ flanks. If he'd had something equally unpleasant done to him, such as a broken arm or two, he certainly would never again want to go anywhere near the place it had happened.
But he wasn't a dragon, of course, and he didn't know how dragons thought about these things. So he struggled onward and tried not to worry about it.
The lesser moon was down and the greater sinking fast when he finally scrambled around a towering boulder and found himself in sight of the back row of dragon pens, with the farmhouse just barely visible beyond them.
He smiled, satisfied, and crept down toward the pens, moving as silently as he knew how. He ignored the cur
ious glances some of the dragons gave him. Several of the sharp-eyed creatures were awake, and some had spotted him as soon as he emerged from behind the boulder into sight of the farm, but they hadn't done anything about it. There was no reason they should.
They weren't watching him constantly, but they certainly knew where he was and cast an occasional glance at him.
The bigger ones did, at any rate; the yearlings didn't seem to have noticed anything, and he couldn't even see the hatchlings from where he was.
The hatchlings, however, were what he was interested in. If he could sneak off with a pair of them, one of each sex, then he could start his own farm, and to hell with Kensher and his brood.
He had planned it out as best he could while he was convalescing, and although he never got another real tour after that first one, and had had to hurry everything up drastically when Teneria showed up, he had had chances to watch out the window when the hatchlings got fed, and had asked a few important questions—such as, “How do you tell them apart? Male and female, I mean.”
He hadn't gotten a good explanation, really, but in the ensuing conversation he had been told that the black one, the red one, and the reddish-gold one were all male, while the two blue-green ones were both female. The green ones included four males and two females.
He intended to ignore the green ones, since he couldn't tell them apart, and grab a blue-green one and one of the others. He figured that if he held them by the neck, one in each hand, they wouldn't be able to bite him—and he just hoped they wouldn't claw him. Hauling two four-foot, forty-pound dragons was going to be quite difficult enough without getting clawed up.
He hoped he could manage it. It would be tough, but if he got away with it he would be set for life.
He had watched when the hatchlings were fed and watered, and when Seldis had given them their bath—she had climbed up on top of the cage and poured buckets of water in through the bars, and then had gone into the cage with another bucket and a scrub-brush to do a final inspection and touch-up. Wuller had gone in with her, carrying a sharp prod, and two of the others, Kinner the Younger and Korun, had stood at the door of the cage as back-up, but the dragons hadn't given her any trouble.
The Blood of a Dragon Page 19