Highland Dragon Warrior

by Isabel Cooper

  “Two months.” His accent wasn’t nearly so strong as that of other Scotsmen she’d met, even the others who spoke English, but the first word still came out twa. “Best start at the beginning. You ken the war?”

  “More or less. The details…” She lifted her free hand and let it fall.

  “No need of them. We were fighting the English… Aye, some ways from here,” he added at her surprised look. She’d not heard that the war had reached such a remote part of the Highlands, nor had Loch Arach the look of a village that had recently seen combat. “I was at the war then, and my sister managing all of this.”

  “Your sister?”

  “One of them, aye.” He glanced down at her and flashed a grim half-smile, one that admitted no questions. “She’s taken my place now, and I hers. So then. We were a ways from here on a fair desolate patch of ground, and there was a troop of the English. Not a normal part of the army, I should think. I’ll give Longshanks that much. Whatever sort of devil he may be, I’ve heard nothing like that of him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Ah.”

  She didn’t immediately get an answer, because their journey through the kitchens had stopped in front of a man with red hair, a large beard, and an air of officious bad temper—probably a butler or a steward. He glanced from her to Cathal, blinked, and then asked a question in Gaelic. Cathal replied with what sounded like several of his own, and the conversation lasted an incomprehensible few minutes.

  Sophia took a look around. Castle kitchens had never really been a part of her life. She couldn’t quite fit the modest domain of her mother and sisters, nor even the kitchens in the grander parts of town, into the same word as this sprawling, busy maze. On one side of the room, men in bloody tunics were cutting up what looked like half a pig, while a woman almost as covered with flour kneaded bread some distance away, scolding more pages as she did so. Everyone was moving. Sophia tucked her elbows closer to her sides and took a step closer to Cathal, trying to get out of the way.

  Naturally, that was when he finished talking and turned toward her. For an awkward moment, her nose practically hit his chest. There was a great deal of chest, she noticed again, and it still all looked to be solid muscle. Hurriedly, she stepped back. “My apologies.”

  “Think nothing of it. This way. And take a cloak.” He pulled one from a peg beside the kitchen door and tossed it to her. “You chill easily.”

  “I do no such thing,” Sophia said, though she was wrapping the cloak around herself while she spoke.

  “You…humans. Mortals.”

  “Oh. Well.” She looked down at the cloak, which smelled like onions. “Whose is this?”

  Another name, this one a bit like George. “He’ll not leave until long after we’re back. Not with dinner as it is.” They stepped outside, where the world was clear and blue and brittle. After what Cathal had said, Sophia forced herself not to gasp at the chill of it. “The men were vicious.”

  It took her a moment to realize he’d stopped talking about the cold or the cloak. “The English?”

  “Aye. Past what I’d expect of men, even in war. One or two of them didna’ seem quite like men at all. Their faces…shifted. There were too many shadows to them. I could say no more, not with any certainty. And their leader was a wizard. Is.”

  “A wizard?” For a man not entirely human, Cathal spoke very generally. Wizard could have meant her uncle Gento, gray-bearded and ink-stained, or Merlin Ambrosius, or Sophia herself, though it embarrassed her to even make the comparison. “How do you mean?”

  Cathal shrugged. “He threw fire at us. It came from a wand…one that looked to have been a bone once, though I was never close enough to look very well. I took no hurt from it, of course. I changed shape to handle the shadow-men.” He sighed, sending a cloud of steam out into the frigid air. “That impressed him.”

  His voice suggested that both wizards and men made of shadow were, if not usual, at least not wholly a shock to him. “Do they have many such forces?” Sophia asked. “The English?”

  “Enough magic to hold us off. Nothing quite like this. Not that I’ve seen. A moment.”

  A smithy sat at the corner of the courtyard, and Cathal swung into it. Sophia followed, glad to feel the warmth of the forge but carefully keeping both her cloak and skirts out of the way. The smith himself looked up once, spoke to Cathal, and then went on speaking even as he turned back to the horseshoe he was hammering out. His apprentice, crouched before the fire with a pair of bellows, spent more time looking at Sophia—at least until the smith himself directed a growl the boy’s way.

  Looking out, Sophia saw that the smithy and stables were just a few of the buildings sheltered behind the castle walls. A covered well was near the smithy itself; opposite that, another low building whose purpose she couldn’t identify; and across the way she caught the gleam of stained glass and guessed that there lay the chapel. Off in a corner, snow-covered hedges marked out a square of barren earth—a garden, when the weather allowed?

  It’s like a tiny city, she thought, and the idea was unsettling. She’d known the idea of a keep, of course, but walking through the reality brought it home. If Cathal and his people had so much behind the castle walls, it was probably because they could get it nowhere else so quickly, nor be assured of their safety in the process. Out here, the castle was a lone flame in the darkness.

  She shivered, which she could have told herself was the cold, and then swallowed, which she couldn’t, and fortunately Cathal chose that moment to start walking again.

  “What did he do? The…magician?”

  “Made me an offer.” Cathal’s jaw tightened. “Not a bad one, by his standards. Not…” He shook his head, golden-brown hair shifting in the cold breeze. “He said they could use a creature like me. Pointed out the benefits. Then I cut his arm off.”

  “That would be an answer, yes?”

  “It was.”

  Passing the stables, they headed for a door near the gatehouse. Cathal went a few yards without speaking, and Sophia was nerving herself to ask another question when he began again.

  “The arm…crawled. It must have. But the word sounds slow, and it was quick. It’d flown some ways when I struck—they do betimes, aye, if your blow’s strong enough, and I was sore angered—and it wrapped its fingers around Fergus’s leg. The stump of the arm was still bleeding.”

  Sophia put a hand over her mouth, stopping the small sound of revolted surprise that she couldn’t suppress any other way.

  “The magician said something. I didn’t know the language—and I’ve Latin and Arabic both. Fergus fell down screaming. The magician said he’d melt like the snow in spring, did I not come and join him. His name, he said, was Valerius.”

  “I doubt it,” Sophia said without thinking. Cathal turned toward her, eyes sharp, and she shrugged. “At least, I doubt that his mother or her priest would know it. At least it wasn’t Maximus. Or Rex, though I suppose Edward the Longshanks would have had a few things to say about that.”

  Mirth stole onto Cathal’s face, not softening its lines but warming it from within. His smile was wide, and his teeth surprisingly white for a man in this country, though perhaps not for one of his blood. “I hadna’ considered that view of it.”

  “I could be wrong. He could be a very well-preserved Roman. Or have a very pretentious family,” Sophia said, unable to resist a smile as she spoke.

  “Aye, well, they’d have to have something amiss with them,” Cathal said, and then the warmth faded from his expression. “As it may be. I went for his head. One of his shades went for me. Gave me this.” He patted his shoulder, over the bandage. “And by the time I’d dealt with that wee bastard, his leader was gone. Vanished into the shadows, my men said.”

  “And since then…” Sophia let the sentence trail off.

  Cathal nodded. “As you saw.”

 
He opened the door and held it so she could go through. Passing him was like walking by a fire. Sophia resisted the urge to hold out her hands. Beyond, a short hall led to a winding stone staircase, just broad enough for one person to climb at a time. She followed Cathal, glad of the chance to think without speaking for a time.

  Directing her thoughts required a greater effort than she was accustomed to. With Cathal walking just before her, she spent some time noticing the shift of muscles beneath plaid and tunic while he walked, the straightness of his shoulders, and the lift of his tawny head. In the dimness of the castle stairs, he stood out like a flame.

  By the time they came to a landing and he opened another door, she’d collected her thoughts as much as she thought she was likely to manage. “I’ve never tried to counter a spell before,” she began in the interest of honesty. “I have read one or two passages about it, and some more notes, but I can’t say I ever paid as much attention to that as I did to other things. I’ll see what I can remember, and I have a few books with me. Does the castle have a library?”

  “Aye. I can’t swear to all its contents.”

  “If you’ll permit it, I’ll see if anything there can aid me.” The MacAlasdairs were a family of dragons, and at least parts of the castle seemed to run on magic. Somebody might have bothered studying it, or even writing it down. “You would have told me if the village had a magician…even a cunning man, or a witch nobody talks about?”

  She hadn’t gotten her hopes up and therefore was not too disappointed when Cathal shook his head. “We’ve a midwife who knows a bit of herbs.”

  “She might be helpful. I’ll need to talk with her, though that’ll be later. And I’ll need a room…not to sleep, but where I can experiment.”

  “We’ve rooms enough. Especially now. The one by Fergus is empty.”

  Sophia hesitated, uncertain about asking for too much, but then practicality stepped in. “A more isolated chamber would work better. There are explosions from time to time.”

  “Naturally,” Cathal said. “I’ll find you a place. For the present…here,” he said and opened the door from the previous night.

  Now the room was light enough for Sophia to see her bags on a table by the hearth. She could see Fergus’s face too, in more detail than she’d been able to before. He didn’t look unusual: brown hair, square jaw, pale skin. He would have blended in very well with the rest of the men in the castle, if he’d been awake and moving. Stillness, even more so than his growing dissolution, distinguished him.

  “He’s young,” she said, unthinking.

  “They’re all young,” said Cathal.

  With nothing to say in response, Sophia turned from Fergus to the table where her supplies lay. Already she was making lists in her head: the necessary tests, the herbs she had and those she might even be able to get in the Scottish winter, and the small vials of ground metal or stone. She’d have to be careful of her resources, she thought, remembering the sense of isolation in the courtyard.

  She’d have to be careful of many things.

  Four

  Cathal had bled men before. Such times had been rare and unskilled: he’d spent his manhood as a knight, not a physician. Yet war was war. The aftermath of battle left more wounded men than hands to heal them, and the days and weeks after led to fever as often as not. He’d cut arrows out of flesh a time or two; he’d opened veins when that was necessary. The process was faintly familiar. He also was covering no new ground. Bleeding had been their first thought for a cure, and the cut on Fergus’s arm was only half healed.

  It was still hard, and Cathal was glad of it. In the work of remembering which veins were minor, of tying them off and passing the blade of his knife through the candle flame, of making sure not to overlook any step, he could almost forget the man on whom he was working.

  Conscious, Fergus had never been stoic. His profanity when injured had made priests shake their heads and brought pages and squires to listen and further their education. Later he’d go to confession and truly repent, but that never had stopped him the next time he’d taken a wound during battle or had a tooth pulled. Profanity in English, Gaelic, and French had blended, coming from his mouth at a speed and volume that would have been a miracle if not for the subject matter.

  Now he lay soundlessly compliant. Picking up Fergus’s wrist, Cathal felt it as boneless as wax, even where the flesh was still solid. He swore himself before making the cut, but only inside his head.

  Sophia knelt and held a small vessel—blue pottery, incongruously domestic-looking—under Fergus’s arm, catching the blood. Her hands stayed steady, her eyes focused, and her face showed no sign of distress, only concentration and thought. Men might have been surprised, had they not grown up with Cathal’s sisters—or not seen the field after a battle, when the women who followed an army often did as much to save its men as any of the physicians.

  Cathal was not surprised, but still watched her: the brown-wimpled top of her bent head, the faint lines on her forehead, and the way her dark eyebrows slanted inward, then the straightness of her shoulders and her spine, one unbent line down to the floor where she knelt. Although far from angular of body, she still spoke to him of right angles and clear paths, order and calm—the opposite of the way Fergus was fading at the edges.

  “Enough,” she said finally, and the sound was almost surprising.

  Cathal turned to binding up the wound. He’d send word to Sithaeg that it would need further attention, but the woman should have a chance to eat first, and to sleep as much as she’d ever seemed to since the curse had taken her son. “Will we need to do this again?”

  “I fear it’s likely,” Sophia said. She rose to her feet, holding the bowl carefully. “This is only a start. I’ll test it with the metals, see if he lacks any elements, and then…” She shook her head. “But I doubt you want the details. Let me then say that this is for investigation. I may yet need more blood for the healing itself, if I find a way to carry that out.”

  “Very well,” Cathal said. “And I know that this is chancy. You don’t have to keep warning me.”

  She had set the bowl down on the table with the rest of her things while Cathal was speaking, and she turned then to look at him, brown eyes wide and grave. “As my lord wishes,” she said, “but I think it worth remembering.”

  “Be assured. My memory is very good.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, and dropped a curtsy.

  Polite, Cathal thought, careful, and still very dubious. It probably wasn’t worth pressing her. “I’ll find you a laboratory,” he said. “I’ll send word. Go wherever you wish. You might even find an escort to the village if you enjoy the cold.”

  He left her with those words. Suddenly, he needed to be in that room no longer, nor torn between watching Fergus decline and looking for reassurance from a woman so clearly reluctant to give it. He sought the western tower instead.

  Up there, before Cathal had been born, his father had built a turret that rose some little way above the rest of the stone, opening into a small, round chamber. In bygone days, Cathal and his siblings had played there on rainy days, seeing the world spread out below them in a taste of what flying would be like when they grew old enough to change shape. Now the furnishings were old and dusty, and little light came through the shuttered windows. All of that would be easy enough to change.

  For the most part, the turret was also isolated, as Sophia had desired for her laboratory. Aside from a few guards on the battlements, most of the castle’s residents avoided the western wing since it held nothing for them. The vast majority of the time, that was also true for Cathal himself. It hadn’t been the case for his father or his siblings, but they were far away now.

  When he’d been a stripling, a few years after those when he’d played in the turret, he had, like his siblings, spent days in the largest room of all those in the western wing. There strong
walls and stronger magic had kept him—and the rest of Loch Arach—safe while he’d learned to master shape-shifting and to keep a mostly human mind while in the dragon’s form.

  Nearby were other rooms, smaller but no less potent in their own way. Cathal had no doubt of that, yet he’d only had reason to enter two, and one only in times of peril. He’d done so after his encounter with “Valerius.” He didn’t think that Sophia’s presence merited a visit now. He could use slower methods.

  Hope never really merited urgency, after all.

  * * *

  Even in summer, messengers rarely reached Loch Arach. Sophia’s companions had brought general news with their spices and cloth, but even that news was, at its freshest, weeks out of date. Likewise, the messages Cathal had written for the traders to pass on would perhaps reach their destinations in a month or two.

  Pigeons were quicker. Pigeons also needed a permanent target and, like all other animals the MacAlasdairs didn’t breed themselves, were unreliable around them at best and often ungovernable. As her children had reached maturity and gone out into the world, Cathal’s mother had called on her knowledge and the inhuman side of her own bloodline and had established an alternate method.

  On the very top of the western tower, in the middle of a ring of silver-etched runes, Cathal knelt and lit three blue candles. He watched as the flame on each expanded and melded with the candle itself, until three creatures stood before him, each a half-solid blue manikin the height of his ankle. Blank white eyes opened and featureless faces turned toward him, ready for his command.

  Cathal drew three letters from the pouch at his belt and handed the first to one of the spirits. “Douglas MacAlasdair.”

  Douglas would be with Robert the Bruce most likely, far away, discussing a surrender that still made Cathal’s lip curl when he thought of it. Last time they’d spoken, Douglas had thought the Bruce was playing a deeper game than he showed, and Cathal had often had reason to trust his older brother’s judgment. Better Douglas as an ally in such matters than him; even the thought made his skin itch.