Highland Dragon Warrior

by Isabel Cooper

  “I’ll teach you manners and gladly, boy,” said Grant.

  Various murmurs rose around them. Clyde was saying a few things, trying to calm the situation, but he would know as well as Moiread that it wouldn’t do any good. Once certain words took the air, all that would cage them again were fists. The best he could do was keep it to a brawl.

  Madoc was watching her from the dais. Moiread gave him a quick bow and saw him start to stand. Eachann put a hand on his shoulder and spoke, low and amused. Young blood, it could have been, or let the boy prove himself. Whatever it was, Madoc sank back down, though he didn’t look happy about it.

  Neither was Moiread happy, leaving the warm hall and the music for the windy courtyard. The light wasn’t wonderful, and it had been a few years since she’d been in a fight without weapons. She sighed as she walked out the doors and around the corner.

  Only Grant and Clyde went with her, the others having more sense than to leave comfort in order to watch a fistfight.

  “Will neither of you give over?” Clyde asked as he stepped out of the way.

  “Can’t,” said Moiread. “Sorry.”

  “I spoke but the truth,” said Grant, slurring his words more than a bit, “and I’d say it again. Your lord’s maybe a spy and most likely a coward.”

  He might have gone on, but then Moiread punched him in the jaw.

  Pulling the blow was always the hard part. In human form, she was no stronger than a hefty mortal man, but that was considerable force, and men did die in tavern brawls. Killing this one, even by accident, would have gone badly.

  So she struck more lightly than she could have—a solid hit, but not enough to put a man out, especially a drunk one. Grant staggered backward, righted himself, and threw a punch in return. He had a good arm on him, and his eye was keen. Still, Moiread ducked it easily.

  Enough of this foolishness.

  She jabbed a fist quickly into Grant’s stomach. He doubled over. She pulled back, swung, and hit him in the nose with a satisfying crack. Still she pulled her blows, but it didn’t matter. Speed was as good as strength for an advantage once a fight was underway, and less likely to be accidentally lethal.

  “Can we have done with this now?” she asked, stepping back but keeping her guard up.

  Grant was clutching his nose, blood flowing freely through his fingers. To give what little credit he deserved, he wasn’t yelling with pain, only making a low noise in the back of his throat.

  Moiread pressed on. “Will you keep a civil tongue about my lord in the future?”

  Hesitation, then a jerky nod, gave her the answer.

  “Aye,” said Clyde, “go find the leech and get that seen to. Your snoring’s bad enough as it is. He’s a decent man, in his way,” he added after Grant had departed. “But he took the war hard. Plenty do, in that way or another. You’re maybe too young to have seen it.”

  “Ah,” said Moiread.

  Thinking she was embarrassed about admitting it, Clyde clapped her on the shoulder. “Youth’s an ailment we all recover from, lad, and sooner than we’d like. Come back inside, and we’ll finish the wine.”

  She went. Wine sounded good right then.

  Eleven

  “You’ve made a name for yourself, rather, in a short time,” said Madoc.

  “By how badly I’ve lost at dice? I promise I’ve not cast us into poverty,” Moiread replied. They followed a curving path up a hill, riding behind the Calhoun, his daughter, and their priest toward the ring of stones at the top. Three men-at-arms followed at a distance, one of them Clyde. “And whatever the blond kitchen girl says, I wasn’t the one with her last night.”

  Madoc lifted his eyebrows and shook his head, but laughingly, and there was good humor in his voice when he spoke again. “I’d not heard of those exploits. I was thinking rather of your skill with your fists, or what I’d heard of it.”

  “Oh, that.” Grant was not accompanying them. He’d caused no further trouble, and kept himself away and silent when Moiread was present. She shrugged. “Only defending your honor, my lord.”

  “Were you, now? And you left him alive and able to go about his duties, I hear. That was kind of you.”

  “Your honor doesn’t need much defending,” Moiread said, flashing him a grin.

  Madoc wrinkled his brow, then shook his head again. “I was attempting to picture you striking someone with a gauntlet on my behalf,” he said. “It doesn’t quite work.”

  “Try getting on the bad side of a man of rank, and I’ll see what I can manage,” said Moiread. “If he gives voice to his feelings when I’m there and you’re not, that is, and that could be difficult to arrange.”

  “Slightly.”

  A short distance from the hilltop, the party separated. Moiread and the men-at-arms stayed behind, not witnessing but guarding. Even in peacetime, there were bandits, not to mention wolves and wild boar. The others moved out and upward. Against the gray sky and the dull brown hill, their clothing made spots of brightness, save for the priest’s black cassock.

  Moiread watched them go.

  Around her, the horses stamped and blew. “Damned restless beasts,” said Clyde.

  “’Tis the weather,” said Kinnon, one of the other guards. “Likely a storm coming up.”

  “No, they’ve been out many a time in worse,” said a third man, “and never been so skittish. It’s this place.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” said Kinnon, as Moiread surreptitiously relaxed.

  “I’m not. We all know yon ring of stones”—the guard gestured—“is uncanny, and why would they choose the spot else?”

  “Can’t be too uncanny,” said Clyde uneasily. “They’ve Father Parlan with them.”

  Having no ready response to that, the guard made a skeptical noise in the back of his throat and fell silent.

  “He’s young,” Moiread said, seizing her opportunity to get away from dangerous lines of discussion. “For a priest, that is.”

  Kinnon nodded. “And a good change, that. The man we had before him was old as the hills and slept through mass half the time by the end. Died during the war, and it took the best part of a year before we got Parlan. Things were that disarranged.”

  “Pious folk had to ride half a day to be shriven and confessed,” Clyde added. “I was with my lord in the battles, and we had priests with us, else I’d have had a hard time tending to my own soul. It’s quite a way to go when a man has duties.”

  Moiread made what she hoped was an appropriately sympathetic noise. Her concern about her immortal soul had always been haphazard at best. Between having a grandfather who’d done equal reverence to Jupiter in his day and knowing that most of the Church would think their ancestry damned regardless of deeds or faith, none of the MacAlasdairs had ever quite managed devotion. Men gave such matters more thought. Moiread was mortal enough to consider it on occasion, usually during a wakeful night, and to go to confession and mass when she thought of it. She was enough her father’s daughter to keep her tongue still and act understanding otherwise.

  Thinking out what to say next, she heard Madoc’s voice. It was extremely faint; Moiread couldn’t have heard it at all if she’d been human. Even she couldn’t make out words, but from the cadence it was likely the start of the ritual. When the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood on end, she knew for sure.

  “He’s earnest, aye, and scholarly,” said Kinnon, watching the hill. “Not like old Ervin. Remember when—”

  He turned to Clyde, starting on a story from their youth that had them both laughing at the memory before Kinnon was more than a few sentences in. Moiread listened and laughed herself—in the right places and often genuinely amused—but she had to make an effort to concentrate.

  There’d been magic in the war. Moiread had faced most of it, because most of her men couldn’t. It was never a light matter, nor one t
o ignore. Even when the spells cast came from her own side, she’d learned to take them as a signal to prepare herself and her troops. Magic had a way of making things happen.

  Now there was no preparation to do. She could stand and wait. She’d learned to do that well too—but a part of her was ever thinking of what happened up the hill.

  * * *

  They made an odd group, Madoc thought. The Calhoun stood opposite him in the middle of the stone circle, stiff-shouldered and thin-lipped in the way of a man who was trying desperately not to fidget or wince or finger the rosary at his belt too hard. Father Parlan, standing in the east, actually looked more comfortable with the whole process, while tiny Seonag, in the west, was clearly fascinated.

  She hadn’t looked down the hill once since they’d arrived. Evidently the prospect of the ritual had overcome her infatuation with “Michael”—an impressive feat to Madoc, who remembered his own heart at that age.

  He raised his hands skyward and began, speaking the Latin slowly and deliberately, but at the top of his lungs. Every word was important in a spell, every syllable, just as every gesture and every moment of mental activity. Get any of them wrong, and failure was the best possible outcome.

  “I, Madoc, heir of Avondos, son of Rhys, son of Aberthol, a servant of God, now do in the eyes of Christ and the saints, and of the angels Michael and Zeruch, pledge my aid and friendship, and that of my line and land, to the Calhouns of Hallfield.”

  The spell began to work. Madoc felt it at first as a tingling in his palms, heat despite the day’s chill wind. As he spoke, he pulled that warmth down into his body and through him to the land beneath him, joining his spirit to the power and then both to the earth.

  “Be it known to those present and to come,” he went on, “to those visible and invisible, terrestrial and celestial alike, that I promise strength, counsel, and refuge to the Calhouns and their liege men. I pledge to always conceal and never reveal that which they bring to me in secrecy, to lend my spirit and the spirit of my land to their defense should there be need, to always give good counsel and never to work against them, whether by word or by deed.”

  Going down on one knee, he put the palm of that hand flat against the earth. The soil was cold, damp, and gritty against his skin, the pale ends of the grass barely showing through the dirt. For the moment, the layers of tunic and hose kept Madoc’s knee from the wet ground, but he suspected moisture would get through by the time he was done. He had taken part in ceremonies with more dignity.

  Yet he felt the power, warm beneath the chill ground and warm inside his body, humming in threads of sensation he barely had the skill to part and manipulate. Madoc sensed them going further than him, just as they went deeper than the ground. The magic reached out to his siblings, then forward to those who would come after, tying them all into the spell. He saw no presence, heard no celestial music, but felt witnesses beyond the human all the same, as a hunter knew the unseen life in the forest around him.

  Slowly the Calhoun knelt, mirroring Madoc’s pose. He reached out a hand and Madoc took it, so that an irreverent observer might have thought of men arm-wrestling with no table to be seen. “I, Eachann Calhoun,” he began, speaking even slower and considerably less surely than Madoc had done, “son of Uisdean, son of Eachann, a servant of God…”

  As he went on, the tendrils of magic wrapped around him too, entering his soul and through him that of the daughter nearby. Madoc felt the connection and sent his own power out to strengthen it, making a deeper channel between the two families and the two lands. They could draw on each other’s strength magically now, and if any of their blood was in need near the other’s domain, each would be drawn to the other, even if they didn’t know why. Through him, the land’s power would also flow into the shield when he cast it. It would bring in the mortal aspects of England’s enemies, men more ordinary that the MacAlasdairs and more civilized as well.

  Eachann came to the end of his oath and drew breath again, not to speak further but in clear relief at having gotten through the speech without disaster. Facing him, Madoc felt the magic solidify like fired clay. One with force or skill could break it, but left to itself, it would last.

  “It is done,” he said with the sudden weariness that always followed major spells. While the magic was tied to him and his blood, it was part of him no longer, nor he of it. The departure left him drained and hungry. In company, he couldn’t ask for help getting to his feet, nor be seen to struggle, but he groaned inwardly as he rose. “You have my deepest thanks, my lord.”

  “And you mine. More so if this does what you say.”

  Madoc looked around. Parlan was standing a polite distance off and not speaking yet, but he had an expression on his face that suggested a thousand questions. There was no danger of hellfire or hanging from that quarter.

  “That felt odd,” said Seonag. Her pale brows were drawn together under a wrinkled forehead, but her eyes were dazed. “As…as when Beitris…my nurse,” she added aside to Madoc, “was first teaching me how to stand and walk as a lady. Drawing me up straight and pressing my shoulders back. Only not in my body.”

  “’Twas for me like the first time I donned armor,” said her father, frowning slightly at Madoc.

  He, who’d known the sensation of magical ties for most of his life, nodded and did his best to give a reassuring answer. “All vows bind a man’s soul…or a woman’s,” he added, managing a smile at Seonag. “We feel these bonds more tangibly than others, for a while. The sensation passed, yes?”

  “Aye,” said Seonag, and the Calhoun nodded.

  “You said we werena’ the lone place where you’d…do this.” He waved a broad hand at the land around them. “And you said we’d be in no danger from the other lords.”

  “True,” said Madoc. “All the connections go through me. In me, they all stop.”

  “It’ll be quite a journey for you, won’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Madoc. “I’m sure it will.”

  Twelve

  Rest had done the horses as much good as it had Madoc, and the careful attentions of Hallfield’s grooms had helped too. Rhuddem looked a few years younger when they were packing than she had when they’d reached Hallfield. Madoc would usually have thought Moiread’s placid gelding as stolidly unchanging as rock, but even he pricked his ears up and gazed over his stall with new energy when Madoc entered the stables.

  Madoc had politely let it be known that he and “Michael” would handle the last stage of preparation on their own. He doubted that an assassin could have penetrated into the keep at Hallfield, where few travelers stopped and new faces attracted attention, but he’d gained a certain habit of caution over the past few weeks. Then too, he wanted to pack the last of his bags himself.

  He secured the items carefully: two wooden chests, one the size of his hand and the other thrice as big, as well as one long pouch made of white silk and silver thread, all wrapped for travel in thick wool and then leather. He’d bound the chests with stout cords as well as locking them. The pouch was less important. The implements of his own magic might raise eyebrows or put Madoc in jeopardy if he entered a land with a truly strict priest, but they had no power of their own. He’d knotted the drawstring and left it at that.

  Satisfied that the saddlebags were in place and wouldn’t fall, and that the edges of the chests would cause his mare no discomfort, Madoc bent to inspect the saddle itself. The leather seemed sound and whole, the smell of it as primitively reassuring as the other smells surrounding him, those of hay and horse, but he couldn’t let himself be lulled. He peered carefully at the straps for minute cuts, ran his fingers over the buckles to be sure they fastened tightly, and passed a hand under the saddle itself, checking for burrs.

  Rhuddem shifted beneath his hand, and Madoc heard footsteps crunching the straw.

  “Good man,” said Moiread from behind him. “Nothing amiss?”


  “Nothing to my sight,” he said, straightening up and turning to face her. Light from the door fell slantwise across her face, so that one eye peered bright out of shadow, while the other reflected sunlight. “I’d not expected you here so soon.”

  “I’d get questions if I left all of this to you,” she pointed out, gesturing to the horses. “It should all properly be my job, ye ken. They’ll likely be thinking me incompetent as it is.”

  “Alas, ’tis true,” Madoc said.

  “I know. I’m a dreadful failure as a squire, aye?”

  “Dreadful.” Madoc pulled a face of exaggerated sobriety. “Continue in this vein, and you’ll never be a knight yourself. Bad enough that you’re given to drinking and dicing, bad enough that you start fights—”

  “For your sake, and I never started it. Well, not really started it.”

  “—but now you can’t even be trusted with our baggage.” Madoc leaned on the door of the stall and shot Moiread a reproachful look, clicking his tongue. “I could wonder why I took you on to begin with.”

  “An act of charity, plainly. You took pity on a poor lad, and you’re convinced there’s good stuff in me yet, if you can bring it out. It’s noble of you, and I’m sure you’ll spend fewer years in purgatory because of it.”

  “I shall put myself up for sainthood as soon as I get home.”

  Moiread laughed and rested her back against the stable wall, folding her arms across her chest. “You might check my tack, then, out of the goodness of your heart. Shadow’s no’ disposed to mind me on his back, but neither is he overfond of me probing around his belly, and I’d rather not upset him more than I must.”

  “Out of the goodness of my heart,” Madoc replied and left Rhuddem’s stall for the gelding’s. He glanced back over his shoulder. “You really named your horse Shadow?”

  “I’ve got to call him something,” Moiread said with a shrug. “Black is confusing, and horse is worse. And I can’t name him like the ones I had in war, since we’re going to civilized places, wi’ women and children and all. It was Shadow or Fatty.”