The Blind Dragon

by Peter Fane

The foal's eyes cracked open, but just barely.

  "You were brave, no doubt," Anna said soothingly. "You saved us. But you've gotta learn to reduce your aspect, make yourself a smaller mark. You need training." She let her voice go even softer, a gentle murmur. "Spread wings can be intimidating, but they make a nice target for trained soldiers. You might've scared those guardsmen a bit, but d'Rent didn't care. What would you have done if he'd hit a joint, or a tendon, or a flight bladder? Or your head?"

  Anna placed her hand on the foal's jaw. It turned slowly into her touch, its huge eyes shut. Its white scales were smooth and very warm.

  "You gotta learn," she said softly, lulling him to sleep. He breathed deeply. "In combat, a tight, furled shape is ideal. Small is stealth, and stealth is strong. So says Master Zar. That's a good boy."

  As it nestled further down in the straw, she looked at its right wing. D'Rent's bullet had passed clean through the leathery membrane, three fingers away from the foal's body. No blood, no real damage. The rest of the wing looked perfect.

  "A very good boy."

  The foal snored contentedly.

  "And because you're such a good boy," she whispered, "I've got a name for you. Your name is Moondagger."

  Big mistake.

  The foal's eyes snapped open. It rolled over, reared up on its haunches, and spread its wings, showing her its fangs. They seemed bigger than ever.

  "Oh boy," she muttered. "You like that, eh?"

  Moondagger growled and did a funny little hop.

  "Moondagger it is, then. My father commanded the Sun Daggers and Nightlove's your mother—makes sense, eh? Now, I've gotta go."

  Moondagger hissed.

  "Easy, there. Easy."

  But it was too late. Moondagger was completely alert, cocking his head this way and that as if waiting for his own orders, as if sleep was the last thing on his mind. If he had a name, then he must have a mission, right?

  Anna nodded. "I'll be back. You've got an important task, too, Dagger. You'll watch over Nightlove. If enemies come, you'll protect her. That's an important job. She's the best we have. Probably the best on Dávanor. That means the best in the Kingdom. You'll stay here and protect her."

  Moondagger snarled, but he almost seemed convinced.

  At least he settled back in the straw.

  Anna took the high silver dagger that Master Khondus had given her, slipped it snugly behind her back in its sheath, and pulled her tunic over it. Then she strapped the knife she'd taken from the bundle of enemy gear against her left forearm, under her one remaining baggy tunic sleeve, just where she'd seen Master Khondus wear his own blade. She practiced drawing it several times until the knife sprang quickly to hand.

  Moondagger was very interested in all this, especially the weapons. Most of Anna's formal combat training had dealt with gear used from dragon back: crossbows, bolas, carbines, net guns, lances, and the like. But Master Khondus had always made sure that his dragon squires had instruction in hand fighting too. And Mother and Father had worked with her and her sisters in basic sword- and knife-play since all of them had been old enough to hold a blade.

  Of course, Anna knew that she was no match for trained soldiers. But she also had the advantage of appreciating that fact. She understood her own limits. She also understood the value of speed, stealth, and surprise. She was small. She was unthreatening. She was a mere dragon squire, nothing more than a skinny girl from a well-born family of soldiers, a girl not even past her final rites of passage. Nothing to be afraid of.

  "Nothing at all," she murmured and touched the blade under her sleeve.

  Moondagger stared at her, his eyes wide, as if reading her mind.

  "Stay here," she said. "I'll be back soon."

  Moondagger grunted.

  She'd reduce her own aspect. She'd complete her mission.

  They'd never see her coming.

  14

  ANNA SHUT THE stall door and set out at a jog, down the stable's central hallway, past the utility closet, up the stone staircase at the hallway's end, and out the stable's main door. From there, she followed the series of short bridges that connected the lower stables to the Dragon Steps. From there, she took the Steps to the bottom sections of the Drádonhold's fortifications.

  The Drádonhold had been built on a tall peak at the foot of the Ahkaggor Mountains, its pinnacle rising jagged and sheer from the green forests below. From a distance, on dragon back, the High Keep and its surrounding town seemed to cling to the mountain top like a cluster of encrusted, silver-grey jewels, slate rooftops sparkling in the sun, the Dragon Steps winding up the mountainside like a snaky, white ribbon.

  The Dragon Steps were the only way to reach the mountaintop fortress from the ground. They also provided the primary road for all traffic around the Drádonhold proper. They were a broad, rock-cut set of stairs about twenty paces wide, paved with white marble, fronted by a waist-high parapet. From the forest floor, the Steps switch-backed up the mountainside, across and through the mountain's craggy face—sometimes arched into the sky, sometimes colonnaded within the cliff side—before finally tunneling into the rock itself and opening onto the broad, fortified terrace that lay before the Keep's main gate. From there, you could either enter the main gate proper, which led to the Drádonhold's High Square and the High Gate protected there, or you could continue around the mountain to the east.

  The High Keep itself had been built during the Founding, of course, after the Great Sister Aaryn had shaped Dávanor's first High Gate on the broad, natural plateau that would later become the foundation of the Keep's High Square. The usual defensive architecture had followed, carved or built up around the High Gate in the centuries between the Founding and the Plague Years. Millennia later, mostly during the Restoration, various noble clans had built mansions, stores, porticoes, squares, workshops, and homes in and around the High Keep, terracing and tunneling into the sheer cliffs, bridging chasms and clefts, spreading down and out around the fortress proper.

  The lower stables, birthing stalls, and flight ramps where Anna worked were all part of a service complex cantilevered from the mountainside on the lower, western side of the peak. Anna's destination—the dragon riders' upper barracks and stables where Sara Terreden and her men were quartered—was on the mountain's far eastern face, high on the other side of the Drádonhold itself. It would take her about a half a bell's time to jog there.

  It was still early, so there was little traffic on the Dragon Steps to slow her down, just a handful of lamplighters, bakers-boys, rubbish cart drivers, along with a few shepherds herding their flocks. The sky was the pale pink of pre-dawn, a few shreds of orange cloud smeared across the western horizon. A good number of messenger dragons—of all colors and no larger than geese—glided on the morning breezes above the Keep's highest towers, bringing the early missives to the citadel's offices and secretaries. On a distant battlement, a large crow watched Anna's ascent with silent, beady eyes. A squad of guardsmen wearing House Dradón's blue and white livery marched past her, mail jingling as they tramped down the Steps to relieve the night watch at the mountain's base.

  When Anna turned the Step's next switchback, a tall guardswoman wearing the blue and white of House Dradón stopped her with a whistle. The guard was leaning against the Steps' parapet, her steel-tipped spear aimed at the sky.

  "Got a friend there, squire." She tapped her spear butt against the Steps' flagstones, lifting her chin and looking over Anna's shoulder.

  Anna turned.

  Moondagger hung there upside down from a stone balcony like a giant, white bat. The dragon foal craned his neck, looking at Anna with his huge eyes. His broad tongue tasted the air for a moment. Then he showed Anna his fangs. A shred of maroon cloth hung from the corner of his mouth, caught on one of his molars.

  Anna tried to make her voice firm. "Gave you an order, Dagger."

  Dagger cocked his head.

  Anna stepped up, pulled the shred of Tevéss uniform from between Dagger's teeth
, and put it in her pocket.

  Moondagger gazed at her calmly. And he didn't budge. And it was impossible to be mad at him.

  "I suppose when you're hungry, you're hungry." She stroked Dagger's face. He grunted, then gave her a gentle head-butt.

  "What's wrong with his eyes?" the guardswoman asked.

  "He's blind," Anna said, not looking away from her dragon.

  "Doesn't act like it."

  Anna nodded. "Doesn't take commands well either."

  Moondagger sniffed at the morning breeze and licked his fangs.

  A bearded shepherd leading a flock of sheared merinos came down the Steps, around the switchback. When he saw Moondagger, the shepherd stopped short, halted his flock, and frowned. He ticked his crook against the parapet to get the guardswoman's attention. She turned and raised an eyebrow.

  "These here sheep hafta go down to the lower stables," the shepherd grunted. He spit over the parapet and nodded at Anna. "They ain't for eatin'. Just been sheared and counted proper, but they ain't for eatin', hear me? And war dragons ain't allowed to run wild, no rider on, flyin' only the Sisters know where, eatin' whatever they please. It tries to eat one of these," the shepherd cocked his head at his flock, "it'll come from her purse, count on it, sure."

  "Leave the dragon to me, sir," Anna said.

  But the shepherd was right, of course.

  Moondagger would continue to attract attention as the High Keep woke. That's why she'd wanted him to stay with Nightlove in the first place. A blind dragon foal following a squire through the Drádonhold was hardly an ideal way to avoid notice. That shred of bloody Tevéss uniform dangling from his mouth hadn't helped, either. But there was no time to wrangle Dagger back down to the stables—even if she could.

  "Come on, you," Anna said, looking at Dagger. She nodded her thanks to the guardswoman, gave the shepherd a cool look, and continued up the Dragon Steps.

  Moondagger grunted, dropped from his perch, and swooped past Anna, landing on the stone parapet near the flock. There, he growled with feigned menace at the shepherd, nearly falling off the parapet when his right wing bumped against a stone planter, claws scrabbling on stone. The merinos bleated, jumbling away as a single wooly mass, huddling together near the far side of the Steps.

  "No eat! No eat!" the shepherd shouted and jumped in front of Moondagger, waving his crook in the foal's face. Dagger recoiled with a hiss. The guardswoman stepped up and put her hand on the shepherd's shoulder.

  "The squire has everything in hand, sir. Let's move you and your sheep along," she said.

  The shepherd grimaced, muttering under his breath. "War beasts runnin' loose, eatin' honest servants' goods, whole cursed place fallin' to pieces." But he gave a wry grin and a whistle, turning his merinos onto the switchback from whence Anna had just come.

  The guard turned to Anna. "Better get him into harness, squire. Trouble for everyone."

  Anna nodded. "My thanks."

  Moondagger fell backwards off the parapet, coiled in midair like a falling snake, and opened his wings with a snap. He swooped back up, landed on the parapet beside Anna, and showed her his fangs. Anna shook her head and tried to frown at him. But she failed miserably.

  15

  MOONDAGGER SAW ANNA cross a paved terrace and approach a two-storied building. The sun was just up and the early sky was red, bathing the building and mountains with flushed, morning light.

  It was three years ago. Anna was eleven years old.

  But, from Moondagger's perspective, those three years past meant nothing.

  For Moondagger, three years ago was now.

  Anna opened the building's front door and walked toward a blood-stained cot. An armored man lay there. Beneath him there was a pool of dark blood. The man on the cot was dead. The man was Anna's father.

  Armored soldiers and dragon riders gathered around the cot. Mother was there, too, standing beside Father's head. Her face and armor were streaked with ash and blood. Her eyes shone with sorrow and rage.

  When Anna approached, the soldiers went silent and opened a path. Mother did not look up. Anna kept her chin high, her eyes straight ahead. Her step was slow. But she did not tremble. She did not falter. She did not cry.

  She stood at the cot and looked down at her father.

  Moondagger felt something open in his own heart, a deepening ache, as if a pain there was being slowly born.

  He wanted to turn away, to stop the hurt.

  But he could not.

  Anna was strong. So he must be strong. Anna was brave. So he must be brave. Anna could see. So he must see.

  Please. For a moment, let me see him.

  Anna put her small hand on Father's breastplate. The steel was icy cold. Mother put her armored hand on top of hers.

  And then there was the hole.

  It was larger than Anna's fist, punched jagged into the left side of Father's chest.

  A black opening.

  Emptiness.

  A hole that should not be.

  If I reached down into it, Anna thought, I would reach into nothing, and its steel teeth would close on my shoulder and bite . . . .

  In the battle, Anna had been riding behind Father as one of Voidbane's signal hands. (And she hadn't been there because she was Erik Dyer's daughter. She'd been there because she knew the signal codes and flag combinations better than any squire in the High Keep.) She and Tayne Taller, Father's other signal hand, had spotted Lord Oskor and the dread Irondusk descending from above, a roaring nightmare of fang and fire. She had flashed her signals, fired her carbine, and shouted her warnings. Voidbane had reacted perfectly, banking hard, rolling, allowing Irondusk to pass beneath them with a roar and a gust of thunderous wind, his war lust shaking the air. Upside down, Anna had gotten a good shot off at the monster. But for Father, it had been too late. A little gold dragon, wearing a green House Fel war banner on its chest, had seen its chance and had dived through the defensive formation of House Dradón middle weights. Its rider had carried a simple battle lance, nothing else. And as Anna reloaded her carbine, working the mechanism as fast as she could in her small hands, she had seen the impact that had taken Father's life. It had been over before she had known what had happened. Done before it had started. Not like the poems and songs—where things made sense. Voidbane's grief-stricken roar had shaken the heavens.

  Now, on the cot, father's armor was caked with the cold stickiness of gore and ash. His face was pale. A cork of black blood clotted his right nostril. His left eye was open, but only its white showed. A single tear pooled in its corner.

  It was Father.

  But it did not look like him.

  Anna understood then what it meant when people said that the body was just a "shell." Father's passion, wit, his easy laugh, his black rage when angered, his sense of honor, duty, and loyalty—all were gone.

  This thing before her? This body?

  It was an empty husk.

  A soldier never betrays his word. A soldier never forgets his promises.

  The eyes of the riders and warriors pushed against her, the pressure of their gazes bearing down like real weight.

  She wanted a moment alone. Just one moment.

  Pay them no mind.

  Father turned his dead face towards her.

  His eyes opened. Gentle and clear and real.

  Death is not defeat.

  Father's mouth did not move, but Moondagger heard his words all the same.

  The ache in his heart blossomed.

  You have my pride and love 'til Kingdom's end, Anna. My pride and love, forever.

  16

  THE MOMENT ANNA stepped onto the upper barracks' terrace, she knew something was wrong.

  The barracks was a fine, two-storied building made of well-cut stone. Its tall windows looked out over the terrace into the red morning sky—but the windows' shutters were closed. Seven dragon riders, all wearing the dark maroon livery of House Tevéss, sat and stood around the barracks' front steps. They smoked their pipe
s and sipped their morning tea, laughing casually as if sharing some private joke, their pipe smoke barely stirred by the light morning breeze.

  But they were obviously blocking the barracks' front door.

  Two of the seven riders wore standard scout harnesses, light leather armor over maroon House Tevéss livery. But the other five wore full battle gear. The armor's traditional design was modeled on the ancient panoplies of the Plague Years: the distinct, V-shaped breastplates protruding two palms away from the center of the riders' chests, their beveled surfaces designed to deflect wind, bullets, and flame. All wore short battleswords at their belts and several wore steel revolvers slung beneath their shoulders. Their leader was a tall, grey-haired captain who wore a thick maroon riding scarf, his goggles pulled down at his throat. He leaned nonchalantly against the barracks' wall, an ancient revolver of high silver belted low on his hip. Rings of black iron adorned his earlobes. A sheathed greatsword leaned against the wall beside him. As Anna stepped onto the terrace, the captain chuckled, spat, and tapped his pipe against his hand, brushing his palms together as if he hadn't a care in the world.

  Why were they here?

  Moondagger landed on the terrace's parapet and immediately hissed at the riders, his white tail whipping against the stone, his scales pinkish in the morning light.

  The riders' laughter stopped short.

  Anna shot Moondagger a hard glance.

  Stealth, she thought.

  Moondagger's tail went still.

  "What is this?" the grey-haired captain asked, frowning. Like the rest of the Tevéss riders, he wore sharp sideburns styled to points near the corners of his mouth. His western accent was thick. The riders looked from Moondagger to Anna, their eyes narrow.

  "Forgive me, my lords." Anna bowed respectfully. "I come with an urgent message for Captain Terreden—."

  "What is this animal doing out of harness, girl?" the captain cut her off. He lifted a whistle of black iron from the chain on his neck and blew into it. It made no sound. Dagger's eyes widened and he cocked his head with keen attention. All the riders wore whistles of similar shape.