Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  Therkon had let me go at last and turned a little, still sitting tight against me, but now with heels dug in the sand, arms bowed between his knees. He had gone quite still, almost as if he had forgotten me, along with the land, with himself. His eyes were staring out to sea.

  Staring, in more than grief. Dilated, as at some horror just come into view.

  I jerked my eyes down the beach. Flotsam was emerging behind the tide now. Kelp wreaths, ancient driftwood, sanded and salted white and smoothed like a craftsman’s work from the natural form of trees.

  But not painted, on the baulk’s facing side.

  Red, a rustily faded red, picked out with shreds of white. The heart-stoppingly familiar shape of a volute from a galley’s stern fan, its inner side scoured whiter than the paint.

  Sea did that, something announced, so far away from me. Wind, and salt, and sea.

  I jerked my eyes away. I jerked my hand too, fiercely, brutally, in Therkon’s shirt and cloak and almost spat it at him. “No! Don’t look!”

  He might not have heard. He was still staring down the beach.

  Then he said abruptly, hoarsely, “I should have known.”

  “Known what?”

  His right hand released the other and thumped, almost viciously, against his thigh.

  “The River-lord forgive me, any backstreet brat would have known. Straight out of the sagas, told on any street-corner. A survivor. One survivor, and a message and a mysterious—clue.” It came out nearer a curse. “And the messenger dies that moment. No follow-up. No questions. Dhe, how many tales, how many times—”

  He punched his knee again and suddenly sank his head between both hands. “I should have listened.” He almost whispered it, into the uncaring sand. “I should have stayed, at the fort. But I ordered it. Dhe pity them, I brought them here—”

  He fought the tears this time, though now they were almost convulsive sobs. When I tried to touch him he half-turned away and too many of Two’s memories warned, No. When a man cries in earnest, an outland man, he wants no witnesses. Especially this man. He hasn’t just lost friends or a ship, he was the one who commanded it. It’s pride broken as well as grief. Give him the only kindness possible. Let him be.

  I got up as quietly as I could and wove away, stumbling in the sand and trying to find my land-legs, further up the beach.

  * * * *

  He came to me in a while, moving as shakily as I had, the sodden cloak battering in the wind. Trying to hold his head up. To re-assume, whatever the lapse, his responsibilities. To recall and reassure the one he thought still in his care. Looking at me with those freshly reddened eyes. Trying, however pitifully, to smile.

  “My lady. Forgive me. I’ve neglected you . . .”

  “No,” I said and could not help it. I put both arms around him again and held him tight. “You didn’t neglect me. You didn’t neglect anyone. Nobody could have foreseen this. Nobody could have done more to stop it. You—we—had to go out to the forts, we—it was a message nobody could have chanced. Do you hear me?” I actually managed to shake him, just a little, on his feet. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  He was looking at me: uncertain, but listening. Willing, perhaps, to believe. To accept it. But Two had broken in before I knew.

  “This was not chance.”

  Therkon’s face very nearly blanched. His eyes seemed to pierce me through.

  “Not chance? Then—”

  “It was planned.”

  It was no longer the sea’s hobbledehoy, but the imperial hatchet man. I wanted to step back. Especially when the voice dropped another note. “Who?”

  “We have insufficient data.” A teetering pause. “But it may have been, What.”

  Therkon almost gasped. Then his eyes slitted.

  “The, the thing? Whatever it is? Sthassamaer? In the Archipelago?”

  Two pulled me back a step. “We have insufficient facts!”

  Therkon was breathing hard enough to hear. He just managed not to shout, Don’t tell me you can’t guess! He did get out, through his teeth, “What proof?”

  “Wind . . . the wind thinked.” Two was losing words along with grammar, I clenched my hands and panted, trying not to shout at her, Not here, not now, you have the inference, find words for it, or let me tell him—Think!

  “Wind . . . Too long! Then change—at the worst. And the sea. When the oars broke . . . TELL him, Chaeris!”

  “Wind, sea, the wind thought?” Therkon was on the edge of violence too. “How does that mean, What?”

  “Two-legs!” Two screamed at him. “Two-legs can’t change wind!”

  We stood shaking, glaring at each other like a pair of gargoyles. Then suddenly my legs melted. I was down on the sand and Therkon had both arms round me, hatchet man vanished, the crown prince babbling, “Chaeris, I am so sorry, I should not have done that, I beg your pardon—”

  He stopped. Neither of us had to go on.

  Two-legs means, Human.

  Human beings cannot rule the wind.

  Selfishly, despicably, I let my forehead rest against Therkon’s shoulder a minute or two longer. Letting myself linger in that physical presence, the delusion of safety, warmth. Anything to avoid thinking. Drawing the conclusions. And then, from that worse place, repeating the inevitable question. Now, what do we do?

  It was he who finally pulled himself straight. Released me. Carefully not looking seaward, he struggled to his feet, and offered me a hand. And somber beyond dourness, gave me the first words of any reply.

  “Lady Chaeris, let us get off this beach.”

  * * * *

  The ling was wind-dwarfed and thick with horizontal, twisted but wiry twigs, as difficult to cross as it was infuriating. We struggled up the first rise, tripping, stumbling, in our sodden, salt-rough boots, feeling six days’ hunger in every step. And at the top, the Mother finally favoured us. The shallow transverse valley below held a footpath, a thread of white sand among the ling.

  At its edge Therkon glanced left and right, and then at me. Saying silently, to me or Two or both of us: Which way?

  Two had no suggestions. I turned my back on the wind and said, “Down there.”

  Skirting the next hill’s swell, the track reached a deeper, seaward running valley, with shrubs and occasional trees in its seam. Thick, green, seeding grass grew among tall wet-spangled ferns, and from them came the sweetest sound I could have prayed for. Water, running over stones.

  “Praise the River-lord,” murmured Therkon, wiping his mouth at last. It was a mere rivulet, its water spate-ebb, cold and pure-tasting but brown as peat. Brown as Amberlight eyes.

  I cut the thought off as the spear transfixed me all over again. No Azo to scout before us, no Verrith standing watch as we drank . . .

  Therkon’s head was bowed above the water too. Still kneeling, he scooped out another double palmful, and let it trickle away among the ferns. The whisper was almost inaudible, but I caught the River-lord’s name, and guessed it was a prayer.

  After that we did wash, the bliss of clearing salt from limbs and hands and feet and faces, if not a complete bath. But as we re-laced our revoltingly soggy boots, Therkon eyed me, considered his own shirt, rasped a hand over his chin, then produced a rueful laugh.

  “My lady, if we even had a comb . . .”

  It would take hours to untangle either of our heads. We had no razor either. Seeking charity from strangers, we would win no favor for prepossessing looks.

  The path went across the rivulet’s three stepping stones to the further valley side. Over the crest, down, up. I plodded after Therkon, feeling my eyes blur, my muscles soften with every climb. He had naturally put me behind him, and I was past protesting that I had the knives, and he was precious too. Soon it did not seem to matter. Every so often the dull green ling, the great, silent, lichen-patched boulders, the wat
ery, clouding sky would swing slowly round me. I literally walked into Therkon when he stopped.

  He said, “There’s a house.”

  We had mastered a particularly stony crest. Before us stretched another dull green and grey-spatched valley, but this one ended in silver-blue reflections through a lattice of taller trees. A pool, if not a lake. Framed in grass rather than ling. And tucked neatly into the slope above it, a roofline and a haze of smoke.

  House? I thought. Two amended, Perhaps. With a stone-walled—yard? Greenery in a further enclosure, and this side the lake, an oddly dancing series of varicoloured patches, brown and black and white.

  Someone said in my ear, “Goats.”

  Smoke meant fire. A hearth? What possible connection could unite goats and hearth-smoke neither Two nor I could imagine, but one of us managed, affably, “Goats brew tea?”

  Therkon drew in his breath. Then he gathered me by an arm and, just slightly the steadier, started down the hill.

  The house kept swimming in and out of focus, but it grew stranger with every glimpse. Long, low, single-story. Roughly rounded ends. Stone walls, the color of the brindled roan cliff-stacks, but not squared either. Unshaped, miscellaneous slabs.

  I stopped short, head reeling to memory of the wildest yarns spun in Iskardan winters. Fragments older than Amberlight, tales of the scree folk who dwelt on some lost mountain, in houses of stone and grass.

  Thatch, Two insisted. From one end to the other of the swaybacked roofline, it was a deep shaggy covert of age-pallid thatch. End-poles stuck up like masts, and rope laced round above the wall-rim, held in place by a necklace of big dangling stones.

  Therkon urged me on. The yard-wall was more unshaped stone. The sapling-frame wicket gate had a leather loop over a standing rock. Beyond it the doorway confronted us, a rag-edged rectangle, under a particularly long slab for lintel. A portal on silent dark.

  Therkon cleared his throat. Hesitated, and almost managed a shout.

  “Ahai!”

  Wave Island dialect, Two informed me. Neutral signal at an unknown threshold.

  A woman came out.

  She was pale-skinned as some of the Riversrun folk, tall as I and gaunt as Therkon, and though, once past the lintel, she held herself upright, her face was deeply seamed, her coronet of braids iron grey.

  With no hint of surprise, she said, “There ye are.”

  Two very nearly came apart. I was past reaction. But my companion had kept some wits.

  Therkon said, “You saw the wreck?”

  I felt his voice falter over the word. I did see the odd look cross her face, but in a moment she answered, again in Riverspeech, if with an almost unintelligible accent.

  “The wreck. Aye.”

  “Did anyone—do you know if anyone—”

  He could not go on. But the break seemed to make her refocus: next moment she had me by one arm and him by the other and was saying in that gruff deep voice, “Ye’ll be better inside.”

  The doorstep was a wide stone flag. The wall was thicker than my forearm-length, breathing the cold of stone, that vanished under the inner fume. Smoke, I identified, gasping. Human fug, dried herbs, drying meat, a whole history of food. And smoke, a haze that overlaid the air like mist, white in the glare from some window, red-lit above the rock-burning fire.

  The flames sat at the room’s heart, under a tripod and hanging chain. They filled a stone-rimmed hearth, and the right-hand wall was broad slabs of stone, with a doorway blocked by what must be an unshaped hide. The cupboard against the back wall was all stone slabs, and the saddle quern to the left was not a mortar, but a huge, recumbent boulder like those outside.

  We’re underground, I could not scream. In the scree-folks’ lair, and it may be five centuries before we get out.

  The ensuing blur Two cannot reclaim. I myself can recall sitting down, a bliss of rested feet. A huge pot swinging against the hearth-glow, a hot bowl in my hand. Broth, barley and meat and vegetables, finely seasoned, and a miniature loaf of gloriously crusty, rough-milled bread.

  Also a grey blob sliding past my feet, the brush of fur against my wrist. Lunatic commonsense observing, The scree-folk keep cats. Therkon biting into a mouthful and faltering abruptly. And the woman opposite us, her face uplit devilishly by the fire.

  Consuming rock rather than wood, the blaze glowed rather than flamed. Of the five hundred questions seething in my head for eminence, Two reached that one first.

  “What is that fuel?”

  “Peat,” she answered, with an expression, even on that face, that anyone could read. How could anyone not know?

  There I must have greyed out again, because the next thing I recall is Therkon saying, “Woman of the house? What do they call this land?”

  “Sickle,” she said.

  Never ask banefolk where they live! I try to scream it, and my vision clears in shock. Therkon’s face swims close, looking blank as I felt. And suddenly, more than a little sick.

  “You mean, the island—some—call Scythe?”

  “Aye.” She answers after a too long moment. “They do call it that. Beyond the Isles.”

  I clearly see Therkon’s expression. Before she rises, speaking crisply enough to pierce the fog.

  “Best not fill your bellies yet. Best . . .” Words blur, and motion is drawing me away into the outer dark. Someone fumbling with my boots. Then a horizontal surface, thick, soft, and warmer than the fire. Fur. A deep, deep fur with level stone under it, all drowned by the oncoming swells of sleep.

  * * * *

  I came awake with a pop. A sinking net-cork cut loose. I actually sat straight up and sound came out of me on a wordless yelp that would have become, “Azo—!”

  Memory struck on the breath. Sound became a sob.

  Something rustled in the gloom. Close to me in unfamiliar gloom, fur and stone instead of planks under me, no light of wave-crest or ocean, no motion at all. Only salt persisting in my matted hair, my vilely salt-caked clothes, and a grip on my wrist over Verrith’s knife-sheath that I just kept Two from sparking loose.

  “Y’re awake.”

  The beach, the ling, the stone-house. The woman with iron-grey hair. I managed not to gasp, Where am I? I could make out the inner door now, its curtain pulled back, the glow of fire beyond. My heart slowed, then jumped in fresh panic. “Therkon! Where’s Therkon, is Therkon all right?”

  “Just outbye.” The hand let go. “Come now, and break y’r fast.”

  Pale light was creeping through the outer door and the back window, visible now, its shutter drawn back. The brume endured, but the fire was burning high and hot, a pot over it and a grid below, and on the hearth rim an indubitable iron pan.

  “You cannot suffer iron.”

  Two had harvested all those wretched stories and got loose at the most inapposite time. But the woman actually laughed aloud.

  “Aye, a score o’ mothers past! But there’s use in it now.”

  Beyond the hearth Therkon rose from what must be a block of stone, softened with another hide. He looked twice as disreputable as I felt, a ragamuffin rather than a crown prince, let alone the gorgeously apparelled Dragonfly: but his expression was clear relief.

  “My—Chaeris.”

  As superfluous to ask, Did you sleep? As, Are you all right? I seemed to circle the hearth without volition, as if homing into his arms.

  I tried to tell myself it was to reach the one familiarity left. He did grasp me lightly by the shoulders, and after a pause just not long enough for a hesitation, bent and kissed me on both cheeks. A formal, or perhaps a kinsman’s salute.

  No time to weigh that. Two was already rabid to record the house from end to end, to drain its owner of every fact about herself, the island, the Isles. Not yet! I ruled fiercely. Just as the woman herself said behind us, “Ye can begin now.”

 
Porridge she gave us first, thick and hot and salted from the pot, then eggs, tossed neatly in the iron pan. Therkon hid a shudder at the sizzling fat, but when she handed him his wooden platter, he braced himself to eat.

  I gulped back any version of, Should you leave that? Clearly, the disaster of flouted hospitality out-weighed his stomach’s possible vagaries.

  Bread followed, with cheese to spread on it. Thick soft white cheese that set Two loose again, demanding, “From the goats?”

  Blight and blast you, I yelled, don’t ask point-blank like that! But the woman, looking amused, answered only, “Aye.”

  She measured our meal like a groom gauging water for an over-ridden horse. Then, returning the cheese and bread to that stone cupboard, she brought back a big wooden comb and a lidded basket so tiny it left me speechless. Where, Two wanted to yell, do you find work like that?

  “Happen ye’d wish a bath? Then,” with a drolly straight face, “best fettle y’r hair first.”

  The basket held fragrant salve. “Goose grease, wi’ a touch of lavender,” she annotated, at our dubious looks. “Later, we’ll try it elsewhere.” Her eyes dropped to our blistered, still swollen hands.

  We had to “fettle” each other, for the back knots were beyond either of us. We rubbed in grease, and combed, and re-combed, ignoring the hideously gooey results. “Though I hope,” Therkon muttered as I worked over the nape of his neck, “she does have soap.”

  She had soap: she had also heated the big cauldron, so we had hot water to dilute the double yoke of wooden buckets she had unobtrusively filled from the lake. Then we could strip down, out on the flags between the house and peat-stack, to scrub and rinse to our heart’s content.

  Therkon naturally insisted I go first. There were even fresh clothes, for me an ankle-length robe in the softest imaginable un-dyed buckskin. When Therkon disappeared in turn I was happy to loll barefoot on the wooden settle by the door, shake out my wet hair, and look around.