Highland Dragon Rebel

by Isabel Cooper

  She’d learned long since to take the good of a moment and ignore the bad. It wasn’t easy, but life often wasn’t.

  Twenty-four

  “And do you truly breathe fire?” Namwynne asked, her violet eyes bird-bright with curiosity. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “Aye, and no,” said Moiread cheerfully. The air was cool enough to walk comfortably, the forest smelled of slightly more metallic soil and slightly sweeter pine, and Namwynne was proving congenial company.

  For hunting, the princess had dressed practically like the rest of them: long breeches of drab green tucked into boots, a gray robe pinned up around her waist, and brown leather gauntlets that laced up her arms to the shoulder, keeping her arms safe while giving her wings freedom. She’d pinned back her hair into a tight knot on top of her head, and although she hung sensibly back behind the men, she carried a bow as if she knew how to use it. She walked beside Moiread without seeming to begrudge her guest the necessity.

  If she did lose Madoc’s company to someone, Moiread reflected, at least this woman seemed to be worth him. “We can,” she went on, “but only in dragon’s shape—I couldn’t do it to toast my bread, which I’ve sorely regretted on a few evenings in the wild—and it feels a bit as if you could make yourself sneeze, only more so. Fire other than our own doesn’t hurt us at all, as a general matter. One of my great-aunts swears by it for cleaning herself after a long day. She’ll not go near a bath, only steps into the fireplace for a while.”

  “Stars and sky,” said Namwynne, her tone making it clear that the phrase was an oath. “Should we have given you a larger hearth, perhaps, and no bath?”

  Moiread laughed. “Not me. I find the water soothing, and it’s always done well enough for me. You can’t always be minding what your ancestors say, aye? Though my father would doubtless wish I did more of that.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She died a good while back,” said Moiread.

  Namwynne blinked. “Ah. I…I’m sorry.”

  She said it with the air of one being polite about a matter she’d only encountered in books or tales.

  “Thank you,” said Moiread, “but she’s been in heaven—or so I like to think, with all the masses we bought for her soul—a good hundred years or so, and these things do happen. At least to us. Do they,” she ventured, watching the princess for any sign of discomfort or offense, “to you?”

  Namwynne hesitated before speaking. “In a way, yes. We go onward. We lose this form when our time here has passed and we wish to be—” She used a word that didn’t translate to Moiread, frowned, and said, “…to be another thing. And we can die, and that’s often unpleasant. Though some find the waiting to return restful, it’s only seemed boring to me, like having to spend days abed. Mother says that’s a sign of my youth.”

  It was Moiread’s turn to blink. She looked up ahead to where Madoc walked and chatted with a few of the other hunters as they flew close to the ground. She didn’t wish to interrupt his reunion with friends of his youth, but she would have appreciated a guide. These were strange waters she was entering.

  Again, carefully, she asked, “Waiting to return?”

  “Oh yes,” the princess said in a matter-of-fact tone. “We come back the next morning. Here, that is. It’s harder if we’re in your world. We lose our wings there too.” She smiled wistfully. “It’s a lovely world, or it was the few times when I saw it, and I would dearly love to view it from the air. Greatly do I envy you that.”

  “If you can find me when next you come, I’d gladly show you about,” Moiread said. She made the offer almost absently, her mind adjusting to what Namwynne had said.

  She’d heard stories, of course. Madoc had told her one or two, but those had mostly been about pigs, not people. The Norsemen’s heaven, or their equivalent for warriors, was a place where they fought all day and their wounds healed by mealtime, but Moiread had never heard that those wounds included death.

  Granted, she’d been on enough battlefields to know that a day full of warriors fighting one another probably would end, in the normal course of things, with at least one fatality. She’d never thought about it, nor thought past it to what that implied. It had never been important. It had never been real.

  “I must have worn the same face, often and often, when I was first here,” Madoc said, falling back to walk beside them.

  Namwynne laughed. “And not so rarely after that, you know! I liked you fosterlings for all the questions you asked, that I might overhear and learn what otherwise I considered it beneath my own dignity to inquire about.”

  “You had a great deal of dignity in those days,” said Cauldir, joining them with a smile that Moiread thought seemed a trifle forced. Still, he talked lightly enough, and God knew she wasn’t familiar with his people. She couldn’t trust her judgment as completely as she could have done with a human.

  “Say rather that I thought of it more,” Namwynne replied. “As a young maiden may seek to seem more maiden and less young. Lady MacAlasdair, I know not if you fell into such folly too, or if perhaps you’ve seen it in your attendants.”

  “Both,” said Moiread, grinning. “My youngest brother and my cousin Erik could speak well on how high my nose got, and how vastly above them I held myself for a while…or tried, aye?”

  “Oh, Her Highness seemed above us indeed when I was a child.” Madoc smiled, rueful and admiring at once. “And not as though she had to try for it. To us she was full-grown, and that she spent any time in our company seemed like the very stars coming to land.”

  “You’ve learned elegant speech indeed, hall brother,” said Namwynne. She laughed again, and a strand of violet hair slipped out of its imprisonment and trailed down her neck. “But I’ve not forgotten the pranks you once pulled. You and Celened had no notion of stars then.”

  “His ideas, I swear it.” Madoc put his hand to his heart.

  A soft chuckle ran through the group, but stopped as one of the hunt’s leaders turned back, putting a long finger to her lips. All fell quiet, and up ahead Moiread could hear rustling in the brush: the sounds of a great beast. Namwynne lifted herself up from the ground with a few graceful, near-silent wingbeats, but made no motion forward. Madoc hung back as well and, curious as Moiread was, she did likewise. Footsteps on the ground might well scare away the game.

  In talking to the other hunters, Moiread had gained some idea of the type of prey they might find, but her jaw dropped when their quarry burst from its cover. Like a wild boar in its shape and the wickedly sharp tusks jutting from its mouth, it was near the size of a bear, almost man height at the shoulder and solid enough to crush branches in its wake. Short, leathery wings beat the air at its back, raising it half a foot off the ground as it pawed the air with razor-edged hooves.

  “Christ’s bones,” Moiread muttered, drawing her sword just in case.

  Boar hunting was chancy sport even in the mortal world, where the boars were generally smaller. She’d seen more than one man killed or crippled that way, and dozens of dogs injured—and the Caduirathi didn’t hunt with hounds. The hunters darted in and out instead, jabbing with spear and sword, then dancing out of the way of the lashing hooves or the deadly tusks.

  “They’ll tire it out,” Madoc said at her side, “and make it safer for one of them to give the killing blow.”

  “Never entirely safe. They’re vicious beasts,” said Namwynne. “Meat-eaters, when they can get it, and eaters of men as well. I remember—”

  A high squeal from behind them interrupted her, followed by another branch-cracking rush of movement. Two more of the creatures rushed from the underbrush. Perhaps they were a touch smaller than the one the hunters had surrounded, but they were vast, and while they had no tusks, their teeth were pointed like those of sharks. They charged toward the princess and the two humans, wings giving them greater speed.

  Namwynne screamed. A s
hout of alarm went up from the main party. Moiread couldn’t turn to see if any of them were coming to their aid, and she doubted they could get there in time. She doubted that the three of them could hold off the sows, and while she could heal and Namwynne could come back from the dead, Madoc had neither protection.

  There was only one thing for it.

  “Get behind me,” she shouted to both her companions, then dropped her sword and transformed.

  In times of peace, the shift felt like a good stretch, one that didn’t quite hurt but that made her feel the pull on her muscles. Done suddenly, it was more painful, but most times when she’d had to change quickly Moiread had other things on her mind. That was true now as well.

  * * *

  To Madoc’s eyes, the air around Moiread shimmered, then twisted, and then the immense form of a silver-white dragon crouched between him and the wild sows. Her scales flashed in the light; her wings snapped out with a sound like a thunderclap; and the sows shrieked in terror.

  Madoc himself let out a muttered oath and involuntarily stepped back, putting a hand to his sword hilt. He knew Moiread wouldn’t hurt him, nor any of the Caduirathi, knew that she’d transformed to protect them—but instincts died hard, and she was intimidating in this form. To one who didn’t know her, she would have been terrifying.

  She whipped her sinuous neck down and closed her jaws most of the way around a sow’s throat. The beast reared and struck at her with its hooves, drawing blood in a few places, but Moiread didn’t appear to notice. Her teeth closed tighter, and then she wrenched her head sideways with another swift motion. Madoc could hear the sow’s spine crack, and the life quickly went out of it.

  The other beast squealed and ran, galloping off into the woods with no thought of its pack mate. Moiread seemed content to watch it go. She lowered the other body carefully to the ground, then turned to face Madoc and Namwynne.

  Her eyes fairly glowed, like they had in the inn when she’d been poisoned. Now Madoc saw what she’d been fighting against and fully understood her fear. Even knowing that she was in full possession of human wit and human consciousness, it was hard to overlook how vast she was, and how sharp her teeth and talons were. The sight of her made him uneasy on a primal level, one he had to fight to ignore. Imagining her taken out of her senses by injury and bloodlust, in the middle of a populated town…

  She would have taken shuddering the wrong way, so Madoc squelched the impulse.

  “My thanks, lady,” he said, and bowed. “Are you all right?”

  He gestured to the bleeding scratches on Moiread’s chest. She regarded them for a moment, then managed a recognizable shrug: Nothing to worry over.

  “And mine as well. That was magnificently done, and well-timed indeed.” Namwynne smiled. A few of the hunters were rushing back toward them now, Cauldir and Arbelath foremost among them. She turned to give them a reassuring smile. “All is well, I promise! Lady MacAlasdair has kept the danger from us.”

  “We’ll have all the more meat on our table too,” said Arbelath. “For the price of a few bad moments, much as I wish they’d not happened. It’s early for their breeding.”

  “Nature doesn’t often ask our blessing,” said Namwynne. “We can only be glad when we survive.”

  Twenty-five

  At the top of Gilrion’s palace, up a winding staircase made entirely and alarmingly of transparent blue glass, a pearl-white door opened into a small circular room, one which Moiread found familiar in many ways. No matter what the world, some principles seemed to apply. Whether a room for magical work should be up high to be closer to the stars or simply harder for anyone without business there to reach, the height was almost always there.

  Unlike her father’s workroom, there were no candles on the walls and no pentagrams on the floor. Five windows let in light, each from a different direction. Five fist-sized gems, one set below each of the windows, shone red and green, blue and gold and diamond-clear. The air smelled of roses and cedar.

  Moiread hadn’t expected to be there. When Gilrion had turned to her the previous night and said, “You will find clothing for the rite in your wardrobe. Bring no weapons,” as if she were offering another slice of roast boar, Moiread had nearly choked on her mead.

  “I hadn’t expected it, but I should have,” Madoc had said later as they walked the corridors. “You yourself are from a powerful family. You don’t lack for magical skill—”

  “Not entirely,” Moiread had said with a snort. “There’s a good few who’d say differently.”

  “You know at least the rudiments, and you’ve power to back that knowledge. More, you put yourself between her daughter and danger. She’s pleased with you.”

  “Ah,” said Moiread, and didn’t touch on any of the things she could have said. Temporarily alone with Madoc in the hall, having spent the evening watching his legs beneath his dark-red tunic and his forearms when his sleeves fell back, watching his lips and his eyes now, she knew it was best to keep the conversation as impersonal as she could. “And I suppose there’s no illusion to maintain. That is, if you’ve no objection.”

  “None. Your presence would only help, and so would a closer tie…to your people.” He’d stuttered a little over the last few words.

  A day later, Moiread bathed thoroughly in herb-scented water, clothed herself in dark-blue silk with a white sash at her waist, and walked barefoot up many stairs, all of which were colder than she’d have liked to tread without shoes. Did those who came this way usually fly, she wondered, or was this a matter of mortifying the flesh before the ritual?

  Gilrion, Madoc, and Namwynne already stood in the room, in silk robes like Moiread’s. Gilrion and Namwynne both wore their hair loose, and it tumbled down their backs to their waists. Neither wore crown or circlet.

  On the floor, outside where a circle would have run between the four outside gems, two shining dark chests sat at Madoc’s feet. One was small, the other slightly larger, and the locks on both were silver. The soldier in Moiread, who’d sacked a few castles in her day, quickly estimated their value and whistled silently.

  She bowed. “I’m honored to be here,” she said, looking back and forth between the others. “How is it that we proceed, exactly?”

  * * *

  “Join hands,” said Gilrion, and held out her own, the fingers shining of themselves but bare for once of rings. Namwynne took one, Moiread the other, and Madoc stood between them: symbolic, he supposed, in a way.

  If Gilrion marked it or minded, still her face remained serene. Her eyes were like polished sovereigns when they met his. When she spoke, every word was carefully shaped, and every syllable at the right volume to fill the chamber. “Madoc, son of Rhys, what do you seek?”

  “Friendship and favor,” he replied, trying to be as careful and knowing he’d never quite manage the resonant precision of her speech. “Between you and me. Between our children and our children’s children. Between your land and the land of my fathers.”

  “Madoc Firanon,” Gilrion said, “what do you seek?”

  “Safekeeping for the treasures I bring, so that none may use them against my people. Refuge for my folk who may need to flee our conquerors.”

  Namwynne’s hand was cool and smooth in Madoc’s left. In his right, Moiread’s was rough and warmer than any human’s would have been. Power ran between them in a ring through him. There was no seeking and directing here, as there would be in the mortal world, or at least not when Gilrion was in charge of the rite.

  She called, and the land answered. Her daughter was a part of that, and Madoc and Moiread rougher threads in the same tapestry, borne along by their surroundings even as they lent their strength to the weave.

  “Madoc, son of my hall, what do you offer in return?”

  “My strength, if you would have it.” That strength, or the mystical part of it, began to flow from him in earnest as he spoke t
he words, as naturally as water ran downstream. “My skill with a sword and a spell, should you have need. The hospitality of my land, that you and yours may ride freely and without harm.”

  Wingless and closer to mortal in Madoc’s world, the Caduirathi still found little that truly endangered them, but silver weapons could kill them, or cold iron. Madoc suspected that creatures like Moiread in dragon shape could manage it as well. Wounds that didn’t kill could hurt or vex, and there were mortals enough who would wish to do so, for a growing assortment of reasons. What Madoc pledged had taken some haggling with the sterner of the priests at his father’s court.

  “What more do you offer?” Gilrion asked.

  The magic was twisting between them, an unseen braid with two strands.

  “New blood,” said Madoc. “A child of my line in each generation, as fosterling and apprentice, and fostering in turn for those of your line who wish it.”

  With six siblings living, that would be easy enough to ensure—save for an enemy managing to wipe them out root and branch, in which case the other obligations of the oath would most assuredly come into play.

  Gilrion took a breath, then dropped Namwynne and Moiread’s hands and held hers out. Madoc stepped forward and took them. The invisible braid knotted itself twice, once at each set of clasped fingers, and became a stable, solid cord, then vanished. Madoc felt one end of it in his soul, as he did his other ties of alliance, and knew he would soon cease to notice it as he did them, unless dire events indeed called on it.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Moiread standing straight and composed, her hands now folded in front of her. A faint flush stained her cheeks, and her eyes were bright. That was no surprise—effort was effort, magical or physical, and Moiread was neither a wizard by inclination nor in her own land—but it reminded Madoc of the last time he’d seen her flushed and excited, and he had to fight the memory back lest he become distracted.