“It’s going to be a long ride for you, isn’t it?” Madoc asked, his shadow falling over her while she was bent to adjust straps.
“He’ll calm down. I hope.”
Hearing footsteps crossing the packed dirt of the courtyard, Moiread straightened up, then paused as she saw Bronwyn.
Elian’s daughter wore dull brown, long-sleeved and almost shapeless. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her. Both the garment and her pose made her look years younger than her age. The dark figure of Father Evan, a short distance away, added to the impression of a truant child.
“My lord, my lady,” she said quietly and bowed. “I wanted to apologize again. I should never have trusted Signor Antonio, nor should I have given in to my own fears. I thank God that my folly and sin resulted in no worse than what did happen, and I most humbly ask your pardon.”
“You have it,” Madoc said with little of his usual courtly manner. “I hope your time in France aids you.”
Bronwyn bowed her head.
She really was very young. Antonio had been incredibly old. What chance would any lord’s naive daughter have against a mind formed in the intrigues of Rome? Moiread stepped forward and put a finger under the girl’s chin, lifting it upward. “Lass,” she said, “I’ll not say you did right. But you did, in the end, no worse than a score of kings and a pope or two.” Evan, who’d heard that, flinched in a rather amusing way. “I dare say hell doesn’t quite gape before you, if you don’t make a habit of this.”
“Thank you, my lady.”
“That said,” Moiread continued, letting her arm fall back to her side, “you tried to kill someone I love. Had you succeeded, I would have sworn my life to your torment. And I live a very long time. Nor am I the only one.” She allowed her eyes to glow a shade brighter than the girl could mistake for mortal. “Bear that in mind, should temptation whisper again in your ear.”
Without waiting to see Bronwyn’s reaction, she turned, swung herself up into the saddle, and nudged Shadow toward the castle gates.
* * *
“So, then,” Madoc said once they’d left the castle behind and were on the road again. “You put the fear of God into her, rather.”
“She had that already, or she’d not have confessed. Finding that you’ve been consorting wi’ a demon is a bit unsettling for a girl her age, aye?” She smiled grimly. “But I find that fear of this world lasts where concern for the next might not.”
“Your people aren’t demons. She knows that.”
“Her father does, and her mind might. Otherwise? It’s not as though she’s seen much to compare with us, aye?”
“Neither have I,” said Madoc. The sky was overcast, the air chilly and damp. Rain was likely coming. He felt no cold, particularly when he looked over fiercely to meet Moiread’s eyes. “I’ve never glimpsed a demon outside of some probably inaccurate books, and I would never have thought you one.”
Moiread had never in their acquaintance been one for blushing, but her tanned skin burned rose-copper at that statement. “You weren’t raised like most,” she said. Although she shrugged in a very matter-of-fact manner, she didn’t sound able to disguise the pleasure in her voice.
For the sake of diplomacy, and not giving away too many secrets, she’d left Llanasef Fechan in female attire, without any illusion to shield her. She would change at the first inn and ride the rest of the way as a man, yet Madoc knew he’d always have her true appearance in his mind—both true appearances, at that, and he couldn’t imagine her without either.
Nobody approached to overhear or interrupt. Madoc nerved himself to speak the words that had been in his mind ever since they’d left the castle gates, the ones he’d felt unable to simply spring on Moiread out of the blue. He’d led up as far as he could manage; now he must make the leap.
“Did you mean what you told her?”
“Every word of it. But I’ll grant the bit about the popes was mostly rumor.” A sly, teasing smile widened, lighting her face like the dawn itself. “But particularly what I said about you. Though if I’ve read aught wrongly and you feel nothing for me, I’ll bite my tongue about it for the rest of our journey.”
“No,” he said, the joy in his heart joined by a sense of great honor. “I suspect I’ll love you as long as I live and, if God is willing, as long as you do.”
“Aye. Well.” Moiread tried to move closer, but the tan gelding snorted and shied. She and Madoc both laughed ruefully. “Demonstrations later, then, when the damn horses are na’ involved. We’ve a few days left to us yet.”
“On this journey, yes. And I’ve been thinking.”
“A young man needs a hobby, I hear,” she said, her voice full of giddy mirth.
“I’ll not be marrying Bronwyn for an alliance,” Madoc went on, after pulling a face at her, “but another lord’s daughter may sit well with my father. One whose family is in Scotland, for instance. One whose blood could mingle favorably with ours. One who’d saved my life a few times.”
“It is generally the reward, I hear.” Moiread’s pale-blue eyes shone. “Do you think you could bring him around, then, to this woman?”
“It’s likely. If, of course, she were willing to come to a foreign land and tie herself to the lord of its people.”
Given Moiread’s face, Madoc didn’t quite have to hold his breath as he waited for an answer. Still, when she said, “I think a land would be a deal less foreign with you there,” he beamed with happy relief. When she added, “And a tie or two will do me good,” he sent a wordless prayer of thanksgiving heavenward.
“Then it’s all settled but the talking,” he said, “and I’m good at that.”
And the road in front of them was as magical as any shining path in the otherworld.
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Dawn of the Highland Dragon series by Isabel Cooper
Prologue
The tent smelled of tallow and smoke and blood. Mortal men said they got used to the reek after war had gone on long enough. Erik doubted he ever would.
At least the blood was mostly old by now. Dragons weren’t carrion-eaters: the inhuman part of him stayed quiet. It was the human side that wanted to howl with fury, a longing that had become familiar in the days since Balliol’s treachery and only intensified now, with the moans of dying men only a few paces outside.
In the face of Erik’s rage, Artair MacAlasdair’s calm stillness would have been offensive, had Erik expected any other reaction. He’d rarely seen his uncle roused to any emotion, and never to passion. In Erik’s youth, it had been a joke between him and Artair’s younger children that the MacAlasdair patriarch wouldn’t have done more than lift his eyebrows if someone had cut his head off.
Now Artair sat in Erik’s tent, drinking bad wine and picking weevils out of bread with the same air he’d used when presiding over holiday feasts in his own castle. He’d seen as much fighting and death that day as Erik, but his white hair and beard were neat, his blue eyes as impassive as the glaciers they echoed in color. Under their scrutiny, Erik could give voice to but a bare fraction of what he felt.
“I’d thought,” he said, his own wine cup neglected, “that we’d done with this. Years ago. Will they not stop until the Day of Judgment itself?”
“Likely not,” said Artair. “I don’t know that stopping’s in their nature.”
The devil of it was that Erik didn’t know if the older man meant Englishmen or mortals. Like Artair’s daughter Moiread—now married to a Welshman and unable to take an active part in the war, lest other lands be drawn into the conflict—Erik would have ardently voiced the former view. Artair himself had argued for the latter on more than one occasion.
Artair had tilted his head, dragon-like, and peered at his son. Because we wouldn’t, or because we can’t?
There’d been no good answer then, there wasn’t one now, and it mattered little. Four years of fighting already, nearly twenty before the treaty the English had broken, and many days it seemed as though the wars would go on until there was no man left able to lift a sword—or until the vindictive bastard who’d taken the crown at Westminster felt his father’s honor satisfied, whenever that would be.
“Your eyes changed,” Artair observed with neither fear nor admonition. “Maintaining your form becomes harder?”
Not wanting to voice the words, Erik nodded, once. For the most part, the MacAlasdairs kept firm control over their shapes once they’d passed through the trials of youth. Dire sickness or wounds could make the matter more difficult, though, as could great strain on the mind or heart. Spending the days killing didn’t help either.
Artair finished his wine. “I’m sending you away from the front. Douglas and I can take command for a time—and after this, there’s likely to be a lull, for the winter if no longer.”
“My lord—”
“Soon you’ll begin to see them all as prey.” The single sentence, delivered with only fact and no feeling, cut Erik’s voice off entirely. Artair crossed the room and put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “Be at ease. It comes to us all in time, and you’ve not failed me. Indeed, I need you for another duty just now.”
Erik bent his head in acquiescence. “I’m at your service, my lord.”
“I’ve had a message from Cathal’s wife,” said Artair. “You wished a way to make the invasions end? She may have found one.”
One
Bordeaux was far emptier than it had ever been in Erik’s long life. In the past two centuries, he’d been accustomed to seeing the cities of men grow greater and more crowded, pushing out their borders every time he visited and building new houses almost atop the old.
Now many of the houses sat empty, their windows black as the empty eyes of a skull. The noises of the street were almost a whisper compared to what they had been. Sellers of fruit and fish, meat and leather still plied their trades in the markets, but there were far fewer, and their voices sounded muted, afraid. The rumbling of carts easily drowned them out, and while most of those carts held goods for the market, still there were many with a cargo of the dead, open eyes oft staring up to an unseeing heaven.
Man was a fragile creature. Never had Erik seen that more clearly than in the last ten years.
He walked without fear down the pitted cobblestone streets. The dragon-blooded took no harm from mortal plagues, save perhaps to their mind and soul. That horseman might ride after him and the other MacAlasdairs in vain—or perhaps simply leave the duty to his brothers. Certainly they were War’s creatures often enough.
War was the root of Erik’s mission, after all.
Although far fewer ships sat in the harbor, there were yet enough that their masts made a bare-branched forest against the blue summer sky. Men crossed the docks with their burdens: barrels of goods, pails of tar, even the occasional horse or cow. Other men stood or sat in more idleness, fishing off the docks or talking over mugs of ale.
Some such idlers stopped Erik, as men in their position always had done with a well-dressed man who carried a nobleman’s arms. They asked him to join them in drinking—and doubtless stand them a round later—which he declined; asked if he’d found himself lodging and care for his horse, which he had; and asked if he’d need of fresh fish, which he didn’t. He did accept one offer from a young towheaded man for directions.
“I look to hire a ship,” Erik said. “And men. I wish to make a voyage westward.”
“Hmm,” said the young man, and put his head to one side like a spaniel seeking a bone. He had great brown eyes that only heightened the impression. Those eyes scanned the ships in the harbor with alertness, though, and he gave answer promptly enough. “The Hawk might do it, m’lord. She’s small, but she’s been known to take human bundles from time to time, and she’s not beholden so far as I know.”
It sounded promising. “And where might I find her captain?”
“Aboard, most likely. They made port but two days ago. She’ll be looking at every board, if the past’s any measure.”
“She?” Erik asked. It was no shock—among his line, the women fought nearly as much as the men, and such had been more common even among mortals in his parents’ day—but it was a surprise to hear as much from modern lips.
The young man rolled his eyes. “Not that there hasn’t been a bit to say about it. But her husband’s dead, and they’d no children, so…” He shrugged. “The world’s not over-blessed with men these days, no?”
He crossed himself as he said it, and Erik joined him. “The Hawk,” he said.
“Down at the end,” said the young man, and waited expectantly until Erik handed him two pennies.
The docks creaked beneath Erik as he walked toward his destination. That sound, and water lapping against wood, brought back memories from his youth: fishing out in boats on the loch with his cousins, with more joking than actual fishing being done in the end. Cathal and he had been of about an age, or close enough to make little difference among the MacAlasdair youths. Together they’d hidden from tutors, run races, and later planned to court kitchen maids.
Cathal had been the one to explain Erik’s current mission—or, rather, his wife had. A charming woman, unnervingly intelligent and more unnervingly familiar with the magic that Erik had only half learned in his youth, she’d been the one to unearth the relevant legends. Their two daughters had served the evening meal while Sophia told stories, their eyes as grave and brown as their mother’s, but with a dragonish gleam in their depths.
Such an evening left a man brooding, apt to consider his own past and perchance the future to come.
Such a man, Erik told himself, would do well to concentrate on the task at hand, ere he fell into the harbor and earned himself an unpleasant evening. He turned his attention to the ship he was approaching.
The Hawk was a flat-bottomed cog, its oak boards weathered smooth by the ocean but to all appearances solid and sturdy. As it lay in harbor, the single sail was furled against the mast. Above it, a blue flag displayed a single yellow silhouette that might have been a hawk, an eagle, or indeed a giant bat. For certain it had a head and wings, but that was all Erik could make out from a distance. The ship looked to be a good length, eighty feet or so, and sat well in the water.
Two figures stood on the deck. At such a distance, a mortal man might not have known that one of them was female. The dragon-blooded had better eyes, but save for her sex, her height—greater than that of most women—and the gleaming copper-red of her hair, Erik could make out no more of her.
Approaching, he hailed the ship. The captain set her hands on her hips, considering, and then nodded. “Wait there,” she called, gesturing to the docks, “and I’ll come ashore.”
Erik heard a familiar note in her voice, but he couldn’t place it. Not until she reached the docks and he looked into a tanned face with wide, almost-black eyes, in which gleamed small specks of golden fire, did he know her. Then, laughing in amazement, he saw the joke of the flag.
* * *
If the man before her hadn’t gaped and then broken out laughing, Toinette would have thought herself wrong about his identity. The world had big men in plenty, and blond men—whole countries full of big, blond men. There might even have been a few big, blond men with the same shimmering blue-green eyes as the one in front of Toinette had.
His expression convinced her.
“Erik MacAlasdair? What are the odds?”
Not so great as all that, come to think of it. The world could be small, and it was growing smaller of
late. In truth, there’d been times when Toinette had wondered if her blood would be all that was left.
Best not to brood on death. Better to step forward and let Erik embrace her. His lips brushed lightly over hers: a quick kiss of greeting, as between any friend and another, quite unlike the rather messier and more daring one that she remembered receiving behind the forester’s cottage at Loch Arach so many years ago. His arms were stronger, though, and Toinette stepped back feeling a tingling echo of the same thrill she’d had at sixteen.
“A pleasant surprise,” he said, and the accent of Scotland in his voice called back memories of hunting and hawking, of stone halls and the triumph of controlling her heritage for the first time. “Captain Toinette?”
“Captain Deschamps, rightly.”
“I heard,” he said, and bowed his head. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. It was ten years ago now, so—” She spread her hands, smoothing the air as time did pain.
Erik looked slightly surprised. “Ah. Not the plague, then?”
“Only mortality—though you might say the plague counts. He was middle-aged when I met him. A very kind man, and not a very curious one.”
“God rest his soul.”
“Yes,” said Toinette. “Quite likely. And how many times have you wed since we last met?”
“Two.” He made sure that none of the crowd were likely to be listening, and then added, “Both longer past than your man.”
“Quite a crowd in heaven, I’m sure. Children?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t ask in return. Toinette would not bear to a mortal; the blood didn’t cross that way. Men could crossbreed, with difficulty and rituals. The older ones, like Toinette’s father, didn’t even need those. Whether mortal or magical, though, bearing the child of a man with dragon’s blood had certain risks unless you yourself had it to begin with. To Toinette’s mind, it was a bad deal either way.
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