Dragon Coast

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Apologize? Beg forgiveness for whatever offense he’d committed? Play the amnesia card? Breathe fire and summon an earthquake and slink away while the castle collapsed around him?

  “I am sorry,” he said. “Things have been difficult. But maybe it would be best to discuss the future. The past is unchangeable.”

  She saddened. “Does that mean you want to change it?”

  I don’t know, do I? Daniel wanted to scream. Had Paul done some awful thing that he should wish to change if he could? Daniel wasn’t good at these kind of fraught exchanges when he was being himself, let alone trying to pass himself off as someone’s lover. And he found himself actually feeling bad for upsetting her. Maybe ingesting Paul’s breath gave him more than memories and some magical essence. Maybe he was metabolizing Paul’s emotions.

  Cynara put her hand lightly on Daniel’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Paul. I’m being selfish. I’m pushing. It’s just you stand here, smelling of new magic, looking as physically strong as ever.” She glanced down at the pup tent in his crotch. “I mistook you for whole, but of course you’re not.”

  “Thank you. I just need some time.” Time to ransack Paul’s library and workshop and find the axis mundi bone and then get far away from this castle, because it turned out Paul’s domestic situation was more complicated than Daniel had anticipated.

  Cynara slid her hand down to Daniel’s hip and let it rest there, comfortable and intimate. “Time is not something you have in abundance, my love. My brother was so close to the prize, and you coming back just in time to snatch it away … You know what he’s like.”

  Other than the fact that he looked like an Aryan fascist, Daniel really had no idea what Allaster Doring was like.

  “What will his first move be?”

  “He’s already requested audience with the Hierarch. She’ll see him tomorrow. He’ll try to plant seeds of doubt in her mind. He’ll tell her you’re untrustworthy after your absence, an unknown quantity, and absolutely not suited to be High Grand Osteomancer.”

  “I’m not sure he’s wrong.”

  That got a bit of a smile from her. It felt good to make her smile.

  “The Hierarch knows Allaster’s not my biggest fan,” he said. No, that sounded too much like himself, not like Paul. He changed tack. “Let him have his audience. That gives us another day to prepare for him.”

  Cynara nodded, satisfied. At least for now. “As you say, more time.” She kissed him again, softly, and Daniel felt a pang of loss when she pulled away and turned to the vault door. “Come by after eight,” she said.

  That sounded like the most wonderful and awful idea Daniel had ever heard.

  “Cynara,” he said, with true regret, “I have a lot of matters to catch up on. Perhaps tomorrow—”

  “Tonight,” she said, displaying steel that must be at least part of the reason she was reportedly feared throughout the realm. “You’ll see Ethelinda. If this has been hard on you, imagine how hard it’s been on her. She thought her father was dead.”

  Paul had a kid.

  Oh, shit.

  Paul had a kid.

  “Yes,” Daniel said numbly. “I’ll come by tonight.”

  * * *

  A form stepped out of the fog and blocked the narrow path from the castle to Cynara’s guest house. He was tall and blond in a snug white dress shirt. His longish, tousled hair, and the way he wore his shirt open at the collar, and the way he kept his hands in his pockets, all contributed to an effortless insouciance that must have required practice. He made Daniel feel as he often did in the presence of beauty—grubby. Perhaps a bit snail-like. Even the buzz of kraken magic Daniel summoned to his hands brought him little comfort, because Allaster Doring smelled of even richer magic than his sister.

  “Why are you hiding among my olive trees, Allaster?”

  “I’m not hiding. I’m poaching. You grow fantastic olives.” From his pocket, he produced a greenish, roundish thing that Daniel supposed was a rare and valuable olive.

  “Don’t let my steward catch you.”

  “Would that be your old steward, or the new one you brought from wherever the hell you’ve been?” Allaster sniffed the air. “And what’s that magic you’re summoning? I don’t recognize the scent. Something you picked up on your travels?”

  “I’d be happy to show it to you.”

  Allaster rolled the olive around with his his fingers, examining it with a keen eye. “Threats? That’s not like you.”

  It wasn’t? Threats were part of the way Daniel conducted business. They often saved him from having to burn people. Maybe Paul burned fewer people. Or maybe he just burned them without warning.

  Daniel refrained from squeezing the bridge of his nose. He’d barely slept since leaving Los Angeles, and squeezing his nose was what he did whenever he had a stress headache, and maybe Paul never had stress headaches.

  “Say what you came to say, Allaster.”

  Allaster maintained his tight, smug smile, but Daniel saw that, for just a brief moment, it took effort. “I came to see you, Paul. You’ve been gone. I thought you dead.” Daniel said nothing to this, and Allaster’s smile grew tighter and smugger and less convincing. “You look healthy enough. On the outside, anyway.”

  Now, was that a threat, the distinction between outside and inside? How many times had Daniel threatened to turn someone inside out, to soak up their magic with a sponge, to pick his teeth with their ribs?

  “I feel fine. Thank you.”

  “I suppose you know I have an audience with our Hierarch tomorrow.”

  “I’ve heard you plan to impress upon her how unfit I am for the office of High Grand Osteomancer.”

  “That’s the case I’m going to make. But first I wanted to make it to you.”

  “Generally, when I receive visitors, I don’t do it in the dark of my gardens.”

  “I wanted to talk to you before you see my sister. Cynara can be … persuasive.”

  Through all this, Daniel’s kraken magic sizzled and popped inside his finger bones.

  “Make your case, Allaster. And make it brief.”

  “You’re making my case for me, crackling with foreign magic, reappeared from the dead after a disastrous mission in enemy territory. And why there? Why did the great, mysterious weapon you supposedly crafted for our Hierarch have to be built in the waters of the Southern Kingdom?”

  “I needed the resources there. They had the osteomantic materials I couldn’t get anywhere else. And I needed to be free of obstructions. I didn’t want anyone poaching my olives. So, your argument is that I’m using strange magic and it makes you nervous and you think I’m a traitor. Do you have anything else?”

  Allaster dropped the smile entirely. He took two slow steps forward, eyes locked on Daniel’s, and Daniel wondered if he’d realized Daniel wasn’t Paul. Allaster smelled of molten rock, and chitinous armor, and the musk and manure of large cats.

  Daniel readied himself.

  “We used to be such good friends,” Allaster said. He looked so sad. “What happened, Paul?”

  Daniel had no idea what happened. He had no idea that Paul and Allaster were friends.

  “Things change. People change.”

  Allaster nodded.

  He dropped the olive in the dirt and turned down the path.

  * * *

  Daniel arrived at Cynara’s guest house fifteen minutes early. Showing up before he was expected might lend him a little advantage of surprise, but the truer reason was that he was dreading this meeting and wanted to get it over with.

  He kept his hands at his sides when Cynara answered the door, resisting the urge to touch her without invitation. But when she leaned forward and kissed him, he returned her kiss and brushed his fingers through her hair, cool silk in his hand.

  She drew him into the house.

  “Go see her,” Cynara said. She picked up on Daniel’s hesitation and uncertainty and added, “I put her to bed.”

  “The northwest bedroom?”
Daniel had learned the floor plan from Moth so he could pretend a familiarity with the layout.

  “You know she doesn’t like the garden shadows in that room. She’s in the eastern room.”

  “Right. I thought she might have grown out of it.”

  He found Ethelinda nearly buried under a white mountain of cotton blankets in bed. At its summit lay a fabric bunny with black button eyes.

  Daniel remained rooted in the doorway, his heart cleaved in two. He knew her face so well. It was his mother’s face, and his father’s face, and his own face, blended together in a four-year-old child.

  No, he reminded himself. She didn’t look like him. She looked like Paul.

  What nicknames did Paul have for her? What were their little jokes? What was her favorite book? Did he even read to her? What was the damn bunny’s name?

  Cynara nudged him into the room.

  He came over and sat on her bed. Ethelinda looked at him suspiciously. He didn’t know how Cynara was looking at him, because he flatly refused to turn his head in her direction. It would only make him more nervous.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said in barely more than a whisper, sitting up. She was on the verge of tears.

  Was she afraid of him? Did she know he was an impostor? Or was she just overwhelmed by his return after his absence? After his death.

  “I’m sorry I was gone for so long,” he said. “I missed you. I would have come back sooner if I could.”

  Her lip trembled, her face crumpled, and she held in her sobs and turned her face as the tears started to fall.

  Was she not allowed to cry? What kind of parents didn’t let a four-year-old cry?

  “I feel like crying, too. It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?”

  More tears and quivers. She nodded.

  “How about you just tell me what you did today?”

  She cocked her head at him like a confused puppy.

  “I just want to hear the whole story, from when you woke up till when you went to bed. Because I’m nosy.”

  He pulled out a tissue from her bed stand, ready to help her blow her nose, but she handled it herself.

  “Boris told me about chrysalis spells,” she began, sniffling.

  Daniel had no idea who Boris was, nor what a chrysalis spell did, and he sat there with her, listening to her tell him about more unfamiliar names and places and books he’d never heard of and songs he didn’t know, until she ran out of steam and sagged back in her bed.

  He grew furious with Paul. Congratulations, brother, you made a Pacific firedrake and deprived your daughter of a dad.

  No, that wasn’t right. Paul hadn’t deprived her of a father. Daniel had.

  He took the wet tissue from her and tucked her blankets securely over her shoulders, but she pushed them off with sleepy irritation.

  When he stood, Ethelinda reached out with her small brown fingers and put them in his calloused hand. Daniel gave them a gentle squeeze and touched them to his lips.

  Cynara’s face was unreadable as she turned out the light and led Daniel from Ethelinda’s room. At the front door, she stood on one side of the threshold, in the warm, lit house, and Daniel stood outside in the damp night.

  “She’s what you almost gave up,” Cynara said.

  “I’m glad I didn’t.”

  She nodded. “Tomorrow, we’ll talk about putting me in power.”

  She shut the door with a soft click, followed by the heavier sounds of bolts and locks.

  TWELVE

  Daniel stood on a bluff overlooking the beach a few miles south of Paul’s castle. The sun burned off the morning fog to reveal massive lumps of light brown flesh sprawled across the sand. They might have been easily mistaken for driftwood tree trunks until one of the bull elephant seals reared up, elevating its head eight feet from the ground, and let out a great, snuffling roar. Another bull rose up and roared a return.

  “Are they going to fight?”

  Daniel reached out with a restraining hand when Ethelinda moved closer to the cliff edge, her eyes full of solemn wonder.

  “I hope not,” he said.

  The beasts weighed three tons or more, and their battles were brutal and ugly and deadly. A lot of their pups got crushed to death as collateral damage.

  It had been Daniel’s idea to take Ethelinda off the palace grounds. The household needed to see their lord doing more than hiding in the dark with books. And, more important, Cynara needed to believe he was Ethelinda’s father. Also, he thought Ethelinda might enjoy it.

  He found her gaze uncomfortably probing, so he looked away, out to the open sea.

  “Mother said you were hurt,” she said.

  “I had an accident. It took a long time to get better. That’s why I was away for so long.”

  “Were you burned? From the dragon?”

  Daniel had killed Paul by vomiting poisonous magic in his face.

  “Something like that.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  He was sure it did. It must have been agonizing.

  “A little bit.”

  They walked along the edge of the cliff. The waves crashed and the seals coughed and snuffled. A few lumbered into the water and became dark islands beyond the surf.

  “I got hurt once,” Ethelinda said. “There was a spider woman on my ceiling. When Mother killed her, she fell on me and her elbow hit me in the mouth.”

  Ethelinda skipped ahead to chase a foraging seagull, leaving Daniel behind, breathless.

  He caught up to her. “What did your … what did Mother say about the spider?”

  “That she was a maid at the house, but only so she could get close to me, and someone fed her spider magic to turn her into a spider. She tried to assa … assassa…”

  She screwed her face into a frown, struggling with the word.

  “Assassinate?”

  “Assassinate me.” She smiled with triumph, but only briefly, like a glint of sun on a black sea.

  Daniel reached out for her hand and she took it.

  “What did Mother do with the spider?”

  “She cooked it and made magic for herself. When I’m old enough, I get to have some. And she made all the maids go away.”

  Daniel didn’t ask where they went. Out on the streets, or prison, or Cynara’s cauldron. He didn’t want to hear it in the girl’s soft, serious voice.

  “Did it hurt? When the spider hit you with her elbow?”

  She tightened her grip on his fingers. “Yes. But I’m better now.”

  * * *

  At least half the books in Paul’s library were locked with osteomantic devices, and each lock added minutes to the task of simply opening the cover. Many of the texts themselves were written in languages and scripts Daniel wasn’t fluent in. Even the ones written in English employed nonstandardized spellings and unnecessarily baroque typefaces.

  Moth came in, smelling of virgin honey soap. Daniel looked up from the book he’d been studying, winced from his stiff neck, and rubbed his eyes.

  “Don’t like your breakfast?” Moth asked, noticing the plate of morels and quail eggs with pickled ramp sauce and gorgeous, rare lamb medallions, untouched at his elbow. Daniel’s wineglass contained a Sonoma coast pinot noir, jewel red when held to the morning light streaming through the windows. Daniel had not even sipped it.

  “That was my dinner.”

  “Not hungry?”

  “Not for poison,” Daniel said, stretching his back and hearing an alarming pop.

  Moth barked an incredulous laugh. “They tried to poison an osteomancer? One with your finicky nose? Do you want me to round up and club the usual suspects? Or club someone who can tell me who the usual suspects are?”

  “No. We don’t have time for that.”

  “When you’ve got bigger fish to fry than your own staff trying to kill you, you’ve been fishing in some shitty oceans. How about I send up a bagel and coffee and demote your head cook to food taster?”

  “Bagel. Cof
fee. Please. Thank you.” And then something occurred to him. “Who cooks for Cynara and Ethelinda?”

  “Cynara has her own staff, including a cook. The ingredients are brought in separately, just for her, and they’re prepared in the cottage. Cynara’s cook wouldn’t have any contact with your food.”

  “No, that’s not why I’m asking. Find out about this cook, will you? And everyone else who has contact with Ethelinda.”

  Moth frowned. “What’s this about?”

  Daniel told him of the attempt on Ethelinda’s life. Moth was interested but didn’t seem concerned. Ethelinda’s welfare wasn’t part of the job.

  Daniel opened another book and began turning pages. It was a catalog of some kind, with ink and watercolor drawings of rings and pendants and bracelets. The notations were in a Latinate cypher, a script often used by seventeenth-century osteomancers that Daniel struggled to remember from his father’s tutelage. He’d pulled sixteen other books just like this one down from the shelves, and the shelves still contained at least another sixty.

  “You’re going to ruin your eyes, you keep reading in this dim light.” Moth said. “I can have your electricians install something brighter. I’ve got them working in the wine cellars, but I can pull them off that. You should see that place, by the way. Total fire hazard. Really, the whole house needs rewiring. And we’ve got termite damage under the rugs in the formal dining room. Talk about headaches.”

  “You are doing a very good job running the house, Moth. The toilets even flush on time. You do realize we’re not going to spend one damn second here longer than necessary? As soon as I find the axis mundi bone, we’re gone.” That came out with more heat than Daniel had intended.

  Moth didn’t move, but he seemed to grow, his muscled body looming and building in menace. Daniel figured he managed it by flexing some muscle Daniel didn’t even possess.

  “Are you pissed at me?” Moth’s voice was mild and frightening.

  “No. No, I’m not,” Daniel said with a sigh. “Sorry. I’m pissed at Paul. I’m pissed at him for being the kind of guy who gets himself entwined in byzantine power plays. I’m pissed that I can’t tell the difference between his friends and lovers and enemies. I’m pissed he built a dragon that took Sam from me. I’m pissed he abandoned his four-year-old daughter.”