The Dragon Token

by Melanie Rawn

  Andry savored the taste, his eyes dreamy. He hadn’t his aunt’s nose, but one would have to be dead and burned not to appreciate this glassful of liquid rubies. Dead and burned—or Nialdan, he thought with a smile, watching the big Sunrunner take another large swallow. Nialdan much preferred the heavy, bitter ale favored by sailors who made port in Waes, where he had been born. He tended to toss back the finest wine as if it were colored water.

  Nialdan wasn’t the only one who had taken a swift, bracing gulp after Andry’s casual announcement. The other devr’im—including the two newest—had overcome their initial shock by now and were marshaling arguments. Andry won his bet with himself about who would speak first.

  “You can’t!” Valeda exclaimed. “We need you here!”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re Lord of Goddess Keep!”

  “That I am. But my duties extend beyond these walls.”

  She gave a hiss of frustration. “Very well, then, let’s talk about what goes on immediately outside these walls! Jayachin and her people have been impossible enough with you here—what will happen if you leave?”

  Andry shrugged and poured himself more wine. “I have complete trust that Torien will keep everyone in line.”

  “My Lord. . . .” Torien’s dark Fironese face was worry-lined. “I value your confidence, but I have a hard time sharing in it.”

  “I don’t see why,” Andry said.

  “That’s not the issue,” Valeda snapped. “What about your leg, Andry? It’s not healed yet—and don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt. You’ve been drinking like a tavern slug to numb it.”

  “I’m fine.” He took a long, deliberate swallow of wine and waited for the next objection.

  It came from the young woman who had replaced Rusina in their defensive configuration. Crila had eyes and hair as pale as dawn, but her skin was a rich, deep brown with a lustrous sheen over her high, prominent cheekbones. The color of that skin and the cant of those bones were the only physical clues to distant Fironese ancestry—and the diarmadhi blood that sometimes went with it.

  “My Lord, you must do as you will in all things,” she said in her light, soft voice. “But as much as I trust in your teachings and in Lord Torien’s ability to lead us, I confess I would much rather have you here with us if we must use the ros’salath.”

  Smiling at her, he said, “You wouldn’t hold the title devri and drink from Rusina’s cup if you hadn’t learned everything you need to know.”

  It had taken many days to test everyone here, and Crila had been the closest match to Rusina’s colors and strengths. That her four Sunrunner’s rings had turned to fiery circles on her fingers during the final test increased her value—though Torien was still trying to convince her that Sorcerer’s blood was not necessarily an evil thing. Andry had found her the perfect pupil and perfectly obedient; born the year Lady Andrade died, Crila was entirely of Andry’s making as a Sunrunner.

  Not so the man who had taken Oclel’s place. Antoun was of the old guard. Past sixty, his gray hair was thin and his fingers were gnarled and stiff. But the dark blue eyes, surrounded by fine lines and thick lashes, were astonishingly young. Antoun had earned all of his nine rings under Andrade’s tutelage; as a Master Teacher, he had supervised Andry’s own training years ago. He had been willing to give up the eighth ring when Andry decided it would betoken physician’s status alone, but his knuckle had swollen so with joint disease that the only choice would have been to cut the ring off. And this Andry would not do to his old teacher. Antoun was part of his memories of his youth—a youth ended when at barely twenty he became Lord of Goddess Keep. Antoun was part of the past, having known Andrade and Urival and Sioned. And despite the changes Andry had wrought here, despite the traditions overset and the innovations made, he valued the heritage of Goddess Keep.

  From a purely practical standpoint, of course, there was no one better to fill Oclel’s position. The older Sunrunners, those who had their doubts about Andry, would approve of one of their number being admitted to his innermost circle.

  He turned his gaze to Antoun now, arching a brow. “Well? You’ve been as quiet as autumn sunshine all the years I’ve known you—except in the classroom when I did something wrong.”

  “If you’re asking me to judge whether or not this is wrong—” Lean shoulders shrugged. “It’s not for me to say, Andry. Nor any of us, except for you. But I do have a question.”

  “Ask.”

  “Meaning no offense, but why does everyone fight so hard for the Desert?”

  Jolan looked taken aback, then nodded. “I’ve always wondered that, myself.”

  Antoun continued, “I’ve never understood what’s so compelling about the place. It’s hot, empty, and exhausting. Except for Skybowl, there’s not enough water to take a bath in. It grows nothing but cactus. I’ve given up wondering why the Vellant’im want it, but why is Pol so determined to keep it? I say let them have it, and welcome. They wouldn’t last two seasons. I’ve been there, and I know.”

  Andry chuckled. “You’re telling me this? I was born there!”

  Ulwis, who usually said even less than Antoun, smiled at him. “And you can’t explain it, my Lord?”

  “Oh, I could grow philosophical like my uncle Rohan, and say that the deeper one’s roots must go to find water, the harder one clings to the land—even the Desert. Lady Merisel called it a Sunrunner’s natural habitat—for which a case can be made!”

  Valeda shrugged. “Yet you’ve been uprooted.”

  “Never.” He was surprised to hear the word from his own lips, but the instant it was spoken he knew it to be true. And it sobered him as nothing else could have.

  Setting down his cup, he said, “Listen to me, all of you. There are plenty of reasons why I’m able to leave—the least of which is that I’m the Lord of Goddess Keep and can do as I like. The reasons that mean something are that Master Jayachin has her people under control now, as we saw today. There are some rough spots to be smoothed over, but in a crisis they’ll do as they’re told. Torien, you can rule Goddess Keep perfectly well in my absence. You know how to use the ros’salath, there are two or three others now in training to strengthen it—if it even becomes necessary to use it, which I doubt.

  “I’m not needed here. You know it and I know it. You’re all so careful of the trappings of my position that only a few others have begun to suspect it. But once I’m gone, after a couple of days of nerves, they’ll know it, too.”

  “I don’t see how this is an advantage,” Valeda grumbled.

  “But it is, you know,” he said softly. “It’s exactly as it should be, that I or anyone else in this position can be important but not essential. It’s all Sunrunners who matter, not just one.”

  “Very modest and self-effacing,” she retorted. “But it doesn’t disguise the fact that we do have need of you.”

  “The Desert needs me more. Since Pol failed to protect Radzyn, they’ve learned a thing or two. But I’m the only one who can teach them what they must know so that we don’t lose Skybowl and Feruche the way we lost Stronghold.”

  “We,” Antoun murmured.

  “Yes. Whatever our differences, I am still the son of my parents and the grandson of Prince Zehava. The Desert is my home, my birthplace. Nothing will ever uproot my heart.”

  Valeda shifted her shoulder. “I understand that, my Lord. I’m sorry for what I said earlier. But you know Pol won’t welcome you. And in saving the Desert, you’re saving his position as High Prince, too.”

  Andry had weighed the one against the other, finding the balance alarmingly even—until he thought of Rohan.

  “Well,” he drawled, “no plan is ever perfect.”

  She gave a complex snort, half of laughter and half of disgust. “Isn’t it just? Which reminds me. Very soon winter fog and rain will wrap us tight and make Sunrunning impossible. How will we keep track of you?”

  “I’ll send to you as often as I can. To others here and there as the s
unlight permits, so they can tell you when they’ve got time. I won’t have much to spare.” Glancing at the water clock by the doorway, he said, “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment for dinner. Torien, would you see that Jayachin has an escort? She’s never been farther than the courtyard before.”

  “And shouldn’t be now.” Valeda’s eyes were bright and hard as polished steel. “She’ll play you for a fool, Andry. Anyone can see it.”

  With a shrug, he answered, “She can try.”

  • • •

  When Amiel of Gilad was a little boy, he had delighted in flouting his birth to his playmates at Medawari. Though they were all sons and daughters of highborns, he would one day be their prince and he never let them forget it. When his father told him that Pol had expressed an interest in fostering him at Dragon’s Rest, Amiel was quite unsurprised. He was himself a prince, his father’s only son, and that he should be chosen as a squire to the next High Prince was entirely fitting. He was, after all, an important person.

  This attitude was tolerated for exactly three days at Dragon’s Rest. On the fourth, his fellow squire, Edrel of River Ussh—a year older and a handspan taller—gave him a salutary lesson in humility and fistfighting.

  Amiel’s scornful dislike of Edrel changed to an active loathing that increased with every throb of his blackened eye. Pol ignored both emotion and injury, which outraged Amiel. As the heir to Gilad, his worth was infinitely superior to Edrel’s. The mere second son of an athri, Edrel had no prospects of wealth or position beyond what he could marry. And at fourteen, he looked unlikely to attract any girl above the rank of scullery drudge—and would be lucky to get that much attention.

  Life at Dragon’s Rest was not what Amiel had expected. His father had emphasized that he must serve his new lord diligently in all things, of course. But cleaning the mud from Pol’s boots and mucking out his favorite horse’s stall were beneath Amiel’s princely dignity. So, emphatically, was any association with Edrel. As senior squire, the older boy had full authority over him. And used it.

  On the fifth day of his martyrdom, after Edrel had given him just that one order too many, Amiel complained to Pol. He was heard in a silence that he interpreted as encouragement to present the full list of his grievances. They were many. At length, when he was done, his lord looked down at him with those strange, changeable blue-green eyes and said something shocking.

  “Legally, you’re bound to my service until I decide you’re worthy of being knighted. But as you seem so unsuited to life here, I suppose I’ve no choice but to send you home.”

  Amiel gaped. Send him home? It was Edrel who was impossible—and Edrel who was unimportant. Momentarily deprived of the power of speech, he finally found voice enough to burst out, “But I’m a prince!”

  “No,” Pol replied. “You’re a squire. And likely to remain one for several dozen years unless you alter your thinking. If, that is, anyone will take you after I release you from my service.”

  “No, my lord—please!”

  Pol regarded him thoughtfully. “Well, well. That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that word. I’ll wager it’s the first time you’ve ever said it.” Then he smiled. “If we’re lucky, we all learn something new every day, Amiel.”

  Over the next eight years he learned how to say “please” and “thank you.” He learned that what he was worth depended on what he was, not whose son he had been born. He learned to tolerate Edrel, then to like him, and finally to regard him as the brother he’d never had. At the Rialla of 737, Amiel knew that Edrel was in love with Princess Norian before Edrel did. This was only fair; that spring, Edrel had been the one to point out that the reason Amiel was losing sleep was bronze-haired, dark-eyed, and the niece of the Master of Hawks. When he married Nyr that autumn, it was in a double celebration with Edrel and Norian.

  But after, while riding home to Medawari, Amiel knew that childhood playmates also grown to adulthood would expect a man-sized version of the dictatorial little prig they’d pretended to like because one day he would be their ruling prince. The change in him would shock them witless.

  So would his new wife. Nyr lacked any inheritance of money or land; she had no important family connections; she came from a holding so remote that nobody had ever heard of it; she was barely even highborn. She had come to Dragon’s Rest to visit her uncle, and stayed because Princess Meiglan liked her. Amiel’s former companions might have understood his taking her as his mistress—though she wasn’t even that beautiful until one looked into her eyes or heard her laugh. But that he had actually married this nobody would have them gaping.

  He thought this over on the first days of their journey back to Gilad, amused to find an impulse still in him to demand their deference toward his Chosen wife. It was the difference between thirteen winters and twenty-one that he thought of Nyr rather than himself—and that he decided to restrain his despotic urges and let them see her worth for themselves.

  He had planned a leisurely ride home, escorted by ten of his father’s soldiers. Cabar had gone ahead, disliking travel for travel’s sake and wanting the comforts of his own castle. His had turned out the wiser choice. By mid-autumn, they were at war.

  Amiel and Nyr’s pleasure trip became a journey through nightmares. They hid by day in copses and forests, and sometimes in the scorched shell of a barn, riding only by night and beseeching the Father of Storms for cloud cover that would blot out the moons. A journey planned for thirty days had taken more than fifty. When at last they arrived home, Cabar wept while embracing the son he had given up for dead.

  Medawari had been locked up tight since the first day of the war. Cabar could not be budged from his adherence to the point of treaty law extolled by Pirro of Fessenden: that because attack had not come from another princedom but from enemies totally unknown, each prince was absolved from going to the others’ aid.

  Amiel learned this almost the moment he rode into the courtyard. He waited a few days to make sure, asking questions and growing more and more infuriated when people told him only what they thought he wanted to hear. Then he confronted his father—rather untactfully, as it happened, in the middle of dinner one evening.

  “I know we haven’t the resources to mount an effective army of our own,” the young prince began, “but surely we could send what we have to reclaim what we’ve lost.”

  “All the troops we can muster are needed to protect us here. Their duty is to protect their prince—and the heir,” Cabar added sternly.

  “I don’t like the cost of safety,” Amiel retorted.

  “Then look at the cost of war! If Rohan wins, he will be bound by what he himself wrote. He can’t punish us for holding to the treaty. If these savages win, we will have shown that we wish only to live in peace. But until somebody wins, our gates are closed and I will hear no more on the matter.”

  “Father—”

  “No more!”

  It was Nyr who coaxed him from the high table, saying she felt faint and needed his support up the stairs. He very nearly told her to find a servant, then saw the urgency in her dark eyes and went with her. Grudgingly.

  When they were alone in their chamber, she said, “Dearest, I know what you think and what you feel, but shouting at your father in the middle of dinner—”

  “I’ll go myself!” he fumed. “I’ll take whoever has the spine to go with me. If I have to, I’ll order them out of their soft chairs and safe chambers—”

  “Amiel! Listen to me! What about the physicians?”

  That stopped him before he could work himself into a tirade. “What?”

  “The physicians,” she repeated.

  “What in the Name of the Goddess do they have to do with anything?”

  “Isn’t part of their oath to give of their skills whenever there is need?”

  “So?”

  “There is need,” she said simply.

  When he got to where she already was, he gave a whoop of delight. “Whenever and wherever! They
can’t fulfill their oath, to help all the princedoms if they can’t get there! So if I escort them with a force of troops, Father can’t stop me!” Seizing his wife in his arms, he whirled her around the room and landed with her on the bed. “You’re brilliant! Whatever made you think of it?”

  She hesitated. “I wouldn’t have, except that I consulted a physician myself. Yesterday.”

  Paling, he sat up and stared at her. “Nyr? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m all good, healthy peasant stock on my mother’s side. We never have any trouble. You mustn’t worry.”

  This made no sense to him, and he said so.

  She smiled. “Oh, Amiel.”

  The moment he realized his prospective fatherhood changed him as much as his eight years at Dragon’s Rest.

  On the day after a dragon was killed at Stronghold, Amiel marched out of Medawari. His childhood companions had not yet had time to discover the differences between the boy he’d been and the man he was. When he gave an order, it was obeyed. When he commanded secrecy, they kept their mouths shut. If the “escort” Amiel provided for the sixty physicians who had volunteered their services was—at three hundred and twenty soldiers—a trifle excessive, no one commented on it.

  Excepting Cabar, when he found out. But few listened to him, and no one stopped Amiel from going. They knew who their next ruling prince would be.

  • • •

  “One more story, Papa? Please?”

  Pol might have resisted Jihan—who would have demanded, not asked—but it had always been impossible to tell Rislyn “no.” Not when she looked up at him with those big green eyes from beneath a tangle of golden hair. His gentle little girl had said hardly a word since Stronghold. The terrible shocks of the last eight days—being caught in Sioned’s working, the death of her beloved Grandsir, and the flight from the burning castle—had affected her more deeply than Jihan. Or perhaps Jihan simply hid it better.

  “One more,” he agreed, and settled more comfortably at the foot of the bed, his back against the post and one bare foot tucked under him. He paused for a sip from the cup of taze in his hand as the girls snuggled into their pillows, and then he began.