“I’m going to finish packing. Why don’t you work for a while. I’ll say goodbye before I go.”
She came around the table to him, clasped his arms and kissed him gently on the cheek. “Don’t forget the hoskas.”
“And a vat of honeycream.” He laughed and turned away.
“Well, a small wooden bowlful. It’s in the cloth with the bread. Garce designed a fascinating lidded bowl for you and Kiersta filled it with cream.” Now Vyck smiled and turned away to clean the table. “A reminder that a lot of people believe in you.”
Lighting continued to flash over the next hour as Hardt reviewed his packing and walked through his memories in the cottage. He’d lived in this home for sixty seasons. Fifteen birth day anniversaries had been celebrated with songs sung and dinner in bed. Today’s weather would make for a good calling of the tale of his stormy beginning. The kitchen had been witness to both he and Vyck’s many disastrous cooking experiments. And they’d hinged the back wall when Hardt had traded with Garce for a chair too big for the door. It was his first trade, with the first coat he ever made completely by himself; hunted, tanned, cut, and created. Vyck didn’t want to disappoint him. The back ‘door’ had been quite useful recently for escaping from visitors.
The memories washed over him as took down his necklace from the peg, fastened the silver clasp at his throat, and smoothed the braided leather. The band had been a gift from Vyck, given to her by her grandmother. Hardt treasured the rare family heirloom and rare tales he had of his family.
When he’d gathered what he’d need into his pack and tied the extra pouches to his belt, he sat in his big chair and looked over the small room. He tried to shake off the strange feeling that he would never be here again.
Vyck was working under the raintarp when he stepped outside again and he paused at the doorway to watch. The muscles of her arms rippled as she scraped bits of muscle and sinew from a snakecat skin. She’d run it down a few days earlier and had joked that the creature sacrificed itself to her in apology for its brother’s vicious attack on Hardt. Hardt suggested that in that case she should burn the pelt. Instead they’d burned the claws as a private anniversary celebration. Now she was finishing the skin as a rug so whoever ended up with it, the animal would be walked on for eternity.
It was a rather severe bloodprice to pay for what its brother had done, Hardt thought. And no snakecats got any say in the punishment. Rather like the dTelfur had no say in Hardt’s bloodprice. Hardt wandered through the yard to the far side of the cottage. He poured a cup of water from the keg and took the pitcher over to refill Vyck’s cup on the small stool by the tarp. Vyck was deeply concentrated on her work and he sat back in the grass, unnoticed, to watch her as he thought.
Perhaps the current wasn’t pushing him towards Voferen Kahago. The summons had been only a request after all and a request in fact to come and teach them something he didn’t believe. A conversation needed to happen between the dTelfur and the lander, but perhaps it wasn’t the leaders who needed to talk this time. He could really pay a bloodprice if he could find the dTelfur and talk to them.
Disturbed the dropping temperature, Hardt stood anxiously and paced back into the house. His cloak still hung on its peg just inside the door. He pulled it down and flung it over his shoulders, staring at the staff gifted by Garce and carved with a dragon’s head atop. Maybe he could find the dragon and apologize. And there was a chance that the woman hadn’t died. He tied the cloak and stepped outside to shrug into his pack. Why should he go to Voferen Kahago and try to convince them of what his heart believed when he could go to the dTelfur village and learn the truth for himself?
Vyck looked up from her work at the dark gathering clouds and saw Hardt on the threshold. He saw she used a rope hanging from the tarp supports to help her stand from the kneeling rocker. There were always new improvements showing up around Vyck and with Hardt gone, she’d have to rely even more on her ingenuity and, he hoped, on other people. A myriad of hopes and dreams ran through his mind for her and for himself as she crossed the yard to meet him at the bottom of the steps.
“I should cut your hair before I go.”
“I was thinking I’d grow it long again.”
He took a step back and tried to picture her with long hair. “I never knew you with long hair.”
“Yes, you did. You just don’t remember.”
She passed him and climbed to the doorway to gather his spears. She’d tied them together earlier and made a shoulder sling for him. Everything in her said that this trip to the kimoet was no answer for his healing. Their hoped-for dragon fighter had given up hunting. What would he discover in Voferen Kahago? She feard for him. As she stepped down to help him sling the spears on his back, beside his pack, her heart reached patience’s limit and she spoke what she had intended to keep to herself.
“I don’t want you to go. I don’t think you’ll find answers in Kahago.”
For a moment she saw her cold family in her nephew’s face. And for a moment the metallic crackle in the air froze, the increasing winds fell still, and the forest held its breath. And in that moment Hardt made his decision.
“I’m not going to the kimoet.” He inhaled a deep and wonderful breath and let it all go. “I’m going to the dTelfur village to find out who I killed.”
And Vyck cried. The lifting joy of relief overwhelmed her even as dread powerlessness over his unknown future melted her strength. Her legs gave way and the spears crashed to the dirt as she sank towards the steps. Hardt met her halfway down and helped her back up. The neither of them had any words. She showed him all her sadness, fears, and approval and he embraced her approval like an un-looked-for but much desired gift and shared the fears and sadness. But he saw over her shoulder into the trees where a flash of lightning illuminated Getek and Ker, and Jaydee and Hundred and Noah with Firth and Calien. So he kissed her once and left her with the spears on the steps to their cottage.
The wind whipped through Vyck’s hair and slapped the apron against her legs. She stood on the steps and let the tears pour down her face as they hadn’t since she’d left her own home. Lightning exploded the trees in midnight color and thunder cracked the sky as Hardt walked away into the western forest. And a hot rain poured down all over the shale.
Act II
k145 – k207 (107 – 169ath)
One
∞
Rain spattered coldly on Sophie’s broad wings. Turning her head up to the gathering clouds, she closed her eyes and let the water hit her lids, feeling it slide down to drop from the sides of her muzzle to the earth so far beneath her. Again, she wished she could cry as the telfs of the village did with tears running down her muzzle, releasing the constriction of her throat and emptiness in her chest.
She enjoyed the sensation of crying, but the rain was too much for the old dragon’s sensitive new hide and she soon soared down to seek shelter beneath a copse of hardwood trees, their new leaves spreading broadly out over a stony ledge overlooking a small lake. The stone was cool on her sunwarmed hide and she quickly felt herself falling into a heavy doze. Every spring her shedding made her sleepy. Every spring she left the village to swim off her sloughing skin in the warm southern waters. And every spring her return was marked with change.
A couple hundred sheddings ago, give or take a dozen, she’d returned from shedding just in time to see the infant dTserra pop from her shell. She returned about a century ago, with dTserra, to find that the land had been invaded by a new sentient species. Four decades before that she’d overflown the old Vize, dTarent on her return as he walked away from the village, never to be seen again. And then only two springs ago she’d returned from shedding to lay dTserra, dying, by the riverside.
The hypnotizing rhythm of the rain falling on the leaves and into the water beneath the stone ledge lulled the grieving dragon deeper into her morbid thoughts. She had no reason to leave the lake, she thought. Nobody waited in the village for her return. She could stay here, dying
as dTarent did in obscurity. Still, she thought for the hundred-millionth time, she didn’t want to die without knowing what she had lived for. So instead, she slept and she remembered.
Hunting had been good in the southern waters that spring of her last shedding with dTserra and so the two had stayed long after Sophie’s old hide was well gone. Finally flying north, laughing madly at the usual inanities, Sophie had spotted a pack of landers far from their village. At dTserra’s suggestion, they’d followed the pack as they hunted a clan of Kyirghon, intervening only when it looked as though the dam might hurt the landers. Then dTserra had crept too close and gotten herself stabbed with a lander spear. She would have died there in the forest, surrounded by raging landers if that one man hadn’t lifted the fool up high enough for Sophie to reach her.
Instead, Sophie’s dearest friend had died slowly at the riverside while a battle began raging in the village as to what should be done with the landers.
The grief of dTserra’s death had aged Sophie, but Deg…Deg had flown for the first time in fifty sheddings. dTserra had always insisted that as long as his wings grew every year at the same rate as his body, he should still be able to fly. And she’d proven it. She’d demanded that he fly to her muddy deathbed and the exercise had rejuvenated the ancient counselor. He’d left his eggs on the hatching ground several more times since then and looked healthier than ever.
The little dTur-like dTserra had been a favorite of Deg’s just as the telf-like dragon, Nahni was now. And neither had given the old hatching dragon much warning of their arrival. A storm had been raging over the village the day dTserra hatched. Sophie had just returned from her annual shedding with some fruit for old Deg from the beautifully colored trees on the eastern shore. Delivering them directly to him on the hatching grounds, she’d just barely arrived and spread a wing to shield poor Deg’s head from the rain when a shell had popped open and tumbled an infant telf onto the sand at their feet.
That little hatchling was the sleekest and brightest telfling Sophie had ever seen. When Deg put his head down to look closely at her, the girl child had reached up and used the old hatching dragon’s nose to pull herself upright. No telf had before stood at birth and the little girl’s belly, when she fell over, showed a covering of light blue fur. Young dragon bellies were covered in blue fur to give them camouflage and padding as they learned to fly. The earthbound telfs needed no such protections. Immediately, the infant had attached herself to Sophie who loved her back equally and named the precocious child Serra.
Sophie had quickly learned that this telf was determined not to be earth or species bound. She strapped herself incorrectly into a harness and demanded to fly with Sophie before she could form the words. Because as she grew the girl showed more dTurish qualities and a clear preference for the company of the dTur element of the symbiotic community of the dTelfur, Sophie soon changed her name to dTserra and the pair remained virtually inseparable for a decade over two centuries.
The sudden disappearance of dTserra in her dream shot a cold stream of loneliness up the length of Sophie’s spine and woke her to a dry sky and the slowing drip of leaves draining into the lake. Crawling from her shelter, the sad woman took again to the sky, travelling home with new skin and no new answers for the purpose of her life.
Konifer had a clear purpose to his life. He was the Vize. The nature-gifted overseer of the village identified at hatching by Deg and apprenticed to his father, dTarent to be taught his responsibilities in life. He was so sure of himself where Sophie floundered. When dTserra was murdered, Sophie sunk into despair and Konifer took action. He declared strict sanctions against interaction of any kind with landers or lander items and then he organized the dTur and telfs adapted to flight with each other to dig moats around the fire and soak it where they could. He then walked the boundary of this moat, all but the eastern edge which led towards the lander shale, and asked nature to stop the fire there and allow regrowth. Sophie had offered to fly the unadapted Vize to the beginning of his walk but he’d turned down her kindly-meant offer with such disdain that she’d shrunk off to hide until he’d gone from the village.
Deg had sent little Nahni, the telf-like dragon, to distract her when Konifer had flown off on Ahnarie. The hatchling had done her best with the grieving old dTur.
“How old is Deg, Sophie?” The forty year old asked.
For centuries the dTelfur had whispered about Deg’s seemingly endless life. Dragons could live a very long time and despite symbiosis, they still usually lived longer than the telfs’ average five hundred sheddings. Of course some dragons died in hunting, some through illness, some from injury, and a few from size. But Deg had survived hunting accidents and illnesses and innumerable injuries. And as dragons grew every year, Deg was the biggest dragon ever. Still he was alive.
Sophie answered absently. “Nobody knows. He says he was born after symbiosis and before the shared hatching ground but even he does not remember how long ago that was.”
“He must be very old if he was once as small as me.”
“He was never as small as you, little soul.”
“That’s what he calls me!”
“I know. Because you are the littlest dragon that ever was. Your egg was so small that everyone present, save Deg and Akai, thought that when it shattered the infant would be a telf.”
“Because no one ever bothers to remember which egg comes from which female.”
“No one except Deg.”
“Is Akai my dam?”
Nahni’s ploy was successful and Sophie was momentarily surprised out of her grief. “You want to know who your dam is?”
dTelfur rarely knew who they came from and most didn’t particularly care. The eggs didn’t have an exact gestation period. A soul would hatch when it was needed. All the hatchlings were cared for in the nursery and raised by all in the community. Sometimes a child would attach to an adult as dTserra had done with Sophie and often as not these days the attachments formed across species. Less and less often did dragon attach to dragon or elf to elf. Still, the choice was usually mutual and if ever an infant attached its dam or sire, only Deg would know. The only genetic connection Deg revealed would be the Vizet, the soul hatched to replace the Vize. The infant was revealed so that the Vize could raise and teach the child until the child reached ascendancy at the sundown of its one hundred and fiftieth shedding.
“I also want to know my sire. Is Akai my dam?”
“You know she isn’t. She was just interested in your egg because it concerned her that you were in the shell so long and you never grew. And she birthed a small egg on the same day that your dam dropped you.”
“And her egg hasn’t hatched yet.”
Sophie tired of the conversation. “Nahni, you know all of this. Go back to Deg and leave me in peace.”
The little dragon dipped her head under her wing as the infant dragons often did when they wanted to hide. But Nahni had shed forty-three times and thought herself too old for such behavior so she quickly caught herself and pulled her head out again, though she still couldn’t look Sophie in the eye. Her tail flicked in agitation as she confessed. “Deg doesn’t want you to be alone. I stayed with him at the river when he wanted to jump in and float away and so now he asked me to keep you from running away too.”
“How did you keep him from running away?”
“I don’t think I did. He knew that people would be waiting for him at the hatching ground.”
“Ah, and is anyone waiting for me at the hatching ground, do you think?”
“He is.”
So she had relented and walked with the little dTur to be comforted until Deg let her fly away east to check on the fire.
Sophie forgave Konifer his cruel sanctions and harsh words because she knew that his indiscriminate words were partly due to his self-perceived ineptitude in the handling of the landers but mostly due to the little-known fact that Konifer had loved dTserra. And that dTserra had never loved Konifer. His anger at that un
fortunate state of affairs and his loss came out as fury against the landers and Sophie. She couldn’t blame him but she could stay out of his way.
She tried to stay out of the village as much as possible. Often, she would take young Nahni with her on trips to help her practice flying. The little dragon was just not picking up the skill as naturally as most. She had long legs and preferred to run about. But Sophie had tossed her into the river a few times and once the fun of that had worn off, the little dragon quickly realized the benefits of having wings. Deg had importuned Sophie’s assistance rather frequently over the past couple of years and Sophie obliged by taking Nahni on a few long trips. This was partly for Deg’s sake and partly because nearly all the dTelfur had become skittish of the telf-like mammals from across the water since dTserra’s murder and none would indulge Sophie’s fascination with the landers except Nahni.
This trip, however, Sophie had taken alone. She wanted the peace and quiet to think. Konifer had spread the word that no one was to overfly or in any way disturb the landers, yet all lander activity was to be reported in. The long walk around the burn zone hadn’t helped his mood or his opinion of the landers and she feared he was planning some kind of offensive. Sophie also feared that she was the only one to think reasonably about the creatures even though she was the one with most cause to hate them. Even Deg didn’t seem to be dampening Konifer’s vendetta.
Sophie started as she realized that she had just overflown a clearly lander-made stone hut. She didn’t see it until it was directly beneath her and hadn’t registered what it was until she was already beyond it. Nobody was outside the hut and no one inside was screaming or throwing things at her. The hut actually looked abandoned as she circled back around it. Not too many people could have lived in such a small space she thought. It was crudely made and already the stone roof was crumbling unless that hole had been left deliberately for the smoke from an indoor fire. In winter, dTserra used to build little stone chimneys and then direct the smoke away from their bower with treated woods shaped over the same fire.
Hardt's Tale: A Mobious' Quest Novel Page 11