Meghan's Dragon

by E. M. Foner

  “The peak to the left, which we’ll be passing before the sun goes down, is known to my tribe as the Dragon’s Lair,” Storm Bringer replied. Meghan coughed loudly to cover Bryan’s reaction to the name, and the shaman continued. “But as your people moved inland from the coast, they saw it as the ideal place for a castle to control the pass cut through the range by the river. We fought a war over the mountain and many lives were lost before a dragon became involved and put an end to it. The northern duke’s castle, Eagle’s Nest, is the result.”

  “The dragon sided with the newcomers?” Bryan asked.

  “Not exactly,” the shaman said with a smile. “The dragon took the mountain for himself and lived there for generations. My tribe will not go where a dragon has made its lair, so when he finally vacated, your people built the castle that stands there today.”

  The four walked along without conversation for a moment, though with the rattling from the wagons and the cries of the children, it was hardly silent. Then Bryan asked, “Am I the only one who’s hungry?”

  Chapter 43

  “Why can’t we just walk around?” Meghan whispered for the third time. “We could enter through the main gate in the morning, when the carters arrive to remove the night soil.”

  “This cliff is a piece of cake,” Bryan replied. “I could climb it in the dark with one hand tied behind my back.”

  “It is dark, and I had enough trouble getting up the lower slope, even with you dragging me along.” She yanked on the rope that Bryan had fashioned into a harness for her to make her point, but he was too intent on studying the rock face to pay attention to her words or the tug on the coil around his waist.

  “It’s an easy climb to the bottom of the wall, with plenty of ledges for me to stop and haul you up. Once we get there, you can do that sticky thing to the end of the rope, and then I’ll climb it and pull you to the top.”

  “That ‘sticky thing’ took months of studying spiders to learn,” Meghan whispered at his feet. He’d started climbing before he even finished talking and was already well above her head. She stared nervously into the shadows above, barely able to make out his form against the overcast night sky. After what seemed like forever, she felt a short jerk on the improvised harness, and she grabbed on to the rope up high, to make sure she didn’t flip over.

  Bryan had found a spot to wedge his heels, and he rapidly pulled in the rope, one knot at a time. He knew he was much stronger than he had been before Meghan brought him to her world, but the ease with which he hauled the girl up the cliff surprised even him. In a quarter of the time it had taken him to climb the first section of the rocky face, he had his arms around her and was pushing her flat against the wall.

  “Just wait here. I’ll climb to the next ledge and bring you up.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Meghan muttered. “I’m afraid of heights, you know.”

  “Don’t look down,” he advised her seriously, and began climbing again.

  “I can’t see that far anyway,” she muttered. “Why do you think I save all of my castle escapes and cliff-climbing expeditions for dark nights?” Receiving no answer, she tried to make herself as small as possible on the narrow ledge. While waiting for the next undignified stage of her ascent, she concentrated on the rope, whispering encouragement to strengthen the fibers and repair any damage from scraping against the rocks.

  After the twelfth portage, Bryan announced that they were almost to the wall and decided to take a quick break. The sky began to clear, and from the position of the Big Dipper and the North Star, she knew it was well past midnight. Then she glanced down and her knees buckled. If Bryan hadn’t grabbed her arm, she would have fallen.

  “Did you look down?”

  She nodded weakly, her eyes clenched shut.

  “And you say I don’t listen,” he chided her. “Anyway, start concentrating on getting the end of the rope ready so we can make it over the wall. It’s not that high a throw. I could have done it with a grapnel, though it might have made noise.”

  “I’m not waiting on some ledge without a rope to hold on to,” she whispered. Her fingers sought and found precarious holds on the rock face.

  “It’s my end of the rope we’re going to levitate into position,” Bryan said. “Don’t be a baby, we’re almost there.”

  He started climbing again, and after a long silence broken only by a small chip of rock plinking down the cliff, there was a jerk on the rope. Not opening her eyes, she let go of her hold on the mountain and grabbed the knot above her head. Forty powerful tugs later, she joined Bryan on a tiny outcrop below the base of the wall.

  “Here,” he said, offering her the end of the rope. “Tell it to cling or something.”

  Meghan opened one eye and saw to her relief that clouds had covered the moon again and she could barely see the outlines of the wall above. She grasped her pendant and muttered, “Spider silk.”

  Bryan nodded in approval, took the rope back, and tossed it up, staring after it. It came back down on their heads, and it took another spell from Meghan to get it unstuck from their hair.

  “Why didn’t your magic work when it was up there?” Bryan demanded.

  “The rope end never touched the wall. You have to get the throw right or levitate it into place.”

  “I can’t throw that high without a weight on the end, and it didn’t levitate right for me,” he complained. “You’re going to have to do it.”

  “I have to be able to see it to levitate it. Wait, I have an idea.”

  “Are you nuts?” Bryan demanded when he saw what she was doing. “What if the cord breaks or if somebody sees and steals it?”

  “The cord isn’t going to break, and if somebody sees, losing my gold ring will be the least of our problems,” Meghan replied. “Just do it.”

  As Bryan levitated the ring with the rope attached up to the top of the wall, she saw that the fire in his eyes wasn’t just an illusion. A green glow was visible on the stones where he was looking.

  “What do I do when it’s in place?”

  “Stop levitating it, and see if it stays.”

  Bryan went one better and pulled himself up a knot. “Good,” he whispered over his shoulder. “But if it comes down and we lose our ring, it’s your fault.”

  “Our ring?”

  Chapter 44

  “There doesn’t seem to be much going on,” Meghan said, peering around the dim courtyard. The two invaders remained in the shadows at the base of the wall inside the castle, waiting to time the patrols that never came. “Maybe it’s protected by magic.”

  “How often does a castle like this get attacked?” Bryan asked.

  “I don’t have a clue,” Meghan admitted. “Castle Refuge was besieged once in the last seven years, but our baron was always making enemies. This is the northern duke’s castle, and it may go for decades at a time without being attacked. Maybe longer.”

  Bryan straightened up, shaking free of Meghan’s grip on his arm, and began striding towards the tower.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed, catching up with him. “You’re going to get us killed.”

  “I’ve got better vision and hearing than you, and I haven’t seen or heard a thing since we got here,” he replied quietly. “Maybe the guards are all at the front gate, maybe there are some in the tower, but I can hear hundreds of people snoring and not one conversation.”

  Meghan opened her mouth to argue, but realized she didn’t have anything to say. She had rarely left her room at night after returning from work back home, and then only to visit Hadrixia. There were late feasts from time to time, but obviously, this wasn’t one of those nights. Before she knew it, they were at the tower. The massive metal-studded wooden doors were closed.

  “You know how to pick locks, right?” Bryan asked in a low tone.

  “Did you try opening it yet?”

  Bryan pushed on the right-hand door, and it yielded inward with a loud creak that told of insufficient lubrication.<
br />
  “Who’s there?” a voice called from somewhere above.

  “Quick,” Meghan said, slipping through the crack and pulling Bryan after her. “Make me a light so I can see what I’m doing.”

  A subdued globe of fire appeared floating above their heads, and Meghan squinted around the circular room at the base of the tower.

  “The stairway looks solid at the bottom,” Bryan observed. “But that doesn’t make any sense, since the rest of the steps are on beams stuck into the walls.”

  A bell began to ring above their heads, and other bells rang in response. Bryan pushed the door shut, causing another loud creak, and then he slid the heavy bar into place. “I’ll watch the stairs,” he said, drawing his practice sword. “You work on the knot thing.”

  Meghan wondered for a moment how he thought they would escape with the door barred, but given that the bells had started sounding around the castle, she realized it was the only sensible thing to do. She approached the blank wall beneath the stairway where a door to another flight would appear in a multi-story dwelling and flew through the intricate hand motions diagramed on her pendant. Nothing happened.

  “It didn’t work,” she shouted at Bryan.

  “Try it again, go slower,” he called back. Somebody began beating against the tower door with something heavy, probably the butt of a spear, and two arrows suddenly shattered on the floor, one of them leaving a bloody cut on Bryan’s shoulder. Without thinking, he cast a fireball up the center of the circular stairwell. There was the sound of a trapdoor being pulled shut, and the arrows stopped.

  “I know I did it right this time, but nothing’s happening,” Meghan said desperately.

  “Maybe you have to say something, like, ‘Open Sesame.’”

  “What?” The reply was so nonsensical that Meghan halted her third attempt to make sure Bryan hadn’t been hit in the head. The moment she dropped her hands so they were pointing down, the stone beneath her feet suddenly opened up and she vanished.

  “I guess that counts as under the stairs,” Bryan muttered as he dove into the passage after her.

  “Stay out of the way,” she warned him, after he landed with the crash of his drawn sword beside her. “I need to do the untying in reverse and put the stone back into place.”

  “Huh?” Bryan watched without understanding as Meghan went through another bout of hand waving. Suddenly, the light from the orb he had left floating above was cut off by the return of the rock slab, and they found themselves in pitch darkness.

  “And give me back my ring,” she added.

  Chapter 45

  “Put it out!” Meghan hissed, as a suspicious glow began to form over their heads. “How many times do I have to explain it to you?”

  “They aren’t working in the dark up there, and I’m getting tired of listening to all that tapping,” he retorted. “If there were any cracks in the rock, we’d see their light from above after sitting here in the dark forever.”

  “It’s hasn’t been forever, it’s been like a half a short candle. It took a while for the watchmen from the top of the tower to work up the courage to come down and let the guard in after you tossed a fireball up there. But I guess you’re right that we would have seen a light leak by now,” she admitted. “Don’t make it bright or you’ll blind us.”

  Bryan immediately kindled a small orb and used the light to examine the thick slab of rock above their heads. “It looks almost real.”

  “It is real,” Meghan replied, frustrated that Bryan needed to hear everything repeated at least three times before it sank in. “If it were an illusion or some other trick, anybody who stepped on it would have fallen through. The untying spell temporarily moves a section of the rock to a magically prepared place somewhere else, probably nearby. It takes a great deal of energy and skill to create this kind of doorway, I think it has to do with the weight involved. There’s a balance between the two locations where the rock can exist and it doesn’t require much work to move it back and forth, but…”

  “Too much information,” Bryan cut her off. He stood up and bumped his head on the rough-hewn ceiling. “Either we’re in a tunnel or in a crevice that got roofed over. I don’t see anything that looks like a dragon’s tooth.”

  “It may be hidden,” Meghan said, peering around in the dim light. “Is that the entrance to another chamber, or just a shadow?”

  “Follow me,” Bryan said, and crouching to avoid hitting his head again, disappeared through the opening. “The stairs are steep, so be careful.”

  Meghan created her own light and ducked through the opening after Bryan, pausing to look ahead. The walls of the new passage were glassy smooth, as if the tunnel had been melted through the rock, but a set of stairs had been cut into the floor. She counted them as she followed, ninety-four stairs in all, before the journey ended in what appeared to be a large natural cavern.

  “There’s nothing here but a giant slab, a bunch of bones, and a pile of old rags,” Bryan complained from the middle of the space. He kicked at the offending garments, which sent up a cloud of dust and fibers.

  “Bones? What kind of bones?” Meghan halted to wait for the answer.

  “I don’t know, animals I guess. I don’t see any human skulls, anyway. Maybe the dragon’s tooth is in with all the other bones and we’re supposed to find it.”

  “Either those clothes are pretty old or they were never fixed,” Meghan observed. She approached the pile and nudged it with her foot. “Is there something covered up here?”

  “Let me in there,” Bryan said, using the leg bone from what might have been an ox to prod the disintegrating textiles out of the way. “It looks like a roll of oilcloth—no, there’s something sticking out the end. It’s a sword!”

  A moment later, he had unwrapped the scabbard and drawn the sword. He held it aloft, admiring the narrow blade that made his training sword look like a bludgeon by comparison. Meghan saw a faint green fire rippling in the polished surface that looked like it had just been delivered from the swordsmith.

  “Are you doing that, or is the sword enchanted?” she asked. She had to repeat herself twice, nearly shouting the question the third time to get his attention.

  “What? I’m not doing anything,” he replied, fluidly working through the forms he’d been taught just two weeks earlier. “Is it really enchanted? What does it do?”

  “Well, it’s glowing, for one thing,” Meghan pointed out. “I think its humming too. Can you hear that?”

  “I can feel it,” Bryan growled, cutting energetically at the air. Then he took an experimental slice at a pile of bones, and the blade slipped through so easily that it seemed as if the skeletal remains had parted of their own accord to make way. “Let’s go.”

  “Go? Go where? We have to find the tooth.”

  “You keep saying I’m your dragon, so this must be my tooth. Now let’s go see what it can do.”

  “Wait. Stop!” Meghan ran to get ahead and turned to face Bryan at the opening to the passage. “What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going back up there, and we’ll see who’s boss.” His voice was low and threatening, and the hints of green fire dancing along the blade were increasing in intensity to match the flames in his eyes.

  “No!” Meghan said, stretching her arms to fill the space so he couldn’t brush past her. “They’ll give up searching soon, if they haven’t already, and we can sneak out without a fight. They probably think it was some kind of false alarm, with the drunk watchmen seeing things and firing arrows at shadows. Why are you so anxious to kill somebody?”

  “Come on, let me past,” Bryan pleaded. He was reluctant to force his way for fear he might hurt her in the process. “It’s always hiding and sneaking around with you. I could take on the whole castle with this sword.”

  “Whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t mean you should,” Meghan said. “Why do you think there are so few dragons left? According to the scrolls, fighting and killing became such a habit with s
ome of them that either they destroyed each other or their behavior forced warriors and lesser mages to band together to hunt them. Even if your magic combined with that sword can make you equal to trained fighters, I don’t want a dragon who falls in love with death. Besides, you’ll just get a spear in the back.”

  “I’m getting really tired of you stopping me all the time,” he grumbled, but the comment about getting stabbed in the back made sense. It was a long way from the tower to the wall, and he didn’t have any reason to believe he could stop arrows like an experienced war mage. In truth, Bryan wasn’t that anxious to kill somebody—he just wanted to try out the sword.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, relaxing her arms and shouldering off her pack. “I brought supplies.”

  Chapter 46

  By the time Bryan finished devouring everything in the pack, his mood improved markedly. The girl limited herself to a drink from the waterskin, but she wasn’t the one who had climbed a cliff in the dark, not to mention hauling up her dead weight.

  “My pendant said that our path would be laid bare,” the girl said. “What do you think it meant?”

  “The pendant was probably wrong.”

  “How can a pendant be wrong?” Meghan demanded. “It told us about the secret passage, showed me how to open the stone, and you found your enchanted sword.”

  “That’s three out of four,” Bryan responded, peering around the cavern. “There must be half a dozen tunnels leading out of here. We’re already at the top of the mountain, so any of the uphill ones should come out somewhere.”

  “If they came out near the castle, somebody would have found them by now, and the sword wouldn’t have been here,” Meghan argued. She sifted through the mound of disintegrating clothes. “Are you sure there wasn’t anything else?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get us out of here. Just stay behind me and don’t get freaked out if we run into a lot of bats.”