Meghan's Dragon

by E. M. Foner

  The statue stood at the center of the courtyard, where it was largely ignored as an ever-present outdoor monument that provided no places to sit. Bryan strolled right up to the horse’s rear quarters and observed, “It’s a sack, alright. The duke must have been blind not to see it.”

  “Nobody looks at the rock the statue stands on, it’s like an afterthought,” Meghan said in defense of the long-deceased traitor without understanding why. “There’s too much light. When I start moving my arms around, everybody in the courtyard will see.”

  “Maybe they’ll think you’re doing maintenance, cleaning it or something.”

  “Oh right. I’m wiping a bronze horse’s butt in the middle of the night. That makes sense.”

  “Well, if I stand behind you, the statue will shield you from the other side.”

  “Except that I count four sides.”

  “Two of them are really small. Do you want me to try my diversion instead?”

  Meghan slapped down his hand as he prepared to form a giant dust dragon or something similarly insane, then she took a deep breath and did the fastest magical untying spell on record. Her hands blurred through the air and the side of the bronze sack disappeared, allowing her to reach in and pull out what appeared to be a copy of her own pendant. Nobody raised the alarm about thieves in the castle, and she was about to retie the knot when she noticed that the top of the sack seemed to be moving closer.

  “The statue is falling!” Bryan yelled, at the same time grabbing her elbow and pulling her out of the way.

  Looking back at the toppling monument, all Meghan could think was that at least she would escape the indignity of being executed while dressed as a boy.

  Chapter 76

  “Just keep on circling and try to look as confused as everybody else,” Bryan murmured into her hair. He had kept a tight grip on her arm ever since pulling her back as the towering monument toppled over with a tremendous crash on the courtyard flagstones. “The trick is to blend in. I used to see scenes like this all the time in moving pictures. Oh, you know what I mean. Did you get what we came for?”

  “Here,” she said, handing over the pendant. “If I hang them both around my neck they’ll just clank together.”

  Bryan casually accepted the pendant and slipped the chain over his head, as if he was receiving a good-luck charm as a farewell gift from his sweetheart.

  “Everybody make room,” shouted a self-important man in a nightshirt. He mounted the fallen statue and the crowd drew back a few steps, at the same time becoming more closely packed together as people on the fringes pushed for a better view.

  “It’s the duke’s son,” a woman walking past Meghan said in reply to her escort’s question. “The mean one.”

  A few uniformed guardsmen pushed through the crowd and began examining the statue while the duke’s son began questioning the witnesses.

  “Now, did anybody actually see the statue fall?”

  “Somebody shouted a warning, and then I turned and saw it coming down,” a man called out.

  “Was there anybody suspicious nearby?”

  “All I saw was the old bronze duke coming at me with his sword drawn,” the man replied, approaching the inquisitor. “I pushed Ann out of the way and jumped after her. If not for the warning, we both would have been crushed like those broken flagstones,” he added, pointing at the damage.

  “He’s making it up,” Bryan muttered to Meghan. “There was nobody else near.”

  “Who shouted the warning?” the duke’s son demanded. After a long stretch of silence, he added, “Did anybody see who shouted the warning?”

  “I think I saw a tall guy near the statue wrestling with a woman, and the voice seemed to come from that direction,” somebody finally ventured.

  “A tall man wrestling with a woman. Thank you for describing half of the people present,” the duke’s son said sarcastically. “Anybody else?”

  “There’s something here,” one of the guardsmen examining the statue called out to the duke’s son. “The money sack the horse was standing on is folded over, as if it couldn’t take the weight anymore. It must have cracked as the duke fell because it’s hollow at the crease.”

  “All statues are hollow, you fool,” the duke’s son rebuked the man. “Did you think it was solid bronze?”

  Some of the crowd laughed in a mechanical way, as if they were accustomed to playing chorus to the young nobleman. As quickly as he had suspected foul play, the duke’s son shifted to accepting the statue’s collapse as structural failure and lost interest in the investigation.

  “Tell the guard to stay on alert,” he ordered for the sake of sounding like he was in command. “Tomorrow we ride for the mountains.”

  Now that it was lying on its side with many of the pointy parts broken off, the statue began to attract attention from tired legs looking for a place to sit. The duke’s son shook his head in disgust, and then stalked back towards the palace section of the castle.

  “Let’s go,” Bryan said, guiding Meghan towards the lover’s lane along the dark base of the castle wall. Strangely enough, the commotion with the statue had done nothing to interrupt the jousting couples, and they had to take a serpentine route to reach the stairs to the wall-walk.

  “Hold on,” Meghan whispered, her eyes on the top of the wall. “The guards just started toward the stairs.”

  “It seems like a shame to just waste the shadows,” he murmured back, throwing in an exploratory nibble on her ear.

  Her slight body went rigid against him, and he would have sworn he could see black fire sparking in her eyes.

  “Oh, please not now!” he heard in his head, as clearly as if the girl had spoken out loud.

  “Meghan?”

  Her hand flew to cover his mouth, and his superior night vision showed the look of shock on her face. He realized that she thought he had spoken out loud.

  “I didn’t say anything out loud. I just thought it.”

  Her eyes grew so large that he worried for a moment that he was shrinking.

  “You can hear my thoughts?” she asked in his mind.

  “I think it’s just the things you say to yourself, if you know what I mean.”

  “It must be the pendants. I’ve heard about magical pairing of objects, but I thought it only worked with crystals.”

  “So tell me something,” he said in his thoughts. “How is it that all of these couples we can hear having fun in the dark are so willing to share their magic?”

  “Maybe they’re all married?” Meghan thought back.

  Bryan was sure he detected a shade of concealment in the girl’s answer that he never would have caught if she had been speaking out loud.

  “Maybe they aren’t all married and you haven’t been entirely truthful with me?”

  “The guards are past the stairs so let’s get going.” She whispered her sound-muffling spell and sped upwards before Bryan could convince her to join the lovers in the shadow of the wall cast by the full moon.

  Chapter 77

  “Then the duke’s son said that tomorrow they ride for the mountains,” Bryan concluded his report to Rowan on their outing to the Black Duke’s castle. Isabella, Storm Bringer, and Laitz were also part of the group walking out in front of the wagon train, which had taken on the feel of an armed troop moving through enemy territory.

  Rowan nodded to the shaman, who exchanged a significant look with his hawk, and then cast the bird into the air. It winged off in the direction of the mountains.

  “Better safe than sorry,” Laitz commented.

  “Maybe in the daylight somebody will examine the statue more closely and realize that a chunk of metal is missing,” Bryan speculated. “Nobody seemed to be particularly upset by it, so maybe they’ve all been waiting for the thing to topple over.”

  “Traitors are rarely loved, even if they act in the best interests of the community,” Isabella observed. “The old duke, the current duke’s father, was a man of honor in his way. Given how
it worked out, I’m sure that the family would prefer that everybody forget about those times. The duke’s men were probably behind the trouble we had at our last performance.”

  “If the exiles fled Old Land because their uprising against the old kingdoms failed, why did they set up the same system when they got here?” Bryan asked.

  “Excellent question,” Storm Bringer chimed in. “I’ve been asking your people the same thing as long as I’ve known them and I’ve never gotten a sensible answer.”

  “Why do you think it happened?” Bryan asked the shaman. His question elicited a groan from Rowan, who had obviously heard Storm Bringer’s opinions on the subject more than once.

  “It’s the castle economy,” the native replied. “Building large castles requires funds raised through taxation, a division of labor, and a ruling class to occupy them. Once your barons, dukes, and kings have their castles, constantly attacking one another is the only way to justify the expense. If your people all lived on farms, you wouldn’t need the centralized governments and armies.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Bryan said. “But why did the exiles build castles?”

  “Why do fish swim?” Storm Bringer responded.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because it’s the only way they know how to live.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Bryan repeated, bringing another groan from the leader of the players. “Hey, can I ask you guys something about magic?”

  Laitz raised an eyebrow, and Rowan gave the shaman a “See what you’ve gotten us into,” look, but Isabella smiled encouragingly and nodded her head in assent.

  “When we were in the castle, there were a bunch of people pairing off in the dark who didn’t strike me as married, and I wondered how they could avoid losing their magic to each other.”

  Isabella turned pink and choked back her mirth. “You men explain it to him. I’ll go check on the girls.” She walked quickly away, her back shaking with silent laughter.

  “Didn’t they have the oldest profession where you came from?” Laitz asked.

  “Sure,” Bryan said. “But what difference does that make?”

  “The mage-certified inability to share magic is the main qualification for those who wish to join the guild.”

  Chapter 78

  Thanks to the pain-killing magic worked by Simon’s wife, the boy had stopped shrieking by the time Meghan got there. But when Jomar’s son had tripped and sprawled while running around the wagon, his foot had gone under the wheel sideways and been crushed to a pulp.

  “Better put him to sleep for this,” Simon told his wife.

  She nodded grimly and stroked the boy’s forehead while crooning a lullaby. Jomar and his wife arrived just as their child’s breathing became regular and he slipped off into unconsciousness.

  “I can’t save the foot,” Faye told the parents. “We’ll have to take it off.”

  The boy’s mother gave a sobbing cry and sank to the ground next to him, cradling his head on her lap. Jomar’s face took on a set expression that was horrible in its lack of emotion, and he stepped forward and drew his large belt knife.

  “I’ve done battlefield amputations, and the knife is best if you take the limb off at the joint,” he said hollowly. “Let’s get this over with so he can start healing.”

  “Wait,” Meghan pleaded, pushing her way in between the father and son. “I don’t know if I can fix this, but you have to let me try. I’ve only watched the healing for injuries this bad, but I’m sure I can’t make it worse.”

  Jomar pushed her away impatiently, his mind too focused on the task at hand to even understand her. Rowan had arrived with Isabella by this point, and the large man restrained the boy’s father by the simple expedient of clamping Jomar’s arms to his sides. Faye happily made room for Meghan to sit by the child and do what she could.

  Calling on her memory of aiding Hadrixia with the crush injuries so common among the local quarry workers, she took the mangled foot in both hands and tried to imagine the bone structure before a loaded wagon and a hard oak wheel had turned it into a pulp. The toes were still intact, which reminded her of a trick she had seen the healer use when a drill-holder’s hand had been shattered by an errant sledgehammer swing.

  “Let me see his other foot,” she demanded, pulling the boy’s leg out straight so the feet were side by side. Then she started at the little toe on each foot, using both of her hands simultaneously. She traced the path from the toe to the ankle with her index fingers, while muttering every bone-setting incantation she could muster under her breath.

  Faye gasped as the mangled foot began to reshape itself under the girl’s ministrations. It was as if the bones had suddenly been transformed to snakes that were writhing about under the torn skin.

  By the time Meghan reached the big toe, the sweat that formed on her scalp was dripping down her face. The girl had never felt her magic so strongly before, and she started over again at the pinkie toes. By the third pass, the little foot looked almost normal, though it was swollen by the blood from all of the crushed tissue.

  “Do you need to take a break?” Isabella asked, crouching next to the girl. “I once saw a court healer lose her ability after overexerting herself with a child.”

  “I’m fine,” Meghan replied, realizing with surprise that it was actually true. She shifted both of her hands to the injured foot and cupped it between her palms. “Some of the soft tissues need help before they can start to heal, but this part is easier.”

  A glow formed between her hands, more green than blue, and she wondered at the subtle color change in her healing aura. Still, Meghan could sense the boy’s muscles and tendons drinking in the energy and repairing themselves, and she held on to the foot until she felt him stir. Her healing energy had infused his entire body and brought him out of his magic-induced slumber.

  “What happened?” the boy asked in a sleepy tone, causing his mother to burst out anew in tears and clutch him to her bosom. Her son looked embarrassed and tried to push her away. “I’m hungry. Why is Elstan holding on to my foot?”

  “I’m not Elstan,” Meghan retorted automatically, but she couldn’t help smiling as she rose to her feet. Jomar grabbed her hand and pressed it to his heart, a gesture normally reserved for soldiers pledging loyalty to noble households. The girl blushed red and mumbled something about anybody doing the same thing. She was relieved when Bryan arrived and led her out of the group of players, who were looking at her like she was some kind of goddess.

  “Don’t I get any thanks?” he demanded as soon as they were clear.

  “Thank you for getting me out of there,” Meghan replied. “I don’t like it when people treat me like I’m somehow better than them.”

  “I mean thanks for helping you heal the kid,” Bryan said. “You were drawing so much magic from me that my pendant started heating up.”

  “I was?” Meghan fingered the pendant hanging around her own neck. “I’d never felt so strong, but I didn’t know why. I thought it was just because the need was so great. Thank you.”

  “Yeah, well you’re just lucky that everybody was so busy standing around watching you that I was able to slip into the kitchen wagon and grab a pie to replace my energy. Mincemeat, pretty tasty.”

  Chapter 79

  “I know it’s a bit of a rush, but my sister and I think that you should play the lead for The Good Harvest. We always put it on for the last day of the festival in the White Duke’s castle, so you have eleven days to learn the lines.”

  “Does she dress like a boy?” Meghan asked.

  “Oh, no. She’s very girly. And we’re both getting too old for the role in any case,” the other twin said.

  “Thank you, Juliana. That must be the nicest thing anybody has said about my looks.”

  “She’s Nesta,” Bryan interjected. “And I’m always telling you how cute you are when you get mad.” Meghan cast him a withering glance as they all walked along behind the props wagon. “No, you have to get reall
y angry or you just look disagreeable.”

  “We’ll take turns teaching you, Meghan,” Juliana said. “I bet you have the whole part memorized before we even get near the castle. You’re so smart.”

  “Father wants to see you,” Nesta added, giving Bryan a little push to get moving.

  “You’re so lucky,” the other twin said as soon as Bryan was out of earshot. “He’s so tall and handsome, and father says he has the makings of a great man. I wish I was married to someone so nice.”

  The pink blush that had begun mounting Meghan’s cheeks under the constant stream of compliments now bloomed to rival a rose, and she self-consciously pulled some of her dark hair forward to hide her face.

  “But you get proposals all the time,” Meghan protested. “Bethany told me that you turned down a duke’s son, Nesta, er, Juliana, and that you could have married into the king’s family, Nesta.”

  “Our parents didn’t approve of those men, and to tell the truth, neither did we,” Juliana replied with a sigh. “Besides, we’ve both been betrothed to men from Old Land since we were babies. We’ve never even met them.”

  “But you must be, uh…” the girl trailed off, not willing to ask their ages outright.

  “Oh, we’re not quite that old,” Nesta replied. “I’m twenty-three and a fraction.”

  “And I’m twenty-three and a slightly smaller fraction,” Juliana added. They both looked at Meghan expectantly.

  “I’ll be eighteen in a few days,” she said. “Please don’t tell anybody. I hate making a fuss.”

  “Well, you have a husband to celebrate with,” Juliana replied, winking at her sister. “Are you ready to start on your lines?”

  “I guess. How come I’ve never heard of the play? I know our castle was a bit off the beaten path, but we did get visits from some of the smaller traveling companies.”

  “We only put it on during the summer or at the White Duke’s castle,” Nesta explained. “Even though it’s for kids, it’s kind of political and it causes too many fights at the festivals.”