Dragon's Milk

by Susan Fletcher

  The draclings had teeth. She found no teeth.

  The draclings had bones. She found no bones.

  Her hands went limp; the branch dropped to the ground. “Thank the heavens!” she whispered. She sank down with a crunch, tried to piece together the fragments of her thoughts.

  An explosion. And before that, the draclings had flamed. And before that, the apothecary had found out about the draclings. And before that—the dragonslayer.

  Kaeldra shivered. Where were the draclings now? Where was Hokarth? His nags were gone, she saw; their hoof prints led into the wood. Had he pursued the draclings? Had he captured them? And the kestrel—where was it?

  Kaeldra looked up, searched for its shape in the tree branches.

  It was gone. They all were gone. Perhaps—the thought came to her unbidden—perhaps she might go home.

  “Home.” She said it aloud and felt a sudden lightness, as if a burden had been lifted from her back. She had wanted—it hurt to admit it—she had wanted to be free of the draclings. She didn’t want to be the dragon girl. It would be so easy now to go home, home to Lyf and Mirym and Granmyr.

  Perhaps, Kaeldra thought hopefully, the kestrel would lead the draclings to Rog. They could hunt now, a little. They had fire.

  But there were wolves and hunters and bands of angry farmers. There was the apothecary. There was the dragonslayer. The draclings might be captives, even now.

  Above the trees the waxing moon hovered. Far off, she heard a ring owl’s lonely cry. Inside her, there was a silent place, once filled with talk and dracling thoughts.

  Kaeldra leaped up. 〈Embyr! Pyro! Synge!〉

  In her listening mind she felt it, a faint tingling.

  〈Where are you? Embyr!〉

  A cry, high and distant. A kestrel’s cry. She heard a growing, rapid wingbeat and then the cry again, louder this time. The kestrel burst through the trees. Thrice it circled the clearing, then disappeared into the wood.

  Kaeldra followed, pushed through the underbrush in the direction it had gone. At last, scratched and weary, she spied the bird preening on the bole of an enormous uprooted oak. In the cage formed by its roots she made out three huddled shapes.

  The draclings. Kaeldra let out a slow breath and, creeping closer, saw that they were trembling. They stared at her with wild, frightened eyes. But why?

  〈Why are you afraid?〉 she asked. 〈Is Hokarth near?〉

  She reached to touch Embyr’s mind and felt a burst of light, a blistering shudder of sound.

  The explosion. It must have terrified them. The last time they had felt an explosion, they had lost their mother. This time they must have believed they had lost Kaeldra.

  “Hey,” Kaeldra whispered, reaching her hand between the roots for the draclings to sniff. “I’m here.”

  Tentatively, Embyr sniffed Kaeldra’s hand. Then the draclings squeezed out from between the roots. They crowded onto her lap, flicked their tongues, nuzzled her face. Their breath was smoky and warm. Kaeldra laughed, and the sound of it burst inside her, made her throat catch and her eyelids sting.

  * * *

  The next morning Kaeldra made a breakfast of roasted acorns for herself and the draclings. Then they set off through the wood after the kestrel. Their progress was slow, for the trees, massive oaks and blackwood, were knit with tangled skeins of nectarvine and parse-bramble and ivy.

  Only slivers of sky showed behind the thickly layered branches, but the slivers seemed brighter in the direction they faced. We must be traveling east, Kaeldra thought, toward the sea. Though she kept a sharp eye out, she saw no sign of Hokarth; nor did she see any bird resembling a gyrfalcon. Still, she could not feel easy in her mind, especially when she thought of what lay ahead. How ever would she get the draclings across the Kragish Sea?

  During the day the air was warm, redolent of moss and blooms and sweet new growth. Kaeldra gathered corberries and lichelroots and hoarnuts to eat; the draclings flipped fish from a stream. But at night the cold crawled up from the ground and clung to Kaeldra’s back.

  On the third day they came to a river, and on the fifth, the river crossed a narrow dirt track. The kestrel led them along the track; Kaeldra watched and listened for signs of other travelers so that the draclings might hide. But they met none. Late that day they emerged from the forest, and there was a town—wall and rooftops—sprawled out on the land before them. Behind the town stood a castle with tiny rounded towers and bright banners, which fluttered gaily in the breeze. And behind the castle was water, stretching away to the edges of the sky.

  “Regalch,” Kaeldra breathed. “This must be Regalch.”

  But now she was more worried than before. Never had she imagined that a sea could be so vast. How would she get the draclings across it?

  They skirted the forest so as not to be seen, until it ended at a bluff above the sea. There they waited for dark. Then the kestrel led them down a treacherous path, which twisted and turned across the bluff face, then plunged at last into a cave.

  The draclings settled down quickly for the night. But Kaeldra stayed awake, gazing across the vast, moonlit sea, breathing hard against the despair that weighed upon her heart.

  The next morning she knew what she must do. She still had the coins Granmyr had given her; she must hire a mule cart and purchase a tarp for the draclings to hide beneath. Then she must book passage on a ship bound for Rog. It was, Kaeldra felt, a flawed plan—a bad plan in fact—but it was all that she could think of.

  The draclings were asleep, back from a nighttime foray. Kaeldra had awakened in the middle of the night to find them gone and, when she had called, had felt them returning from somewhere deep inside the cave. Now she saw that they bulged about their middles as though they had eaten something. A slimy film coated their scales, and they smelled of rot. Kaeldra peered uneasily into the cavern, but felt no desire to explore. Anyway, she told herself, she had no candles.

  〈Stay,〉 Kaeldra said, crouching beside Embyr, trying not to inhale too deeply.

  Embyr tilted up her chin and opened a sleepy eye.

  〈Stay here, Embyr. It is not safe outside the cave. I’ll soon return.〉

  Embyr closed her eye and thrummed noncommittally.

  If I hurry, Kaeldra thought, I’ll be back before they wake.

  Kaeldra slipped through the town gates in a mob of travelers and pack mules and gabbling geese. Inside, shops and houses bunched together like sheep in a shearing pen. The air smelled of sea brine and dead fish and things she didn’t know. No longer did the castle seem small; it had grown as she approached until it filled the eastern sky.

  She wandered through the cobbled streets, wondering how to buy a cart or book passage on a ship. People bustled about, all seeming in a hurry to get someplace important. Kaeldra noticed with surprise that many were taller than she, and some were fairer of skin and hair. Their garments were vibrant-hued—scarlet and purple, teal and gold—unlike the muted pastels of Elythia. Self-conscious, Kaeldra ran her hand over the rags—boy’s rags—she wore. The fabric was stiff and coarse and sticky with sap.

  A carter creaked past, hauling a load of yellow squamkins. “Excuse me, sir?” Kaeldra began, approaching. “Could you tell me—”

  “Off with you, ragrat!” the carter said, shaking his whip at her. “Git!”

  Kaeldra shrank away, blinking back the tears that stung her eyes. A pox on Granmyr! How did she expect Kaeldra to get those draclings across the Kragish Sea? She didn’t know how. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t.

  She blundered toward the far end of town with the vague notion of finding a harbor gate, and thence a ship. Before long she found herself amidst a throng of people milling about before a huge, barred gate, flanked by two stone towers. A few stray gulls hopped and pecked on the battlements.

  But this was the castle gate, not the harbor gate. Kaeldra turned to go. Just then there was a grating noise, and the gulls fluttered, screeching, into the sky. The gate was rising. A sudden shout; hoofbeats cl
attered. Kaeldra was shoved to one side by a tide of human bodies.

  And not a moment too soon. A troop of horsemen burst from between the shops behind Kaeldra and pounded across the ramp. Through the crowd she saw brief flashes of color: a gold banner, a red cloak, a blur of faces.

  Again Kaeldra tried to escape, but too late. The mob surged forward, dragging her with it. She was jostled and shoved and stepped on; the air reeked with the musk of human sweat. The castle wall moved close, surrounded her, then disappeared behind her shoulders.

  She was inside the castle. She must get out! She had already been gone too long; if she were caught in here, the draclings would become restless and who knew what they would do!

  Kaeldra turned and pushed against the mob, but the grating sound came again, and the gate slid down and crashed against the cobblestones.

  She was trapped.

  Now the crowd thinned and dissipated. Kaeldra stood at the edge of an enormous, cobblestoned courtyard, bordered by thatch-roofed buildings, which hugged the castle walls. Grooms helped the horsemen dismount and led their mounts to a stable. A blacksmith clanged at his forge. Armored sentries scurried about.

  “Hey, you!”

  Something hard jabbed at her side. A man in leathers prodded her with the butt end of his spear.

  “Off, pig swill!”

  “But I need to go out—”

  The man made as if to jab her again. “Get where you belong!”

  I don’t belong anywhere, she thought. I am like the draclings; there is no place for me. I am farin, no matter where I go.

  Kaeldra stumbled away from the sentry and headed for a place far across the courtyard where a knot of stragglers were disappearing through a stone-arched doorway.

  It was the biggest room she had ever seen. It was like being outdoors. The ceiling reached for the sky in overlapping arches. There was a din of talk, a hubbub of workers, and an overwhelming aroma of food.

  Abruptly, Kaeldra realized she had eaten almost nothing but berries and nuts for many days. Her mouth began to water as she watched blackened carcasses turn on spits in enormous fire pits. Across the room, a man was carving a huge, charred hunk of meat. The slices fell away, thin and pink and juicy. Workers piled them onto platters, then vanished through another arched doorway at the far end of the room.

  Kaeldra edged toward the meat, past a row of troughs, past a square hole in the floor into which a boy tossed a bucketful of peelings. Steam wafted from the meat in an aromatic cloud. She reached for a small chunk that had fallen onto the table.

  “Oh, no you don’t!”

  A hand clamped onto Kaeldra’s wrist, and she was dragged across the room behind a stout, hooded figure.

  Near a low trough her captor stopped. “Know you not the penalty for stealing the lord’s meat?” she hissed.

  It was a woman, broad faced, snub-nosed. One of her front teeth was missing, and the edges of her mouth and eyes were deeply etched with wrinkles.

  The woman arched her brows. “Did no one tell you!”

  Kaeldra shook her head.

  “Hort’s warts, why don’t they tell the new ones these things! They send me a squip of know-nots and expect me to feed an army!” She thrust a metal scraping tool into Kaeldra’s hand and gestured to some fat tube roots in the trough. “Well, what are you waiting for? Peel!” Kaeldra began to hack at a root as the woman scraped and muttered beside her. “They don’t tell ’em anything, they don’t feed ’em anything.” She pinched Kaeldra’s arm. “Why, you’re skinny as a plucked chicken.” She squinted hard at Kaeldra. “You look like a girl”

  Kaeldra gulped, her heart pounding. But the woman was scraping harder than before, in rhythm to her words. “And His Lordship with his stripe-beast and his horse-with-long-neck—”

  Kaeldra looked at her, puzzled.

  The woman stared back. “You still don’t know my meaning, do you?”

  Again, Kaeldra shook her head.

  The woman waved her scraper at the meat hunk, which now was not much more than an enormous bare bone. “What do you think you were fixing to eat? A cow? A pig? Huh!” She snorted.

  Kaeldra did not know. She could see now that the bone was much too massive to have come from any animal she knew.

  “By the devil’s rump, I wouldn’t have stopped you, then. You’re hungry enough, that’s sure. No, my boy, that was a desert pig from deep in the land to the south. Though why they call a beast that size a pig, I’ll never know. Never in my life have I seen a pig the size of a cottage, with ears like serving platters and a nose like a pit snake.

  “He sends his men over sea and scarp and for what? Something new to stuff down that maw of his. Why he can’t eat herring and squab like other fine folk, I’ll never know. And now he’s fit to be fried about this dragon girl and—”

  Kaeldra’s scraper slipped and dug into her finger.

  “Watch yourself! Don’t they teach you young ones anything?” She inspected Kaeldra’s cut. “Tsch! It’ll be all right. Suck the blood off, suck the blood off.”

  Kaeldra put her finger in her mouth. Dragon girl. She took it out. “What dragon girl?”

  “What! You haven’t heard! She’s flittin’ about the wood with seven half-grown dragons, or that’s what they say. Some fiddlesham herb-and-leech man claims he saw ’em. Me, I don’t credit a word of it. Dragons were killed off long before my time, thank the blessed stars. If these be dragons, they’re the last of ’em. And His Lordship says he must have dragon meat; he’s rounded up a troop of men to go gallivantin’ across the countryside searchin’ for ’em. I say let ’em stay where they are! If there’s a girl with seven dragons, she’s a witch for certain and it’ll come to no good stirrin’ up the nest. And m’lady, with her blighted furs and feathers! That one won’t rest till she has a gown of ’em.”

  “A gown of what?”

  “Of dragon scales, what did you think! She wants—”

  “Come here, boy!”

  A man grabbed Kaeldra’s sleeve.

  “Well, it’s to pourin’ with you. Come back when you’re done, and mayhap I can find you a bite o’ dinner.”

  The man thrust at Kaeldra a huge pitcher, full to the brim with a dark, sweet-smelling brew. He pushed her through the back doorway into an even larger room, where a mob of men sat at long wooden tables, eating and drinking and setting up a din.

  The heavy pitcher, seeming to acquire a life of its own, pitched and wobbled in her hands. Waves of brew sloshed over the sides, soaking her tunic.

  “Pour!” someone yelled.

  Kaeldra squeezed between the benches, pouring into upraised flagons, spilling often onto the floor reeds, already brew drenched and strewn with rancid meat. Perhaps now she could slip away and get back to the draclings—but how?

  Kaeldra scanned the room. At the far end, seated at a table elevated upon a dais, a red-faced man huffed to his feet. He shouted and jabbed at the air with a joint of meat. Rolls of flab shivered at his neck, undulated across his belly.

  “Draconitas!” he shouted.

  A woman stood up beside him, the most striking woman Kaeldra had ever seen. On her head she wore a crown of tall feathers, azure and emerald and gold. At the tip of each was an enormous eye; when she moved, the eyes rippled and winked. A lush, white-gold fur hung from her shoulders and draped loosely to the floor. Her waist was girt about with a green-and-red snakeskin; her gown was of the hides of dappled fawns. Its bodice shimmered with some shimmery, black-and-yellow stuff: wildly exotic, yet familiar, too, somehow. Kaeldra worked her way nearer to the dais. It looked like—she sucked in her breath.

  Butterflies. Row upon row of black-and-yellow butterflies.

  “Draconitas!” the lord shouted again. He pointed at something high up on the walls.

  “Draconitas!” the men roared back.

  Kaeldra looked up to see plaques bearing the stuffed heads of animals, strange animals she had never seen. There were heads with striped fur, heads with spots. There were feathered
heads and scaled heads, heads with twisted antlers, heads with horns growing right up out of their snouts.

  And just above where the lord stood, mounted high up on the wall, was a plaque with no head at all.

  “Draconitas!” The shout reverberated through the room.

  And a tall figure strode down the central aisle, his scarlet cape billowing out behind him.

  Kaeldra knew him at once. She did not have to see the gyrfalcon twisting restlessly on his wrist. She did not have to see his face.

  He stepped onto the dais and conferred with the lord. The fat man nodded, looked at the gyrfalcon, then reached out to clasp the other’s hand. As the dragonslayer turned to face the hall, Kaeldra felt the pitcher slipping from her hands.

  It shattered against the floor, soaking her boots with brew.

  The hall fell silent. Kaeldra looked up.

  Jeorg was staring at her. He looked directly into her eyes, and she knew that he knew her. Her heartbeat rang loud in her ears, but she could not look away. She waited for him to speak, to point her out.

  His gaze drifted across the hall. He turned and said something to the lord. The din rose again around her.

  Trembling, Kaeldra bent to pick up the pieces of the pitcher. He had seen her. Why had he not betrayed her? She stacked the shards neatly in her hand. Nearby there was laughter and shouting. Suddenly her arm wrenched; someone yanked her to her feet.

  A hand pulled down her hood, held up her plaited hair. With a shock, Kaeldra realized who it was.

  “She is here!” Hokarth shouted. “The dragon girl is here!”

  chapter 18

  Yet often as the falcon nears, the dragon stills its thoughts, and thus confounds the bird.

  —Dragonslayer’s Guyde

  Grabbing Kaeldra’s plait at the nape of her neck, Hokarth steered her between the benches toward the central aisle. Her cheeks burned as she stumbled past the uplifted faces, now strangely silent.

  “The dragon girl,” someone whispered; others shrank back and muttered as she passed.

  Jeorg, gazing at her in a way she did not understand, said nothing.