Dragon's Milk

by Susan Fletcher

  When they reached the aisle, Hokarth murmured, “Truly, I hate to do this. If you’d tell me where they are—”

  “No!”

  Hokarth shoved her in front of the dais. “This is the one of whom I spoke, Your Lordship,” he said. “Her beasts—there were a dozen, at least—attacked me, unprovoked. Had I not dispatched six with poisonous darts and frightened the rest away, at this very moment I would be dead, gone, charred to a cinder.”

  “That’s a lie!” Kaeldra cried.

  “Silence!” Hokarth jerked her plait. Pain arced through her neck. Kaeldra drew back one foot and booted him on the shin.

  “Ouch!” Hokarth yelped. He let go her hair and clutched at his leg. “Did you see that? She kicked me!”

  Kaeldra ran for the kitchen, far across the room.

  “After her, you durfdolts!” the butterfly lady screamed.

  Several men rose and blocked her way. Kaeldra snatched a knife off the nearest table and held it out before her. “Stay back,” she said, remembering the way the men had looked at her when Hokarth shoved her through the hall, “or—or I’ll call my dragons.”

  The men hesitated.

  “Cowards!” cried the lady. “She’s nothing but a girl!”

  One man lunged. Kaeldra dove beneath a table. Her hands slipped on the rushes; one elbow banged against the flagstones. Still clutching the knife, she crawled the length of the table toward the archway to the kitchen. There was a din of shouting and benches scraping. Feet kicked at her. Hands grabbed for her. Red, upside-down faces yelled at her.

  A hand caught her tunic near her shoulder. She twisted and sank her teeth into flesh; there was a yowl, and the hand went away. She scrambled across the open floor, sprawled headlong beneath the next table. At the far end of the long, rough planking overhead, she could see an opening in the wall.

  Almost there.

  A hand gripped her boot. She shook her foot, smashed the hand against the floor, but it did not let go. She began to slip her foot out of its boot, but then her head whipped back in the opposite direction.

  Someone had hold of her hair.

  “I got her!” boomed a voice near her head.

  “I had her first!”

  Kaeldra tried to twist away but could not. Her scalp stung. The sinews in her neck stretched until she thought they would pop. She groped for the hand that held her hair, but it was near the end of the plait; she could not reach it. She was stuck, her boot held on one side of the table, her hair at the other.

  “She’s mine!”

  “We’ll see about that!”

  And the hubbub swelled around her. Helpless, she was pulled first one way and then the other as her captors quarreled and others took sides. She gave a last, agonizing wrench, but to no avail. And it came to her, then, what she must do.

  She wriggled her foot until it slipped from the heel of her boot. She held it there, part in, part out.

  Then she sawed through her hair with the knife.

  Bit by bit, the strands began to sever. Bit by bit, the pain eased in her head and neck. I should have let Granmyr do this, she thought, tears springing into her eyes.

  As the last strands gave way, Kaeldra let go of her hair and slipped her foot out of its boot.

  A roar went up, but she was already scrambling for the end of the table. She careened into a soldier stationed by the doorway. He grabbed her hand and tried to wrest her knife away; she dropped it and plunged past him into the kitchen.

  “Stop her!” someone yelled.

  The kitchen thralls stood frozen, staring. Kaeldra raced past them toward the outer door; then skidded to a halt as a band of castle guards clattered through it.

  “Seize her! She’s the dragon girl!” came a voice behind her.

  Kaeldra whirled around to see a mob of soldiers rushing in from the great hall. The guards, brandishing swords, advanced in a rank from the outer door.

  She was trapped. Frantic, Kaeldra scanned the kitchen for another way out.

  The slop pit!

  She darted past a table to the hole in the floor she’d seen earlier. The opening, wide enough for her to fit through, might be too narrow for most armored men. It was dark down there, but Kaeldra could see that the pit was deep and seemed to extend beyond the edges of the opening. Perhaps there was another outlet. A foul, rich, rotting odor wafted up; Kaeldra backed away.

  “Seize her!”

  “Quick!”

  Kaeldra jumped. She landed with a splat, waist-deep in the moist, fetid swill. The stench made her gag. She thrashed about to extract herself from the mire: bones, fish heads, root peelings, eggshells, cinders, rotten carcasses, and maggot-infested fruit—all buzzing with flies and bound into a stew by a rancid, oozing slime. She slogged away from the hole, tripped, toppled forward, slithered down the mountain of slops, and slammed into something hard.

  Pyro!

  Startled, the dracling reared up, snorted out a blue smoke-puff. Then, recognizing Kaeldra, he began to thrum and flick his tongue.

  “Pyro! What are you—”

  Embyr and Synge appeared from behind a hummock of carrion. They scampered to her and, slimy with slop rot, leaped onto her lap. Their bellies bulged; their breath stank.

  “You . . . you durfdolts,” Kaeldra whispered, feeling an irrational surge of relief. “Where did you come from?”

  Garbage, she saw, mounded clear to the walls of the room in which she found herself. But at one end, deeply shadowed, a passage led out.

  There was a shout from above. Kaeldra dumped the draclings off her lap and clambered to her feet. 〈Get out of here! Now!〉

  Another shout, then a soft plopping noise as someone dropped into the pit. The draclings bolted, Kaeldra close behind. More plops, then curses and thrashings about. The draclings had disappeared into the hallway; Kaeldra, squishing after, hoped they had not been seen. Although their stomachs bulged—they must have discovered this feast last night—they still trod lightly upon the slops. Kaeldra sank to her knees with every step.

  Soon the garbage thinned to a slippery scum. Skidding around a corner, Kaeldra collided with the draclings at the head of a downward-curving stairway.

  Kaeldra fled down the stairway, the draclings close beside. At first she could discern the shapes of the steps in the thin gray light, but as the stairway veered and twisted, the light was cut off. There was nothing to guide her but clammy walls against her fingertips and the cold, gritty feel of stone steps beneath her one bare foot. She plunged blindly down into a suffocating darkness, which was heavy with the smell of mildew and chilled by a penetrating damp.

  Then came the sounds she dreaded: a crescendo of voices, a rumble of footsteps. The slop pit was probably not the only way into this place.

  Kaeldra’s knees buckled suddenly from an unexpected impact on her feet. The stairway had ended. Tentatively, she stepped forward, feeling the wall. The ground slanted downward, and the wall opened up to her right. Kaeldra turned to go that way, but a dracling became entangled in her legs; she lost her balance and sat down hard on the stone floor. And the draclings were nudging her, prodding her to the left. 〈This way,〉 they were saying, 〈this way.〉

  Behind, the storm and clatter of the men grew louder. No time to argue. Kaeldra bore left, feeling her way along the walls. She became aware of a gentle pressure of draclings at her knees, guiding her now to the left, now to the right, through a tangle of sloping passageways. She soon lost track of the turns they had taken, but the draclings never hesitated; they seemed to know exactly where to go.

  Now the men’s voices came from all around. Kaeldra could not tell whether they had broken into groups or whether the echoing walls only made it sound as though they had.

  This must be a labyrinth, she realized. Granmyr had spoken of labyrinths, honeycombs of twisting tunnels through which the lord of a castle might escape if he remembered the way, but where invaders invariably floundered.

  Did the lord’s men know their way?

  Did
the draclings?

  The air seemed to thicken, seemed to press against her. Her throat filled with dread.

  She heard a clattering of footsteps close, and yet closer; she saw, through a passage that veered to the left, a flickering yellow light in the blackness. She pressed herself against a wall, and the soldiers went clanking past, only an arm’s span from her face, dark shapes needle-pricked with light. Only when their sounds had receded to a distant echo, and when the glow from their lights had faded, did Kaeldra dare to breathe.

  And then they were running again. Men swarmed through the tunnels on all sides; the sound of them was constant. Often Kaeldra and the draclings had to press themselves against a wall or duck into a nearby tunnel to avoid being discovered. Yet after a time the footsteps grew fainter, and the men were seldom seen.

  〈Wait.〉

  It was Embyr. For the first time that day, Kaeldra felt the dracling’s fear. Over her own panting breath, she strained to hear.

  The soldiers in the distance. The whir of a bat. A plink of dripping water.

  〈What is it?〉 Kaeldra asked, reaching out with her mind to touch Embyr.

  The ground swooned beneath her; Kaeldra leaned against the wall to keep her balance. The gyrfalcon?

  She reached again to touch the dracling’s mind, but felt the consciousness seeping out like water through a sieve, draining down to a place she could not find. She groped for the draclings with her hands and felt them—all three of them—crouching by her legs. She groped with her mind and felt silence.

  There. A sound. Not in her mind, but in the tunnel. The crunch of a man’s footsteps.

  He moved slowly, not running as the others had done. Kaeldra strained her eyes to find the pale flickering of torchlight, but there was no breach in the darkness. He carried no light. Kaeldra strained her ears to place him: ahead, and to the right. She could not tell whether he searched in a different passageway or farther down in her own. She stepped forward with her bootless foot so as to make no noise, and moved her hand along the wall.

  Ah. An opening.

  “Can you feel the dragons? Are they here?” The voice was very close. Jeorg’s voice.

  There was a rustle of feathers. Kaeldra felt the breath of it across her cheek.

  The gyrfalcon.

  Her heart was beating so hard, she felt sure he must hear. She had to throw him off-track. She wished she had not lost the knife. She felt for her coin purse and closed one hand around the bottom of it to keep the coins from jingling. Then, fingers trembling, she fumbled with the thong.

  There. It was untied.

  Slowly, she coaxed the purse open. She did not know how the connecting passage angled off from her own, but she had to take a chance. She hurled the purse, heard it ring and clatter some distance away.

  “Kaeldra?”

  He sounded lonely, uncertain. She fought back a sudden urge to speak. It would be so easy. She would say—

  “Kaeldra?” Pause. “Is that you?”

  He is the dragonslayer. He is my enemy.

  She held her breath as Jeorg’s footsteps came closer, then began to recede.

  She waited, her heart beating in her throat, until she could hear him no longer. Then the draclings were nudging her again, hurrying her along. The ground slanted steeply downward to another flight of steps. There was a glimmer of light, a breath of fish and brine, a muted hiss and rumble.

  The tunnel narrowed, curved, and was suddenly flooded with blue luminescence and the sound of roaring water. Stars hung in the darkness ahead.

  The cave, the one where they had spent the night. The draclings had known the way.

  Embyr and Pyro loped ahead. Kaeldra waited for Synge. Soon the little dracling appeared limping behind her.

  They stood at the cave mouth, drenched by spray. Surf surged against the rocks not far below, much higher than the previous night. And a small dark shape was wheeling above the waves.

  “Kiree! Kiree!”

  The kestrel.

  The draclings nudged at Kaeldra, pushed her toward the water.

  “No!” she cried. “I can’t swim! Did you hear me? I can’t—”

  She clutched at the air as she slid down the rocks into the water.

  chapter 19

  In ev’ry fix I finds a friend;

  In ev’ry brawl, a keg.

  And so it is, when trouble brews

  I drinks it to the dregs.

  —Kragish sailor’s chantey

  The waves swallowed Kaeldra in a shock of bitter cold. They rushed up her nose, sucked her head under. She cried out for help and choked on a flood of salty water.

  And then she was rising. She broke through the foam and gulped for air, her legs astraddle something—Pyro! She grabbed for his neck and hung on tight; he hissed through the waves like a giant eel. Embyr was ahead, she saw, and to the left a flash of lighter green. Synge. The draclings dove and leaped and arced, great manes of spume billowing and shimmering in the moonlight.

  The water was so cold it burned. Kaeldra sat up, clinging to the spiny, flexible ridge that ran down Pyro’s neck. Through the stinging salt spray, she saw the castle go drifting by. Tiny lights swarmed around it like spry-bugs. The bluff gradually flattened into a long beach rimmed by the town wall. Ahead she made out the black silhouette of a ship against the evening sky.

  The draclings slowed, making hardly a ripple as they approached the ship. The hull, encrusted with barnacles, loomed above. It rocked and moaned in the sea swells near the stone wharf where it was moored. The draclings swam round the ship, past the small square portholes, beneath the creaking hawsers that stretched to the wharf. Kaeldra looked up and found what she sought. Atop the mast, which swayed across a moonlit cloud, the kestrel perched.

  Wouldn’t you know it, she thought. The ship, no doubt, was bound for Kragrom. The kestrel led them infallibly toward their destination, heedless of the trouble it caused. What was trouble to the kestrel, who could fly off and reappear when all was well?

  Voices. Footsteps thudded across the deck. The draclings slipped into the shadow of the hull and settled down into the icy water until only their nostrils showed. Kaeldra pressed herself flat against Pyro. She stifled a gasp as the water scalded her back with cold.

  “. . . only a fish, but better to make sure. Can’t be too careful, with that ruckus on Rog,” a voice said. A lantern bobbed on the ship’s deck above, dripped puddles of molten gold upon the water. Kaeldra, not daring to move, followed the light with her eyes.

  The sea made gentle slappings and suckings against the ship’s hull. Far away, a dog barked.

  Footsteps again, fading. Kaeldra let out her breath.

  The draclings swam silently for shore in the shadow of the wharf. The surf carried them in in a breathtaking rush. Kaeldra waded through the shallows, her body throbbing with cold. She huddled with the draclings in the sand near the wharf and waited to see what they would do next.

  But they only flicked their tongues at her and thrummed. Slowly, Kaeldra grew aware that they expected something. They were waiting, waiting for her to act.

  Kaeldra sighed. Hugging herself against the cold, she rose to a crouch and peered over the edge of the wharf. It looked empty, save for a single mule-drawn cart and an assortment of wooden casks grouped near the ship.

  〈You stay here,〉 she said, wondering why she bothered, for they always did exactly as they pleased, no matter what she said.

  She climbed onto the wharf and tiptoed across it, feeling dangerously exposed. If the man with the lantern should come looking right now . . .

  But he did not. The mule’s ears twitched forward as she approached. It swished its tail and snorted. Kaeldra stroked its muzzle, murmuring, and soon the animal calmed.

  There was no way to get on the ship. At least, not now. The gap between the ship and the wharf stretched as long as a man is tall. And if she did manage to jump it, the men inside would surely hear.

  Kaeldra looked for the kestrel. It had moved from the
mast and now perched in the confusion of rigging overhead. A massive hook dangled from the tangle of rope and swung back and forth above the deck.

  A cargo hook, Kaeldra thought.

  Cargo.

  In the morning, the ship would load cargo from the wharf. The casks—they were cargo.

  They were large casks, waist high. Large enough for a person to sit inside. Large enough for a dracling.

  Kaeldra knocked on one cask and felt the fullness of it. She wrapped her arms around it and tried to lift it, but the cask would not budge.

  Heavy. Full of liquid. Brew or wine, most likely.

  She tugged at the chime hoop to see if it would come loose; a splinter slid beneath her nail. “Ouch!”

  “Well, now, Coldran,” came a voice from behind her. “And so we meet again.”

  Kaeldra whirled around. A man was sitting up in the cart. Thick, black eyebrows, graying hair—Yanil.

  “You’re a more convincin’ boy without your braid, but I can’t say I fancy your haircut. Where be your friends?”

  She knew she should say something, should think of something quick. But her mind was stuck like a cart in a bog.

  “Often I’ve been wonderin’ about you,” Yanil went on, moving down toward the casks. “Quite the rousin’ exit you made. I wondered—could you be a witch? That would explain your hold over those dragons.” He scratched his chin. “But you didn’t seem a witch to me. You seemed—”

  Kaeldra inched by the casks, ready to run.

  “I wouldn’t do that.” She heard the iron in his voice. “I’ll give the cry if you do, and you’re well-known hereabouts, from what I gather.” She stopped, and when Yanil spoke again his voice was gentler. “Your dragons ate three rabbits from my barn and killed my son’s dog. I think you’ll be owin’ me your story, at least.”

  A light slanted suddenly across the wharf stones. Kaeldra dropped to her stomach behind the casks.

  “Who goes there?” a voice cried.

  “ ’Tis I,” Yanil called out, in a lilting, slurred voice. “And Girtle, of course.”

  The light moved, spilled through the cracks between casks. Kaeldra’s heartbeat hammered in her ears.